Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography – review

Despite being rushed, unfinished and disowned by its subject – making it perhaps the first ever unauthorised autobiography – this book is surprisingly revealing about one of the most infuriating and self-defeating awkward customers ever to have been born. And it reminds us of the huge amount Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have contributed to this epochal time and how important is the principle of free publication.

A note from his publisher at the beginning explains that Assange found the book too personal and withdrew co-operation, performing the usual disservice to himself and also to the novelist Andrew O'Hagan, whose writing he unjustly criticised. If Assange would only control his need to storm from every room, leaving the most appalling static behind him, we might eventually get the account that WikiLeaks deserves.

But this isn't bad at all, as far as it goes, and the most fascinating part is what Assange objects to: the personal stuff.

Assange was the product of a relationship between his country girl mother, Christine, and a man with a gentle voice who spoke to her at an anti-Vietnam war rally in Sydney. "It [the voice] belonged to a 27-year-old, cultured guy with a moustache. He asked if she was with anyone and when she said 'no' he took her hand."

Not long afterwards, Julian was born into a hippie set-up in north Queensland. They moved house often and quite soon he learned "how to master the environment and conquer danger". He spent a lot of time exploring a disused mine, sometimes burning ants with a magnifying glass. "At an early stage," he says, "I realised there was a social element to all this. I put a gang together, the better to get things done and have fun while doing it." A solemn-faced, slightly scary Tom Sawyer or William Brown emerges.

Assange's upbringing consisted of one cult, multiple homes, more than 30 schools and two stepfathers, one of whom left him with the name Assange. He was clearly a handful and probably manipulative. He advises his schoolmates that dirt is a certain way to stop bleeding and on another occasion organises his friends to dig a tunnel under the neighbours' fence in order to supply his folks with tomatoes. As he gets older, his mother's peripatetic existence seems more pathological and a fugitive pattern sets in. His father and two stepfathers disappear from the narrative without much explanation and it becomes clear that Julian has fairly big issues in the authority department.

The unfinished nature of the book, I suspect, means that quite a lot has been let through by Assange that a second or third round of editing might have seen adjusted or eliminated. At times, it looks as though he is artfully supplying scenes from childhood to explain the adult outlaw, but then there are real shafts of light such as the moment when he talks about a teacher called Mr King. "In my view, even then, a lot of teachers were prissy, but this guy was strong in a way that seems important. He was a very competent individual and I felt safe with him – I clung to the idea of manly competence."

In his late teens, Assange meets his real father, who has become a yoga teacher. He describes becoming angry as he walked round his dad's bookshelves. "There, on shelf after shelf, were the exact same books that I had bought and read for myself – if I had only known him, I might just have picked his books down from the shelf." You feel sorry for the rootless misfit prodigy and it is a testament to O'Hagan's subtlety as a writer and interviewer that so much of this material surfaces in the book.

Assange's natural voice is off-key, pompous – sometimes childlike. "My sense of computers and my sense of justice and my view of authority. It was there during the period at Goolmangar and I felt the force of my own personality coming out." It is a little odd to say such a thing. Of his own son, Daniel, he remarks: "I could see he had good humour." Not bad for an earthling child.

There is a really good section in which he talks about the first computer hacking placing a large part of his mind in the space of the computer. You glimpse the thrill of his trespass when he hacks into the Nortel network of 11,000 computers, which he likens to "walking in the Sistine Chapel at midnight".

Last winter, I happened to see the collaboration responsible for the book in front of me, when I went up to Ellingham Hall in Norfolk to try to wring out of Assange details of his relationship with a man named Israel Shamir, who was alleged to have supplied information from

the US diplomatic cables to the dictatorship in Belarus and was

therefore getting in the way of efforts, which I was part of, to drum up support for Assange. O'Hagan was in and out, the atmosphere was tense and I got nowhere with Assange. My lasting memory is of my arrival. It took 15 minutes before Assange acknowledged my presence in our host Vaughan Smith's sitting room. "What are you doing?" I eventually asked. Without looking up from his keyboard, he told me that he and others were hacking into the satellite communications of an electronics company to provide the demonstrators in Cairo with the internet.

You don't know whether to believe the man who once gave himself the handle Splendide Mendax (nobly untruthful). Littered in his wake over the past 12 months are many well-known journalists, lawyers, activists and helpers who will have no more to do with him because of his congenital bloody-mindedness and what they see as his shaky grasp on the truth. Yet this book seems remarkably candid. He admits to measures of autism, arrogance and insensitivity and, in a rather bewildered passage, remarks that he can empty a room faster than most.

All this and probably much more is true of Assange. He is an awkward odd fish, but just like his 18th-century libertarian forebear, the promiscuous John Wilkes, who was also casual with the truth and other people's money, Assange has been right on some of the big things, notably the publication of the Iraq war logs, the film of the US gunship shooting up innocent civilians and journalists and the US diplomatic cables, which contributed to the successful overthrow of at least two of three dictators in the Maghreb.

But he was dead wrong and stupid to release a mass of unredacted cables this summer, because it makes it that much more difficult to defend the legitimate war on secrecy, which he does not own.

The book could have been so much better and it is a great pity that he didn't sit in the room long enough with O'Hagan and his publisher to put together the arguments that he still needs to make. Instead, a deep-seated vanity seems to have taken hold, which pushes him further into isolation and towards an utterly unnecessary martyrdom. This story isn't over.