PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Wilson’s confessions aren’t quite to be understood in the Augustinian sense, though that hovers over the text. They are, though, confessions in another, more positive sense, a commitment to the act of writing and an acknowledgement of the role of memory in that act. Though there are Dickensian cadences throughout the book, it would be unfair to use the adjective of Wilson’s family portraits ... One is never sure – and this is his power as a novelist, rather than a failing as an autobiographer – whether A. N. Wilson’s clarity of vision comes at the cost of emotional intimacy. There are moments at various points in his career, though the question is quietly elided here, when his soul seems too perfectly balanced between belief and unbelief. One understands that all autobiography, anything remembered, is always fiction in some sense, but it’s difficult to discern whether we are getting a rarely unmediated glimpse of a very private man who has lived very publicly or whether, with the cover picture – suit, tie, bicycle with basket, unreadable smile – and the teasing title, we are being softened up for A. N. Other fictional persona.
James Campbell
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)That editorial role is perhaps the only significant road not taken here. The pitch-perfect title comes from a relative’s instruction while on holiday in the north of Scotland ... Above all, this is a memoir not so much of trouble – though Campbell acknowledges that but for the grace of literature, trouble might have been his lot – as of opportunity. Campbell joins a line of modern Scots, running from Robert Louis Stevenson to the anarchist vagabond Stuart Christie, who have just gone down to the road and taken it from there.
Patrick Laurie
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Whether handling his kye or repairing the farm’s one-gear tractor, Laurie has an authentic ability to balance the pains and joys of small farming ... The great strength of Galloway is that it allows a touch of sentiment back in. Laurie works a remarkable balancing act. The blackened fingernail, bruised by bustling cattle, presses down on a key as richly ambiguous as the curlew’s cry.
Richard Greene
MixedThe Herald Scotland (UK)In a sense Greene’s work was an attempt to capture precisely the lives of those who did not paint or compose, or know some form of transcendence in the form of established religion or spirituality. His own Catholicism is sufficiently well-trodden territory to need no further investigation. What Richard Greene does instead is to link Greene more solidly to the historical events he participated in. In other words, he attempts to reverse the priority of \'life and times\' ... This is where problems set in. There are moments – many – when the biographer digresses to point out the after-histories of the many trouble-spots Greene knew. Sometimes, the point is briefly apposite ... Elsewhere, as in the Congo, his flash-forwards seem out of place and too quickly mugged-up ... The book is on much stronger ground when dealing with the evolution of what Greene referred to as \'the doubt in my disbelief\' ... Richard Greene does a very useful job in suspending the irrelevant distinction between \'novels\' and \'entertainments\', which Greene himself came to regret ... In short, punchy chapters, Richard Greene delivers a remarkably whole and believable Greene, stripping away some of the mystique and \'doubleness\'.
Ben Okri
PositiveThe Scotland Herald (UK)... here [Okri] seems bent on writing a tale, or interwoven network of tales, that serves as a kind of philosophical and aesthetic primer to the previous books ... It is a curious book, as much tract as fiction, and sometimes written with the same heedless banality one found in Hermann Hesse, subject of an important recent biography ... Christianity, the second magical tradition to transform African life – technology followed – is dealt with gently but dismissively. One also needs some familiarity with a long tradition of dystopian and anti-totalitarian literature ... Okri has said that the book is written in three languages, those of fable, of truth and of our secret predicament. I’d say that in his case the first two are so completely subsumed under the third that any questioning of his literal background is suspended ... These ideas are virtuosically juggled in a series of short, enigmatic chapters that often have the discrete-but-connected feel of Nigerian composer Akin Euba’s piano pieces Scenes From Traditional Life. It’s a further valid parallel, not just because of the Nigerian provenance, but because Okri writes with a similarly limited palette, no fear whatever of repetition and with the sense that every tiny anecdote or descriptive detail generates its own significant form ... As such, it is a difficult book to write about meaningfully in narrative terms. The story does not so much unfold as become manifest. If there are moments when it seems in danger of turning into a libertarian manifesto, it swerves away into another episode of beautiful strangeness. Hand on heart, I would still be happier to re-read Starbook, but The Freedom Artist has a compelling power and energy that won’t let the reader go. Or fall by the wayside.
Rachel Cusk
RaveThe Scotland Herald (UK)\'Coventry,\' the title essay, is a whole novel crunched into the form of a think-piece, a theory of art masquerading as a few, deliberately disjointed autobiographical musings ... The other essays in the collection are in the more familiar vein of social observation ... \'Driving As Metaphor\' deals with contradiction: we roar through other people’s villages, but snarl at anyone who passes through ours faster than 32mph ... Faber could have sold me this on the strength of \'Coventry\' alone.
