The Fry Chronicles

Stephen Fry – The Fry Chronicles

In fairness to Fry, I picked this up mainly because it was going cheap in a secondhand shop and because I thought it would be an easy read dealing with a person and an era of the British entertainment industry that I am particularly interested in.  It didn’t disappoint on these scores.  But it was feather-light in places and, when compared to a work such as Stewart Lee’s, reviewed yesterday, it suffers dreadfully in comparison.  I’m not sure this comparison is fair — Lee and Fry have totally different comedic styles, for one, and they have completely different agendas for their respective books.  Where Lee’s is wholly about the work, Fry’s is clearly and fairly marketed as an autobiography.  And yet, reading one after the other, it is hard not to draw comparisons, and they are generally comparisons in which Fry comes out the loser.

Surprisingly, my main criticism would be in Fry’s choice of register.  It is far too campy and heightened to tolerate in a thoroughly equable manner for very long.  For instance, he tells a slight indiscretion or hints at the identity of an anonymous subject of a piece of gossip, only to follow it up with a paranthetical direction to the reader of “no, but shush”.  That’s a direct quote, and that exact phrase occurs frequently.  If you could see how that might rub you up the wrong way, then I hope you see where I’m coming from.  Fry is usually a real master of register, and I’ve read plenty of the rest of his work, fiction and non-fiction as well as scripts, where his tone never troubled me before.  It’s a real shame.

There is also, if I’m honest, just a bit too much detail.  Fry mainly deals in this book with the period beginning with his entry to Cambridge (which is where his previous instalment of autobiography, Moab Is My Washpot, ended) up to his 30th birthday, and it runs to over 400 pages.  A bit more could have been done to give it a rigorous trim.  Similarly, at least to my mind, it takes ages to get to the meat — I don’t so much care for Fry’s Cambridge years (particularly not when he is so ostentatiously cavalier about his academic performance, which drives me up the wall; a typical platitude from this section reads, “A real education takes place, not in the lecture hall or library, but in the rooms of friends, with earnest frolic and happy disputation” [122] — er, no, Stephen, no).  It’s the graduate Fry that is of most interest in this period, and I would have liked quite a bit more about his work.

And yet I feel I’m being hard on it.  It doesn’t purport to be anything like Lee’s routine-based book, and when it works, it works excellently.  Earlier in the week, when I was reading it in the glorious sunshine in the garden, when I came to the Blackadder II section, I was enthralled, and I simply squirmed with delight at the descriptions of Alan Bennett, with whom Fry had dealings during the 1984 run of Forty Years On.  One day, breaking for lunch from a rehearsal, Fry comes out of the theatre with some others to find Bennett attaching bicycle clips to his trousers.

“Are you going to join us for spaghetti?” [asked Fry.] [...]

“Oh no,” said Alan, in slightly shocked tones, as if we were inviting him to a naked orgy in an opium den.  ”I shall cycle home and have a poached egg.”

I hope you are also squirming with delight, because if anything deserves it, that does.  But there’s not enough of that level of anecdote for me, though the book is nothing but anecdote from end to end; maybe it stands or falls by how interested you are in the subjects of the stories (and, admittedly, Alan Bennett is a fantastically easy sell for me).  And it’s probably not hurt if you choose to read it on a beautiful summer’s day when all’s right with the world, rather than on a packed and smelly commuter train.  As Fry himself might say, humby-ho, really.