Book review: An Education, by Lynn Barber

Published on Thursday 9 July 2009 15:24

AN EDUCATION BY LYNN BARBER Penguin, 192pp, £8.99 Review by ALISON ROBERTS

AT THE BEGINNING OF LYNN BARBER's brief autobiography, she fully admits to being "a deeply unreliable memoirist" who is "never exactly a slave to facts". I'm not sure how her interviewees will respond to this, though by now Barber's reputation as the doyenne of British newspaper interviewers is pretty much unassailable. As she says, however, it's not really the facts that matter here. Barber's tale of sexual awakening in early-1960s London is so wincingly self-revelatory that I read large parts of it as one might watch The Office or Fawlty Towers – chuckling, enthralled, but with one hand covering my eyes. This makes An Education lots of fun; it does not make you warm much to Barber.

The book is built around the second chapter, which first appeared in Granta magazine in 2003 and has now been turned into a film by Nick Hornby. At the age of 16, an attractive, nave, yet horribly precocious only child living in Twickenham, Barber began a two-year sexual relationship with a much older man whom she calls Simon. Nowadays, flashy Simon, with his posh motors and fancy cigars, would be called a predator or a groomer but back then, still in the days when even the brightest girls were expected to bag a man at the first opportunity, it was Barber's parents who actively encouraged the affair. They knew almost nothing about him yet effectively "threw me into bed with him" by agreeing to his request that he take Lynn away for weekends. "Why go to Oxford when you could marry Simon?" Barber's father began to ask.

It's the Simon episode that makes Barber so loathe her parents in retrospect. Boy, does she murder them. Her father – "formidably intelligent but socially untamed" – gets it in the neck for sticking to his working-class roots, not providing a big enough house for her to grow up in and having a broad Lancashire accent. But it's the middle-class pretension of her mother, an elocution teacher, that really winds her up. "My mother was far more civilised (than dad], but as I told my father, she had only a beta or maybe even beta-minus brain."

Simon, it turned out, was a married father of two; a thief and a conman who consorted with the notorious 1960s landlord Peter Rachman. "My parents were white with shock – unlike me, they had no inkling before that Simon was dishonest." But by now Barber has done her best to make the whole family (including herself) seem so awful that you're very nearly rooting for him.

The second odd thing about Barber is that after Oxford, she worked for Penthouse. It's a career move she glosses neatly – "I know it probably sounds deluded now, but we really did feel we were part of the sexual revolution, fighting a crusade against censorship" – but I did find myself at this point wondering why on earth the young Barber couldn't escape the clutches of these relentlessly seedy men.

She does, eventually, when she marries David Cardiff, her saintly-sounding husband. "David was good. He was thoroughly kind, thoroughly truthful, thoroughly decent. Whereas I was somehow morally damaged. I had become a proficient liar in my years with Simon and found it hard to break the habit."

And so the final chapter, in which David dies a really quite vile death from the bone marrow disorder myelofibrosis, is suddenly very moving. The memoir changes pitch here. Barber's dreaded facts acquire crucial importance and intensity – the exact timing of hospital visits, the barely comprehensible test results, the medical detail of disease.

The rest of the book fills in the career gaps, and while there's no real insight gained from Barber's 28 years on Fleet Street, its snapshot of the "entirely male cabal" who ran the newborn Independent on Sunday will undoubtedly raise some grizzled hacks' hackles.

Barber's voice is of course hugely confident – sometimes grumpy, often a bit snooty, very often funny and always extremely frank. Take this to the beach; and be grateful for feminism.

&#149 Lynn Barber will be at the Edinburgh book festival on 15 August.