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Gilbert Adair, in the third of his Evadne Mount novels, changes tack and disposes with the cosy Christie model subverted successfully in The Act Of Roger Murgatroyd and less so in A Mysterious Affair Of Style, by opting to throw himself into the mix and tell the story of And Then There Was No One (2009) as a fictional memoir. Set in 2011, Adair has found himself at a literary festival in a Swiss town by the Reichenbach Falls, setting for Conan Doyle’s attempt at ridding himself of his popular detective character.

The influence of Sherlock Holmes plays as much a part in And Then There Was No One as that of Agatha Christie has for the triptych of Evadne Mount novels, and fans of Holmes may be interested to know that Adair reproduces, in full from his fictional new book of Sherlock Holmes stories, his take on The Giant Rat Of Sumatra, first mentioned in The Adventure Of The Sussex Vampire (cf The Casebook Of Sherlock Holmes) as “a story for which the world is not yet prepared”.

The reason for this change in the style of the novels comes late, but is worth mentioning, as Adair regularly talks about his novels, past, present, and in translation throughout:

For all my efforts to have the second novel ring as many changes on the first as was organically feasible within the generic conventions I was pastiching, there remained a stubbornly samey something about A Mysterious Affair of Style which long afterwards nagged at me. And not only at me. One reviewer, praising the book, had also expressed disappointment that I had taken an ‘if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t fix-it’ attitude to the first of the cycle, and I couldn’t help agreeing with him.

Like that novel, Adair begins by playing with the conventions of the murder mystery genre. Where the murder didn’t occur until late in A Mysterious Affair Of Style, the murder has long since been wrapped up here. The victim is Gustav Slavorigin,  a Booker Prize-winning author sent, after publishing a collection of incendiary anti-American essays, into hiding, Rushdie style, due to a contract on his head, courtesy of a rich Texan reactionary.

The prologue, seemingly extraneous to the mystery itself, fills in details that, to a first read, seem dry and dull, and in doing so recalls both the introduction to Eco’s The Name Of The Rose and the short foreword to Nabokov’s Lolita. This in itself is strange, given that Adair has mentioned in the past that Nabokov has “become something of an albatross about [his] neck”. The details of this chapter deal with the history of Slavorigin - his early days at university, with Adair, through the rise, fall, and infamy of his writing career. One notable book, and the reason Slavorigin is making a rare public pitstop, is his new thriller, A Reliable Narrator, which gives the game away without, if you catch my drift, doing so.

How to describe A Reliable Narrator? Its opening chapter resembles the concluding chapter of a whodunnit, one that just happens never actually to have been written. Thus the reader of Slavorigin’s book (I mean, the book which was written) cannot hope to comprehend the picturesque twists of this first-chapter denouement since, of the murder which has clearly taken place, the only detail to which he is made privy is the identity of the murderer, a murderer who has already been apprehended, charged, tried, found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

The idea of a reliable narrator is played around with too, as is Adair’s playful style. Personal views come into the fray, such  as calling the forty-five minutes of literary festivals “so much hassle for so little result” and his description of a book as being “a fat, virtuosically executed novel by one of that new breed of American wunderkinder who, I would be lying if I denied it, are positively bloated with talent but who are also just too fucking pleased with themselves.” As a fictional Adair, he’s able to get away with it, even if, with reference to Slavorigin’s book:

The first-person protagonist is no canonic unreliable narrator, such a tired old cliché of postmodernism now, but a perfectly reliable narrator, except that not a single soul is prepared to rely on him.

The usual alliteration, literary and cinematic in-jokes, and postmodern trickery are present and accounted for in And Then There Was No One. The unashamed use of puns (’Google Gogol’, a delicatessen named ‘Salvador Deli’ and a few more Nabokovian references, ‘Son of Palefire’ and ‘Adair or Ardor’) adds to the fun, and I’d like to think that only Adair’s style, like a British eccentric, could get away with a metaphor like “the train tranquilly unzipped the country’s flies from Oxford to London”.

