And that’s before Alastair Campbell strides onto the battlefield
Posted in General on 28. Sep, 2010
And that’s before Alastair Campbell strides onto the battlefield.Two-thirds of the book is taken up with Dyke’s time at the BBC. He was famously hired to rescue TV-am, which he did until forced out by Bruce Gyngell, who arrived to inquire which of the attractive women at the company was an “easy lay”.What sort of man emerges from Inside Story? I would say sharp-witted, honest, cheery, loyal to friends and well-motivated. When LWT won its licence and the top 44 people in the company made piles of money, Dyke persuaded all but one to contribute some to the rest of the staff He must be enormous fun to work with or for I wish I had.At the same time, he comes over as vain. He tells of programme-making with as much relish as he does of running the company, and the deals he made in charge of Pearson television. “Grovelling” and “vitriolic” are among the adjectives on page one.
Yet much of the book is a breezy read.
Dyke remembers a happy lower-middle-class childhood in the Middlesex suburbs. A love for his family permeates the book.After a first job as a local reporter he went, late, to the University of York. For such a funny and engaging man, Dyke’s book is short on good stories, though I relished the mention of the now right-wing firebrand Peter Hitchens arriving late for a meeting of the left at York and announcing to applause that he had “been out working for the revolution”.I would have liked more about Dyke’s disillusioning time as a community relations officer, but he is soon into television at LWT. HARPERCOLLINS £20 (352pp) £18 (free p&p) from 0870 079 8897
Greg Dyke wrote this book at the suggestion of Lord Bragg, he says, as a kind of therapy, a way of earthing his anger at being sacked as director-general of the BBC The anger shows. The language, you realise, is replicating the naive, simple-minded responses of African Asians to the vast and unforgiving forces that descended on petty-bourgeois lives.
Medium and message are perfectly aligned.Vassanji may have found a solution to the problem that so many such writers face. To satisfy occidental markets, many write with a sophistication that inhibits their own people, stops them engaging as readers or critical subjects. I hope this compelling, clear story can get East African Asians reading – and, in time, writing – so that we too can one day boast a culture that goes beyond the small shop. For most readers, a lot will be new, and perhaps there is a danger this book will become another thrilling journey by an “exotic” purveyor.Vassanji tells the story straight; the language is deadpan, the sentences short. As Lall’s family is forced to move, their decency is corrupted Yet Deepa and Njoroge can grow some faith and love.
Memories that we Asians had sent floating off were netted in: it won an award, as did The Book of Secrets in 1995.Most of this new novel takes place in Kenya among Punjabi Asians, as they experience the beginning of the end of colonial rule. The gruesome period of Mau Mau resistance touches and burns them; British callousness and perfidy stalk them; their own “in-between” lives prove hopelessly weak. Much of this is seen through the eyes of Vikram Lall and his sister Deepa as children, and their little black friend, Njoroge.Lall opens the book with a startling confession: he is known as “a cheat of monstrous and reptilian cunning”. Now living an empty life in Toronto, he asks us to bear with him so he can explain why it went so wrong. We do: it is well worth our patience.The Kenya here is far removed from the nostalgic romances of white settler accounts There is horror, grit and chaos. Black racism prevailed and Asians took off, settled in the West to become magnates, pharmacists, accountants, lawyers and shopkeepers. Like global Jews, they are astute, educated, their suitcases always half-packed.
But unlike migrants in the Jewish Diaspora, they don’t write their stories, or paint, compose or sculpt.