Book review: One on One

THE SATIRIST has reached such a peak of mastery he no longer needs to make things up. Here, in this work of non-fiction, he simply tells the truth and nothing but the plain, bonkers, howling truth.

One on One is a literary daisy chain of 101 genuine celebrity encounters, each more preposterous than the last. Groucho Marx meets TS Eliot coming up the gangplank of a glass-bottom boat in Jamaica; Marx wants to discuss King Lear; Eliot wants to discuss Animal Crackers, and one excruciating dinner together is all they will ever see of each other. On to the next round and TS Eliot meets the Queen Mother at a poetry reading. He declaims The Wasteland; she gets the giggles. And on to the next round, until the circle is completed, with the hammiest name in the hat – Adolf Hitler. It is partly a huge karmic parlour game, partly a dance to the music of chaos – and only the genius of Craig Brown could have produced it.

His self-imposed rules are as intricate as a Moorish ceiling: the book has 101 vignettes of 1,001 words, so 101,101 words in total. It can be read backwards or forwards. This is not showing off, so much as necessary precautions taken against the dangerous commodity the satirist is working with here: chance. Slippery, messy, meaningless chance, which catapults celebrities out of their genres, leading to moments of magnificent, ignominious comedy. Walter Sickert slams his door on the eager teenage carol singer Ted Heath; Heath fails to listen to Terence Stamp’s political advice when he comes to tea.

Each encounter is disruptive in an unexpected way: a one-night stand echoes on for ever (Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin at the Chelsea hotel); a meeting between a murderer and a justice-for-victims campaigner results in a friendly correspondence (between Phil Spector and Dominick Dunne).

Out of the truth comes absurdity; out of levity comes profundity, and out of chaos comes order, as Craig Brown’s mighty wheel revolves.

• One On One by Craig Brown. 4th Estate, 400pp, £16.99