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That Guest fella started on of these a while ago but he doesn't post anymore so I thought I'd start one.
John Le Carre - The Biography by Adam Sisman.
If you like Le Carre's books and are temped to think "Ooh, yeah...that'll be a good read", don't bother.
It's 600 pages (of small text) about his relationship with his various publicists / publishers / agents / etc and it's boring.
We get an insight into David Cornwell's formative years - what a properly dodgy twat his Dad was, how his Mum finally had enough and ran off with another bloke, how he got packed off to boarding school, how he hated said public school and his subsequent time at Oxford (despite it opening doors to landing a cushy job teaching at Eton and a career in SIS) and all that guff.....
But that takes up the first few hundred pages and the bulk of the book is padded out schlep from the author which doesn't provide any real insight into his subject's psyche other than:
He doesn't trust anybody, sees himself as a writer of "serious literature" rather than a simple genre writer, he craves acceptance by the mainstream but doesn't want to play the game with the media to achieve this and has always been a bit confused.
And he abandoned his young family about two minutes after he realised that The Spy Who Came In From The Cold was a hit and fucked off to a Greek island for months at a time to "feed the muse" because he felt that being a "normal" person with a family was inhibiting his creative process.
And he might be a gay, given the way he writes in private letters to / from and about other male writers he associated with.
Not that that's a bad thing but the way he stringently denied it at the time and continues to do so leaves a bad taste.
So in summary, the book's padded-out shite and I no longer respect its subject.
I should probably stop reading biographies......
John Le Carre - The Biography by Adam Sisman.
If you like Le Carre's books and are temped to think "Ooh, yeah...that'll be a good read", don't bother.
It's 600 pages (of small text) about his relationship with his various publicists / publishers / agents / etc and it's boring.
We get an insight into David Cornwell's formative years - what a properly dodgy twat his Dad was, how his Mum finally had enough and ran off with another bloke, how he got packed off to boarding school, how he hated said public school and his subsequent time at Oxford (despite it opening doors to landing a cushy job teaching at Eton and a career in SIS) and all that guff.....
But that takes up the first few hundred pages and the bulk of the book is padded out schlep from the author which doesn't provide any real insight into his subject's psyche other than:
He doesn't trust anybody, sees himself as a writer of "serious literature" rather than a simple genre writer, he craves acceptance by the mainstream but doesn't want to play the game with the media to achieve this and has always been a bit confused.
And he abandoned his young family about two minutes after he realised that The Spy Who Came In From The Cold was a hit and fucked off to a Greek island for months at a time to "feed the muse" because he felt that being a "normal" person with a family was inhibiting his creative process.
And he might be a gay, given the way he writes in private letters to / from and about other male writers he associated with.
Not that that's a bad thing but the way he stringently denied it at the time and continues to do so leaves a bad taste.
So in summary, the book's padded-out shite and I no longer respect its subject.
I should probably stop reading biographies......
