Archer’s Inferno
From This is London, paraphrased extracts from (ex-Tory party chairman and bestselling novelist) Jeffrey Archer’s A Prison Diary (which doesn’t seem to be available on Amazon). My natural disgust of Tories is tempered in this case by a nagging sense of injustice; not because he was convicted and got his comeuppance, but that he got six years for a non-violent crime. A local child murderer here got less than two years for an abduction before being released to murder.
Reading of Archer’s experience, of how he is “profoundly depressed” on entering a cell, on seeing Ronnie Biggs and within seconds Jill Dando’s (supposed) murderer Barry George, it reminds me of Dante entering Hell. He meets famous names of the time too. Archer is about as sophisticated a writer as I am a successful one (compared to him), so I guess there’s no hope of it being more than a stolid record, yet I wouldn’t mind reading it. However, I’m not buying the Daily Mail to read the serialisation.
Archer’s publicist defended the decision to publish by referring to a tradition “from Oscar Wilde onward” of writers writing in prison. He could have cited Boethius in the fifth century writing The Consolation of Philosophy. But maybe he was put him off by the fact that his imprisonment by Theoderic the Goth was only a prelude to his garrotting. Many in the press might have asked if this couldn’t happen to Archer too! Personally, Alain de Botton would be my candidate for that due to his unacknowledged appropriation of Boethius title for his populist self-help “philosophy” book a couple of years ago.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Shoot The Archer
- Haruki Murakami in direct reader contact shocker
- What I Am Reading
- Summer picks: don’t listen to them
- Separation
