The first thing to be said about Clive James's fattest book is that it is a miracle of compression. 900-plus pages might sound like a lot, but granted the weight of learning impressed on those pages the book could have been twice as thick without seeming overlong. Hard to pick up, Cultural Amnesia (Picador, £25) is harder still to put down.
In large part this is due to its A-Z organisation. Just as you finish a damning entry on Sartre you get caught up in an adoring one on Satie. James's essayistic musings on Gibbon's style are followed by an analysis of the political import of Terry Gilliam's comedy. The book's most breathtaking turn of page takes us from the "emphasis and impetus" of Tony Curtis's line-readings to Ernst Robert Curtius's "incomprehensible and unforgivable" silence about the Nazis. Who could have imagined an alphabetical accident so pregnant with... well, with what?
Because eye-opening as James's jump-cuts can be, it is moot whether they could ever
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have been as invigorating as the narrative account of 20th century thought and action he has so signally not written. James says that because he "wanted to write about philosophy, history, politics and the arts all at once" he couldn't conceive of a scheme for the book "only... a linear cluster of nodal points" - hence, the encyclopedia-style format. Yet for good or ill history cannot but be a scheme - a pattern laid over life's chaos. James might rate Duke Ellington over John Coltrane, Chesterton above Brecht, but he has written a highly modernist book - stream of consciousness history.
Which means that for all its readability, this is a volume for dipping in to. Not a paragraph - not a sentence - goes by without your learning something, but here is not the place to start getting a handle on the recent past. Clive James has likely forgotten more than you or I will ever know, but memories are made of rather more than Cultural Amnesia. 
To buy this book  
FIRST POSTED MAY 17, 2007
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