One of the more interesting ploys in the novel is how, as a memoir, Adair manages to introduce his sleuth, the Dowager Duchess of Crime, Evadne Mount, into real events. As the last novel was set in the 1940s and this novel is seventy years hence, and she should be the one dropping dead, he pulls it off well, and humorously, too, introducing her into a book that she should never be written, as per a Q&A session after his reading of The Giant Rat Of Sumatra:

‘You wrote two pastiches of Agatha Christie, The Act of Roger Murgatroyd and A Mysterious Affair of Style? Will there be a third?’ Me: ‘Absolutely not. I have had my fill of cardboard characters and preposterous plotlines. What I desire to write now is something more personal, a work of genuine depth and ambition.

Amongst the answers at that session there are some interesting insights that, if we believe the reliable narrator, into Adair that show And Then There Was No One as being that personal work, bringing with it a few questions of its own:

‘I read a book, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Les Enfants terribles, Death in Venice, or whatever, I like it, I rewrite it. I am in short a pasticheur. Less by opportunism, though, than by superstition. I long ago discovered that I could embark on a new work of fiction only if its premise had already been legitimised by one of the writers in my personal Pantheon. Each of my novels is thus a palimpsest. Scrape away at its surface and you will find, underneath, another novel, usually a classic. I offer no apology for this.’

Apologies are not in order as Adair has produced his best novel since 1992’s The Death Of The Author. His funniest, too. It has more conceptual twists and turns than the labyrinth in Eco’s The Name Of The Rose, another novel that owes a debt to Sherlock Holmes, and probably why the Italian writer was also due to attend the same literary festival. In fact, in Eco’s essay, Travels In Hyperreality, he says that ‘once the “total fake” is admitted, in order to be enjoyed it must seem totally real’, and this is what Adair does with this novel, giving us a reliable narrator, so reliable that we can believe his every word, only to have the rug pulled out from under us, to see it for what it is, yet still believe.

For the rest of the world, who had been waiting over ten years for Díaz’s first novel, following on from his short story collection, Drown, I hope the wait was worth it. For me, having never heard of Díaz until his book, The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao (2007) took the 2008 Pulitzer Prize there was no weight of expectation hanging around, waiting to confirm him as a genius or to wallow in what could have been. And were it not for the Pulitzer I would probably have remained ignorant of it as the cover is…well, ugly. Not something I’d pick up, never mind read.

Wao being a distortion of Wilde, used to ridicule him, the Oscar of the title is actually Oscar de León, an overweight nerd of Dominican heritage living in the United States who, unlike his skirt chasing contemporaries, is more into sci-fi, fantasy, role-playing games, and writing novels. Not that he doesn’t attempt some skirt chasing himself, it’s just that his lines, along with the rest of him, need a bit of work:

Anywhere else his triple-zero batting average with the ladies might have passed without comment, but this is a Dominican kid we’re talking about, in a Dominican family: dude was supposed to have Atomic Level G, was supposed to be pulling in the bitches with both hands. Everybody noticed his lack of game and because they were Dominican everybody talked about it.

Dominicans talking is nothing new - it’s in their history. And the history of the Dominican Republic plays a large role in The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao. While the idea of Oscar’s bad luck, to some, is something to be skeptical about, it could possibly be attributed to a curse in the family, referred to as  fukú:

But the fukú ain’t just ancient history, a ghost story from the past with no power to scare. In my parent’s day the fukú was real as shit, something your everyday person could believe in…But in those elder days, fukú had it good; it even had a hypeman of sorts, a high priest you could say. Our then dictator for life Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina.

The life of Trujillo, whose reign was one of the 20th Century’s bloodiest, and lasted over thirty year, mixes with the history of Oscar’s mother and grandfather and ties them neatly together.  And with a narrator -who doesn’t reveal himself until late into the novel - that wasn’t actually there at the events he relates, there’s much filling in of the blanks. There’s footnotes, too - loads of them - providing further history about Trujillo and the Dominican Republic, and it’s an unsettling experience, being dragged between narrative and notes, that soon becomes annoying.

And when it comes to annoying, The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao has another ace up its sleeve in the use of ghetto Spanglish. It’s understandable why Díaz has done this, given that it’s his narrator’s voice and to not do so would lessen its power but the Spanish is sometimes laid on so thick that, save taking time out to look up words and phrases, the context sheds no light. Reading this was reminiscent of the white boy in the wrong neighbourhood stereotype. However, I didn’t feel too fussed by the peppering of sci-fi and fantasy references, mostly alien too, because they seemed more like texture, whereas the Spanish felt important.

