Always an original

Before I opened Peter Parker's new life of Christopher Isherwood, I read, on the jacket of my proof copy, the statement: "The definitive biography of one of the 20th-century's greatest novelists." Having now turned its very last, 914th page, I can confirm the accuracy of the first three words of that claim. But the last seven? Do they genuinely apply to a writer who, on his death in 1986, was judged by the majority of his obituarists as having failed to fulfil the promise of his two mercurially brilliant pre-war novels, Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye To Berlin?

If Isherwood's personal fame has gradually tended to obscure his strictly literary achievement, it is perhaps for a trio of reasons. In the first place, most of his later works, written in American exile, were not novels at all but diaries and memoirs, which has meant that he has become the posthumous beneficiary of an increasingly universal preference for gossip over fiction.

Second, the enduring success of Cabaret, the musical based on his Berlin stories which made him, as we say now, seriously rich, has enhaloed his name with the kind of semi-mythic aura that his books would have been unlikely to generate on their own. And, third, he had the good fortune to find himself, with amazing frequency, in just the right place at just the right time.

A personable public schoolboy in Edwardian England, a homosexual in deliciously decadent pre-Nazi Berlin, a pillar of Hollywood's post-war colony of prestigious European expatriates, intimate with Huxley and Garbo and Stravinsky and Hockney, a precocious New Ager (via mescaline and yoga) in the California of the Fifties (which he described as "the state where we make the mistakes first and then learn from them"), a hero of the Gay Liberation movement in the Sixties and Seventies - for a writer like Isherwood, whose natural gifts were observational rather than imaginative, it must have felt as though all he had to do was sit back and just let the material keep coming.

The fact not only that he led such a stupendously interesting existence - he seems not to have had a dull day in his life and his official autobiography, Lions and Shadows, was published in 1938 when he was only 34 - but also that he virtually never wrote about anything else is both a boon and a bane for the biographer. A boon because it means that the primary research has already been done, as it were, by the subject himself; a bane because the biographer will inevitably run the risk of complacently parroting Isherwood's indefatigable self-absorption and ultimate self-absolution.

Parker neatly avoids that trap by the ingenious expedient of juxtaposing Isherwood's own lifelong running commentary on his friends, lovers and family (his long-suffering mother, callously patronised in print by her favourite son, emerges here as something of a martyr to his spoilt-brat selfishness), and demonstrates again and again how much their side of a juicy story would differ from his.

He also subjects Isherwood's sometimes posturing self-analysis to almost hallucinatory scrutiny, often catching out this allegedly most transparent of authors in downright fibs. "I am a camera," Isherwood wrote on the very first page of Goodbye to Berlin. "I am a magnifyingglass," Parker might have written on the first page of his biography.

AS for Isherwood's niche in literary posterity, Parker acknowledges that there were too many disappointing books (The World in the Evening, A Meeting by the River), too many hack film jobs (who remembers Rage in Heaven? Or Diane?) and rather more botched and bungled false starts than might be thought seemly from so experienced a writer (although, when you consider what else was happening in his life, it's extraordinary that he turned out to be as prolific as he was).

But by focusing throughout on his subject's ineradicable originality both as a writer and an individual (even at his feeblest, there has never been anyone quite like Isherwood), he has written a biography as fascinating to those who are already familiar with his work as those who are not - a 914-page page-turner.

There's one frivolous question, though, which he hasn't addressed and which has long nagged at me. All those glamorous photographs of Auden, Isherwood and Spender - but who was the fourth man? Who, in short, held the camera?