Obviously Morrissey needs no ghost, unless we count the phantom of Charles Dickens. “My life is streets upon streets upon streets upon streets,” begins *Autobiography *and immediately someone somewhere with a big nose who knows remembers Little Dorrit. “Nothing to see but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to breathe but streets, streets, streets.” Those who took umbrage at Morrissey’s Penguin Classic status might be appeased to know how often he genuflects to Dickens; repeatedly quoting Oliver Twist, his youth’s register of sadistic teachers from the same grotesque mould as Nicholas Nickleby’s Wackford Squeers, or his transparent parallels drawn between the 1996 trial over Smiths royalties (told with epic if exhausting retributory relish) and the legal travesty of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce. (“Bleak House, indeed.”) If Morrissey’s life reads like a Victorian melodrama, it’s because his quill is never happier than when dipping in the gaslit inkwell of 1850. When the Smiths’ self-titled debut misses No. 1 because Rough Trade didn’t manufacture enough cassettes, it’s the histrionic 19th-century vapors that attack: “My life sinks.”

“The Smiths could only ever have lasted as long as we did because of the differences in my and Morrissey’s personalities,” writes Marr, alas too mealy-mouthed to spell out those differences beyond the fleeting passive-aggressive slip. When he dismisses Morrissey’s godhead Oscar Wilde, whose “talent was spoiled by his smug self-regard and pomposity,” the eyebrow needn’t arch very high before registering the inference. In touché, the Achilles heel of Marr’s fence-squatting “Mr. Nice Guy” is pinpointed with cutthroat clarity by Morrissey. Capitulating before the judge in 1996, the guitarist becomes “a child again, wanting anything at all except the disapproval of complete strangers.” Contrast this with the rascally young guitarist waving off an overweight Smiths fan in Denver with “ta’ra, fatty.” Morrissey clearly misses that mischievous Marr. And as uninspired and unnecessary as the fat joke is, so do the mirth-starved readers of Set The Boy Free.

A chapterless Joycean monolith, Autobiography is the more demanding volume, but whether mercilessly mocking the monarchy or swooning in praise of the poet A. E. Housman, Morrissey never treats his reader as less than an intelligent equal. Marr, preoccupied with stunted-adolescent notions of “cool,” seems to regard his as the village idiot. Upon forming the Smiths, he writes: “I wanted what I was doing to be modern, and I wanted my friends to like it and think what I was doing was cool.” Five years later, Marr returns home after recording in Paris with Talking Heads when a friend asks how it went. “‘Good, good,’ I replied. ‘Talking Heads are cool.’” Thereafter Marr’s post-Smiths adventures pan out like The Littlest Hobo, trotting from one “cool” established band to the next only to scamper on, apparently without acrimony, once his work is done. The moral of his story: “For a Mancunian-Irish kid with a guitar, it’s all been pretty good.” And with that the composer of the Smiths—sorrow’s own minstrel of “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want,” Ardwick’s Beethoven behind “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me”—reduces his life to a winking emoji.

Towards the end of Autobiography—between an attempted kidnapping in Mexico and failed efforts to save dying pelicans—Morrissey makes it unambiguously clear he will never reform the Smiths when, first litigant drummer Mike Joyce, then Marr, knock for second helpings. “Johnny, too, tells me that he is ready for a re-formation.” But what Morrissey dismisses in a single bite, Marr makes a needless feast of as his book’s apostle-teasing Big Reveal. In late 2008 they meet in a pub outside Manchester, when “suddenly we were talking about the band reforming.” “It could be good,” Marr continues in typically frostbitten fashion, “and it would make a hell of a lot of people very happy.” Excluding, that is, the singer. Both men make defiant virtue of their post-Smiths successes, but it is Marr who reveals himself as infinitely needier of his old group’s oxygen to keep him in public view.

“Yes, time can heal,” writes Morrissey. “But it can also disfigure.” Reading the twin lives of its crash victims, he alone emerges as the sole recognizable voice of the Smiths. Autobiography makes you laugh like the first time you heard “Frankly, Mr Shankly” and cry like the first time you heard “Well I Wonder.” It is a work of art, Morrissey’s best in 20 years, all slipshod solo albums considered. Whereas Set The Boy Free is a work of opportunism, an excuse for Marr to return to the spotlight and protest that there’s more to his life than the Smiths, you know. But as his gutless book betrays, not much more.