A very smokable blend

Even the rubbish on the flyleaf isn’t rubbish. One of the astonishing things about Simon Gray’s new book is that the publishers’ claim that their author has ‘developed a new literary genre’ turns out to be accurate. This is the same blend of autobiography, anecdote and random reflection that made The Smoking Diaries a bestseller.

The new book is better. Less childhood memoir and more present-tense insight. The style is chatty and deliberately ‘unfinished’ and gives the impression that the book was dashed off during a few wet afternoons at the Renaissance café in Holland Park where Gray likes to smoke and muse and write notes over a double espresso. He specialises in great trundling sentences of six or seven hundred words or more, filled with rhetorical digressions and scenic by-ways. But the labours of selection and revision have been brilliantly disguised. This is a work of enormous and conscious artifice.