Christopher Hitchens: ‘the consummate writer, the brilliant friend’

Ian McEwan’s tribute to his friend.

The place where Christopher Hitchens spent his last few weeks was hardly bookish, but he made it his own. Close to downtown Houston, Texas is the medical centre, a cluster of high-rises like La Défense of Paris, or the City of London, a financial district of a sort, where the common currency is illness. This complex is one of the world’s great concentrations of medical expertise and technology. Its highest building, 40 or 50 storeys up, denies the possibility of a benevolent god – a neon sign proclaims from its roof a cancer hospital for children. This “clean-sliced cliff”, as Larkin puts it in his poem about a tower-block hospital, was right across the way from Christopher’s place – which was not quite as high, and adults only.

I should add, Christopher Hitchens was a brilliant writer (in the sense of a master of language and the polemic form), an obnoxious and arrogant man who adopted both defensible (atheism) and indefensible positions (Iraq) and who wrote both great books (Orwell’s Victory) and less great books (God is not Great).