Book review: Autobiography, by Morrissey

by Morrissey
Penguin Classics
3 stars
John Harris

Thanks to a hyped-up fuss that has done its job in spades, this much we all know: owing to its author's cheek and his publisher's marketing nous, former Smiths singer Morrissey's autobiography is a Penguin Classic, which means it shares its imprint with Ovid and Plato.

Self-evidently, it's also a high-end example of a literary genre that seems to form at least half of the publishing industry's raison d'etre: the celebrity memoir, 2013's most notable examples of which include the self-authored life stories of Mo Farah, Jennifer Saunders, Harry Redknapp and Katie Price (again). Despite career wobble after career wobble, the author has become an unlikely British institution. As the blurb on the back reminds us: "In 2006, Morrissey was voted the second greatest living British icon by viewers of the BBC, losing out to Sir David Attenborough."

Autobiography is, in its own way, as faithful to the celeb genre as all the other books that are piled into stores at this time of year. Though its 457-page splurge of text occasionally suggests a bold stylistic experiment - there are no chapters; nor, for the first 10 pages, any paragraph breaks - as with so many famous-person books, it also betrays a lack of editing. So too do some very un-Morrissey-like American spellings ("glamor", "center"), his habit of jumping between tenses, and the odd passage that simply doesn't make sense. "I will never be lacking if the clash of sounds collide, with refinement and logic bursting from a cone of manful blast," he writes on page 90. You what?

And yet, and yet. For its first 150 pages, Autobiography comes close to being a triumph. "Naturally my birth almost kills my mother, for my head is too big," he writes, and off we go - into the Irish diaspora in the inner-city Manchester of the 1960s, where packs of boys playfully stone rats to death, and "no one we know is on the electoral roll".

And when pop music enters the story, he excels. Before The Smiths, Morrissey fleetingly wrote reviews for the long-lost music weekly Record Mirror under the name Sheridan Whiteside, and his talent for music writing is obvious. "It seemed to me that it was only in British pop music that almost anything could happen," he writes, which is spot on.