Christmas Books II
Books of the Year
A further selection of the best and most overrated books of the year, chosen by some of the Spectator's regular contributors
Bevis Hillier
A good biographer is one of whom you feel, so complete is his empathy with his subject, he has almost got the blood of his subject to flow through his own veins. Such a one is Alan Sheridan, author of Andre Gide (Hamish Hamilton, £25). This is a book in the class of Joanna Richardson's Baudelaire (John Murray, 1993). And Sheridan makes allowances for readers whose French is rusty — telling us, for example, that the nickname for the Lye& Henri Quatre in Paris, which Gide attend- ed, was 'HIV' (pron. 'ash catr')'.
The publishing event of the year was the issue of The Complete Works of George Orwell, edited by Peter Davison (Secker & Warburg, £750 — happy the strapped-for- cash hack who landed those review copies). The 20 volumes stake Orwell's claim as the representative voice of the 20th century, rather as — to plunge into bathos — John Arlott was called 'the voice of summer'. The voice (Orwell's, I mean) was astrin- gent, ironic, disillusioned and far from pacifist. Also, paradoxically, it was at once prophetic and godless.
James Lees-Milne died last December. I know it's hackneyed to choose his latest diaries as a book of the year, but I do choose Through Wood and Dale: Diaries 1975-1979 (John Murray, £20), even though I am reprobated in the book for turning up to lunch in the country 'stub- bled' and with — horror of horrors — no tie. Lees-Milne is an immortal. We have good novelists now, but none in the Austen/ Dickens/ Waugh class; good poets, but no Keats, Wordsworth or Hopkins. But in Lees-Milne we had a diarist to rank with any diarist who ever lived — with Pepys, Creevey, you name them. One of the great mysteries is: why was he such a hopeless novelist? The reply 'because he was only interested in himself doesn't wash, if you read the diaries. Even his set-piece profiles in Fourteen Friends are a bit contrived and mannered. His writing had to be fresh from the tap.
Stephen Bayley's Labour Camp (Bats- ford, £16.99) is a whiff of sour grapeshot from the former creative director — or whatever — of the millennium dome, a vengeful and funny exposé of what he calls 'the failure of style over substance' under New Labour. His best jibe against Peter Mandelson deserves to get into the dictio- naries of humorous quotations: 'If Mandy went to a voodoo sacrifice in Brixton tonight, he'd come back tomorrow saying, "We must have voodoo sacrifice in the Dome."' The most worthless book of the year is on the same subject — In Defence of the Dome by Penny Lewis, Vicky Richardson and James Woudhuysen (Adam Smith Institute, £12). This is an insolent work, in that it dismisses all critics of the dome as *flingers'. The old argument is trotted out, that the Crystal Palace and the Festival of Britain were bad-mouthed until they opened, when they were a wow: this is rather like saying, 'They all laughed at Monet and Van Gogh, so Damien Hirst is marvellous.' Of course we whingers know the government probably will make the dome a success, in the same way as William Randolph Hearst made Marion Davies a star — by upending buckets of gold to ensure a first-class reception for a third- rate product.
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