“Yes, I can see that,” said a journalist pal of mine when I confided a certain unease at reviewing AA Gill’s final, posthumous collection of journalism, which appears only a few weeks after his death at the age of 62. That death itself occurred in brutally short order after he had revealed his illness, in a review of a fish and chip shop; he had, he said, “the full English” of cancer, “barely a morsel of offal not included”. It provoked an outpouring of esteem and devastated outrage from his close colleagues and those scattered across the world of journalism, from restaurateurs, readers, his many chums; and wasn’t it both so appalling and so fitting that he should have died the day before the Sunday Times published his last, grimly eloquent and utterly unselfpitying account of the failure of his treatment?
What you might try to do, my pal continued, is to think what would be most likely to make Gill laugh in heaven. Because, after all, that’s probably where he’s fetched up, that would be just the way of it. Not everyone would agree: probably not those incensed that Gill killed a baboon while on safari in Tanzania in 2009, simply to see what it felt like; nor the proprietor of L’Ami Louis, the Parisian restaurant in which Gill did not enjoy the veal kidneys en brochette, a “suppurating renal brick” accompanied by an apologetic “funeral pyre of French fries”, leading him to dub the establishment the worst restaurant in the world; nor the inward-looking Brexiters so comprehensively demolished in a piece written for the Sunday Times last June, collected here under the simple title “Europe”.
I recall being enraged by that last piece myself, not because I didn’t agree with 99% of Gill’s argument, but because of its opening caricature of an audience member on Question Time, “someone like her in every queue, every coffee shop, outside every school in every parish council in the country. Middle-aged, middle-class, middle-brow, over-made-up, with her National Health face and weatherproof English expression of hurt righteousness.” To me, it signalled a snobbishness that amounted to a lack of empathy; a wilful turning away from the anxiety that might drive someone to vote Leave or, indeed, a middle-aged woman to over-apply her blusher. It seemed callous.
It was. But it was to the greater purpose of making a humane, inclusive plea for sanity – for not allowing ourselves, whatever our position in the debate, to be informed by fear, or the consequent desperate cleaving to a made-up idea of the past and a fantasy of future freedom. Gill’s broadsides, his impatience, his scathing pen-portraits were, it becomes particularly clear when you read his work en bloc, the byproduct of his desire that we should wriggle free of conformity, embrace pleasure, eat our fill.
His abstinence only sharpened that. A recovering alcoholic, he had drunk through his late teens and 20s, and quit the booze at the age of 30; he wrote about his addiction in the 2015 memoir Pour Me. He continued to smoke – he loved the elegance with which he could take a drag on a fag – until 15 years ago, though he still used to recite the names of his bygone brands while walking in the highlands of his native Scotland (Passing Clouds, Sobranie, Gauloises). His writing suggests he had nothing of the converted zealot about him; rather, his apprehension of the exquisite pleasures of substances put him firmly in the shoes of their devotees.
One of the very best pieces here, much remarked on when published in 2013, details a night in Cleethorpes, where he had gone to observe binge-drinking culture. It is as far from censorious handwringing as is possible; he clearly has little time for the “tooth-sucking, finger-wagging, slut-shaming” police commissioner who bemoans our national inability to drink like continentals. “Who would want to drink like an Italian granny? Sip wine with a raised pinky, chew a carrot, when you could be out there with all your mates, people you fancy, people you don’t, people you shag, people you want to. You can go mad, get totally muntered. You can let go. Why have a polite chat when you can have a legend?”
“This is who we are, this is what we do – or what I did,” he goes on, before raising a notional glass to the “inventive, funny children” whose mad nights out are keeping Cleethorpes solvent – a hint there of Gill’s fondness for sniffing out piety and illogic: in a piece about fur, it’s both barrels for Peta, the animal rights group, and their “Fuck fur” cotton T-shirts. Nothing, he points out, fucks the world like a cotton T-shirt.
The first section of Lines in the Sand comprises Gill’s portraits of the world’s refugees; subject matter as far from the world of veal kidneys as you can get (although there is a lovely account of his visit to a makeshift restaurant in the Calais refugee camp, where he eats delicious chicken livers with the tang of “earth and grass and licked copper”). Capturing humans in extremis so great that it seems unimaginable is, to say the least, difficult; the correspondent is trying to take us to a region from which we are barred by lack of experience. Often, Gill’s style – again, much remarked on – strains, and falters; he reaches for an image, a metaphor, and finds it gone. His failsafe is simply to keep listening; to pick out the outsider even among the marginalised, the moment of meaning in a morass of suffering.
Sometimes, Gill’s persona – the suits, the barbs, the controversies – eclipsed this other writer; it’s something to do with the word “wit”, which when attached frequently enough to someone, makes it seem as if they don’t do anything else. Gill did.
Not that savagery isn’t important. Inevitably, one’s eye is drawn to the piece “Trump University”, in which he chronicles a day in 2009 spent being lectured on how to make money somewhere in New Jersey, a piece that Gill didn’t write at the time, but revived last June. It is fantastically angry and sad, as is the sketch he tells us he made alongside his notes; of a man holding an umbrella in the rain, with no trousers on.
As for what might make Gill laugh from the celestial realm, it’s tricky to say; he was the laugh-whisperer, not the laugh-vampire. I shall simply apologise for once being horrid about his review of Morrissey’s autobiography, and pay weak tribute to his love of wordplay by saying that although I feared this commission was a hospital pass, it has turned out to be more of a tonic. Vale.
