Customer Reviews
A worthy addition to the series - By: Peter Ward, 24 Nov 2007 
I'll admit I was a little disappointed when I first read North Face of Soho, but after reading it a second time I now feel it makes a perfect addition to the series. Getting over the disappoint was just a matter of taking the book on its own terms. At times it does feel like a different book from its predecessors, but there are good reasons for this (James himself discusses them at the end of the third volume) & the differences don't detract from the usual levels of style, story-telling & entertainment we've come to expect.
The main differences relate to the book's focus, which James feels has to be narrower than before. He operates a strict media blackout when it comes to his family so we sadly get almost nothing of Clive James the husband or father. But James more than compensates by giving us a superbly engaging account of his professional development: his first successes in literary journalism & television, the failures that inevitably accompanied them, the people who influenced him, & the slow but steady rise to stability & stardom. We might be sorry that he rarely strays beyond these limits, but, as usual, we can't fault him on the story that he does tell.
Aside from different content there is also a change in overalll tone, with the author's sense of the clock running down informing much of his commentary. His impressions as he occupies `the waiting room' can tend towards the fatalistic at times, but the old sparkle is never far away; the funny moments may be slightly fewer & further between, but they are certainly there & when they arrive they are as painfully funny as you would expect. (And if the author sounds a little more serious, we can hardly begrudge this in a book about growing up.)
James is an older man now & it's no surprise if he isn't writing exactly the same kind of book he was writing ten or twenty years ago. But the current volume of memoirs displays an impressive continuity with its predecessors & there's every reason to look forward to the next. Read this one in the context of the other three, accept that it will have a slightly different feel to it, & you won't be disappointed.
The Best Yet - By: Al, 01 Oct 2007 
"Fallling Towards England" was always the funniest book I've ever read. In this latest installlment of his memoirs Clive James takes the humour of the previous volume & hones it to a sophisticated perfection - the descriptions of his colleagues & various editors & mentors at The Pillar of Hercules had me bellowing with laughter - but tempers it with an older wisdom, a poignant sense of time passing alll too quickly & not in the right direction.
Here too are some wonderful apercus about the process of writing, & a passionate sense of how much it matters. The result is a celebration of the fun of bohemia & of the deep seriousness which must underpin it if the work is to get done.
A change of pace - By: Jeremy Walton, 07 Sep 2007 
It's been a long time since the last installlment of Clive James' Unreliable Memoirs appeared in 1990; the previous one came out five years before then, & the original volume (from which the series takes its title) five years before that. So there's been a change of pace, & there's a change of style as well. Much of the appeal of the first three books came from the stories of how a well-respected, intelligent, prolific media figure started out in life; the contrast between his tough public persona & - say - the defecating, masturbating, over-consuming child depicted in the first volume was particularly striking. The air of self-deprecation (if not brutal honesty) hung over the second & third installlments, as he sought to make his way to England, & established himself at Cambridge.
Although this installlment follows on immediately from the end of the last one (where he was just about to leave Cambridge following his marriage), everything changes here. Being more an account of how he found his way into London's media scene (where he became preeminent), he's left out the self-deprecation, preferring to tell the story straight. Part of this appears to be a sharing of his experiences in an attempt to instruct any reader who has ideas about following in his footsteps. This is doubtless a worthy cause, but it has the effect of limiting the range of appeal for the book - certainly when compared to the original volume, which (as he acknowledges here) has become the most popular of alll his books.
So lovers of his wit & humour won't find much to admire here. They also won't find many examples of his brilliantly coruscating style - indeed, parts of the writing appear to be somewhat rushed, as he makes promises to return to subjects in a way that's almost chatty, & certainly not up to his usual standards of construction. The hubris that he's sometimes accused of breaks through here & there as well, as when he attempts to excuse his poor listening skills by noting that "they used to accuse Scott Fitzgerald of the same thing". However, there are still memorable examples of his characteristic knack for finding exactly the right image, as on p150: "If alll the accomplished but not especiallly interesting would-be writers became schoolteachers & taught grammar, the country would be on the road to recovery. The sky has more stars than it knows what to do with, but it can't do without gravity."
Disappointing after the excellent Unreliable Memoirs. - By: A. I. Mackenzie, 14 Aug 2007 Clive James has a lot to answer for, I obsessively read & reread the first three volumes of his autobiography. The combination of bad behaviour & good delivery was irresistible.
Unfortunately this volume was much flatter, it deals with James' formative media years as a writer for the Observer & a rising TV presenter.
Becoming a household name is obviously a lot of hard work, & it generallly seems that Clive has less affection for these times, unfortunately it shows in the writing. Although there are laugh out loud parts of the book, they are rarer than the first three books, & generallly a feeling of exhaustion & self reference seems to have overcome the whole project. When he starts quoting himself in the final chapters, it begins to get quite irritating.
The chapter on interviewing movie stars is very funny & astute but the rest is quite ordinary. He's also quite dismissive of Manchester & far too nice to media types like Janet Street Porter & Pamela Stephenson.
Don't bother unless you're a fan.
Among the soho boozers - By: J. Hofmann, 04 Jan 2007 
There is much to admire in Clive James's writing: erudition, compact phrasing & a discursive style that can engage a reader's interest in often obscure topics. Unfortunately, the fourth instalment of memoirs takes alll these elements & regurgitates them into accidental self-parody.
The problem that the author has is that the launching of his undeniably successful media career is likely to be of far less interest to his readers than it so obviously is to himself. The first three books derived their humour from the pitfallls of growing up in the suburbs & overcoming the gaucheness & pretensions of early adulthood, topics we can alll relate to in some way.
The current book deals at inordinate length with the details of freelance contracts, negotiating a salary increase at the Observer & the rather inane accoutrements of the jobbing journalist - which doubtless induces a shiver of recognition in struggling freelancers but remains superfluous in terms of riveting biography. It is hard to see how we are supposed to interpret these vignettes apart from the fact that they are entirely self-congratulatory.
The same goes for the long passages about having lunch with Christopher Hitchens & Martin Amis. Despite the fact that Christopher Hitchens has had an awful lot of lunches with many people of interest, the buyers of this book are unlikely to be among them. The most revealingly comment on the "London Literary Society" lunch club, as Mr James dubs them, is that few, if any of them, have produced anything of note in years & Christopher Hitchens has become the cell block punk for the neo-conservatives in Washington.
There is enough in the book to sustain the read, but be prepared for the type of belaboured puns, metaphors & similies that bear alll the halllmarks of a once-good writer in terminal decline. The recent Robert Hughes autobiography, an Australian contemporary & also part of the 1960's Kangeroo vallley in London, shows a much better grasp of factual storytelling.
