I’m going to level with you from the start. I’m a fan. A supporter. I won’t say a ‘believer’– for obvious reasons – but my point is that, long before Christopher Hitchens was declared to have the oesophageal cancer that eventually killed him on 15th December 2011, I was firmly of the opinion that he was an extremely fine writer, one of a tiny handful of our very finest thinkers, and without exception the singularly finest public speaker in the whole of western intellectual culture.

‘The Hitch’ meant a lot to quite a lot of people and I was (I am) one of them. His talent as a speaker was such that for many years, pretty much every time he opened his mouth someone turned on a video camera. Hence, searching for his name on YouTube yields a treasure chest of wonderful stuff…* hours upon hours of videos of him lecturing, discussing, debating, improvising, thinking on his feet and, frequently, taking on an intellectual adversary and absolutely destroying them with the utmost grace, wry wit, fearsome intelligence, superior historical knowledge and, that most underrated of virtues, simply being right.

This little book, then, is his final volume, his last hurrah, one might say. It is not the place to start if you’ve never read Hitch before – he has, understandably, written better books – but it is exactly what it purports to be. It is the last words of a man whose staunch intellectual honesty and integrity over the course of his life had rather earned him the right to deliver one last gift, a book written by a dying man on the subject of dying. Without self-pity, without euphemism or fantasy or neurosis. Just this: a book about dying, by a man who is doing precisely that.

The late years of Hitch’s life featured, above all, the continued provocation and reiteration of two main arguments: one saw him being viscerally attacked by the political left for the perceived ‘betrayal’ or ‘shift to the right’ contained in his open and enthusiastic support for the U.S and its allies’ invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq. The second was his own attack on religion, most notably expressed in his best-selling book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

The first of these is barely touched on in Mortality. Which is a shame, because it’s still an important debate: it is at least reasonable to claim, as Hitch’s good friend the novelist Ian McEwan has done, that it was, rather, the political left that changed its position over time, away from its emancipatory, anti-totalitarian core, ditching its hatred of tyrants and oppressive regimes in order to cultivate an even more violent hatred of the United States of America. And that while the left slowly changed, it was in fact Hitchens – lifelong despiser of despots and tyrants – who stayed broadly consistent. (Hitch’s support for the UK’s war in the Falkland Islands is evidence for this view. Acknowledged to be fiercely left-wing at the time, Hitch nonetheless correctly foresaw that if Britain could defeat Argentina in war the brutal, racist and oppressive military regime of Galtieri would fall. And fall it did. Within a year of the end of the conflict.)

The second of the two arguments that dominated Hitch’s late career – religion – seeps into this book in a number of places, and in fact feels never far from the words on any of its pages. It is a presence throughout. Because it was, I suppose, inevitable for Hitch’s detractors to wonder if, faced with the spectre of non-existence, his ‘anti-theism’ would waver. (Hitch was determined to make the distinction between ‘atheism’ and ‘anti-theism’: you can be the former, he said, and still wish there was a God. To be the latter, as he was, is to be relieved that there is absolutely no evidence for such a thing.)

In any case, waver he did not. He discusses ‘Pascal’s Wager’, which describes a kind of ‘bet’ a dying man might place with himself, and which states that you might as well put your faith in God, as you stand to gain everything if proved right, and to lose nothing if proved wrong. Hitch, though, is having none of it:

“Pascal assumes both a  cynical god and an abjectly opportunist human being. Suppose I ditch the principles I have held for a lifetime, in the hope of gaining favour at the last minute? I hope and trust that no serious person would be at all impressed by such a hucksterish choice. Meanwhile, the god who would reward cowardice and dishonesty and punish irreconcilable doubt is one of the many gods in which (whom?) I don’t believe.”

Being what it is, this book, stoic and intelligent and utterly devoid of self-pity, nonetheless becomes more heartbreaking to read as it reaches towards its close. He describes the tortuous effect on him of the slow disappearance of his voice, one of his most unique and treasured assets as a public figure:

“We may not be, as we used to boast, the only animals capable of speech. But we are the only ones who can deploy vocal communication for sheer pleasure and recreation, combining it with our two other boasts of reason and humour to produce higher syntheses. To lose this ability is to be deprived of an entire range of faculty: it is assuredly to die more than a little.”

At the end of this chapter, he sadly and resignedly describes himself as having been consigned, by his disease, in conversation (that most favoured of Hitch’s pastimes,) to the role of listener. And he ultimately connects the awfulness of that fate with his lifelong study of what really matters; of what gives meaning and integrity to human beings: our freedom to express ourselves, to think, and to debate, and to discuss, and to work things out not according to some utopian totalitarian certainty, but by trial and error, using humility, experiment and intelligence:

“What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.”

Mortality by Christopher Hitchens is published by Atlantic Books and can be bought from Amazon by clicking this link.

* If you haven’t done it before, just search for ‘Christopher Hitchens’ on YouTube and browse. Or if you want somewhere to start, this is a wonderfully thoughtful interview that says a lot about his politics and his historical knowledge; or click here to see him debate (and defeat) Tony Blair, himself no slouch as a public speaker; or click here for a fascinating bookstore reading in which Hitch discusses his book about Thomas Jefferson.