Three founding fathers of the media

We had all probably agreed by now that the whole memoir thing was getting out of hand, and a UN-negotiated ceasefire between memoirists and suffering readers was urgently needed. We have had more than enough, surely, of whiny books about alcoholism, rape, criminal pasts, drug addiction, all of which culminate, for some reason, in a scene where the narrator sits alone in a hotel room and ‘considers committing suicide’. Enough already, as they say.

But, hey, what do you know? Take the form away from juvenile American solipsists and give it back to a wily old English fox with some interests in life, and see how enchanting it instantly becomes. Simon Gray’s The Smoking Diaries is one of the funniest books I have ever read in my life; no less excellent, in its very different way, is David Hughes’s The Hack’s Tale, which gives us an idiosyncratic, personal voyage of great elegance and feline cunning. It is not a conspicuously confessional work, and in the end I think I disagree with its case, but, like Hughes’s other books, it has such vivid character and considered music, it proves richly satisfying.

It is an unusual, complicated idea. It springs from a sort of irrational disgust with the all-enveloping atmosphere of the media today. Hughes — himself a long-standing contributor to print media, as he openly admits — suddenly sees how tele- vision, the image, the fabulising news story, the internet, all control and infuse our lives. It begins with a telling little fable. The street where Hughes left his parked car is sealed off by the police after a crime has been committed there. A television news team is filming the scene. Hughes is prevented from moving his car not by the requirements of forensics but by the camera crew. If the car is moved, that will ruin their continuity.