Here comes the judge

Originally published in The Weekend Australian, Nov. 20-21, 2017

Even if you were to take Martin Amis’s fiction off the table, you could still plausibly claim him as the Anglosphere’s most interesting living writer. Look at what he’s produced, in the various departments of non-fiction, just since the turn of the millennium. You have Experience (2000), the gravid memoir; The War Against Cliché (2001), that endlessly nourishing book of literary criticism; Koba the Dread (2002), his controversial monograph about Stalinism; and The Second Plane (2008), an indispensable collection of post-9/11 political pieces.

And now we have The Rub of Time, his strongest collection of non-fiction to date, a feast of a volume that brings together his hitherto uncollected essays, reportage, and reviews. All of Amis’s usual interests are here, along with some new ones. There are meditations on his favourite writers (Bellow, Nabokov, Larkin). There are pieces on sport and popular culture, including some wonderfully funny stuff on tennis. And there are bang up-to-date appraisals of American and British politics. Attacking these questions from the vantage point of his maturity, Amis confirms his status as one of literature’s great and exemplary all-rounders: always stylish, always deeply intelligent, always voraciously interested in the world around him. 

Sprawling and various as it is, the new book keeps returning to two linked themes: masculinity and excess. And a good half of it zeroes in on the place where these themes achieve their most startling expression: America. None of this will surprise the long-term student of Amis’s fiction, which has been probing these connections since his breakthrough novel Money (1984). The narrator and protagonist of that book, the cashed-up philistine John Self, was addicted to the modern world. That meant he was addicted, above all, to America. Starting with Self, Amis’s characters have always been hopping on planes and flying to the United States. And Amis has always been flying there too. Finally, in 2012, he stopped flying back to his native Britain, and settled in Brooklyn, New York. And why not? “America,” he writes in the present book, echoing Henry James, “is more like a world than a country.” What better place for the international writer to base himself?

Amis has already published one collection of non-fiction about America: The Moronic Inferno (1986), whose resonant title he borrowed from his mentor Saul Bellow. The best pieces in the current book revisit the inferno, and find that it has grown no less moronic. The clinching essay, written at the height of last year’s election campaign, concerns Donald Trump: a man who embodies the inferno so thoroughly that he wears it as a hairstyle.

What is it about America, exactly, that keeps stoking the fires of Amis’s imagination? There is a clue, I would suggest, in the following passage from The Information (1995) – another novel whose central character takes a life-altering flight to the States, where he encounters, among other grotesques, a woman named Phyllis. “In person, Phyllis seemed to be the kind of American woman who had taken a couple of American ideas (niceness, warmth) and then turned up some dreadful dial, as if these qualities, like the yield of a hydrogen bomb, had no upper limit – the range had no top to it – and just went on getting bigger and bigger as you lashed them towards infinity.”

Lashed towards infinity: it could be the title of the present book, or of the next biography of Donald Trump. Amis is not an anti-American. Far from it. But he is old-school enough to assert that some things do have upper limits. Decorum, he is in the habit of saying, must be observed. Which means, of course, that the satirist in Amis positively loves it when decorum is violated, the more floridly the better. Hence his ongoing preoccupation with America – its dreadful crankings-up of the dial, its lust for the infinite.

Take pornography – which Amis does, in the current book, by paying a visit to the San Fernando Valley, home of the American hardcore industry. How does pornography crank up the dial? By making itself more erotic? Emphatically not. It does so by becoming nastier – more sordid, more violent, more degrading to the female participants. Amis, who loiters on the set of a gonzo feature until he can take no more, gives you all the grim specifics. These would make for a rough read if the author didn’t introduce an uncharacteristic note of warmth, in the person of an “unforgettable” local porn star named Chloe, who serves as his guide through the Valley of filth, his bawdy Virgil. Chloe is an improbably self-aware and ironic porn star; if she didn’t exist, Amis would have been embarrassed to invent her. Since she does, he is free, indeed obliged, to use her humanity as a counterpoint to the squalor of her milieu. 

In his fiction, Amis has a natural tendency to heighten and exaggerate. His non-fiction plays it straight, since the realities it deals with tend to be exaggerated already, and often downright unbelievable. Reporting from Porn Valley, Amis achieves comic effects by simply offering up the facts in deadpan fashion. Mind you, the comedy is a deep shade of black. When a performer named Regan Starr complains of being violently assaulted during a porn shoot, Amis give us this:

The director of the Rough Sex series (now discontinued), who goes by the name of Khan Tusion, protests his innocence. ‘Regan Starr,’ Tusion claims, ‘categorically misstates what occurred.’ 

