A very smokable blend

Even the rubbish on the flyleaf isn’t rubbish. One of the astonishing things about Simon Gray’s new book is that the publishers’ claim that their author has ‘developed a new literary genre’ turns out to be accurate. This is the same blend of autobiography, anecdote and random reflection that made The Smoking Diaries a bestseller.

The new book is better. Less childhood memoir and more present-tense insight. The style is chatty and deliberately ‘unfinished’ and gives the impression that the book was dashed off during a few wet afternoons at the Renaissance café in Holland Park where Gray likes to smoke and muse and write notes over a double espresso. He specialises in great trundling sentences of six or seven hundred words or more, filled with rhetorical digressions and scenic by-ways. But the labours of selection and revision have been brilliantly disguised. This is a work of enormous and conscious artifice. If you dissect one of Gray’s monumental paragraphs you find an underlying design that gives his prose movement, rhythm and life. It’s a great achievement, a terrific read, every page crammed with jokes, philosophical observations and miniature portraits of Gray’s family and friends.

The Smoking Diaries crops up again when Alan Yentob makes a TV film about Gray’s unkickable tobacco habit. Filmed in a taxi, Gray is given a copy of a newspaper so that he can pretend to be reading it. It’s the Guardian, which he usually shuns, but he can’t help flicking through the pages and he finds himself reading ‘the sort of article that is precisely the reason I never read the Guardian’. During the filming, for continuity reasons, he has to smoke non-stop for days on end. This makes him feel so ill that he almost gives up smoking.