... a mea culpa, a self-appraisal so damning that it becomes almost endearing. Enough contrition, you want to tell him, you’re not so wicked a chap as you make out ... There’s plenty more he might have said about the relationship – and about his happy second marriage. But these aren’t tell-all Rousseauesque confessions. He’s respectful about Katherine and about his mother, to whom he grew close in her old age and widowhood. And he’s especially warm about his exasperating father, whose forced early exit from Wedgwood was unmerited and whose death happened at the same moment as a family landscape painting crashed from the wall in the room where his son was working. After a coincidence like that, who wouldn’t believe in higher powers? ... As for Wilson the controversialist, there’s little sign of him here, though if you’re like me you’ll dislike what he says about Salman Rushdie, LS Lowry, psychotherapists and disbelief in God being a failure of the imagination. By the end I felt knew him better. And having 'never been completely sure' who AN Wilson is, he too may have a better idea.
The cover of Confessions shows him in arch-fogey mode at 32, with his natty attire, midwife’s bicycle and meek demeanour — but this memoir, which takes us up to his mid-thirties, wants to demolish such an image. From the start Wilson presents himself as a shameless badass ... Wilson is a torrentially readable autobiographer, capable of howlingly funny paragraphs, desperately sad scenes, gay slapstick, literary analysis and gossipy name-dropping in the same chapter. His pen portraits of his parents don’t express loathing but hard-won, slightly exhausted understanding. His rampant showing-off (the languages he speaks, the breadth of his reading, his chats with the Queen Mother) seem driven more by glee than conceit. Although I don’t want to read another word about his fight with God, I look forward enormously to reading more about this talented eccentric’s grapple with the flesh.
Mr. Wilson makes up in wit what he lacks in celebrity antics ... He leaves no slight or sadness unexamined while traipsing through the decades, from his 19th-century forebears through his birth in 1950 in Staffordshire, England ... He mines these professional blind alleys, particularly the clerical one, for mirth ... The title’s Augustinian echo notwithstanding, there is little confessing here beyond Mr. Wilson’s self-recrimination over the occasional shabby treatment of his parents and first wife. As the subtitle signals, this is no bulletin of boozy exploits but rather a litany of shortfalls as son and husband, flickering betwixt the Catholic and Anglican churches and adhering to neither ... He livens things up with a parade of eccentrics ... Mr. Wilson embraces this old-fogy persona. He settles no scores here and keeps his criticism of writers to those safely departed ... reveals a dexterous storyteller who trundles out riskily meandering anecdotes—such as about J.R.R. Tolkien—yet chums them with details to keep his audience hooked ... Mr. Wilson examines the poignant human condition of being boring.
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.
This autobiography has its high points, irrelevancies and irritations. Wilson’s exposure of the woefully Dickensian conditions of his prep school, described in another context as ‘a concentration camp run by sexual perverts’, is horrendous and timely ... The camp, Firbankian description is written by an accomplished humourist; the mischievous, observant wit is clear and critical ... What does not entertain is Wilson’s telling so much of his family history. There are longueurs when one wants to shout, ‘I don’t need to know that’, or ‘so what?’ – an experience similar to reading Hermione Lee’s 992- page biography of Tom Stoppard. Still more annoying is the constant mention of ‘the great (but not necessarily) the good’ people he knows, which comes across as name-dropping ... the question remains: why write an autobiography? Is it through strong residual self-regard? The reappraisal of his life, his failures and mistakes, is admirable. Will he need to pen another consideration in five or ten years’ time if still scribbling?
Anglo-Catholic and sometimes arch, Wilson is also a delightfully close observer of the passing scene ... Though it ends on a thud, Wilson’s yarn has much to recommend ... A readable, often entertaining summation of a life of hard work and second thoughts.
