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Andrew Varley reviews
No Ordinary Man, A Life of George Carman
by Dominic Carman,
Hodder and Stoughton.

Like F.E. Smith's judge, after reading Dominic Carman's biography of his father, the famous lawyer, George, we are better informed but none the wiser. The title of the book, No Ordinary Man, tells us what the author hoped to establish. The implication is that George Carman, QC, was utterly extraordinary, but the picture we are left with is of a sad, inadequate, if exceptionally clever man, who furnished his house with books by the yard, who judged colleagues by their income and class of degree, who often preferred rhetoric to forensic diligence in a way which would have made Cicero blush, who spent all of a holiday in Venice next to the Cipriani swimming pool, and who gambled and drank right up to the point of disaster. No doubt this combination is not ordinary in the sense of commonplace, but that is not what the author meant. What he really did mean by the phrase, No Ordinary Man, takes us into the difficult area of his relationship with his father. That was not ordinary. Not many sons pinion the arms of the suspected lover of their step-mother whilst their barrister father beats him up.

Similar, if not quite so bizarre, incidents occurred throughout their time together. Dominic, from a very early age, was left in Carman's care. His mother was driven out of the home and bullied into surrendering custody (her lover was another alcoholic George, the footballer Best). The son's duties included putting Carman to bed when drunk, listening to his developing thoughts on the case in hand (one shared with whoever happened to be in the pub that evening), and dressing him when the shakes prevented his doing this himself. There are no doubt those who would argue that this book is an extension of the co-dependency which seems to have been a major feature of Dominic's life. Not long before he died, Carman laid the mantle of biographer on him. This last obligation blights the book because Dominic feels he has to be fair to his father, perhaps even rein in his feelings, or at least leave them unexamined. It would have been a better book had Carman not wanted his son to write it.

The basic attachment to professional standards, the common humanity, the dispassionate preference for truth over falsehood, which one would like to think co-exist in all lawyers, are elevated to exceptional virtues, but expressed in the hurried tones of afterthought. The descriptions of Carman's most famous – or perhaps, infamous – cases carry with them the obligation towards admiration under which the author labours. His ambivalent attitude to his father, perhaps a repressed desire to debunk, leave these forensic triumphs sounding more like the cheap successes of a fairground hustler. George Carman's career often reads like the legal equivalent of Vinnie Jones' video on great footballing fouls. In this, Dominic Carman does poor service to the law in general.

The description we are given of George Carman's preparation for a case leaves the impression that oratorical tricks, bullying, and theatrical effects were more important than a detailed knowledge of the brief. His powerful intellect and his ability to spot the telling points allowed Carman to skip through the papers and his juniors described being led by him as "a white knuckle ride". If genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains, then perhaps a mere first-class mind allows short cuts. He spent a great deal of time preparing his speeches with a view, not so much as to their containing all the best arguments – though they usually did – as to their making a profound effect on the jury. He tried things out on his drinking companions in clubs and pubs. Their reactions often gave him an idea he subsequently used: their comments, after all, might well be a guide to the jury's attitude. On a slightly more exalted level, the most significant research he did for his cross-examination of Arthur Scargill, was a lunch in the Garrick with Robin Day, who had years of experience in trying to catch out the miners' leader during interviews.

Carman was a consummate bully. His wives discovered this and so did any woman who came up against him in the witness box, notably the actress Gillian Taylforth and the athlete Tessa Sanderson, both of whose evidence he had to discredit and whom he chose, with considerable relish, to humiliate. As Dominic Carman recounts these events, it is impossible not to wish for a psychologist's insight into his father. It is all there: the suggestion of bisexuality, the impotence, the desire to be surrounded by attractive women (from rather brassy employees of Manchester escort agencies to sophisticated female silks), the extreme verbal cruelty, the physical violence. No one can fail to see the connexion between Carman's treatment of these courtroom victims and his offering a wife the choice of which kitchen knife was stuck in her first.

Dominic Carman makes an interesting comment about his father's demeanour in court. He compares it to the way in which he gambled, standing quite still, displaying no emotion. Carman liked to play blackjack, a game in which skill and judgement are reduced to the minimum: the thrill is entirely concentrated on the winning or losing. The implication is inescapable: the verdict of a jury is equated with the turn of a card. Like most gamblers, Carman lost vastly more than he won – in the casinos, at least. His wife's engagement ring goes missing, houses have to be sold, circumstances are driven to the very edge of catastrophe. The same can be said of his addiction to alcohol. From an early age George Carman drank to excess. His junior's anxiety at his seat-of-the-pants advocacy was compounded by the uncertainty as to how drunk he was. Like most drunks, Carman found a willing band of enablers - Dominic, obviously, each wife for a time, journalists, whom, unlike most lawyers, he assiduously cultivated, colleagues. There were plenty around to say that he performed better drunk or, indeed, when he had just had a substantial loss at the tables. This is not an original point of view, if no less absurd for that. Alcoholics of Carman's variety do not lie in the gutter singing "Sweet Adeline" when it is necessary to perform. They have the control to manage circumstances so as to pass muster and sometimes to impress. There will always be someone to insist that Old George was better with a bottle of scotch inside him. How do they know?

In his preface, Dominic Carman makes self-deprecatory noises about not being a writer. In fact he writes very well, during the earlier chapters at least. Later he lapses into journalese - too many things are "legendary" or "famed", for example; the opening of Chapter 7 reads like a Private Eye parody – and references and quotations are shaky. Was there no-one at Hodder and Stoughton to point out that the remark that "the world consists of men, women, and Herveys" was made by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who died in 1762, and not by "a nineteenth century wit" about the eminently respectable 4th Marquess of Bristol? No, of course not.

The interest of the book lies, not so much in the achievements of George Carman, real as they were, but in the implied horrors of the relationship between a self-obsessed alcoholic and his dutiful son. There has been a deal of comment on the appropriateness of Mr Carman's writing frankly about his father's darker side. I suspect he has shown exceptional restraint.