The last act, says Pascal, is always bloody, and certainly that was true of the closing years of Ernest Hemingway's violent life. This is the fifth large volume of the exhaustive study of the writer, drinker, womaniser, big-game hunter, self-promoter, and genuine American myth by the biographer Michael Reynolds, who died recently. It follows Papa's extraordinary activities from 1940 through the last two decades to his suicide in 1961. Although it is a story of increasing bleakness, the author tells it with such style, insight and sympathy that its subject emerges from it with at least some of his honour intact. Hemingway was the last of that breed of American artists who pitted themselves and their sensibilities against the world and nature, and although he lost the war, he did win some significant victories. The writings of his last years were mostly dreadful, but the late, heavily edited novel, The Garden of Eden, is a kind of triumph. And of course, nothing can tarnish the pure gold of those early short stories.