Ian Hamilton

Years ago, when I was serving as an anonymous hack on the Times Literary Supplement, one of my duties was to pen sprightly paragraphs for a weekly books column. The idea was to mop up publications which were not considered worth full-scale reviews but which nonetheless had to be ‘covered’ by a journal of record such as ours. Things like: A Dictionary of Spy Writers or The Balladeers’ Handbook or Henry Williamson: My Friend. Usually, there was a brisk supply of such material and it was easy enough to knock out the required eight or nine paragraphs per week.

‘Dollar bills, pound notes, they’re suicide notes. Money is a suicide note.’ So says John Self, the hero of Money: A Suicide Note, and what he means is that money is destroying him. Self-destruction (along with several of its hyphenated pals: indulgence, interest, loathing) has become Self’s hobby, what he does in his spare time, and what he spends his money on. But it’s money’s fault that this is what he spends his money on. It’s money’s fault that he hasn’t got anything better to do with his spare time. ‘The yobs are winning,’ said a character in Martin Amis’s Success, and one could almost take this as the ‘burden’ of his work so far. In earlier books, there have been yobs aplenty, and from the beginning Amis has scrutinised the species with some ardour. With John Self, though, he shifts the enemy to centre-stage, so that this time he can give him a real going-over.

On 4 March it will be ten years since the death of the writer Francis Hope – killed at 34 in the Turkish Airlines DC10 crash outside Paris – and this last week I have been going through a small mountain of his journalism, for a possible collection of his ‘literary essays and reviews’. For about twelve years, Hope wrote regularly for the New Statesman, the Observer, the TLS: he also contributed to several smaller journals – including my own verse periodical, The Review, which he served for a decade as a member of the editorial board (indeed, so far as I can remember, he attended all three annual general meetings). He worked both as a magazine essayist and as a ‘real’ journalist, and even for a time appeared as a reporter for TV’s Panorama. I guess that over the years he must have published more than a quarter of a million words. Enough for a book? That remains to be seen. So far, the message seems to be that five one-thousand-word pieces on five separate novels by Saul Bellow don’t actually add up to a five-thousand-word appraisal. In the meantime, though, I’ve been reminded just how good Francis Hope was as a reviewer: deft, sardonic and wide-ranging, valuably unenchantable throughout the dopey Sixties.

If you were to look up now you would see The moon, the cars, the ambulance, The elevated road back into town....

‘Australia?’ There was a punishing stress on the second syllable and the tone was one of idle disbelief: ‘But why?’ This was over seven years ago. I had just been invited to a literary festival in Adelaide; no fee, but they’d pay my Qantas. It seemed to me an Opportunity Not to be Missed. In the week or so before I set off, however, almost everybody I bumped into (including at least one Australian) seemed to think that I’d gone off my head. Nobody, I was told, went to Australia just for the sake of Going to Australia. I must be mad. Or was I ‘up to something’?