A Book of Two Halves (Writing Home - Alan Bennett)

Member Name: SueMagee

Product:	Writing Home - Alan Bennett
Date:	05/06/01 (127 review reads)
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My friend Maggie once saw Alan Bennet in Sainsbury's. It's years ago, but she still talks about it. Well, he's the nation's favourite teddy bear, isn't he?. A national icon? Would it be heretical to suggest that a national icon has produced a pot- boiler?

A lot of writers do it. "I must have something for the Christmas market", "I need some cash", "People will forget me". Frequently, as in this case, it's a collection of previously published or broadcast material, and what matters then is the glue that holds it all together, and there doesn't seem to be a great deal of it in this book. Macmillan marketed the book with the description "Scenes from a Writer's Life", and from this it's been assumed that this is Alan Bennet's autobiography. I would hate to think that was the case, if only because I hope one day to be able to read a definitive version that gives more of an insight into the man.

All the pieces, individually, are excellent. Even the introduction contains a gem. His mother, "Mam", has met a friend who was accompanied by a very refined gentleman. It transpired that this was T.S. Eliot, and Bennet attempted to explain to Mam who he was, but without success. Finally he said "he won the Nobel prize". "Well", she said, "I'm not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat." At the other end of her life Mam is responsible for another touching quote. Her mind is not what it was, and her words are going. They picnic on a hill with a splendid view, and Mam seeks to express this. "What a big lot of About" she says.

Bennet writes of the Leeds of his youth, and you can feel the hard seats of the trams under you, but for me the most important parts of the book are the pieces on Russell Harty, whom he is one of the few people to treat with sympathy and understanding, and "The Lady in the Van"
;. Miss Shepherd is elderly and homeless. She lives in a van, which initially is parked opposite Bennet's house in Camden Town, and eventually ends up in his drive, where she stays for sixteen years. I would have bought the book for this section alone, although it does not always make comfortable reading. There are extracts from Bennet's diaries for the period 1980 to 1990. The major events are there, such as Russell Harty's death, but it's the sketches of everyday life as he observes it that are most poignant. "A man rooting in the dustbin opposite stops suddenly and looks at his watch" and "Lent is now "the run-up to Easter"

At the end of "Diaries" I could have shut the book and felt that I'd had good value for £17.50, (well, it was a signed copy) but I was only half way through, and the other half seemed to have no connection with the first part. There's the "Prefaces to Plays", which fleshes out the background to the dramatic works, particularly "An Englishman Abroad" and this theme is continued in "Filming and Rehearsing". "Books and Writers" is self-explanatory, and so is "Stocking Fillers", which contains the delightful "Christmas in NW1". I read the second half of the book, much of it with enjoyment, but I could easily have put it down at any point and not picked it up again. There's nothing to draw you on. It's irrational to feel cheated over the book when I would happily have paid the price had it only consisted of the first half, but because the second half seemed simply to have been stitched on, and not particularly seamlessly, I did. It was at that point that I started to think about pot-boilers.

It hasn't put me off any of Bennet's other work, and I have re-read the first part of "Writing Home" several times, and always with enjoyment. I simply close the book when I'm half
way through.

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