Maurice Saatchi puts himself on trial

In this bizarre memoir, the advertising guru and Tory peer imagines pleading his case at the Pearly Gates

128pp, Eris, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), £19.99, ebook £9.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ

This is very possibly the strangest book I have ever read. Certainly the strangest memoir. Traditionally, a memoirist writes about his life. Instead, Maurice Saatchi has written about his death.

In DNR (as in “Do Not Resuscitate”), the advertising supremo and Conservative peer invites us to imagine that he has died and arrived at the Pearly Gates. But, in order to gain entry, and thus be reunited for eternity with his late second wife (the writer Josephine Hart, who died in 2011), he must plead his case in a celestial courtroom. His account of this trial is written in the form of a script, as if it were a play. (A rather short play, at that: the book runs to barely more than 120 pages. Not a lot, for £19.99.)

On the face of it, the above premise may sound eccentric. Personally, though, I think it’s an inspired format for autobiography. Rather than produce a ploddingly comprehensive record of his life, an author can focus exclusively on its defining moments, those that are likely to give the reader the greatest insight into the author’s character. As the defendant in a celestial court, after all, the author is bound to tell stories about his life that show him in a good light – while the prosecution cites events that show him in a bad light. An ingenious, playful blend of fact and fiction.

That isn’t quite what happens in DNR, however. The main thing that undermines this promising scenario is the prosecution’s line of questioning, which is often bemusing. The stated purpose of this fictional trial is to establish Saatchi’s fitness for Heaven, to decide whether he did what he could to make the world a better place. So you would surely expect the prosecution to interrogate the defendant about his conduct in his personal life. How did he treat other people?

His employees, for example, and his parents, his art-collecting brother Charles, his son, his first wife? How good to them was he?

For some reason, though, the prosecutor in DNR doesn’t ask about any of that. Instead, he begins by cross-examining Saatchi at length about his period as a writer of election-winning slogans for the Conservative party (most famously, 1979’s “Labour Isn’t Working”).

Then, bizarrely, the prosecution starts accusing Saatchi of being “anti-capitalist”, and of having the temerity to “criticise the foundations of America’s economic success”. Does entry to Heaven really depend on uncritical support for billionaire corporations? This sounds like something of a departure from Christ’s teachings.

The responses from Saatchi’s character are perfectly interesting. He has plenty of instructive things to say about the art of political campaigning, the failings of the free market and the problems with Big Tech. It’s hard to avoid thinking, though, that these comments would have been better suited to an essay or a newspaper column, rather than a fictional trial weighing up whether he deserves to go to Heaven.

Finally, Saatchi’s character tells the court about his love for his late second wife, and his desperation to be reunited with her. This part is moving, and much more the sort of thing we might have expected to read in the first place. Why, in order to get to it, we were obliged to sit through his musings on the state of capitalism I don’t know.

At the end, a jury featuring Einstein, Gandhi, Darwin and Saatchi’s former client Margaret Thatcher, among other celestial celebrities, retires to consider Saatchi’s case. The judge asks this jury to rule whether, in his life, Saatchi “did to the best of his abilities effect a positive change in the world”, was “a positive influence on others”, and had motives “informed by considerations other than himself alone”.

Book reviews must never contain spoilers. But perhaps you can guess what verdict DNR’s author decided the jury should reach.