Back in the arena: "Barbaric Genius"

Barbaric Genius forms a brisk profile of John Healy, the Irish author of The Grass Arena - a major literary success at the turn of the 1990s, chronicling the author's time on the streets of London as a vagrant and alcoholic, his time in prison, and his subsequent rehabilitation, sparked by a growing interest in chess. There is evidence enough that Healy has lived the life: though the director, Paul Duane, meets up with the author just as The Grass Arena is set for reprint as a Penguin Modern Classic, the more telling material comes in the downtime, away from the promotional circuit. Here we find Healy either poring over manuscripts in his poky flat (proof that publication doesn't automatically guarantee you a place in the Hampstead hills) or pounding the streets of North London in the snow and drizzle, pointing out where he'd make his shelter for the night if he found himself homeless today. Clearly, the precariousness of the writer's former existence has stayed with him: the chess, yoga and meditation with which Healy now fills his days seem like a quest for stillness after all those years of vagrancy and throwing punches.

Healy probably wouldn't describe himself as such, but he's a prickly, obsessive, innately compelling personality, one who prefers not to be filmed in cabs, because he reckons it sends out the wrong image, and more generally treats being in front of the camera as an experience akin to being interrogated, because he still can't entirely be sure he isn't being fitted up. Duane adopts an understandably respectful line of inquiry: an early montage of outtakes and off-camera remarks reveals just how unwilling Healy was to go into certain aspects of his life. Yet the light, playful sparring between filmmaker and subject generates sudden flurries of information, gobbets of interest: on the appeal of chess among old lags (that it's a formalised variant of breaking-and-entering, and you have all the time you have left to serve in which to master it), the deleterious effects of alcoholism, and - most fascinatingly - on the clash of personalities that ended Healy's relationship with his first publishers Faber & Faber. Barbaric Genius gets to this material late in the day, but it goes to the snobbishness and social prejudice that still exists at the heart of the London literary scene; the film is a piquant reminder of a figure first cheered by the establishment for who he was, then cursed and cast out for the very same thing.

Barbaric Genius is on selected release.