Yet, even when it annoys, the novel has an energy to its prose the likes of which I’ve not enjoyed for a while. It picks you up, and carries you along, to the end. Personally, I found the sections detailing Oscar’s relatives’ lives the least engaging, perhaps because of the distance between the narrator and the tales, whereas the Oscar sections flow with warmth, love, and humour. That they do is a pity because Oscar’s role, despite being the titular character, is minimal on the surface, with Díaz using him as a way in to writing about his political interests in the Dominican Republic.

I know I’ve approached the novel from the wrong angle - or at least, not that which Díaz likely intended - but when the book became a lost cause for me, I relied on the sections about Oscar to get me through. Who couldn’t love the nerd, even if some of his interests….well, you know:

Could write in Elvish, could speak Chakobsa, could differentiate between a Slan, a Dorsai, and a Lensman in acute detail, knew more about the Marvel Universe than Stan Lee, and was a role-playing fanatic…Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens. Couldn’t have passed for normal if he’d wanted to.

While he may not pass for normal, Oscar certainly makes an interesting character and it’s a shame that, for all the interesting history and story there, I couldn’t enjoy the book, except for the brief and wondrous pages of Oscar Wao.

Having had the experience of reading Gordon Burn’s fiction - Fullalove, a novel about a hack journalist intruding on the bereaved to get a story - and his non-fiction - Best And Edwards, a literary account of the lightning quick and slow burn deaths of Duncan Edwards and George Best - and favouring the latter, it now seems Burn is intent on blurring the lines between both as his new book, Born Yesterday: The News As A Novel (2008), is exactly as the subtitle implies: the news…as a novel.

It’s a strange conceit, taking real life events and making a fiction of them, but in a roundabout way that’s exactly what happens everyday in the newspapers, on television, on radio. So here, with “the curiously intimate knowledge the world garners about an unknown figure” Burn, with himself as narrator, finds himself obsessing over important news stories and reporting back not the truth, but what susbtitutes for truth these days.

The news. Always something - usually unpleasant - happening far away to a stranger; to somebody else, somewhere that we’re lucky not to be.

The news, in this case, is predominantly focused around July 2007, in which Britain underwent “a summer of disappearances, absences, some voluntary, others not” and its cast of characters should be recognisable to anyone who followed the larger news stories of the year: Kate and Gerry McCann, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, John Smeaton, and Kate Middleton. Add to these the stories of floods, foot-and-mouth outbreaks, and meaningless stabbings and shootings and it shows the bleak landscape of a year fresh in the memory.

As is common in Burn’s work he turns his attention to the notion of celebrity and works with Warhol’s dictum that everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. And the fifteen minutes of many characters here come by horrific circumstances.

With John Smeaton (”working-class, Scottish, plain-talking man of the people”) it’s the terrorist attack on Glasgow airport and his taking the fight to a flailing terrorist that elevates him in the public eye, first as a media sensation, then political pawn:

By his second visit to number 10 in October, SuperSmeato was wishing he could just stay at home with his Xbox for a week. Have a few nights in his own bed. Even better, he would be up in the north of Scotland, fly-fishing. His mobile would be back at home, switched off, and nobody would know where he was.

In opposition to Smeaton’s media rise, there’s the tale of the McCanns, Kate and Gerry (”controlled, collected, articulate, focused”) who sought to use the media to help find their missing daughter, Madeleine, only to find themselves, because of the way the presented themselves, turned against:

‘We’re normal people,’ Kate McCann protested when her family’s transition from being unknown to well known, and the perks that come with the transition - a hotline to senior members of the government, for example - were just starting to raise resentments: the first signs of a backlash were beginning to become apparent in eruptions of public volatility and paranoia.

The largest news story running through Born Yesterday, however, is the handover of office from Tony Blair (”One minute [he] was part of the national static, and the next he was gone.”) to his Chancellor, Gordon Brown (”an analogue politician in a digital age”). Where the Blair government was much like the media in spinning on the truth to its own ends, always presenting an optimistic mask, Brown’s tenure started differently:

The crises that piled up around Gordon Brown in his first weeks of office - the attempted terrorist attacks on London and Glasgow, the summer floods in the midlands and the north, foot-and-mouth: fire, flood and pestilence, a marvellous start for a son of the manse, as a number of people pointed out - these gifts from the gods required him to be thunder-faced, decisive, dogged, statesmanlike. The one thing they didn’t require him to do was the thing he had always had a problem with: they didn’t require him to smile.

