I must say, calling a book Fires Which Burned Brightly promises much. At best, from the jaded reviewer’s point of view, an autobiography of delusional self-aggrandisement; at worst, a wild mismatch between the, well, incendiary language of the title and the potentially humdrum contents. It might have been dreamed up by a master satirist intending to inflict maximum damage to the reputation of that noted gentleman of letters, Sebastian Faulks. I once invented a novelist named Julian Sensitive, whose only claim to fame was an autobiographical novel called, after T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, ‘My Trousers Rolled’. That was a crude joke compared with the hilarity inspired byFaulks’s title.
As it turns out, it is taken from a Procul Harum song, and I was glad to be told this about halfway through the book because I know absolutely nothing about Procul Harum except that they wrote ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’. And the reason I know nothing about them is that I am ten years younger than Faulks, and Prog Rock is a closed book to me. It suddenly occurs to me to ask whether ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ might not have been a better title. No, probably not.
In fact I enjoyed the first 100 or so pages immensely. It is a not exactly unconventional or original tale of growing up as the son of a provincial solicitor in Donnington; being sent to boarding school, aged eight; then another boarding school, Wellington; and then going on to Emmanuel College, Cambridge. There is an interlude in Paris where Faulks reads literature in a garret room, not just because he likes reading but because he is too broke to do much else.
That might sound impossibly dull but, as I said, I found it perfectly enjoyable. It was not a million miles from my own experience, even down to the Parisian garret. I particularly liked the way Faulks describes how literature came into his life. A teacher handed out copies of David Copperfield, and while the rest of the class groaned at its bulk, Faulks devoured it, finding himself in a world he could become immersed in. (‘This boy was like me, only further up shit creek.’)I struggled to think how he actually might have been up shit creek, apart from the very fact of being at boarding school, and an episode of mental illness, which we learn about later and whose details he is in some respects vague about.
Then the book starts pinging about and I got confused as to its trajectory. The chapter about Faulks’s time at prep school is written for some reason in the third person (is he emulating Caesar? The boy seems to have been very good at Latin). But in the next one we’re back in the first person and we can breathe again.
The fourth chapter begins very promisingly indeed, with a digression on how much he likes drinking. ‘Drink to me is friendship, love, laughter – life raised to the level of jollity its creator might once have envisaged.’ He drinks and smokes quite a bit in this book, and I for one would not dream of wagging the finger. But he starts going on about wine in, I’m afraid, somewhat boring detail. And then there are the mental health problems (he also smokes a fair amount of dope, and he concedes that can’t have helped). After that, he’s a journalist on the Telegraph and later the Independent on Sunday; then he’s doing the research for Birdsong; then he’s enduring the horrors of an author’s tour of the USA and saying how he loves the place. And so the long day wears on, and although we are all over the place the Faulks prose style settles softly, like snow, and it is all very pleasant.
I had another look at the foreword and found that the book originally began as 13 essays ‘on the things that had meant the most to me’; but the publishers ‘asked me to leave out the least autobiographical and rearrange the rest in a chronological sequence’. I completely understand where the publishers were coming from, and I am glad, and you will be too, especially if you like Faulks’s work. I do not mean to disparage the author when I say that a better title might have been ‘Fires Which Glowed in a Cosy but Well-Appointed Living Room’ – but Procul Harum never wrote a song with that title.
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