John Hume: A Biography by Paul Routledge, Harper Collins, pp £20 in UK
Few of the many hundreds of books written by journalists about the Northern conflict have risen above the commonplace. When it comes to books - as opposed to investigative articles or TV programmes - Northern Ireland is not a place which is amenable to the Eamon Dunphy philosophy that the best thing that can happen to a democratic society is more and more journalism.
Very occasionally a journalist's book does appear which is so knowledgeable, sensitive and insightful that it rises above the merely journalistic. Recent examples are Fionnuala O'Connor's study of Northern Catholics, In Search Of A State, and Eamonn Mallie and David McKittrick's inside story of the peace process, The Fight For Peace. This is not one of those books. Its author is the political correspondent of the British Independent On Sunday, and the author of biographies of Arthur Scargill and House of Commons Speaker Betty Boothroyd. His profile of John Hume has the feel of a commissioned work by a solid, uninspired professional, rather than the fruit of deep personal commitment to a subject which is the sine qua non of a good biography.
The first thing that is noticeable is how much Routledge relies on other books and newspaper articles. Barry White's 1984 biography of the SDLP leader is cited frequently in the early chapters, and most prominent Irish commentators on the North will find themselves quoted in those sections dealing with the last decade of painful steps towards peace.
The picture which emerges is one we in Ireland already know well: Hume the public man - tireless, courageous, visionary, single-minded to the point of obsession, refusing to accept defeat but occasionally, and understandably, giving way to deep depression. This is a portrait of Ireland's greatest constitutional nationalist of modern times, a man whose political projects and language have shaped practically every attempt to resolve the Northern Ireland impasse for the past quarter century.
Of Hume the private man there is little. Hume is a cautious and secretive individual, and 1997 - on the eve of the most important and difficult negotiations this island has seen for nearly 80 years - is not the time for him to unburden his soul to a visiting English journalist.
Routledge also labours under the disadvantage that his book was finished in May, a few weeks after Tony Blair had swept into power, but a few weeks before the IRA responded to the new Labour government's overtures and declared their second ceasefire.
So there is an unfortunate vein of pessimism running through its later chapters. Hume is quoted as harking back to Sunningdale as the greatest lost opportunity. Routledge sees the June 1993 Hume-Adams document as the "high-water mark" in the SDLP leader's career, before remarking that if it had been fully acted upon, the course of Irish history would have been different and probably better. Some of us thought it was acted upon, very imaginatively given the huge constraints, in the Downing Street Declaration.
Similarly, he chooses to end with Tony Blair's Belfast speech in which the new prime minister said he valued the Union and his agenda was not a united Ireland. "Almost 30 years after John Hume began his long march towards a new Ireland, the language had hardly changed," is Routledge's concluding line.
Five months on, the politicians are sitting in Stormont talking with great difficulty but some considerable hope about finding a new language for an old conflict in a new century.
Rutledge's pessimism chimes with Hume's momentary despond for a paragraph or two and we get a rare glimpse of the turmoil of the inner man. In the summer of 1996, soon after Drumcree Two, Hume confessed he was in the grip of a deep depression. It felt "like a bereavement".
Six months later he said things had not improved: "It's like butterflies in the stomach, only 50 times worse . . . It's not depression, but chronic anxiety - anxiety about everything, especially when I wake up in the morning."
And yet a few weeks later he was saying that he would fight on, not to gain victory or revenge, but only to reach agreement with the Unionists. There can be few more admirable character traits than that of the person who rouses himself from the "black dog" of depression to find new energy for the long, hard struggle for peace and agreement in a violent and divided society.
A worthy biography of this complex and important man is yet to be written. This book will serve as a limited source book for historians, academics and other journalists wanting to gain quick access to some of Hume's key policy statements: his 1964 Irish Times articles on changing Northern Catholic opinion; his 1972 policy document Towards A New Ireland; the 1980 paper which first raised the idea that Britain should declare it had no "selfish economic and strategic interest" in Ireland; the papers prepared for the SDLP-Sinn Fein exchange in the late 1980s; and, of course, the Hume-Adams document.
However, it answers few of the questions often asked about Hume. What caused him to abandon his careful "internal" reformism in favour of an all-Ireland solution? At what point did he give up on the Unionists and decide that talking to the Provos was the only way forward? How did he manage to keep the party on his side while telling them so little about his talks with Sinn Fein? What were his relations like with men like Lynch, Haughey, Fitzgerald, Reynolds and Bruton?
The final fault of Routledge's book is that it is dull. There is not enough of Hume's personality in it to leaven the relentless detail of 30 years of deadlocked political manoeuvres and violent atrocities. This reviewer's conclusion is that the late 20th century world's most written-about small province simply does not need this extra volume in its groaning archive.
Andy Pollak is an Irish Times staff journalist.