Like his late father, Amis is a connoisseur of language. He revels in the sobriquet of the maligned auteur, Khan Tusion; he instinctively knows that the surname must be isolated and repeated. And he knows that “misstates” is gold too: a quintessentially American piece of pedantry that makes Tusion sound like Mitt Romney on the campaign trail.  

In Porn Valley, reality is self-satirising. The same effect prevails in Las Vegas, where Amis goes to play in a poker tournament. Vegas isn’t just a made-up town. It would seem to have been made up specifically by Martin Amis. In its casinos and fake streets Amis encounters various avatars of American excess, including the morbidly obese. People’s very bodies, in Vegas, “are unbounded, infinity-tending, like a single-handed push for globalisation.” 

As long as he’s sailing close to the wind, Amis singles out a woman “who has munched herself into a wheelchair: arms like legs, legs like torsos, and a torso like an exhausted orgy.” Notice, if you haven’t already, the brazen censoriousness of “munched herself into.” Not many writers, these days, would dare to put it quite like that, for fear of incurring the dread title of "fat-shamer", or "body fascist". Who does Amis think he is, judging this woman he’s never met?

To a writer of Amis’s generation and type, the answer to that question is straightforward. He is a moralist, a satirist, a cultural critic; his job is to register what’s wrong with society. Judging people, therefore, is his bread and butter. And he’s still at it. Evidently he missed the meeting at which it was decided that judging people is no longer on. Also, he's still cracking jokes – another problematic activity, given that humour, as Amis has conceded himself, always entails an assertion of superiority. 

Pushing his luck in two ways, Amis is always getting himself into public scrapes. There is a piece in this book about Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the British Labour Party. In it, Amis observes, or claims, that Corbyn is “undereducated.” When the piece first appeared in print, that word earned Amis a brief spell in Britain’s naughty corner. Columns got written in which he was accused of snobbery, elitism, and other crimes against advanced mores. 

Writers of such columns, however, will always be at least one move behind Amis. He already knows what they think, and what they will say; his prose is already a reaction against their strictures. One of his key virtues as a writer is the seriousness with which he takes his vocational obligations. He knows that our culture is full of people who want to shrink the domain of the sayable. And he knows that one of the writer’s duties is to push back the other way: to establish what can still be said, if necessary by saying what can’t be said. If writers like Amis don’t resist the incoming tide of old and new taboos, who else is going to? 

Alas, the question has already been answered, at least in America. Suddenly the world has Donald Trump. After the cult of compulsory respect, we have the cult of in-your-face boorishness. Amis deplores both tendencies with equal staunchness, without having to vary his principles to do so. His critics, on the other hand, are required to keep two sets of books here. When Amis went on record denouncing Trump’s “cornily neon-lit vulgarity,” few newspaper columnists, to my knowledge, accused him of snobbery. Suddenly they were on his side. They saw the point of elitism after all. 

Amis, the man who invented John Self, is uniquely qualified to write about Trump. Unsurprisingly, his take on Trump begins with the man’s verbal output, before graduating to a more general indictment. Reviewing Trump’s latest book, Amis finds that his sentences “lack the ingredient known as content.” Nevertheless, they do convey a certain attitude. And that attitude clearly has its fans. Among other things, what Trump’s election tells Amis “is that roughly 50 percent of Americans hanker for a political contender who … knows nothing at all about politics.”

What is revolutionary about Trump, to put it another way, is not his ignorance, but the way he has converted it into a selling point. George W. Bush, when he stumbled over the delivery of a simple homily, at least had the decency to look embarrassed. So did Dan Quayle when he got caught misspelling the word "potato". John Self, too, had a vestigial sense of shame: he knew that all his cash did not make up for his lack of culture. Then again, Self was a fictional character; he was Amis’s fantasy of what a rich yobbo ought to feel, when his conscience finally kicked in. 

Trump, on the other hand, is real. If others won’t hold him to the demands of decorum, why on earth should he impose them on himself? Like the pornographers of the San Fernando Valley, like the city of Las Vegas, Trump has dispensed with shame. He has proved that an American can now go all the way without it. This is his fundamental breakthrough.

