booklit

The tributes that followed the recent death of David Markson inspired me to pick up one of his novels, something I’d been hesitant about before. Cursory flicks in the book stores had shown that those available were little more than page after page of collected quotes, statements, and musings. There couldn’t possible hunca life katalog be a story in there. But then, literature is replete with unconventionalists - e.g. Borges, Calvino, Joyce - and sometimes you’ve got to trust their experiments to delivering on whatever they set out to achieve. To this end, I settled on This Is Not A Novel (2001), published with an unassuming cover by CB Editions, and trusted Markson to deliver.

Any initial reservations with the concept of the huncalife katalog book were quickly allayed with the opening sentences, two distinct hunca life lines that set up the premise for the book and introduces Writer, assumed hunca life to be Markson himself, as he expresses his thoughts on the creation of fiction and its many components:

Writer is pretty much tempted to quit writing.

Writer is weary unto death of making up stories.

Lord Byron died of either rheumatic fever, or typhus, or uremia, or malaria. Or was inadvertently murdered by his doctors, who had bled him incessantly.

Stephen Crane died of tuberculosis in 1900. Granted an ordinary modern life span, he would have lived well into World War II.

This morning I walked to the place where the street-cleaners dump the rubbish. My God, it was beautiful. Says a van Gogh letter.

Writer is equally tired of inventing characters.

In his tiredness, the characters — if we label Byron, Crane and van Gogh so — that inhabit the book are drawn this way, in only a brief line letting slip a fact or two, and seemingly unrelated to what has gone before. The breadth of names is impressive as Markson gives us details of writers, poets, singers, architects, jazz musicians, composers, and painters running the gamut of history. The istanbul escort common thread running through much of these references is that of death and what these artists died from, and so we learn of Thomas Mann’s death by phlebitis, Wyatt Earp’s by chronic cystitis, and of Frank Lloyd Wright’s heart attack — a few plucked from a catalogue of hundreds.

The obsession with death has purpose, and as Writer finds himself nearing the end of his life, his thoughts are on his legacy as an artist. While not explicit, the connections between the disparate facts shed their subtlety and we begin to see how people can survive beyond their lifetime, be it their works, their unsolved mysteries, or in tribute:

Among Dickens’ children: Alfred Tennyson Dickens. Henry Fielding Dickens. Edward Bulwer-Lytton Dickens. Walter Landor Dickens. Sudney Smith Dickens.

Among Walt Whitman’s brothers: George Washington Whitman. Andrew Jackson Whitman. Thomas Jefferson Whitman.

The links between the statements are wide ranging with respect to the artist and we touch on Writer’s preoccupation with madness, influences, relationships, other artistic flourishes, and what defines the longevity of an artist —

The peculiar immortality of Sulpicia. Six love poems, totaling only forty lines, and customarily tacked onto the collected works of Tibullus. For two full thousand years.

— which is no mean feat for a piece of fiction that aims to have “no intimation of story whatsoever”.

Part of the pleasure in the novel is being able to draw the imaginary lines between the proffered facts and to build up the story of Writer who, no matter how tempted he may be to quit writing, is an artist first and foremost and will write regardless. A writer, once an idea sinks its hooks into them, will wrestle with that idea to produce their art and in This Is Not A Novel Writer’s desire to produce something different (”Plotless. Characterless.”) pushes him on through more cleverly executed demonstrations of free association, his personality beginning to shine more despite the unrelated lines:

Ultimately, a work of art without even a subject, Writer wants.

There is no work of art without a subject, said Ortega.

A novel tells a story, said E.M. Forster.

If you can do it, it ain’t bragging, said Dizzy Dean.

With all the death and other assorted miseries, there’s still a streak of humour that runs through the book, which is perhaps not unexpected in such a playful piece. At one point Writer muses on Harold Bloom’s preposterous claim to the New York Times that he could read at a rate of five hundred pages per hour:

Writer’s arse.

Spectacular exhibition! Right this way, ladies and gentlemen! See Professor Bloom read the 1961 corrected and reset Random House edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses in one hour and thirty-three minutes. Not one page stinted. Unforgettable!

