Yes, the reviews of Rich Hitch-22 are still cascading onto the 'lit' pages of the broadsheets, much like the BP oil spill, unstoppable and yet unwanted. And to be fair, the book has provoked the entire gamut of critical responses, with reviews ranging from appalled, to critical, to the merely contemptuous (reviews from friends of Hitchens, or from writers who are afraid of him and hope to gain his favour by fawning over him in print, don't count).
'Billed as a memoir, Hitch-22 is a hodge-podge of autobiography and Christopher Hitchens's musings on political and cultural antics of the last 50 years. The question that first struck me when presented with this book is: who would want to read it? Hitchens is, by the standards of Anglo-Saxon journalism, a skilled turn and he's had an interesting intellectual journey from British Trotskyite to American neo-con sidekick, but my guess is that most of those who'd be willing to part with money to read this are those who are regular consumers of his columns.
If you've followed his work, I doubt there's much here that will be new. I've never sought out Hitchens's writing, but even having haphazardly digested his work over the years, there was a great deal that was familiar. As a sort of greatest-hits treasure trove, Hitch-22 will have an appeal for his admirers, but if you don't want to read any further I can sum the book up as too long, far too long and meandering but with half-a-dozen cracking anecdotes, the best of which is Hitchens being spanked (with a rolled-up parliamentary order-paper) by Margaret Thatcher (he insists he has witnesses... Hitchens is well read (especially by the standards of journalism) and there is almost a mania for quotation and learned allusion. I don't know whether this is simply his temperament or whether he's trying to play the sophisticated Brit for the folks in Kansas, but if you do the scholar strut, you've got to get it right. The phrase pecunia non olet doesn't come from Juvenal, but from Vespasian. That an old Trot doesn't know where the term permanent revolution comes from is sad (no, it's not Parvus). Hitchens, in his enthusiasm for Portugal, writes: "In Portuguese bullfights, the bull is not tortured or killed." It's funny, but in the Portuguese bullfight I watched, the bull had these javelin-like objects stuck into him (perhaps they had slipped the bull a powerful anaesthetic beforehand). I could go on.... This is, finally, the great boon of being a media gadfly, you have all the joy of condemnation, without any of the tiresome business of responsibility. Hitchens might have occasionally left his armchair and incommoded himself in some godforsaken dumps and risked his neck in hazardous regions, but it was for the purpose of getting copy and not distributing medical supplies. It's like being a critic, you can poke fun and carp, without the labour of creation. Indignation is the best business to be in because you look so good, so pumped up on ethics, garlanded with fragrant morality as you slate others for the paucity of their principles or their low behaviour. And then if some of those you sympathised with, say Saddam or Mugabe and his cronies, let you down, you can always turn the indignation on them and earn some more money.' |
