Sebastian Faulks, Fires Which Burned Brightly

 Sebastian Faulks, Fires Which Burned Brightly (Penguin)

Sebastian Faulks makes a tremendous job of the memoir that he,

never wanted to write ... because I didn't think my life remarkable. 

 

Compared to whose, I wonder. It's surely well above average in terms of stories, achievement and his capacity to understand it. But, perhaps more than those things, he can write it himself rather than have it written for him like sports people and others usually have to. Always highly readable in his fiction, he is at least as much so in his life.

While it is approximately chronological, at the suggestion of his publisher, it is more thematic with the ten chapters reflecting on school, thirteen years in journalism, booze, France, war, America and family in a variety of combinations. He is aware of the privilege he came into and, in some detail about his education, that it provides no insurance against the misery of private schooling. He 'borrowed' a friend's bike and escaped on one occasion.

He was clearly one of those whose talent was such that he succeeded in school and university without having to work very hard. Without going on any ideological excursions, it is apparent that his sympathies are properly placed, understanding where the world has gone so wrong and with an appreciation of wine, books, music and cricket. In his case it was Procul Harum that were in the right place at an impressionable age for him. The passing references to an enthusiasm for golf are less excusable.

Insights into the writer's life are provided in the depth of research involved in producing the novels, not only about the wars that shaped the world in the twentieth century but also the development of psychiatry that may or may not have been related to them in understanding how humanity functions, or fails to. And also, a promotional tour of America that sounds genuinely horrific. If one thinks that producing full-length novels looks like hard work then selling them afterwards sounds worse.

Faulks is naturally funny. when suitable opportunities arise, and the count of 'laugh out loud' moments was impressive. Several, by no means on every page, but thus similar to Terry Eagleton's The Gatekeeper, similarly thematically organized and possibly done more in the spirit of a stand-up comedian but, as a writer's account of their own life, I can't compare it with anything that I enjoyed more. 

His interests extend well into poetry as I realized some years ago when he attended a session on Thom Gunn, who is mentioned in passing, at the Cheltenham Literature Festival almost inevitably being made aware on his way in how much a reader admired his work. What must it be like being Paul McCartney if a novelist can't go out in public without being harrassed in the same way that I'd bothered Clive Wilmer outside half an hour earlier.

Things come easily to a class act. None of his books are my biggest favourites but I have plenty of them. His memoir is as good as any of them, for some reason still not threatening any all-time list but tremendously enjoyable. It is almost comparable to the music of, say, Fleetwood Mac which is often hard to fault but somehow 'middlebrow' and thus not quite eligible for top honours. But they and he did well out of what they chose to do and are unlikely to worry that they are not quite James Joyce or the Velvet Underground in my book.