Holes in the smoke screen

This is a strange little book by a peculiar little man. Not that I imagine Allen Carr himself would view it that way; for him this is clearly a fascinating book by a very significant and indubitably big man. Not, of course, that Carr actually styles it this way, so far as he's concerned his humility level makes Uriah Heep look supremely arrogant.

The inventor of the "Easy Way" to stop smoking, Carr has written a memoir which casts him in the role of the right man at the right time. He attributes his "discovery" of the method to serendipity, a curiously pagan personification. It's as if we were to find a late 20th century London accountant who had an elaborate shine to the Roman goddess Fortuna in his back garden.

Because that's what Carr was until he hit upon Easy Way, a chartered accountant caning 100 Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes a day and suffering from a gamut of inchoate smoking-related ailments. Carr tried everything to quit the habit: cutting down, not buying them, a pipe, taking a job in a non-smoking office, but it was all to no avail.

Not until he visited a hypnotherapist and coincidentally read an article which defined the habit as a simple drug addiction did the revelation dawn upon him. And revelation it was, Carr - rightly - understood that for a great many chronic smokers a combination of clear information and positive reinforcement could help them to definitively escape their enslavement to nicotine.

I've used the Easy Way to stop smoking and I found it highly effective; granted as I write this piece I'm fuming on a briar the size of a baby's forearm, but hey, that's my problem. I was a smoke-free zone for a year and I enjoyed it tremendously.

Carr's genius was to understand that so-called "will power" is useless when it comes to dealing with addiction; far from consciously making an effort not to smoke (or drink or shoot smack) the addict needs to redefine his self-image and become quintessentially a non-smoker. Not only that, he must embrace this new self-image as a wholly positive one.

The actual effects of nicotine withdrawal (and this is true of heroin as well, although not of alcohol) are pretty mild, and using the Easy Way they become almost enjoyable. Understanding that once the drug is out of your system your craving will automatically fall away, and that substitution is pointless (whether food, or a nicotine patch), since it will only maintain the addictive pattern, is a genuine revelation for many addicts.

It is, however, a revelation that millions of people have already discovered through practising 12-step programmes in the Anonymous fellowships (AA etc); Carr applied a version of this to the slipperier and less socially opprobrious addiction to nicotine. Of course, in his memoir he can't bear to acknowledge this and so he tars (ha, ha) recovering alcoholics and drug addicts with the same old brush: by characterising themselves as suffering from an incurable disease they remain just as gloomy and compromised as they were while actually drinking.

Bizarrely, a scant few pages after he's derided AA's view of alcoholism as a pathology, he characterises nicotine addiction in exactly the same terms. This is just one contradiction in a book full of them.

So full, that for a memoir it stands as one of the great feats of non-introspection. Carr seems to have no insight into himself whatsoever. He writes of his upbringing in Putney, his evacuation during the war, his National Service, and his qualification as an accountant as if it all happened to a cardboard cut-out. By the time we get to the break-up of his first marriage, Carr leaves his patently post-natally depressed wife with four young children, and takes nary so much as a backward glance. We don't even hear about these children until they appear as walk-ons in adult life.