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Good Reading : November 2006
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REVIEWED BY ALISON PRESSLEY biography/memoir word of mouth Wild Mary Patrick Marnham What a gal! Wild Mary Wesley led an unconventional life at a time when women – especially women of her class – were expected to toe the family line. She became Lady Swinfen when she mar ried Carol Swinfen Eady; had three sons by three different fathers, one by another man while she was still married to Carol; scandalised and horrified her family and society in general by divorcing Carol; mar ried again; and became a bestselling author of ten novels starting from when she was a seventy-year-old widow, too poor to buy heating fuel. Peopled by such splendid chaps as Colonel Cambor ne Haweis Paynter of Boskenna, Cor nwall, who drove like Mr Toad and enjoyed the company of show- girls well into his eighties, this is a spiffing read, zinging and ringing with party people, scandal, sex and sin. But it has its tragic side. Mary Wesley suffered mental anguish at the hands of her older brother Hugh, her eldest son Roger, and her sister’s second husband. Her worst enemy was Phyllis, her own second husband’s first wife, who made their life hell for nearly seven years. So you really want to sing and shout when Mary finally achieves success and wealth late in life via her books. ★★★★ Chatto & Windus $59.95 The Joke’s Over Ralph Steadman Illustrator Ralph Steadman’s friendship and collaboration with larger than life Gonzo jour nalist Hunter S Thompson survived their first meeting at the Kentucky Derby in 1970, when Thompson managed to spray Mace in Steadman’s face, and their second meeting, at the America’s Cup later that year, when Thompson (ever a prodigious ingester of questionable substances) gave Steadman a tab of acid and the latter nearly died. They remained friends and colleagues for more than thirty years, despite the fact that Thompson could be vicious and contemptuous in the extreme. These are indeed ‘bruised memories’, but Steadman is still proud that he was Thompson’s friend. His book is a glorious invocation of alter native America during the heady last decades of the twentieth century, and of the ‘last of the cowboys’, a man who always held centre stage. When the Great Gonzo finally shot himself dead in March 2005, it was Steadman who was charged with build- ing the 150-foot-high cannon, topped with the two-thumbed Gonzo fist, to fire Thompson’s ashes defiantly into the atmosphere from Woody Creek. What a long strange trip his life had been. Brilliant. ★★★★★ Heinemann $59.95 North Face of Soho Clive James The fourth volume of Our Downunder Man in London’s unreliable memoirs sees him on the make and making it in the burgeoning British media scene in the 1970s. It begins as a naïve but ambitious Clive leaves the protective womb of university life to forge a career in Fleet Street; it ends with him poised to become a household name via his inter nationally- shown television programs. In between are the years in which he ‘learned his stuff ’. He describes himself as ‘a trick pony who can work like a draught horse’, and in the pages of this book he offers plenty of evidence to support that claim. Always an addictive personality (when he smoked, he used a hubcap from a truck as an ashtray) he didn’t stop for years, writing more columns and articles and plays and poems and revues than three normal people, with a few books and television programs on the side. He’s generous in his praise of the jour nalistic greats who nurtured his talent, and doesn’t suffer fools for an instant. His wit is as rapier-like as ever – the night of the Killer Joint and the interview with Burt Lancaster are a scream – and he manages to encapsulate an entire era in a few telling phrases. Heady times, hilariously told. ★★★★ Picador $32.95
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