Newspaper Article

Saturday review: books: Carman v Carman: Alan Rusbridger on a legendary silk, put in the dock by his son

Rusbridger, Alan

2002

Overview

The other revelatory chapter is the penultimate one, in which all three of Carman's former wives are given space to reveal, in their own words, the stories of their failed marriages. Each relationship, according to these narratives, began well, but soon deteriorated into a sort of hell of debt, abuse, drink, absence, sexual inadequacy and violence. Carman is, as his grandson says, unable to defend himself. But there is enough of a consistent pattern in these statements - partly corroborated by [Dominic Carman] himself - to suggest that they are fair accounts of what it was like to be married to Carman. The main exception is the Aitken case, which required Carman - already quite ill with cancer - to perform the longest and most difficult cross-examination of his career. Dominic Carman has interviewed Aitken, as well as his silk, Charles Gray QC, and the judge, Sir Oliver Popplewell. Aitken's view apparently remains that his bravura performance in the witness box had sufficiently convinced the judge that without the dramatic and damning last-minute evidence from British Airways, he would have been home and dry. Dominic Carman has written a strange, unsettling book. It is, by turns, funny, painful, voyeuristic, Pooterish, muddled, touching, unbalanced, amateurish, painful, racy, angry and - despite it all - affectionate. His father would have hated it. There is no doubt that, were he still alive, he would have moved legal heaven and earth to prevent the book's publication. But the dead can't sue - a technicality which has robbed us of what might have been the ultimate case: Carman v Carman.

• Publisher: Guardian News & Media Limited
• Subject: Biographies / Books-titles / Carman, Dominic / Carman, George / No Ordinary Man: A Life of George Carman / Nonfiction