When we are aware of Holroyd’s voice it is that of a perspicacious and often amused bystander. There are one-liners which nail down the evidence and would stand up in a court of law (of Ellen Terry and Gordon Craig he efficiently articulates what we have begun to surmise: ‘neither mother nor son could sustain emotion’); on other occasions he just shares with us the pleasure he has found in a detail, such as in his description of the horse acquired to play the emaciated Rozinante in Irving’s production of Don Quixote. (An ‘almost dead animal’ arrived at Euston station, only to be ‘arrested by the police and escorted to the knacker’s yard’. A fitter specimen, though given to flatulence, stepped into the breach, inspiring confidence because it ‘had acted with Beerbohm Tree’.)
The book is not a narrative of consecutive events; while it moves generally forward in time the chapters are organised around themes: hence a chapter about Terry and a chapter about Edy may cover the same time period, approaching the family from different angles. A major character in one scene is a walk-on in the next, as in the Ayckbourn plays where simultaneous action is represented, viewed from different locations in the same house. This gives much more of a sense of the way in which families — and histories — really are: in life things overlap and converge and are viewed from disparate points. This strategy adds to the book’s seamlessness and the sense in which it is layered rather than sequential.
To call this book a tour de force too forcibly recalls the clichés with which we began. Holroyd has upped the game of the joint or multiple biography. In his hands it has become an opportunity to open many windows on one world. His book is an unalloyed treat.
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