Guilty on all Counts

TITLE: Previous Convictions
AUTHOR: AA Gill
PUBLISHER: Simon & Schuster

RATING
5/5 "Espionage"; 4/5 "Treason"; 3/5 "Blasphemy"; 2/5 "Sedition"; 1/5 "Littering"
SCORE: 3/5

There comes a time in every love affair when the emotions finally release the optic nerves, letting you see your partner as they really are, when last night's date becomes this morning's hangover, when you stop locking the bathroom door and start cutting your toenails in front of one another. It's surviving that moment, more than any other test, that makes or breaks relationships.

That moment arrived for me and AA Gill about a third of the way into "Previous Convictions". I'll save you from skipping to the end: it turns out all right, we're still together, but it was a close-run thing.

Partially it was my fault. I was quick to overlook Mr Gill's faults. At first, I knew him only vaguely by reputation, as a witty and acerbic columnist for the UK's Sunday Times newspaper. The first book of his I read was "Angry Island", and I was hooked. The vitriol sometimes fell wide of the mark -- he seems to have a personal animus against the Welsh, for instance, which seems to be about as relevant as being against quilt-making or the color green. But he was always original, always fun to have around. His travel writing collection, "AA Gill is away", sealed the deal. It's like pumping ten thousand volts through your literary nerves, blowing all your preconceptions of what travel writing should be. I had it bad, as you can see.

"Previous Convictions" started out right. Oh sure, there was a bit of pretentiousness in his division of the articles into "Here" (the UK) and "There" (everywhere else). The first piece though, on the Glastonbury music festival, had me in hysterics. The high point arrives when the police attempt to escort away a naked, elderly woman noisily masturbating in front of the stage. "Come quietly, love".

But then, I started to notice the little things. How his heart really wasn't in it sometimes. The line about Africa waking up with such promise? That's from "AA Gill is away". The paean to India, ditto.

Sometimes, he was so self-indulgent, like he couldn't even be bothered trying. Like the article devoted entirely to a phone call to his 11-year-old son. Worse yet, he started throwing his own relationship in my face. Here's AA Gill and Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson in Texas. Here's AA Gill and "Jeremy" in Iraq, in Mykonos, in Amsterdam. Other than as showcases for Jeremy's asinine prejudices and Mr Gill's love of name-dropping, there's not much to recommend about any of these pieces.

I was almost in tears. The bastard, how he let me down. Then I went back, reread the better pieces, the middle stretch especially. Wait, the magic was still there. The piece on gold mining in South Africa, that's good, you get a real sense of the oppressive heat, the stifling dark, the hellish noise. His take on the essential loneliness and desperation of fitness clubs ("As close as most of us non-Hindus will ever get to knowing what it's like to be a hamster") has the disturbing ring of truth, his anger at the massacre in Darfur feels genuine (the book was pusblished in 2006, before Darfur became a cause celebre).

His bleak portrait of Haiti is timely given the recent earthquake, and a reminder that it will take more than money to get this basket-case country on its feet again. The trip to Peshawar, near the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, is nicely balanced, a human look at the conflict that has dragged on through British, Russian and American occupations for over a century.

In short, "Previous Convictions" is patchy, baldingly uneven, but when Mr Gill gets it right, it shines. Brilliantly.

Sometimes you just have to close one eye, accept the other's faults, and learn to appreciate the good times. Luckily, in "Previous Convictions" there's still plenty of the latter. I just pray that's the last I've heard of Jeremy-bleeding-Clarkson.