As narrator, Burn is regularly out and about, and in the opening scene is walking through a park sometimes frequented by Margaret Thatcher and it’s here that we get the first sense of the novel’s purpose:

In office, Mrs Thatcher never read newspapers. She only read what her press secretary Bernard Ingham told her was in them. Out of office, though, the rumour mill insists she has all the papers brought to her every morning, when she sets about them with a marker pen, highlighting idiocies, striking through innaccuracies, furiously scribbling comments and corrections in the margin.

One can only assume that Burn himself echoed this action, working his way through the news of 2007 to produce Born Yesterday and instead of making corrections, made connections. For while it ultimately means nothing, he can’t help but linger on the fact that Gordon Brown, Madeleine McCann, and the first suspect in her disappearance, Robert Murat, all have problems with their eyes; or that Gerry, Kate, and the terrorists in Glasgow and London were all, to some extent, involved in the medical profession. In getting behind these connections, Burn offers up musings that add depth to what we get from newspapers, television, and radio:

It is often said that today’s abundance of media images create a screen between the individual and the world, and that this is the source of the feeling we all increasingly have of seeing everything but of being able to do nothing. The media gives us images of everything - but only images.

Despite how high profile the stories recounted in Born Yesterday are, they still make for compelling reading in the way, Burn as prose stylist, evokes the misery of somehow being involved. Sometimes it can venture into duller territory, when providing backstory, but overall its a interesting work, full of memorable characters, literary references, and an excellent eye for detail. By giving an account of exactly what was going on in 2007, it must surely be the definitive state-of-the-nation novel.

I’ve been making it a rule of late that before I see a film I should have read the book, provided it’s available in English and that I know the film is based on a book in the first place. So it has been with The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford and I Am Legend. It produces mixed results: the first one, good; the latter, bad. I’ve now had Bertolucci’s The Dreamers on DVD for some time and have been holding off watching it until I had read the book. And it being by Gilbert Adair, I’m surprised it’s taken me so long to get around to it.

The Dreamers (2003), as Adair notes in the afterword, is a rewrite of his 1986 debut, The Holy Innocents, a novel he was never happy with and constantly knocked back offers of adaptation, only to rescind when Bertolucci came calling. Not just rescind, but seize the opportunity to put past wrongs right, and come up with a new treatment, for both book and film, which he claims “may be twins but…they’re not identical.”

It seems in literature that when young Americans come to Paris they end up caught in the moment and find themselves moving into an apartment indefinitely and enjoying lots of sex. The Dreamers, in this respect, is no different to James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, as its main character, the eighteen year old Matthew, has come to Paris, and in a friendshap “matured in the white shadow of the Cinématèque screen”, has come to know Théo and his twin sister, Isabelle, although his insecurity casts doubts on his worthiness of their aquaintance:

A lonely man thinks of nothing but friendship, just as a repressed man thinks of nothing but flesh. If Matthew had been granted a wish by a guardian angel, he would have requested a machine, one yet to be invented, permitting its owner to ascertain where each of his friends was at any given moment, what he was doing and with whom. He belonged to the race which loiters underneath a loved one’s window late at night and endeavours to decipher shadows flitting across the Venetian blind.

The comparison of Matthew’s loneliness to one of repression is apt in the context of the novel as Matthew, after an embarrassing misunderstanding with a friend back in America, found “the door of the closet out of which he had momentarily stepped proved to be a revolving one” and has buried what desires he has.

Echoing Matthew’s psyche, on a larger scale but in the background of the novel, the French government, under de Gaulle has designs on repressing the liberal movement, one incediary act being the closure of the Cinématèque, a beacon on the French cultural landscape standing outside of beaurocratic borders. And, with no films to see, the trio of Matthew, Isabelle, and Théo embody the ethos of the popular saying that the show must go on, adapting films into a parlour game called Home Movies that starts with petty gambling, only for the stakes to dangerously progress into a heady steam of sexual forfeit:

The Cinématèque had been forgotten. The had a Cinématèque of their own, a Cinématèque in flesh and blood. Which meant that the game was no longer played merely whenever the inclination siezed them. While they read during the day, or played cards, or fumbled one another, the curtain would rise on Home Movies night after night, at six-thirty, eight-thirty and ten-thirty, with matinees on Sunday.

