A professor turns pub bore

When Terry Eagleton was about nine or 10, he became convinced he should read "the classics", whatever they were, and persuaded his mother to take him to a second-hand bookshop in Manchester, where she nobly agreed to pay for the complete works of Dickens in instalments. Mrs Eagleton, working-class housewife and mother of many, was unlikely to be dipping into Dombey herself. "Literacy," as Eagleton explains, "was not the strongest point of my childhood community." No wonder he dwells with pride in this autobiography on his transition from the slums of Salford to Trinity College, Cambridge, via scholarships and exhibitions, then on to a succession of prized academic posts, culminating in the Warton professorship at Oxford.

Radical, prolific and highly articulate, Eagleton has been a force to reckon with in British academic life for almost 40 years and his introductory book on literary theory has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. One might expect his memoirs to be interesting, and at the very least, readable. But when it comes down to it, Eagleton's career doesn't make very gripping copy, and he has had to thrash around his childhood to find memoir-able topics: the Carmelite convent where he was an altar-server and "gatekeeper" (the server during novice inductions), his rough school, where ownership of a coat marked you out as a nancy boy, and home life with his Irish immigrant family. He recalls priests, student cronies, comrades in Oxford with whom he picketed the car works, a temporary job cold-calling for Encyclopaedia Britannica. Interspersed with these are passages on Wittgenstein, Brecht, Oscar Wilde, thoughts on pain, tragedy, homeopathy and (best paragraph in the book) the working-class cult of the parlour.

But if the content is disappointing, the style is unforgivable. Laboured jokes, pointless decoration, glimpses into the obvious - Eagleton seems to have forgotten everything he knew about writing. Reading his memoir is less like gaining access to the mind of a master than being locked in with the pub bore. He has a mania for making comparisons which are embarrassingly wide of the mark: finding out that Ronald was the original name of a friar he knew as Laurence was "a mild version of the jolt one might experience in discovering that one's wife was a professional assassin, or that one's aunt was really one's mother". His similes come in two kinds, ridiculous (above) and fatuous: "Mother Angela had the regulationissue flat Mancunian accent and peachesandcream complexion, like a cross between Coronation Street and The Sound of Music." Sometimes, aware of these weaknesses, he doubles back to make sure the joke gets through. Thus that same Laurence was "a bizarre blend of Brideshead and Bolivia, Evelyn Waugh's Anthony Blanche and a guerrilla fighter".

On inspection, most of what Eagleton writes is pure fantasy, as in this typically overwritten passage about the hidden lives of the nuns: "Perhaps those ghostly turntables concealed murderous rivalries and libidinous rituals, unspeakable rites in which cockerels were drained of their blood and some plump young postulant was held down on the altar to have her gizzard slit, while her weird sisters blasphemously gabbled snatches of the Mass backwards in their cracked Northern voices." This is both self-indulgent and evasive, for Eagleton never gets round to telling us anything very revealing about his own faith, though he seems to have lapsed rather late in life and mentions at one point that he was a member of something called "the Catholic left" in the Sixties.

The cover of this book is full of ecstatic puffs by some distinguished critics who seem to have taken leave of their senses. Terry Eagleton ought to regret that he has reached that plateau of venerability where, it seems, anything goes.