Book: Falling Towards England

Overview
Clive James’s Falling Towards England, the second volume of his memoirs after Unreliable Memoirs, charts his leap from sun-blasted Sydney to the sooty, exhilarating, baffling expanse of early-1960s London. The title captures the sensation of an Antipodean outsider tumbling toward the old metropolis under the pull of literary gravity. What follows is a comic Bildungsroman of a young writer trying to convert culture into livelihood while discovering that London’s promise arrives bundled with fog, queueing, and the chronic shortage of cash. James narrates in his high-compression style, gag-dense, baroquely metaphorical, and unsparing of his younger self, turning near-disasters into polished set pieces.

Setting and Arc
The book begins with arrival rituals: immigration counters, baffling forms, and the immediate realization that his romantic picture of London will have to share space with cold rooms and warm beer. He ricochets between digs and bedsits, discovers the Antipodean archipelago of Earl’s Court and Notting Hill, and assembles a survival kit of casual jobs, borrowed coats, and hopeful letters to editors. Cambridge looms as an intellectual destination and a reputation to be won, but the route there winds through misdirections, bureaucratic mazes, and a constant hunt for enough coin to eat and read at the same time. James’s London is part library, part music hall, part obstacle course.

Scenes and Encounters
James recounts auditions, interviews, and odd employments with a conjuror’s eye for misdirection and the flop. He hauls boxes, proofreads, and fetches tea; he angles for bylines that might lead to rent money; he studies how famous names move through a room and how to look like you belong when you don’t. The friendship networks of expatriates and young intellectuals provide ballast: fellow Australians and New Zealanders, a sprinkling of poets and satirists, and the tolerant saints who lend sofas. The Cambridge episodes, when they arrive, are less coronation than caper, expensive gowns over thin wallets, competitive cleverness masking basic insecurity, and the dawning sense that wit alone is not a meal plan.

Voice and Style
James’s prose is the show. He flips between vaudeville and essay, stacking jokes until a sentence buckles beneath its own glitter, then landing on a clarity that stings. The “unreliable” in his subtitle is both a warning and an ethic: memory is shaped into narrative rather than audited for facts, and the dazzle is part of the truth. He satirizes English class rituals without pretending to stand above them; he mocks his own vaulting ambition even as he feeds it. The similes are outrageous, the timing meticulous, the self-portrait unflattering enough to be trusted.

Themes
Migration and reinvention drive the book. James treats the voyage as an artistic wager: will proximity to the English canon produce a writer or only a better-educated impostor? Poverty becomes his finishing school, forcing improvisation and teaching that taste is not a qualification. He studies the machinery of cultural power, publishers’ offices, common rooms, audition halls, and learns how manner, accent, and confidence perform as currency. The outsider’s gaze keeps everything sharp: fog, newspapers, pubs, buses, and dinner tables are all readable texts, their typography one of class and aspiration.

Place in the Memoirs
Falling Towards England is the bridge between adolescent bravado and professional foothold, the period where dreams are neither abandoned nor yet validated. The comedy is elastic enough to hold discouragement, and the disappointments are framed as necessary weights for a better fall. By the end, James has not so much arrived as learned how to continue, an education in persistence, voice, and the art of turning embarrassment into unforgettable prose.