But like a screening at the Cinématèque, things must come to and end and in The Dreamers Adair brings the final curtain down on a tragic note as the events of May 1968, spurned on by the Cinématèque’s closure, slip from protest to riot. Our dreamers, long lost in their liberal world, are woken by the heavy hand of conservatism.

When I pick up an Adair novel, this being my fifth, I’ve come to expect a level of trickery but such expectations were not met here, although, in hindsight, I suppose I should anticipate the unexpected from Adair. What The Dreamers is, then, is a stylistically tame novel that, in protest at its timidity, delivers a steamy soup of friendship, desire and sin that still needs a pinch of salt. The story is assuredly told, each observation a sparkling pearl, but somewhat lacks the wit displayed, such as showcased in Buenos Noches Buenas Aires, that, for me, typefies an Adair novel and makes it something that The Dreamers can only, well, dream of.

It’s not often that I read books by the same author one after the other but I enjoyed Gilbert Adair’s The Act Of Roger Murgatroyd so much that the only logical thing to do was dive straight into its sequel - and second book in the Evadne Mount trilogy - A Mysterious Affair Of Style (2007). I was hoping for more of the same, a murder mystery with a postmodern twist, and, in this, it delivered, although I was left feeling that I’d read it too soon after The Act Of Roger Murgatroyd, and this put it firmly in the shadow of its predecessor.

Where the action of the first novel took place within the claustrophobic environs of ffolkes Manor, A Mysterious Affair Of Style shifts to London, notably a film studio, in the 1940s. As expected, references to the golden age of crime fiction are there and, given Adair’s passion for cinema, are coupled with plenty of jokes (and in-jokes) pertinent to the film industry that generally work, although a few soon become tiring such as the ongoing confusion over the roles of director and producer.

It’s ten years since Evadne Mount solved the case at ffolkes Manor and, as Chief Inspector Trubshawe, formerly of Scotland Yard, notes when they bump into each other at the Ritz, recognising each other instantly as, in a nod to Agatha Christie, who never let Poirot grow old, “It’s almost as though time stood still”. From here these two old partners in (solving) crime renew their friendship and it’s only a matter of time before Mount’s actress friend, Cora Rutherford, is inviting them to watch her on the set of Alastair Farjeon’s (a thinly disguised Hitchcock) new film, If Ever They Find Me Dead.

Fittingly Farjeon has been found dead and his assistant is in control of the new film. As it is, the production is skating on thin ice and all it doesn’t need is more tragedy striking, which is exactly what happens when the aforementioned actress drops dead during filming. Now, while there are plenty of suspects for Mount and Trubshawe to bring to task for the murder, none of them have a motive. And the stakes get higher when the elderly couple challenge each other in the solving of the case with some drastic forfeits should either lose.

A Mysterious Affair Of Style hobbles along on its own momentum, pausing for long dialogues and passages on the nature of whodunits, throwing in all manner of jokes literary and cinematic, obvious and obscure. For examples. Mount’s favourite exclamation - “Great Scott-Moncrieff!” - is a reference to the translation award Adair won for bringing Perec’s La Disparition to English as A Void. Whereas a film titled An American In Plaster-of-Paris is bordering on groanworthy. Regardless, it’s all playful, even if it doesn’t alway pay off.

For a murder mystery there’s not much sleuthing either, Mount eschewing logical methods and instead trusting the intuition of her itchy bottom. But, as murder mysteries go, A Mysterious Affair Of Style doesn’t quite deliver and this may be because, as in Mount’s words, referring to one of her less successful novels, “it’s too clever for its own good. It’s what you might call clever-clever, which sounds twice as clever as clever itself but is actually only half.” This is certainly true of the conclusion which don’t really hit as hard as Mount’s formula for crime writing:

“When the revelations come tumbling out one after the other, the impact on the reader has got to be instantaneous. They’ve got to hit you - practically smack you - in the face.”