One of the most resounding passages in Amis’s book occurs in an out-of-the-way place, during a brief chapter in which the author responds to questions from readers of Britain’s Independent newspaper. “Why are you such a snob?” one reader asks. After replying, first of all, that he isn't a snob, at least in the class sense, Amis works up to this:

On the other hand, I think snobbery is due for a bit of a comeback. But not the old shite to do with ‘class’. ‘There is a universal eligibility to be noble,’ said Bellow rousingly. There is clearly a universal eligibility to be rational and literate. Sometimes snobbery is forced upon you. So let’s have a period of exaggerated respect for reason; and let’s look down on people who use language without respecting it. Liars and hypocrites and demagogues, of course, but also their fellow travellers in verbal cynicism, inertia, and sloth.

Startlingly, Martin Amis is 68 years old now. The former enfant terrible is now a grand-père terrible. But he is still out there on the cutting edge of public speech. Reading this book, I kept marvelling at what a committed writer Amis is. Superficially this seems an odd word for him, since he has never been committed to any particular partisan stance. What he is committed to is writing itself. He believes that even the shortest newspaper piece must be written with all his formidable resources. He is committed to his role as the autonomous, secular truth-teller, the equal-opportunity offender who answers to nobody except himself and his readers. He still seems to think that writing can change the world. It’s a good thing that he’s currently in career-best form. We are in no danger of ceasing to need him. 

The Best Revenge

Originally published in The Weekend Australian, Nov. 11-12, 2017

Ten years ago, Bruce Beresford published a gem of a memoir called Josh Hartnett Definitely Wants to Do This. Written in diary form, the book chronicled a year or two of Beresford’s life in the trenches of the film industry. That first book was a revelation. One thing it revealed was how little of a modern movie-maker's time gets spent actually making movies. Beresford is one of our most prolific and celebrated directors. His CV is thick with garlanded pictures: Breaker Morant, Driving Miss Daisy, Mao’s Last Dancer. But as his first book gorily showed, even a director as successful as he is must spend an ungodly proportion of his time developing projects that go nowhere slowly. 

Fortunately for himself, and for his readers, Beresford has always had a keen sense of the absurd. This was on show straight away, in the first two words of his book’s title. At the time, the actor Josh Hartnett was at the zenith of his unremarkable career. Professing interest in a project to which Beresford had reluctantly attached himself, Hartnett attended meetings at which he delivered long monologues about his seriousness of purpose as an actor. Beresford did a lot of patient listening, followed by a lot of patient script revision. Hartnett kept failing to commit. Finally he agreed to come on board – on the proviso that Beresford was dumped as director. 

A decade later, Hartnett’s career seems to have flamed out. Beresford, on the other hand, is still around. Now 77, he has directed more than forty movies and TV projects. He is a stayer. His sanity and sense of humour clearly have something to do with that. And now he has found a new outlet for those virtues, in his late-flowering incarnation as a memoirist. Poetry, said Wordsworth, is emotion recollected in tranquillity. Beresford’s movie writings do something like the reverse. Patient and phlegmatic while doing his day job, he turns wickedly acerbic, and sometimes bridge-burningly indiscreet, when recalling his successes and fiascos in prose.

Beresford’s new book is more diffuse than his debut effort, but no less funny or trenchant. It’s a memoir made up of fragments, some of which have previously been published in newspapers and magazines. Some of these pieces concern his professional life, while others serve up memories of old friends, old cinemas, even old cars. 

The book begins with an evocation of his late father. The old man seems to have been a bit of a trial. But here, as elsewhere, Beresford exercises his useful gift for converting frustration into laughter. “He favoured coats without lapels, a fashion he was convinced would be adopted worldwide. It has yet to catch on.” In his declining years, Beresford père had trouble walking but “imperiously refused the use of a cane to help his balance, preferring to fall over regularly.”

On radio and TV, Beresford has always been a trusty raconteur, whose knack for being amusing seems to stem from a boundless capacity to be amused. Fans of his sardonic, self-deprecating drawl will be happy to hear that his prose uncannily catches the tone of his speaking voice. “He was friendly and talked very quickly,” he writes of a dodgy producer, “though it was curiously hard to catch his eye.” Beresford’s prose style resembles the action of a veteran wrist-spinner. His technique looks loose, even effortless. His sentences drift along genially for a while, then bite the pitch and suddenly turn.

