Applying any adjectives or descriptive nouns to the late Mr. Hitchens while he was alive would run the risk of receiving a sharp sarcastic rebuke from him. He complains in this autobiography about even good friends shortening his first name to Chris. He rejects the labels of contrarian, dissident, gadfly, and rebel being applied to himself although it seems to me that all of those were accurate description of his character.
Before picking up this memoir, I was most familiar with his name as one of the “four horsemen” of modern atheism and the author of the sentinel polemic God is not Great. However, he was a also a witty and erudite journalist, a deep thinker and a fearless adventurer. Terrified of becoming bored, he sought adventure around the world, thrilling to hearing a bullet whizz past his ear in northern Iraq, and illegally entering and exploring North Korea. My great fear, in contrast is being stranded somewhere with nothing to read.
The list of people that he had contact with is impressively long and included many heads of state, prominent poets and writers, diplomats and luminaries. He managed to get his butt slapped with the parliamentary order paper by an annoyed Margaret Thatcher. His distain for Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Mother Theresa, Jimmy Carter, Pope Benedict, Gore Vidal, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. contrasts with his loyal friendship and support for Salman Rushdie, Paul Wolfowitz, and George W. Bush along with many socialists, Marxists and Trotskyites. In his early career as a journalist he was a Trotskyite, a founding member of International Socialists, and a frequent contributor to The New Statesman. To say that he held his political convictions firmly would be a gross understatement. But to say that they were consistent would seem to be a lie. To be fair, he recognized and worried about his tendency to want to ‘have it both ways.’ For evidence of this duplicity, he reveals that when he was told that he was a Jew, in 1987, he was a ‘non believing member of two churches.’
This brings me to one of the major problems with this memoir. There is no consistent linear time line as one reads through it. He jumps back and forth from his days as an Oxford undergrad to his later adventures and writing.There is scant mention of his two marriages and no mention whatsoever of their beginnings or endings, nor do either of his wives warrant being named or even acknowledged in the text or the acknowledgements, nor are his son and daughter. One is left with the inescapable conclusion that none of them were important to him. He clearly was a womanizer although he never reveals much about his sexual proclivities. He took pride in his enjoyment of sensual pleasures including smoking for most of his life and regular overindulgence in alcohol. (These proclivities may have contributed to his death in 2011 from complications of esophageal cancer, although it would be cruel to ‘blame the victim.’)
Another major difficulty I had with this book also involves his wide-ranging friendships and familiarity with a vast amount of literature. Unless you are familiar with the poems of Kingsley Amis and many others and the writings and views of dozens of others, you are likely to get confused. He takes as a given that the reader will be familiar with the views and writings of Peter Ackrod, Theodore Adorno, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Rashid Ali, Perry Anderson, and Anne Applebaum- I took these names from the first page of his 11 page index, as an example. Perhaps it is my relative illiteracy that is a problem.
There are some memorable quotes of a philosophical nature. Among my favourites is this: It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live ones everyday life as if this were so.
Overall this book is an erudite educational commentary on many facets of late twentieth century social and political events from a keen observer with a contrarian bent, more than a memoir of that observer’s life in spite of the subtitle.
The Passionate Reader 