While it’s a readable, playful book - trademark Adair, then - it is capable of instigating the occasional smirk at its knowing humour and references, but as a whole it doesn’t really deliver. There may be more to it, as deliberate spelling errors - missing letters, additional letters - can be found at many points. To my mind the mysterious affair of style, aside from that within the novel, is the notion that Adair is emulating Mount’s style and the errors may hint that something is not quite right, and if so, then, through his main character, the author throws one last knowing wink to the reader:

“My publishers, my readers, my critics - well, most of them,” she qualified, not quite suppressing an embryonic snarl - “they all tell me that my latest book, whichever it happens to be, is wonderful, is terrific, is the finest so far, though we all know it’s a dud.”

Having fallen into a reading slump recently, which is somewhat criminal of me, I decided to look for something light, fun, and potentially enjoyable. So, who better an author to sit back with than Gilbert Adair, a man whose novels come laden with lingusitic tricks and twists? And what better a book than The Act Of Roger Murgatroyd (2006), if only because its subtitle is An Entertainment. Oh, I needed entertaining.

This book, then, is a pastiche of the murder mystery genre, the style fitting that of the Agatha Christie mould. In fact, its title is a play on Christie’s The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd, which I’ve never read, so I’m sure there are plenty of in-jokes that went over my head, although ignorance of them is not needed in order to enjoy this novel. But, that one novel aside, there are many nods and winks to Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot that I was able to pick up on, if only through television adaptions.

Set on Boxing Day, in 1935, Raymond Gentry (”a professional snitch”) is murdered in the attic of ffolkes manor in Dartmoor. What makes it all the more intriguing is that the attic is locked from the inside. Snowed in with everyone suspicious of the other, step forward Evadne Mount, writer of the Alexis Baddeley series of whodunits, and Chief-Inspector Trubshawe, retired of Scotland Yard, to solve the case. And solve it they do, albeit with little sleuthing and much dialogue, making this somewhat reminiscent of Adair’s A Closed Book, while being nothing like it at the same time.

As you would expect, especially after he has unearthed much of their dirt, everyone in the manor has their own motives for killing Gentry, which Mount relates to Trubshawe:

You’ll excuse me, I trust, if I decline to go into greater detail about the painful things we all had to hear about each other. All I’m prepared to say is that, when we turned in that night, there wasn’t one of us who wouldn’t have rejoiced if Raymond Gentry had been struck down by a thunderbolt.

Or, for that matter (she concluded), by a bullet.

As you can tell from that passage, Adair enjoys playing within the conventions of the classic murder mystery, knowingly using stereotypes and clichés that would otherwise damn a novel, which Trubshawe lists in one of his fiction versus reality rants that I can only assume references actual Christie novels:

“…apart from locked rooms, you’ll find the whole trumpery bag of tricks. You know, a secret passage that only the murderer has a key to. A clock and mirror facing each other at the scene of the crime, meaning the dial was read in reverse. Some black sheep of a family shipped off to South Africa and supposed to have died there, except that nobody’s certain he really did. All the usual whodunit hoohah. Load of codswallop, if you ask me. “

So how does The Act Of Roger Murgatroyd differ from more cosy murder mysteries? Well, one way is to add a postmodern slant to the text, so that not only do we have a narrative but a conscious playing with the structure. Another is to include references to the author, the publisher (faber & faber) and observations of how it’s just like being in a book. And finally, there’s the ballsy unveiling, without being in any way a spoiler, of the murderer in the title. But while I never solved the crime myself, despite a few moments where I circled around the rather ingenious solution, I’m proud I wasn’t led along by the many red herrings scattered throughout.

In comparison to other Adair novels, The Act Of Roger Murgatroyd is lighter in tone, the verbal trickery not as intense as something like Buenas Noches Buenos Aires, but it’s still, just as it promises, entertaining. And being the first in the Evadne Mount trilogy, there’s thankfully two more acts to look forward to.

My knowledge of Paul Auster and his work is due to the fact that his reputation precedes him. Despite his serious tone, his works are playful and metaphysical; they have a postmodern sensibility. The only novel of his I’ve read is Oracle Night and its thanks to this that I was able to get a slight foothold on Travels In The Scriptorium, as this one is strictly for Auster fans, being a meditation on all that has gone before - for reader, for writer.

