During his career, queer filmmaker Derek Jarman had a hate-hate relationship with the media, it seems. When he declared his HIV-positive status to the world, the baying for blood increased, and he became a pariah for the tabloids.

So it was no surprise that his latest book, the posthumously published diary ‘Smiling in Slow Motion’, was the recent subject of a savage media attack. Not from The Sun, this time, but The Guardian. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the vitriol came from Julie Burchill, who, like Jarman, has made a career out of aim-to-shock cultural commentary. She dubbed the book ‘Diary of a Nobody’, and pronounced it devoid of artistic merit. By contrast, one of Jarman’s friends in the diaries gushes that his stories are "better than Isherwood". As ever, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

For a start, the diaries are in desperate need of a shrewd edit. Jarman’s endless detailing of the intricacies of his garden at Dungeness cottage are both beautiful and tedious; like Bret Easton Ellis, but instead of designer labels you get annuals and perennials. A typical passage reads: "The garden is putting on the colours of spring, the inky purple Crambe maritima uncurl like medieval capitals, sap-green elder, pale-blue rosemary flowers, garlic racing with the iris, crocus punctuate purple and yellow, the snowdrops are over."

However pretty the floral descriptions, 300 pages in and the diaries start to read like a botanist’s catalogue. Even more of a slog are the passages which plainly detail the banalities of his everyday life; trips to M & S, tending to his beehives, going for fish and chips. His frequent nocturnal sojourns on London`s most famous cruising grounds are considerably more interesting; had Jarman written ‘Tales of Hampstead Heath’, it would have been more of a page-turner.

Where the diaries really come alive is in Jarman’s anger, and there is no shortage of targets for his wrath here: England, gays, the media, and politicians are all victims of his acid tongue. Burchill wasn’t far off when she called Jarman a queer Victor Meldrew. Sometimes his commentary is inspired, sometimes childish, and often just plain bitchy.

Jarman hated ‘gays’. He even hated the word, because it "marked us with a false optimism". No, Jarman is a Queer with a capital Q. Much of these diaries, which run from 1991-94, coincide with the peak of the OutRage! movement. Jarman is scathing when he sniffs a trace of assimilation. Sir Ian McKellen is enemy number one ("has a heart as straight as a die") followed closely by the Gay Times (imagine what he’d think of Attitude). The Stonewall crowd are narrow-minded, white-wine drinking luvvies. Labour MPs, he says, should be outed before Tories because "they’re the ones who should be protecting us".

Unsurprisingly, Jarman is an old-fashioned Red on the political spectrum, and at his liveliest when Tory-baiting. Upon seeing a poster of John Major with a Hitler moustache drawn on it, he remarks: "Maybe the long dark dictatorial night of the Right is about to end and the country that sold its heart for shoddy goods will wake." In one of the book’s most memorable images, he berates Mrs. Thatcher: "She should be drowned in England’s tears."

Elsewhere in his verbal trail of destruction, the urban British are "stupid, dim-witted, none more so than the dullards in Camden," while journalists are "people who make a devalued pound out of our misfortune". There are spats with academic hot-shot Terry Eagleton; Simon Callow is a "bumbling old vulgarian"; Vivienne Westwood is a "dipsy bitch," and Kenneth Branagh a "cultural ineptitude."

Just when you think Jarman must be the most sour-faced man on the planet, he’ll write movingly about the love of his life, HB, who he only discovered late in life. "Some of us are slow, it was worth the wait," a painfully ironic passage given Jarman’s imminent death. There is also, believe it or not, a colourful parade of friends in these pages. While not exactly ‘The Andy Warhol Diaries’, some of them are celebs, giving the diaries a gossipy feel: Neil Tennant, Holly Johnson, Jimmy Somerville, Jon Savage, and Peter Tatchell all make appearances. So does Andy Bell, who, rather hilariously, phones when Jarman is virtually on his deathbed and enquires whether he’d like to come on holiday to Majorca. "Real pop star stuff."

As Jarman’s diaries progress, so does his illness. Descriptions move away from flowers, sky and sea to graphic detailing of his wasting body. Germaine Greer recently moaned on BBC2’s ‘Art Zone’ that there’s nothing worse than writing about your illness, but Jarman deserves kudos for his brutal realism. "Life was not ‘The Sound of Music’. If you climbed a mountain it was a sweaty affair and you might not reach the summit."

Ultimately, the diaries are pastoral journals, political rants, a social history of the OutRage! period, and a grim documentation of AIDS. They aren’t a gripping read -- at times, they’re deathly dull -- but there is poetry, humour, and thought-provoking material to be found amidst the mundane if you’re willing to wade through it.

Tellingly, Jarman at one point comments: "Wish there was a foreign power I could spy for." Jarman was indeed a spy in his own country, a self-proclaimed outsider even amongst gay circles. This refugee status helped shape his radical thinking, but also prompted him to seek refuge from society in nature. His rural garden idyll in Kent is somewhat bizarrely located next to a nuclear power station, but it’s a fitting juxtaposition. Jarman was indeed the embodiment of a "modern nature".

Smiling in Slow Motion, Derek Jarman’s diaries for the period 1991-4
Published by Century, 388 pages
ISBN: 712680047
Price: £16.99

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