Newsnight Review discussed Personality, the latest book by Andrew O'Hagan.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

TOM PAULIN:
I think it is very, very poignant. I wish there was more of her, but it's a great sprawling, Joycean novel and a love of language, love of dialogue and in fact internal monologue in it. It is great fun, but you keep thinking God help her if she became a freak and that was what she was reduced to. It was wonderful for her to get on Mike Yarwood, but who remembers him, what happened to him? And then Hughie Green, interesting to see him in a work of fiction and Les Dawson, very interesting to read about him, but I wanted more of her. I felt there was a bit too much Hinterland, in terms of the family before you got to her.

LAWSON:
I thought he does it well and it adds to it that Terry Wogan is about the only one in the book who still is a star. All the others have gone.

Bonnie, there is no legal problem writing about Lena Zavaroni because the dead can't sue. There are moral questions here to write a fictional version of someone's real life and put real people into it did he bring it off?

BONNIE GREER:
I don't know what that means. An artist has the right to do what they like with the material that they shape. I didn't live here in the 70s and Lena Zavaroni is only a bunch of clippings to me. So I can't bring those kind of things to the book. I approach it as a piece of writing. He writes like an angle. There are beautiful parts but what began to bother me as I went through is that I got the third person authorial voice and the first person voice confused. I didn't know who was talking. He would do all kind of things with languages and I have for instance in the third person: 'Maria jumped up and made for the door'. It sounded like the first person voices so I lost that a bit. Then on page 239 some very bizarre and I think this is the Michael Aegis section. I can go into kinds of shrinky analysis and this is her lover in relation to him but that turns into this almost laddish type of depiction of a guy who comes in obviously a writer, falls in love with her and gets involved with her and there is a two-page description of their coupling that just jumps out of nowhere. I have no idea what that is about.

LAWSON:
Isn't he trying to get at the way that celebrities, so many people have a different purchase on them.

GREER:
To go back to what Tom said that can't be ultimately what this novel is about. It's a love letter to someone that this author cares about. We lose this woman in this book as this author meditates on it. The meditation is not terribly interesting.

PAULIN:
She becomes a symbol of Princess Diana at one point.

GREER:
She is a symbol at the beginning. We are there at the beginning and we don't necessarily progress, but the writing is what is important. I felt she was supposed to disappear in the way that she was taken over. The American bits don't work.

CHARLES SAUMAREZ SMITH:
I enjoyed it, but I read it and I saw the disclaimer at the beginning where it says it bears no relationship to real life and then I read the press clippings and it said that it did bear a close relationship to real life and I find that slightly disappointing because it has such a magic, fictional aspect to it that you assume it's a complete invention and I found it unsettling and disturbing.

LAWSON:
I think there are all sorts of reasons why you have to have those disclaimers at the start. He's playing with real people.

SAUMAREZ SMITH:
I love the descriptions at the beginning, the kind of shabby sea side resort and the sense of the vocation of that as a place and that period of Scottish history and the attitude to television.

LAWSON:
Tom, there is a set piece of writing where he moves up through a theatre where she is performing and we get all the levels that. Does he bring it of?.

PAULIN:
He does and the way he evokes London as a Joycean mass observation, even a young man walking through London who's just had a letter from a literary editor excepting a poem. All sorts of little details like that, absolutely fascinating but I felt that the people who ran her needed more attention. And who made her into the freak.