An old man - dubbed Mr. Blank - wakes every day in a spartan room with no knowledge of the day before. Basic objects are labelled (lamp, wall, desk) and, tucked into the ceiling, a camera takes a new snap every second. He doesn’t know if he’s locked in - the fear of this being true makes him not want to know.

Then a woman named Anna comes to visit, talking of medication and treatment, helping him with washing and dressing. Yet there’s a depth to her actions that suggest she’s more than just a carer - she cares. And so Mr Blank’s day unfolds, receiving visits and reading from a manuscript on his desk, as he tries to work out who he is and why he is there.

Travels In The Scriptorium is told in the style of a report based off the photos from the secret camera and the sounds from a microphone, also secret. The prose therefore is clinical and distant (”From the look of disgust that comes over his face as he scans these sentences, we can be fairly confident that Mr. Blank has not lost the ability to read.”) offering us every movement and expression; every word spoken, muttered, sighed.

Tucked into the novel is another novel, in the form of a manuscript on Mr. Blank’s desk. It’s about a man locked in a room writing a manuscript that will be used against him. And so, since Auster was presumably sitting in a room writing about Mr. Blank writing about another in similar circumstances what we have here is a the literary equivalent of matryoshka dolls. From what I can gather the people who pay visits to Mr. Blank are characters from previous novels, bitter about the way he used them on “missions”:

I might be ridiculous, Flood says, with anger rising in his voice, but you, Mr. Blank…you’re cruel…cruel and indifferent to the pain of others. You play with people’s lives and take no responsibility for what you’ve done. I’m not going to sit here and bore you with my troubles, but I blame you for what’s happened to me. I most sincerely blame you, and I despise you for it.

To the casual reader, like me, Travels In The Scriptorium is probably best left until more familiarity with Auster’s work is assured. There’s so much here that passed me by. But, at the same time, it brings a voice to characters left to their damaged lives once the author has moved on to other works and perhaps shows an insight into Auster’s feelings about writing:

I’m sick of these goddamned shoes. If anything, I’d rather take the other one off, too.

It’s an engaging read but I feel that more travels will be required, however, before I can truly make sense of this issue from Auster’s scriptorium.

That Gilbert Adair’s Buenas Noches Buenos Aires opens with an emphasis on how true the ensuing story is, the reader has every right to be suspicious. But, other than a noticeable handul of clues, I’m at a loss as to why such dubiety need be cast upon the text. Adair has a reputation for novels with more tricks up their sleeve than most, but it feels like a straight story all the way. Despite the subject matter, of course.

Gideon A. - same initials as the author - is a young homosexual, nescient to the world he craves but with a handful of embarrassing sexual failures behind him. He leaves his Oxfordshire home and moves to Paris, taking a job as an English teacher at Berlitz. There he’s happy to discover that the majority of the all male common room is gay. Here he listens to the stories of their varied conquests and, in order to fit in, imagines and tells his own sex-laden anecdotes.

It’s okay for a while but, this being the early eighties, there comes the arrival of a “gay cancer”, initially dismissed by one character as no more probable than gay gallstones. It’s not a big issue at first, given that the disease is prevalent in America. But when symptoms start showing closer to home, the reality of it becomes apparent. Gideon, however, sees it as his chance to become more sexually active. If more gay men abstain from sex then, in all probability, that would make him a highly sought after partner. It’s a twisted logic, but it seems to work for him.

The storyline of Buenas Noches Buenos Aires sometimes feels secondary to Adair’s - or should that be Gideon’s? - erudition and verbal games. There’s all manner of references to literature, artists, and architecture - mostly French- and sometimes famous novels, with utmost subtlety, get namechecked (e.g. Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre). The wordplay is a virtuoso performance, puns and poetry coming together to form descriptions, jokes, and more. Then there’s the sex. Plenty of it, all told in a no holds barred stream of graphic prose, illuminating all manner of sexual quirks.

So how much of Buenas Noches Buenos Aires are we meant to take as canon in Gideon’s life? Admittedly, it’s unknown. There are perhaps a few clues within his narrative:

A timid soul, was my report card’s conclusion., an appraisal that had me spluttering with rage. Something of a poseur, was the overall view. Which I suppose I was, except that, if you imitate something for long enough, you eventually turn into it.

