2008-07-07 A sloppy, self-indulgent scrapbook, but still enjoyable - just!

This is a book that echoes with the sound of barrels being scraped - or is it the sound of a multi-book contract with Macmillan being lazily completed?

John Simpson's previous volumes of autobiography, egotistic reportage and anecdote have been stonking good reads - the pomposity and digressions very much part of the attraction.
But in this latest instalment he fails on any number of counts. For one, the previous careful balance of self-importance and self-deprecation comes badly undone here. Grand swagger is very much part of Simpson's persona, but in this book it frequently reaches unbearable levels. At one point he writes: "I didn't particularly care about myself... but I don't like to see any sign that the BBC is being treated disrespectfully". Simpson knows as well as anyone that when it comes to major foreign news stories he IS the BBC, and that of course, is the point.

There is some cringe-worthy name dropping and a lot of smug crowing about the wonderfully exotic and indulgently adventurous life he has led.
This was all present in his earlier works, and was all bearable - or even part of the charm. What makes it less so here is the shambolic scrapbook tone of this book. Simpson claims in his introduction that the book is a loose portrait of the current state of things, the world in which we live. This is nonsense. The declared theme is quite obviously a sloppy last minute tag-on, afterthought of some editor (who ought, incidentally, to have spent more time on the proof-reading) eager to provide at least some kind of theme for a random collection of unconnected anecdotes.
"I once happened to be in Argentina; some time later I was in Iraq again, then I went to South Africa with my wonderful wife and baby; I have known President Karzai well for many years..." You get the idea.

Of course, Simpson is an excellent and engaging writer and a fine raconteur with a neat yet deceptively informal style. And it is thanks to this that there are large chunks of the book that can be read with real pleasure. The pieces about Iraq, the section on America, the interlude in the Congo all fall into this category.
Other sections are less enjoyable. The bits where he pontificates grandly about the state of the world in which we live - mainly in the first and last chapters - are almost unreadable, and the lengthy longeurs about his beautiful young wife and adorable baby son are excruciatingly embarrassing.
Given the disjointed nature of the book these sections can safely be skipped over. But this in itself highlights the major disappointment of Not Quite World's End: amongst the scraps and cuttings there are the bones of potential for at least a couple of really good books. Though he has done it already, Simpson surely knows enough to have written another decent book on Iraq (one of the most attractive elements of World's End is the way he nails his colours firmly to the mast on this topic). It's doubtful that he could muster the humility necessary to produce a soul-searching assessment of the attractions and contradictions of life as a war reporter (as done so well by Anthony Loyd) but he could have made another book specifically about journalism. But perhaps the best opportunity missed here was for a book about sub-Saharan Africa. The self-indulgent interlude on the Afrikaans people is dreadful, but the other chapters and sections on Congo, South Africa and the Kalahari Bushmen are excellent, and given his experience reporting there he could certainly have written something prescient about Zimbabwe (actually, one suspects his next tome will be a hastily hammered out piece of hackery on just that).

Of course, World's End - or most of it at least - is still enjoyable, rather like being treated to dinner in some hallowed London club (Simpson's anachronistic twittering about "my clubs" is unforgivable by the way), by a garrulous old buffoon with a string of entertaining yarns to spin.
But ultimately it's not really a book at all - it's a raggedy collection of little sketches, hammered out in plush hotel-rooms between trips to Iraq, glorious family holidays amid the raw nature of the Veldt, and dinner with movie stars... He ought not to be able to get away with this, but he does, just about - after all, he IS John Simpson...