This self-criticism has a whiff of desperation. Now in his 80s, the British playwright of stage-to-screen hits like The History Boys and The Lady in the Van has become, to his dismay, beloved, a national monument to coziness and harmless affability ... Keeping On Keeping On comprises a decade of diary entries, from 2005 to 2015, all originally published in The London Review of Books, each one a burst of intellectual fire and feeling — but unpretentious and unsentimental to the core ...a string of wry asides to the audience — pensées, jokes and anecdotes with the compression and tang of a Lydia Davis short story ...the proof is on every page. He remains energetically and profitably exasperated, committed to exposing corruption, the abuse of language, the exploitation of people and assorted foolishness of all kinds.
He writes wittily about the intricate mundanities of his days in a way that feels casually intimate, and yet he reveals very little of his inner life: The diaries are, for the most part, an exhaustive catalogue of external bits and pieces ... Bennett employs throughout the diaries, allowing a mundane detail to open out onto some meandering avenue toward his past ...a subtle comedy to the solemn manner in which Bennett announces, say, this late-life turn... One of the collection’s more consistent pleasures, in fact, is seeing the eminences in Bennett’s social circle encountering the mundanities and absurdities of everyday contemporary life ...a very long book... And yet the diary form, the brevity of each individual entry—coupled with my ongoing trust that I was never more than a page or so from some amusing insight or witticism—kept me ploughing through the pages, night after night, keeping on keeping on.
Like the two earlier miscellanies, this volume is Boswellian in its devotion to its subject and in its near-biblical bulk ... Luckily for all of us, Bennett was born with the gift for style that’s been the genetic inheritance of English writers from Jonathan Swift through George Orwell. In spite of age, he still writes with the bite and vigor of a young man ... If you’re not already an Alan Bennett follower, Keeping On Keeping On is not the best place to jump in. There are, as he fears, too many churches visited, too many antique shops, too many meals, and simply too much diary ... Still, there are writers we turn to with almost religious gratitude and Alan Bennett, for many people, is one. In an age of amnesia, he knows and honors the past. In a civilization ruined by cellphones and flip-flops, he is ink and paper, corduroy and tweed. In a world running on ignorance, he’s well read, thoughtful and informed on any number of topics.
That self-deprecation is characteristic, but Keeping On Keeping On — which covers the years 2005 to 2015 — also shows us this kindly, cultured man enraged and despondent over the state of England and its increasing 'nastification' ... Mostly he deals with the vicissitudes of age — cancer checkups, surgery for a stomach aneurysm, worsening deafness — while getting on with new work...an increasing sense of the valedictory in these pages... Such dry humor, about himself and the world around him, is typical of Bennett... While the first half of this massive volume is devoted to Bennett’s diaries, the latter 300 or so pages reprint talks about books, the opera and theater, the texts of two unproduced plays and notes made...the perfect book at bedtime, providing bite-size diary entries, lively anecdotes and, yes, a quite comforting teddy bearishness — if you allow for the occasional swipe from some surprisingly sharp claws.
You could call this book a bumper bonanza bargain, except it’s the work of Alan Bennett, so such over-the-top adjectives feel inappropriate. Bennett’s reputation is for wryness, modesty, pointed but unshowy observation. Thwartedness, also: ambitions unfulfilled, passions fumbled. Nothing grandiose or overheated ...funny, sometimes screamingly so. Some of the diary entries are short, just gags really, shafts of light to leaven the everyday ... Although it’s his diaries that make up most of this book, Bennett’s other works aren’t afterthoughts. They represent just a small part of what he has been up to, aside from his diligent diarising...book is a pleasure, though, yes, a temperate one ... In short, then, don’t read this enormous tome for thrills. This is a life being lived, some of it privately, and we all know what life can be like. Same-same, routine, ordinary.
You, too, can have too much of Alan Bennett if you attempt to plow through this catchall of diaries, introductions to his plays, diatribes, and unpublished scripts straight through; it's meant to be imbibed in small, random sips ...clobbered by repetitive rants bemoaning the Tories and their mad march toward privatizing everything from National Health and schools to public libraries — however sympathetic I am to Bennett's views ... Keeping On Keeping On says it all ...offers his perspectives on all of it — and on his lovely little satirical novel, The Uncommon Reader — in these diary excerpts, written between 2005 and 2015 ... Along with his healthy sense of outrage, Bennett's cheeky sense of humor is on full display here ...a relentless, repetitive hodgepodge of prefaces, commentary, and tributes topped off by two fun, previously rejected scripts ...overall effect is like an oversized suitcase into which a traveller keeps piling additional clothes just because there's room.
More of Keeping On Keeping On than Bennett’s two previous collections – just over half – consists of an expanded version of the diaries that he publishes annually in the London Review of Books ... In Bennett’s diaries, as with all the more personal writings collected here, we find his familiar public persona overlain with something scratchier and less biddable ...a thoughtful, decent man seeking ordinary pleasures and facing ordinary defeats ... What lifts Bennett’s diaries out of the ordinary, and what Palin’s don’t have, is that they are also a kind of commonplace book, home to aphoristic wisdoms on random things ... Bennett’s are a happy exception. For such a mixed bag, this book still feels like a coherent whole ... Every piece here conveys the sense of an idiosyncratic and cussed mind, alive and open to the world.
While the dozen or so essays here are illuminating — ranging from a eulogy for movie director John Schlesinger to introductions to various Bennett plays — it is Bennett’s daily preoccupations that hold us. The death of friends, the depredations of old age, the class system, pseudo-patriotism, doublespeak: all are illuminated in entries that carry Bennett’s voice — dry, measured, confiding — as he meanders from sandwich making to literary reflections and from present to past. His impeccable craft, as ever, is disguised as casualness … Whatever the mood or subject, the precision and restraint of Bennett’s language, its mildness, creates a sense of polite intimacy.
Pleasure is the operative word as one turns and turns these pages. To spend hours in this writer’s company as he records the days and years is to have an instructive and unfailingly urbane companion.
Like its predecessors, Writing Home and Untold Stories, this book contains a decade of his diary entries. Fans will recognize Bennett in these pages: riding his bike, buying antiques, visiting medieval churches, and, as always, enjoying his lovingly described sandwiches. Part of the charm of these entries is the mix of the mundane and the glamorous ... Bennett makes just about everything sound poetic...the good-naturedness in these engaging pages is proof of his current standing.
