The world that Pryor saw in his early years shaped not only his

The world that Pryor saw in his early years shaped not only his rough and ready attitude to sex, but also his scathing take on respectable hypocrisy: “White dude used to come down and ask ‘do you have any girls who’ll cover you with ice cream and little boys that’ll lick it off?’ And he was the mayor.”The routines for which Pryor is best known – laughing in the face of sexual and racial taboos – took a while to work out. By his own admission, he started in the early 1960s as a craven Bill Cosby copyist. Groucho Marx and Miles Davis were among those who encouraged him to wake up and smell the coffee, and he gradually established a unique and category-defying comic persona. Yet even as he was boldly striving “to lob comedic hand- grenades at an unfair, discriminatory system”, Pryor’s personal life became the embodiment of domestic repression, as he subjected his various wives to a series of appalling degradations and eagerly enslaved himself to alcohol and freebase cocaine.Confessing to these addictions in group therapy was “Like saying adios to the greatest, funniest character I’d ever created”. The abusive behaviour for which Pryor became notorious – emptying a magazine of bullets into one wife’s car was just the best publicised of the catalogue of misdeeds recounted here – was bound up in the same self-hatred that his comedy heroically attempted to wrestle with.

The problem for this book is that Pryor has already addressed this fact in his act, which at its best was, as he describes it, “a dialogue between his inner and outer selves”, and he does not really have anything to add in print.What’s more, the special quality of his voice and the momentum of his stand-up – the exhilaration of one-man call and response – have just not translated onto the page. And even though lengthy tracts of Pryor Convictions are lifted wholesale from Wanted…, one of his best concert films, the irresistible life-force that propels his finest work into the stratosphere of greatness is sadly absent. Pryor’s assertion that “If you tell the truth, it’s going to be funny” certainly held true for his career But it does not hold true for his autobiography If you want to find out about him, buy an album.. IS Mark Tully’s ambitious title for this book of stories literal or suggestive or both? Does he intend the unhappy echoes of Conrad and, perhaps more distantly resonating, of Naipaul, from Heart of Darkness to An Area of Darkness? I think not. It seems that Tully, who has for over 30 years loved and recorded India, is rather making the point that at the heart of India is its periphery, its unnamed, drifting, lost or “small” people, individuals who simply spin off or are crushed by the wheel of the subcontinent’s great inertia and fantastic process. It is these little lives that Tully has set out to fix in words.

It is hard to avoid the sense that his motive is love, its object India. The quality of Tully’s broadcasts from India throughout his career with the BBC was unforgettable; his distinctive, faintly spiced voice conveyed volumes of information whose vividness and intimacy were equalled by profound historical and personal comprehension. How fortunate that it was a man so intelligent and compassionate who first told the world of convulsing events in India, the disaster at Bhopal, the deaths of Sanjay, Indira and Rajiv Gandhi. His authoritative mediation must have gone some way to defuse wholesale panic. Tully achieved complete sympathy with the country without effort; it came naturally to him and he gave it to us. Away from the terrors and disasters, Tully made broadcasts about happier things; each was an essay in observation and humanity.

One could not stop listening.
The stories in The Heart of India are without that compelling quality. They seem to have been written because their author very badly wanted to write them, they are often well expressed, they tell tales that ring true individually as well as in the, assuredly intended, wider sense of being representative of a whole people. Yet they are without the sting and flow that comes from Tully over the air. Can this man whose voice must be one of the most widely recognised in the world not yet have found a voice with which to write fiction?Of course fiction makes different demands from the impartial recording of truth, and, also of course, it must be a relief for the (we have come to learn) passionately opinionated journalist to escape impartiality by entering fiction. But for the sake of art, he must learn to be less merciful to his characters, not for reasons of crude sadism but to make the reader love them – eventually – more.