booklit

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.