In the 1970s, when Beresford helped to shape the golden age of Australian cinema, film was at the height of its trajectory as a director’s medium. These days, Beresford ruefully records, the director faces competition from all sides. For a start there are the actors and their agents, who have long “held the whip hand” in Hollywood, and currently have the power to sink a project at whim.  

Then you have the producers and financial types. As Beresford illuminatingly explains, the rise of digital technology means that even the most junior of investors can now look over a director’s shoulder on an almost hourly basis. “They can then make some complaint, invariably referred to as an ‘observation’.” 

Beresford’s feelings about this are typically unpretentious. He acknowledges that the money people have a right to their views. But he explains precisely why the director’s views matter more. Directors, if they are doing their jobs right, will have “an image of the completed film” in their heads, whereas “people watching the work in progress, which is almost never filmed in sequence, have no such concept.”

The meddlers, you might think, ought to get that point, especially when it is put so pragmatically. But somehow Hollywood just can’t shake its fundamental disrespect for the artist. To survive as an artist in such a fundamentally lowbrow environment, you clearly have to have an extremely healthy sense of irony, or else no sense of irony at all. 

Beresford has one, which gives his film writings a dimension that those of the American insiders, even the smartest ones, crucially lack. The screenwriter William Goldman, for example, gets a lot of praise for his wised-up memoirs about the ins and outs of the movie business. But next to Beresford’s, Goldman’s prose sounds compromised, imperfectly liberated from the value-system of Hollywood's cigar-chomping boors and hacks. At some level, Goldman still buys and likes all that macho shit about meeting-taking and deal-making.

Beresford, in contrast, is utterly disinclined to romanticise the film business. He isn’t merely smart by Hollywood standards. He is smart by any standard. He knows about a lot of things besides movies. He is therefore able to write about them in an unusually cultivated and sceptical way. At one point he recalls that the script for his 1986 film, Crimes of the Heart, was almost killed off by anonymous readers’ reports – which tend to be written, he says, “by the scantily educated and deeply insensitive, a notably formidable combination.” 

The way Beresford uses the word “insensitive” here says a lot about the seriousness of his aesthetic. He doesn’t mean that such types are insensitive to other people. He means they are insensitive in a far deeper way – insensitive to art, to nuance, to the human feelings that films are supposed to be about. 

In a cultural world where people like that call the shots, it seems almost touchingly old-fashioned of Beresford to mention the concept of education. But he is eminently well-qualified to do so. He isn't just an educated man in the formal sense. Far more importantly, he has never ceased teaching himself about the arts. The pieces in this book cover a rich assortment of enthusiasms: opera, music, literature, painting. There are pen portraits of artistic friends and heroes, including Clive James, Margaret Olley, Jeffrey Smart, Barry Humphries.

If one were forced to voice a lone quibble, it would be that Beresford’s prose, when he is paying tribute to such figures, loses some of its usual vigour. He sounds distinctly livelier when he is registering irritation than when he is dishing out praise. Then again, it’s a rare writer who can’t be convicted of that tendency.

Otherwise, one’s only complaint about this book is really a compliment. In places it’s too skeletal. You keep wanting to hear more, much more. When Beresford writes, without elaboration, “I went back to England and directed a lamentable rock musical,” you find yourself thinking: hang on. What rock musical? Who wrote it? Who was in it? In what respect was it lamentable? You want Beresford’s affable but mordant voice to settle in for the long haul. 

And let’s hope this will still happen, in due time, when Beresford feels that his movie work is done. The world needs the full and methodical Bruce autobiography, in which he will put juicier flesh on his skimpier anecdotes, and will freely put the torch to the handful of bridges that remain standing behind him. In the meantime, the current book gives us a welcome dose of his bracing tone. In a world rife with philistines, he demonstrates that the best revenge is laughter, and living and working well.

Russell Brand: Peeved Messiah

Originally published in The Weekend Australian, October 7-8, 2017

It is hard to dislike Russell Brand entirely. On the other hand, liking him more than a bit would probably be excessive. Not that an author’s likability ought to matter to a book reviewer. Many of the world's finest writers and thinkers were well known to have been jagweeds in their private lives. We are obliged to look beyond such considerations. We are obliged to distinguish the work from its creator. 

