R.I.P. Gilbert Adair

[Reza]

Gilbert Adair



Gilbert Adair, who has died aged 66, was a
novelist, scriptwriter, translator and film
critic, famed for his sharp postmodernist intellect and self-deprecating wit.

5:35 PM GMT 22 Jan 2012 London Telegraph

Adair took on a remarkable breadth of genres
during a writing career that spanned five
decades. His talent ranged from penning sequels
to children's classics in his early career
Alice Through the Needle's Eye (1984) and Peter
Pan and the Only Children (1987) both received
critical acclaim to writing a
semi-autobiographical novel based on his time in
Paris and translating dense French titles. In
1995 Adair won the Scott Moncrieff prize for
translating George Perec's A Void into English,
which, just like the original, did not contain a single letter "e".
Gilbert Adair

Gilbert Adair

Adair is perhaps best known, however, for his
film criticism, which was always devoid of cliche
and rich with linguistic flourishes. He was an
unabashed cinephile, and reviews were the bread
and butter of his career, appearing at one time
or another in most of Britain's broadsheets. A
regular slot in The Sunday Times in the 1990s was
followed by the position of film critic at the
Independent on Sunday. While there, he wrote a
column called "The Guillotine", discussing which
"icons" would fail to make the canon of
20th-century culture (Henry Moore and Bugs Bunny
were among those who got the chop).

Yet the depth of thought in Adair's criticism
defied the glib judgments of a jobbing
journalist. His book Hollywood's Vietnam (an
analysis of how film tackled America's foray in
south-east Asia, 1981), remains one of the
definitive accounts; while Flickers (in which
Adair celebrated film's centenary by picking 100
stills and writing essays to match, 1995), is
widely regarded as an essential text for any movie buff.

In his later years Adair bemoaned the fact that
"everyone is now a film buff", reprimanding the
industry's self-proclaimed sociologists who "skim
over the glossy surface of film like so many
semi-intellectual hovercrafts without ever
submerging themselves in its depths". Yet for all
his criticisms of 21st-century life (he refused
to use email), Adair never lost his dry wit. He
once rang his publishers and was asked by an
excited secretary whether he was Red Adair (the
famous American oil well firefighter). "No," the
writer replied. "I'm unread Adair."

Gilbert Adair was born in Edinburgh on December
29 1944. The specifics of his early life remain
elusive Adair refused to discuss his childhood,
saying simply that he was reared "North of the
Border" though his accent retained a hint of
his Scottish roots throughout his life.

He took a degree in Modern Languages, turning
down the chance to read Mathematics, and joking
later that he had missed his real vocation. "One
of the real reasons I love reading Mathematics,"
he said in a recent interview, "is that I know it
will never be contaminated by the sound-bite, the
Starbucks culture." Yet it was his fluency in
French which led to his relocating to Paris in
1968, where he would remain for more than a decade.

Adair adored France. It was not long before he
considered himself a native of the country,
turning the first "a" in his surname into an
Eiffel Tower in his signature. Teaching by day,
he spent his spare time writing poetry and
attending the Cinematheque Francaise, becoming
"politicised and eroticised".

In his first year in Paris, the 1968 riots
erupted (Adair admitted throwing rocks at the
police, though curbed his behaviour as the state
paid his bills). His recollections of love and
protest in that year would form the basis of his
novel The Holy Innocents (1988), which was
converted to the silver screen by Bernardo
Bertolucci in the successful 2003 film The
Dreamers. "It was a very sexy thing," Adair
recalled, "being with these young people watching
old American movies or being in the streets
arm-in-arm e_SLps The whole thing was like a collective orgasm."

Despite his love of Paris, his desire to get
published led him to return to Britain in 1980.
"I always think that writing is to publication
what love is to marriage," he reflected once. "I
needed to come back to England to 'get married'
to writing, to officialise it."

As well as writing his two children's novels in
the 1980s, Adair both wrote both about and for
film in 1981 he penned the dark screenplay Le
Territoire for the Portuguese surrealist Rael
Ruiz (he later scripted Klimt for Ruiz in 2006).
He also produced 10 incisive essays on the
idiosyncrasies of the British Isles in Myths and
Memories (1988), mirroring Roland Barthes's
treatment of France in Mythologies. Adair wrote
another collection of critical essays in 1992,
entitled The Postmodernist Always Rings Twice.

Adair found wider fame when his novel Love and
Death on Long Island (1990), based on Thomas
Mann's Death in Venice, became a film in 1997.
The plot details the unrequited love of Giles
De'Ath (played by John Hurt), who becomes
enamoured with the actor Ronnie Bostock after
walking into the wrong cinema. Adair himself was
homosexual, though he rarely talked about the
matter, not wishing to be labelled. "Obviously
there are gay themes in a lot of my novels," he
said in a recent interview, "but I really
wouldn't be happy to be thought of as a 'Gay
Writer' ... Being gay hasn't defined my life."

One of his most celebrated literary creations,
Evadne Mount, Adair's Miss Marple, made her debut
in The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (2006), the first
of three Agatha Christie pastiches. She is an
elderly sleuth, a bestselling crime author, and,
of course, a wearer of pince-nez. Adair's
treatment of Christie's tropes in the series are
more loving than mocking, and tenderly establish
the red herrings and plot twists of a classic whodunnit.

Evadne features in the second book, A Mysterious
Affair of Style (2007), before actually meeting
the author himself in And Then There was No One
(2010). In true postmodernist style, Adair wrote
himself into the plot, attending a Sherlock
Holmes festival where he bumps into Evadne, who
proceeds to give her creator a piece of her mind.
"The point, Gilbert, is that you've always been
such a narcissistic writer," she says. "Nobody
gives two hoots about self-referentiality any
longer, just as nobody gives two hoots, or even a
single hoot, about you. Your books are out of
sight, out of sound, out of fashion and out of print."

Adair suffered a stroke in 2010, losing his sight
and robbing him of the opportunity to conduct two
of his favourite pastimes: reading books and
watching films. He was working on a theatrical
adaptation of his book Love and Death on Long
Island when he died from a brain haemorrhage.

Gilbert Adair, born December 29 1944, died December 8 2011