And:

It was a good story, well told, and I seriously doubt that any of my listeners were capable of spotting the joins - which is to say, working out where reality ended and fantasy began.

But who really cares what’s fact and fiction when it’s this good? Buenas Noches Buenos Aires is a tricksy little novel that turns its attention to the advent of the AIDS epidemic amongst libertarian circles. It’s witty, stylish, immensely readable, somewhat reminiscent of Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat but with much more substance. And despite the saddening subject matter it’s a novel that certainly has a good air about it.

Ignorance, by Milan Kundera, is a small novel but big on ideas. Playing like a watered down Odyssey, two Czech émigrés return to post-communist Prague after twenty years. A chance meeting in the airport stirs memories of long ago that leads to an interesting study of our memory, its limits and unreliability, and how, in our ignorance, we can take it for granted and trust it too much.

Irena fled to France during the Russian invasion; Josef to Denmark. Both have built new lives, made new friends, and forgotten who they were. After the fall of European communism in 1989, they return to their city only to find that it’s no longer theirs; it’s full of tourists, whores, and restaurants the Czechs can’t afford. A chance sighting in the airport causes Irena to engage Josef in conversation; she remembers him from a conversation twenty years ago. They agree to meet, and, as the novel builds up to their rendezvous, they go about their homecomings - meeting parents, friends, and, ultimately, themselves - to discover that Prague is no longer home.

Stylistically, the book is a dream. Although little happens in the novel - a conversation here, a wander there – it is the narrator’s asides that gels the experience, wandering off into philosophical mode, or giving atypical history lessons - all the time, maintaining a poetic tone. The prose is terse, but just right to create the surreal atmosphere it needs to succeed. It wanders effortlessly between the different characters and the lessons learned from their actions.

The characters are well drawn, although their focus is completely on their homecoming, their memory, and doubts about their patriotism. Their actions are believable; their conversations intelligent. Prague, as a character, is underdone – little of the city is given, and, after twenty years, it would have been nice to know the visible changes that time has wrought.

Overall, Kundera has provided an appealing novel, doubtless inspired by his own circumstances as a Czech émigré. While it may not be to the tastes of all (i.e. those seeking action) it does endow us with food for thought, something to consider about our memories. And, at least for me, the true thrill was watching how the philosophical and historical asides came together to complete the novel, and reinforce the characters’ feelings.

A Sweet Scent Of Death is the second novel by Mexican author and screenplay writer, Guillermo Arriaga, although you probably sort-of know him better as the guy who wrote Amores Perros and 21 Grams. It’s one of those novels that you know from the start whether you are going to like it or not.

It is the story of a small Mexican village, Loma Grande, where one day the naked body of a teenage girl is found, and how the finger of blame, when coupled with hearsay, escalates to such a point that it ends with violence. A local boy, Ramon Castanos, had an unspoken of fancy for the murdered girl but his grief leads the villagers to believe they were actually secret lovers. The girl’s secret letters, peppered with coded messages, lead him to believe that she felt the same way for him. And the villages, wanting the murder avenged, force Ramon into killing her attacker. But who was it? One man claims to have seen frequent visitor, the Gypsy, frollicking in the bushes with the murdered lady but it was actually Gabriela, who is married to Pedro Salgado, and he would kill her if he knew she was cheating on him. So, unable to defend the Gypsy she can only watch on helpless, much like most of the implicated characters here, as events snowball to the denouement.

It’s a great plot, but it belongs in the movies. A Sweet Scent Of Death reads like a movie and it’s for that reason I knew I wouldn’t like it from the start - I did, however, press on. The translation, also, felt lacking, the prose sometimes feeling lifeless.

There’s too many characters in this novel, most with little to add to the narrative other than to goad Ramon into killing the Gypsy. And, due to its cinematic style, the author rarely gets within the heads of his players, preferring to describe their actions. Rather than someone swither over to kill someone, a shaky hand for illustration, it would have been far more satisfying to get inside their head and show the turmoil and guilt they felt.

Overall, a good idea with great plotting but let down by some really shoddy prose. If Arriaga ever gets round to it, then you’d be best served waiting for the film to come out.