The trouble with Russell Brand, however, is that he persistently goes out of his way to render this distinction meaningless. Everything he does is all about him, in the end – and in the beginning and the middle too. Whether he is calling for global revolution, or doing his jittery, artless version of stand-up comedy, or proclaiming that we need to keep an “open mind” about who really felled the twin towers, or interviewing some expert he can’t wait to interrupt or speak over the top of, Brand is always engaged in the same basic project – that of imposing his febrile, needy personality on whatever subject or medium is at hand. 

This time around, the medium is a self-help book called Recovery. A picture of Brand’s face features prominently on the cover, as it does on many another Brand product. The eyes fix you with their familiar stare, half baffled, half petulant. He looks like a peeved messiah, or Che Guevara preparing to send back a plate of oysters. Above the photo looms his accidentally resonant name, in its jumbo font: the surname that means a product line, the forename that is a homonym for an inconsequential noise.

The subject of the book is addiction. The modern world, Brand believes, is a dangerously addictive place. Even if you are not technically an addict, you almost certainly have an unwanted dependency on something, such as chocolate, or your smartphone. 

This means that Brand is in a position to help you, since – as you may have somehow failed to hear – he spent the bulk of his youth being addicted to just about everything: heroin, crack, alcohol, sex, junk food, pornography. Since 2002, however, Brand has been free of his major addictions, and has been hard at work kicking his minor ones. 

He credits his recovery to the twelve-step abstinence method pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous. His book is meant to tell you how the twelve steps can work for you, by telling you how they have worked for him. Of course you could always look up the twelve steps online for free, if you were so inclined. They're not hard to find. And reading them won't take you long: they only go on for around two hundred words. This means that Brand, after enumerating the twelve steps in his book, has a lot of room left over in which to talk about himself: an opportunity he seizes with frenzied gusto. Traditionally, self-help books are meant to be about you, the reader. This one is largely about the guy who wrote it. Once again, Brand has hijacked an existing form, smothering its etiquette and customs beneath the whims of his fevered ego.

You could argue that this is a legitimate move, from the practical angle if not the aesthetic one. After all, there is an important message at the heart of this book. And let's face it: allowing Brand to put his personal spin on it means that the message will reach far more readers than it would if contained in a book written by a mere specialist or trained professional. Whether Brand's readers will be able to plough through 280 pages of his hectically improvised prose is another question. But let it be said, for the moment, that Brand has some undoubted personal virtues that offer partial compensation for the way he writes. He cares deeply about his subject. He has obvious compassion for other addicts. And he is insanely honest. “The one thing I’ve always been pretty certain about is that this life is all about me,” he writes at one point. You could deduce as much by reading a page or two of his prose, but it's nice to hear him admit it flat-out. “Self-centredness,” he writes elsewhere, is “the core of my condition.”

Anyway, the twelve steps have proved so personally useful to Brand that he sees no earthly reason why the rest of humanity shouldn’t want to become ardent twelve-steppers too. After all, he says, these days everyone is an addict, of one kind or another. Therefore the steps can serve as a “universal” social tonic – even though, or perhaps because, performing them will commit us to a more or less ceaseless contemplation of the self, with no time left over for studying the world beyond it. Step Ten alone, Brand says, will involve us in “a daily, possibly constant process of instantiation of new ideals.”

You can see why a serious drunk or drug addict might be ready to volunteer for a future filled with the rigours of daily "instantiation". But surely it would be a bit excessive for a mild chocoholic, say, to sign up for the same draconian cure? Well, not according to Brand. And so a book that might have been a slim and pointed manual for people with real problems becomes a bloated spiritual guidebook for our whole ailing society. “I suggest,” says Brand, that the 12-step program “could be the genesis of a new way of being.”

Without apparent irony – or without nearly enough – Brand proceeds to reveal that he would like us to view him not just as a recovery guru, but as a “sage” and “prophet” too. Unfortunately, Brand is a non-starter as an intellectual. He is simply incapable of seeing the world realistically, with humility. He seems to have no sense of its size and complexity; he doesn't seem to grasp that many things in it – most things in it – have nothing to do with him. Except for a merciful late chapter describing the birth of his first child, the atmosphere of this whole book is suffocatingly Russell-centric. 

As for religion, Brand’s position is as follows. He is too smart for vulgar monotheism: he sees right through all that. But he’s too smart for simple scepticism too. The way he sees it, all the big religions share a common message. And he feels that it's high time that somebody (guess who?) had the courage to salvage this precious message from the rubble of the world's collapsed or collapsing faiths. And the message is: “love is the answer.” Or, to put it a slightly different way: “But I know and you know (don’t you?) that there is beneath the shash of thought and the wrought ascent and bilious plunge of feeling, some code of which the Sufis sung (sic).” Wasn't Brand meant to have been a comedian, at some point in his career? What person with even a vestigial sense of humour would be caught dead writing a sentence like that?

