Ridley has the sharpest of ways with words and the wildest of imaginations: he is on peak form in this urban fantasy.. C L R James was, by any measure, one of the most extraordinary writers and thinkers of the 20th century. Buy CLR JamesC L R James was, by any measure, one of the most extraordinary writers and thinkers of the 20th century. Born in colonial Trinidad in 1901, he divided his life between the Caribbean, America and Britain, dying in Brixton in 1989. But if his life was peripatetic, his mind was infinitely more so. Hardly anyone in contemporary life and letters could match the range of James’s activities. Revolutionary and aesthete, novelist, historian, critic, philosopher, political analyst and (in many eyes) the foremost of all writers on cricket, he brought a unified sensibility to all these spheres.

Even if many of his projects never came to full fruition – the autobiography he long planned would surely have been his masterpiece – he still left a literary and political legacy of remarkable power.
In James’s lifetime, his influence radiated mainly among small circles of Trotskyists, anticolonial activists and, in his last years, Black Power advocates – even though he never felt much warmth towards the latter Posthumously, though, his fan-base has become ever broader. Prominent among the latterday enthusiasts have been those who adopted James as a father-figure for the branch of radical cultural studies that labels itself “postcolonial”.One doubts whether the man himself would greatly have liked this appropriation. As a largely self-taught polymath and a graceful, lucid writer, James would have bristled at the narrow academicism and barbarous jargon of much recent work in “postcolonial studies”. More, James retained a lifelong reverence for English literary classics, from Shakespeare to Thackeray and Dickens. For many postcolonialists, apparently, the only point in reading such figures is to unmask their reprehensible racism and imperialism. It’s an attitude to literature from which James would have recoiled with incredulity and distaste.The posthumous James industry has produced several heavyweight studies of his thought, as well as excellent anthologies of his uncollected writings – including, most compellingly, his searingly self-revealing letters to his second wife, Constance Webb.

However, there has not yet been a proper biography of the man, aside from a rather sketchy early effort by the American Kent Worcester.James’s fans had thus awaited the long-promised study by Farrukh Dhondy with eagerness. Dhondy, a broadcaster and novelist with an engaging style and a range of interests almost as broad as James’s own, seemed well placed to produce something special. He would also known his subject well: James was Dhondy’s house-guest for a period in his old age.The result does not just disappoint those expectations, but is pretty much a disgrace. There are some enjoyable anecdotes from Dhondy’s contacts with the elderly James, a keen-eyed if often tetchy world-watcher until the end. There are passages of bravura polemic, even if these tell us more about Dhondy’s own attitudes than James’s. The comments on some of James’s writings, and on some of his political associates, are sharp, illuminating, sometimes witty.But those little nuggets of gold gleam amid a wasteland of impressionistic, often seemingly careless writing, riddled with flippant judgements Some are distastefully caustic about James himself.

Dhondy feels able, without giving any evidence, to accuse the old man of simply not understanding many of the ideas and people with whom he engaged. There are some very odd digressions, like a fictionalised chapter of interior monologue presenting the supposed private thoughts of James’s arch-enemy, Trinidadian Premier Eric Williams.Yet even with all this padding and meandering, the book is far too brief to do justice to its subject’s intensely-lived years. There are no illustrations, no acknowledgements (though Dhondy must surely have sought others’ help); most damagingly, no proper references. Dhondy has apparently ignored almost all previous writing about James, and often fails even in the basic responsibility of identifying source-passages in James’s own works. There is, on the other hand, a generous sprinkling of errors.C L R plays a surprisingly small part in Robert Young’s almost encyclopaedic survey of “Third World” anticolonial thinkers and activists. Even so bulky and intellectually hyperactive a volume as Young’s can’t, after all, include everything – though it sometimes seems to be attempting just that.