A few thoughts on Alan Rickman’s diaries

Truly, Madly: The Alan Rickman Diaries offers an unusual insight into a relatively private man: we’re been taking a look at the book.

It still seems like a cruel joke that an actor as warmly loved as Alan Rickman was taken from us as early as he was. Like many outside of his circle, the news of his death in January 2016 was a sudden shock, not least given he was just 69. He clearly had a lot more living to do, and not just because he had a whole host of other projects on the move.

Earlier this month, and it’s understandably taken nearly half a decade to get to this point, Rickman’s diaries – or at least extracts from them – were published in hardback form. You can find that book here.

I finished the book a week ago and have been mulling it since. I didn’t want to pen a traditional book review because it’s not really a traditional book. In fact, in terms of something to sit down with and work through in one go, it’s a little frustrating. Yet it’s a tome that leaves much to think about.

Readers of published diaries can probably draw an accurate line between those that are written to be read, and those penned with publication never really in mind. Rickman’s diaries feel very much the latter, although I obviously can’t say that definitively. Editor Alan Taylor’s introduction to the book admits he’s not entirely sure either, noting “why he kept a diary is unclear”. He started in 1972 but ramped up in earnest in 1992, and at the time of his death, there were 26 volumes of notebooks. Rickman’s last entry was made on 12^th December 2015, knowing he didn’t have long left, and he left more than a million words behind and a whole lot of illustrations.

Taylor’s assiduous work, in conjunction with Rima Horton (Rickman’s partner of nearly 50 years, and wife), has brought this down to just shy of 500 pages, and the initial response outside of just mine has been a bit mixed. If you’ll forgive the pretentious-sounding statement, Madly, Deeply: The Diaries Of Alan Rickman doesn’t feel like a book to be read.

Yet one frustration that comes through Rickman’s snappy text is the argument that critics often don’t really look deep enough into what they’re asking and writing, and that’s why I’ve sat on this for a little bit. But also, these aren’t diaries of narrative prose. They do, inevitably, feel heavily edited, and many days are just effectively bullet points. The deeply personal stuff has – again, understandably – been very heavily stripped away, but so has some of the work. It’s 25 years of diaries brought down to a single book, and feels it.

The myriad range of entries aren’t always contextualised either, and it’s easy to lose track of just what project Rickman was in the midst of at the time he’s talking about. Rarely have footnotes proven as useful and necessary.

What I began to appreciate though, the longer I read, was that the trains of thought that Rickman was scribbling down weren’t making concessions to an end reader. And why should they? If you’re going to dive into a book of diaries such as this, that clearly weren’t fashioned by someone seeking an end of career payday and a bit of score settling, you have to do some of the heavy lifting yourself. You have to fill in some of the context, and some of the reflection. So for instance, Rickman is effusive in praise for director Tom Tykwer on their film Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer, but you need to go reading elsewhere to get the fuller story of the full, for instance. Likewise, the book has been mined by clickbait farms for its Harry Potter stories, but the ones that stick aren’t the obvious. Rickman and Ralph Fiennes looking for oxygen (metaphorical) during the shooting of a scene, and the general weariness in which negotiations were entered for each subsequent film.

It’s also clear, as much as he’s frustrated about being asked about it, that he loves Die Hard. I did interview the man himself once, and his bemusement and sometimes polite frustration of press junkets comes off the page.

The bottom line is that if you’re willing to put the effort in, and do a bit of searching around he side, what you actually get here is the flavour of a successful working actor’s life (although working actor and sometime director would be more accurate). A peek into Rickman’s life, but not a dissection of it. An appreciation of friends, but no spilling the beans about them.

In short, a life.

What I did ultimately get from the book, even though it took a little while to soak in, is just how present Alan Rickman was in his world. When he wasn’t in shows, he was watching them. When he wasn’t appearing with actors and directors, he was having parties and dinners with them. He was drinking with them until headache o’clock, and would occasionally offset that by doing a bit of shopping in a posh shop (I can’t help but wonder how much Harrod’s charges for a fridge).

I found myself wanting to pull up a chair and ask a few more questions, and as he goes from plane to hotel to car to plane, I wanted to take some of the tiredness away on his behalf. I wanted to see if he had a spare minute in his day just to chat.

I’m not privy to the full text of what Rickman wrote of course, and so I can’t say for sure if the mention of cancer gets more detailed introspection in his notes than it does in the published version. I was quite taken aback by how casually it appears, ironically with no drama at all. And I got a sense more from the pattern of the diaries and their entries as to just how it ultimately attacked his life. It’s worth paying attention to the dates at the top of entries, as the years seem to slip away before your eyes, and then he suddenly gets ill. It’s painful as a reader to see him stopped in pretty much full flow. Heaven knows how it must have been for his loved ones.

Two asides: I should note that I disagree with Rickman on Last Action Hero. Underrated movie, that, and I did very much enjoy his little capsule movie reviews. I also enjoyed the brief extracts from his 1970s and 1980s notes that appear at the end of the book. The way it’s presented comes as an After & Before fame rather than the other way around.

Still, Madly, Deeply: The Alan Rickman Diaries is by its nature an imperfect book, and it’s not really one for us. In the end, that’s what makes it as fascinating as it is. I still wonder what else was in the margins, and still feel there’s space out there for a more definitive look at his life. But this is what we have, and it’s unusual, and interesting, and surprising, and ordinary, and lifelike.

Would he have approved of us all reading the diaries? Again, no idea, and it’s something that’s always in my mind when I read something of this ilk. But heck, it does leave behind what a thoroughly decent and rounded human Alan Rickman was.

He remains very, very missed. But don’t call off Christmas…

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