Thetans under threat

At last! It has taken over two years, but a British publisher has summoned up the nerve to bring out Going Clear, an astonishing exposé of the Church of Scientology by Lawrence Wright of the New Yorker.

Wright — who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Looming Tower, his investigation of 9/11 — is the journalistic equivalent of a virtuoso musician: he can race us through the most complicated narrative because he has done unimaginable amounts of homework.

Wright conducted hundreds of interviews for Going Clear, then had a team of fact-checkers crawl over the text. Even so, none of our big publishing houses would touch it. This UK edition comes from Silvertail Books, a one-man operation run by Humfrey Hunter, a former literary agent whose tiny catalogue also includes Russell Miller’s Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard and John Sweeney’s The Church of Fear: Inside the Weird World of Scientology.

Hunter is a brave man. Our libel laws are tougher than America’s and Scientology employs relentlessly aggressive lawyers. Also, the church’s attitude towards revelations about its founder is roughly that of Muslims to cartoons of Mohammed. Russell Miller’s life was made hell when he first published his biography of Hubbard in 1987: his family was spied upon and there were ludicrous attempts to frame him for two murders.

Wright’s book is even less flattering than Miller’s. Hubbard emerges as a priapic wife-beater who as a young science-fiction writer dabbled in Aleister Crowley’s satanic rituals, probably under the influence of narcotics. He died a recluse, his health wrecked by smoking and over-eating — and, we’re told, pumped full of the anti-anxiety drug Vistaril. These claims will infuriate the Church of Scientology, whose campaigns against drugs (especially psychiatric ones) are the cornerstone of its attempts to win public acceptance.