Faced with a book like Brand's, the critic is obliged to engage in a familiar ritual. Again a celebrity non-writer has published a superfluous and disposable book. Again the reviewer is compelled to blow the whistle on it, so that order may be restored. But really it's a strange sort of order we have, when celebrity typists like Brand get paid immense sums of money to inform us that we live in a shallow culture. Not that Brand is wrong about that. We’re addicted to trivia, all right. But when he lists the many kinds of ephemera that we’re hooked on, he somehow forgets to mention books like this one, which deliver the quick sugar hit of a famous face on the cover, followed by the shameful realisation that you’ve been sucked in by the junk yet again.

Mad, Sad and Bad

Originally published in The Weekend Australian, August 19-20, 2017

Andrew O’Hagan’s new book (The Secret Life, Faber & Faber) is a triptych of long essays, originally published in the London Review of Books, about personality in the age of the Internet. Two of O’Hagan’s three subjects are Australians. The first of these is Julian Assange, who, back in 2011, enlisted O’Hagan to serve as the ghost-writer of an ill-fated autobiography. The second is the computer scientist Craig Wright, who last year laid claim to being the shadowy Satoshi Nakamoto, inventor of the online currency bitcoin. 

O’Hagan’s essays are unified not just by their subject matter, but by the high level of intelligence and sympathy with which their author probes his hyper-modern themes. There are many ways in which the Internet threatens to make us less human, and more stupid. The online world is coarse and binary; and its baseness seems to have inspired O’Hagan to write a set of meditations that are especially rich in old-school literary virtues. The Assange piece, in particular, is a masterpiece of nuanced ethical engagement – and of devastating character analysis. 

O’Hagan’s history with Julian Assange began when the British publisher Canongate “bought, for £600,000, a memoir by the WikiLeaks founder.” In proper post-modern fashion, this “memoir” did not exist at the time. The idea was that Assange, having received his advance, would write such a book in the extremely near future. Or rather: that O’Hagan would write the book, with input and assistance from Assange. For months, O’Hagan made valiant efforts to involve Assange in the writing process. Increasingly it became clear that the soi-disant autobiographer had no intention of pitching in. In the end, O’Hagan produced a draft that Assange refused to sign off on. The publishers released it anyway, under the title Julian Assange: the Unauthorised Autobiography. 

Assange didn’t like that. And then, after publishing the book, O’Hagan wrote his not-very-flattering account of the way Assange had conducted himself during its composition. Assange must have liked that even less. It turns out that Assange made a grave mistake, when he invited the astute and sceptical O’Hagan into his orbit. And this mistake said a lot about him. It was, O’Hagan argues, a manifestation of Assange’s chronic tendency to forget that other people have minds of their own. “He thought I was his creature and he forgot what a writer is, someone with a tendency to write things down and perhaps seek the truth and aim for transparency.” 

Of course, Assange himself claims to be a big fan of truth and transparency. But he and O’Hagan have radically different ideas about what these words mean. According to Assange, truth is synonymous with data, and transparency is something you demand from institutions. And such transparency must be total and unconditional, which means it is only fair to access and publicise institutional data by machine, in bulk, with minimal human involvement. Hence the WikiLeakean preference for the vast and unedited electronic information dump. Even Edward Snowden, one of the great leakers of our time, has chipped WikiLeaks for its “hostility to even modest curation.” 

Assange thinks big. He is, says O’Hagan, “not a details guy.” He has a few simple and unbendable beliefs, and he prosecutes them with a puritan’s zeal. He loves “the big picture … but not the fine print.” For O’Hagan, novelist and man of letters, things are the other way around: maybe there is a big picture, but it can’t be reached except by way of the fine print – the specific observation, the quoted piece of dialogue. 

Another reviewer of O'Hagan's book has said that it deals with “slippery” characters. But slippery isn’t quite the word for Assange; and maybe character isn't the right word either. Groping through the smog of the man's rhetoric, O’Hagan sometimes seems to wonder if there’s any character behind it at all. At one point, Assange’s agent assures O’Hagan that Assange, despite appearances, really does want his memoir to happen. O’Hagan’s exasperated reply is instructive: 

“And what does that mean, ‘I want a book’? He wants a book by not allowing it to be written? By not doing the work? By not committing himself to the interviews or liking what emerges from them? In what sense does he want a book?” 

