The romance of the Roxy
Marcus Berkmann
ARE YOU TALKING TO ME? by John Walsh HatperCollins, £16.99, pp. 311, ISBN 0007139306 r rather, is he talking to us? Anyone who has ever met John Walsh or read the many millions of words he writes every week for the Independent will know of his almost supernatural fluency. Surprisingly then — for he has been around a while — this is only his third book, and it's his third memoir. The first two were all about childhood. Catholicism and Irishness-at-one-remove. Are You Talking to Me?, subtitled `A Life Through the Movies', is all about childhood, Catholicism, Irishness-at-one-remove and old films. No one, as far as I'm aware, has previously done the Fever Pitch of old films, and film critics in their hundreds will be gnashing their teeth that they didn't think of it first. But I doubt any of them could have done it as well as Walsh has. This is a small gem of a book.
Walsh, who currently stares down the barrel of 50, was lucky enough to grow up in south London within easy reach of the many repertory cinemas that once littered the metropolis. (Video didn't kill the radio star, it killed the repertory cinema.) So like many clever middle-class boys and girls of his age he quickly developed into a fullblown cinema obsessive. The 1960s and 1970s were good years in which to discover film. Although the cult of the director was at its height, and pseuds and charlatans proliferated, the infantilism presaged by Star Wars hadn't yet taken root. These days almost all films are aimed at teenagers, who therefore cannot experience the sheer variety enjoyed by teenagers in the 1960s and 1970s, when some films were made for adults as well. So something of a golden age is being recorded here, as in most autobiographies. What sets this apart is Walsh's artistry in connecting the universal experience of filmgoing to the very particular experiences of his childhood and adolescence. Like all the best films, he constantly takes you by surprise. Narrative sleight of hand is his speciality. So a chapter on Mutiny on the Bounty begins as a riproaring tale of eight-year-old classmates going to the Odeon Leicester Square to see what for Walsh, a late starter, was his very first film. Unusually for memoirists he has glorious and distinct recall of what it feels like to be a child. Reviewers are always saying this of writers, but usually they lie. For most people the flavour of childhood fades like chewing gum. Not for Walsh. And while you are enjoying the agonising truth of his recollections, he slips in the unexpected thought or idea that flips the whole chapter around. Mutiny on the Bounty, a school trip, changes his attitude toward school forever. If you don't entirely believe the neatness of this resolution, you are so beguiled by the manner of it that you choose to believe it anyway. Each of eight chapters concentrates on a single film and a particular aspect of Walsh's youth. The Sound of Music, bizarrely, leads him to his first snog. Red River, an old John Wayne western I can only just remember (but will get out on video after I have finished writing this review), illustrates the unceasing fear of violence experienced by all small boys, and forgotten by most of them when they grow up. Like many humorous writers, Walsh is unceasingly hard on himself:
It was clear enough who I was — a spindly, gangling, middle-class Battersea boy with a vestigial Irish accent, the legacy of two westcoast Irish parents, and a face that, while pleasant enough to pass muster among the doting coven of Catholic matrons who populated my mother's kitchen, could not conceal its growing resemblance to that of a friendly horse.
But he never makes the standard memoirist's mistake of believing that he is intrinsically interesting. Like the journalist he is, he sells you his stories. And unlike most journalists, he writes beautifully. Perhaps inevitably, Are You Talking to Me? is too long. Walsh is hard-wired to go on a bit; tougher editing might have helped. He is also generous with detail, to the extent that you soon realise that he has made about half of it up. But all anecdotalists gild the lily; few write books as funny and perceptive as this. No one for whom the word 'Essoldo' has the slightest resonance should miss it.
Previous page
