The Fry Chronicles, by Stephen Fry

It’s been quite a few years now since Stephen Fry’s first volume of autobiography, the excellently-titled Moab is my Washpot - though apparently in light of the fact nobody got it, this new release has a simpler name. It was released to great fanfare about being the first book to be released in so many ways – in bookshops, as ebook download, as an iOS app etc – and shot to the top of the non-fiction charts. And I was well-pleased, because Stephen Fry is amongst my favourite public figures, being educated, eloquent, and also very funny, a non-threatening example of what much of modern England seems to have grown to fear and resent, yet also remains venerated by thousands who are perhaps less vocal about it. I thought him superb in Blackadder and Jeeves and Wooster, better in Wilde and read most of his novels. I love QI despite occasionally being annoyed by it, and his is one of only three Twitter accounts I follow. I like that he represents the old world but is so tech-savvy. I like that he is vulnerable and happy to talk about his flaws and that he is also very much an aspirational figure, and have read most of his novels, which while really no classics were well-written and highly memorable.

So though I was far from a day-one reader, I was very interested in this release once I was reminded it existed, and even put other books on hold for it, which (Anna Karenina – which I have read on and off for years now – aside) I rarely do. I had been very eager for this book after finding Moab is my Washpot so compelling yet stopping short of the most interesting parts of Fry’s life. Maybe it is because I had been so eager that I was so disappointed.

I wanted to read about Fry’s realisation that he was bipolar and his infamous disappearance. I wanted to hear about how his first love made him feel and the fear and the desire of beginning a first serious relationship. I wanted to know how his public school sexual experiences affected him later. I wanted to know about his creative process and his struggles to write books. I wanted him to talk about why almost all his books have pretty boys in their early teens in pseudo-innocent sexual situations. I wanted to hear about the rebellious side of his life at Cambridge. Instead…where the first book seemed to have Fry bear his soul about his difficult adolescence, this one seemed very much to be keeping up a screen, despite the times he consciously says that he is revealing more than, perhaps, he would like to. Oh, and it said ‘autres maeurs’ instead of ‘autres moeurs’.

It’s a short book, and there are some very pleasant anecdotes about Emma Thompson, about Alan Bennett and about Douglas Adams, all drawn in the shorthand needed for such public figures. There’s some interesting little paragraphs about Blackadder and I derived some personal satisfaction from seeing how similar Fry’s attitude to his Cambridge education was to my own, except when it came to writing exams: he apparently developed a winning essay that he could bend to answer any question, largely based on an Anne Barton essay (my own wonderful old skeleton of a supervisor as an undergrad).

But by and large, this book was dull and totally lacking in insight. Some anecdotes had been told on QI. Others were covered in documentaries about Blackadder. All were the sort of thing suitable for those platforms – light, entertaining and at arm’s length from the actual man and his actual beliefs. His endless hand-wringing and emphasising the fact that he knows he’s very lucky and doesn’t want to come over as a prick but inevitably will gets very tiresome, too.

Perhaps it’s time to expect the safe and sanitary from Fry. But I wanted so much more than a book full of the padding of funny little stories and the repetition of the fact he really just got very lucky writing a play for Edinburgh, being in Footlights at the right time and getting an agent out of it, with everything else just tumbling out of that. This felt like an inflated encyclopaedia entry written by the subject. I wanted to know not just what happened, but how it felt.

Well, there’s still another volume to come – or even, perhaps, two. I will still read them, but my keenness has faded.