Words, O’Hagan insists, must have meaning; claims must have content. This isn’t just a linguistic point. It is the very basis of ethics: in the end, we must be judged by what we do, not what we say. Assange, the big-picture man, seems to think that having high ideals exempts you from having to behave with personal integrity. A lot of starry-eyed revolutionaries have thought that way through history; and their revolutions have had an uncanny habit of turning sour. As a young hacker, Assange's handle was “splendide mendax” – noble liar. As an adult, he “has a notion,” according to O’Hagan, “that WikiLeaks floats above other organisations and their rules.” 

If we take the view that morality begins at home, Assange begins to look like a very iffy hero for our times. Like other Assange watchers, O'Hagan finds himself repelled by the visionary’s table manners. He eats with his hands. He licks his plate. He lets other people make his meals, and – far from washing the dishes – never so much as takes his dirty plate to the sink. This, O’Hagan concedes, “doesn’t make him Josef Mengele.” Still: “I found his egotism at the dinner table to be a form of madness more striking than anything he said.” Again, the local detail points us the wider ethical question. If we all gave ourselves permission to behave like that, what would the world be like? 

Early in his career, Assange was fond of quoting a maxim of Oscar Wilde’s: give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth. WikiLeaks, whose website uses technology that conceals the identities of its informants under a veil of random noise, is ready to proceed on the assumption that Wilde was right. But was he? Spend ten minutes online and you start to wonder if Wilde’s epigram doesn’t need some serious tweaking. Give people a mask and they will behave abysmally. 

WikiLeaks has a mixed record in the moral field. On the credit side of the ledger, more or less, you have the story of Chelsea Manning, who divulged American military secrets to the site. Manning can just about be called a “whistleblower” in the classic and honourable sense. She saw things that concerned her; she leaked them, although she leaked mountains of collateral data at the same time; although she didn’t precisely step forward to identify herself as the leak’s author, she knew the risk of exposure was high; and she suffered the consequences when they came. 

Compare that with WikiLeaks’ latest contribution to history: the publication, during the American election campaign, of the internal emails of the Democratic National Committee. That was not a leak but a hack, whose object wasn’t to ventilate and reform the processes of American democracy but to subvert and corrupt them – to sway the election in favour of a man with a professed contempt for the nation’s democratic institutions, its free press, and indeed for truth itself. 

So who was the masked perpetrator of that hack? The FBI, CIA and NSA have unanimously declared that it was Russia. Against this, we have Assange’s personal assurance that it wasn’t. But as O’Hagan is only the latest writer to demonstrate, Assange has by now wholly frittered away his right to be taken at his word about anything. He claims to be a friend to America and its institutions. But in practice he seems to be out there with Putin and Trump, trying to knock down those institutions with a wrecking ball. There was a time when Assange could plausibly assert that his goal was to improve America’s imperfect democracy. But the American landscape has changed: these days, imperfect democracy is beginning to look pretty good, considering the Trumpean alternative, which has the feel of a ghastly reality show that can’t be switched off. These are the alternatives currently on offer in the real world. Which of them would Assange prefer? If he would prefer the former, he's got a funny way of showing it. But for some reason the radical mind has a horror of impurity and imperfection and compromise, and likes chaos much better.  

It would be misleading to convey the impression that O’Hagan’s essay on Assange is a hatchet job. Like the book’s other pieces, it is rooted in a desire to understand. Indeed its overall effect is poignant, because it demonstrates that Assange is his own worst enemy. He seems constitutionally incapable of keeping a friend. The great whistleblower trails behind himself a growing cohort of former colleagues and sympathisers who have ultimately felt compelled to blow the whistle on him. This cohort now includes O’Hagan. “The extent of Julian’s lying,” he writes, “convinced me that he is probably a little mad, sad and bad.” In the tribal world of the Internet, this will be taken as proof that O’Hagan is an “enemy” of Assange, who has set out to smear him. But let us recall that this is a book, not a tweet. In books, context still matters, and so does language. In a book, as in the more civilised spheres of real life, “convinced” isn’t something you start off being; it’s something you become, after absorbing the little details and seeing what they add up to.