To most readers, if not all, This Is Not A Novel will contain anecdotes about some people known to them and many more that aren’t. It’s tempting to enjoy the act of looking up Markson’s references as they appear on the page to get a complete sense of who he’s bringing in to Writer’s thoughts, and from which books quotes are drawn. But to do so would break away from the ultimate goal of a book that revels in having no action “yet seducing the reader into turning pages nonetheless.”

Recalling the Dizzy Dean quote, there’s sly references to what’s been involved in producing the book —

If you find this work difficult, and wearisome to follow, take pity on me, for I have repeated these calculations seventy times. Wrote Johannes Kepler.

— and a sense of hope for its future, the fate of which, is at the mercy of posterity:

My work is not a prize composition done to be heard for the moment, but was designed to last forever. Said Thucydides.

As to what Writer is writing, that’s up to him. At various interjections he suggests what it may be, “if Writer says so”: an autobiography? An Egyptian Book of the Dead? So, if Markson decides that this is not a novel, who are we to argue with the artist? But while it’s a novel that purports not to be a novel, there’s one thing for certain — it is novel.

In Ichthyology, the opening story of David Vann’s collection, Legend Of A Suicide (2008), there appears a fly that gets stuck in a fishtank and, in its panic, sends off a series of ripples that highlight his predicament. It’s a visible showing from the insect and, having little consciousness, it can’t fight instinct in making its panic known. Humans differ, however, and the troubled father of Roy Fenn was not going to be found flapping helplessly in the water. Instead he took himself onto the deck of his boat and, with his .44 Magnum, shot himself. It’s an act that made its own ripples, affecting others, and the mystery around that suicide forms the basis for this book.

It’s hard not to see Roy as a loose version of Vann, whose own father commited suicide in 1980. Of the six stories making the collection, five of them are narrated by an adult Roy, casting his mind back to growing up in the empty expanses of Alaska, where life seemed to consist of nothing more than riffs on guns and fishing.

While the stories are independent of each other, they are deeply anchored in the life of Jim Fenn. The portrait painted is of an impenetrable man with “neither eyes nor ears for matters below the surface”, a weakness for women, and a history of failed investments. In Rhoda, where we meet his second wife - Roy’s stepmother - we are shown how Jim acts, storing his concerns without seeking to tackle them, when he worries that Rhoda may leave him:

“She’s not going to leave,” I said.

My father squinted looking out over the brush on either side distrustfully. “I wish I could believe that.”

“You can,” I said. “She told me she wouldn’t.”

My father stopped hiking and looked at me then as if I were someone entirely new to him. “She told you?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

“I asked her.”

Such an inability to communicate appears again and again throughout the book and there’s no doubt this has partly led to his suicide. Without a shoulder to lean on and an ear to hear him out we rarely get a sense of his thoughts and feelings, all of which allows Roy to build up a mythology around his father that goes some way toward the overall title of the book.

In the third story, A Legend Of Good Men we drop in on Roy’s mother after his father’s death where there’s little stability in her love life —

The men she dated then were a lot like the circuses that passed through our town. They’d move in quickly and unpack everything they owned, as if they’d come to stay. They’d tempt us with brightly colored objects — floweres, balloons, remote-controlled race cars — perform tricks with their beards and hands, call us funny names like snip, my little squash plant, ding-dong, and even apple pie, and yell their stories at us day and night. Then they’d vanish, and we’d find no sign left, no mention even, as if we’d simply imagined them.

— and we see the breadth of unsuitable father figures that, like Jim Fenn, just disappear one day without a goodbye. Guns abound here, referenced in an obsessive way — “…a Browning .22-caliber rifle, a .30-.30 Winchester carbine, a .300 Winchester Magnum with scope…” — and when Roy breaks into his own house, there’s an eerie dissonance whereby he describes it as if it’s the first time he’s seen it. It’s a tactic that works well to try and understand different perspectives, something which the book parallels on the whole.

The writing in Legend Of A Suicide is almost always controlled. Vann keeps a tight rein on his prose, careful not to let it fly off too far from the polished sparsity that characterises it, and this sometimes creates a cold distance between the narration and the recounted events. However, when it comes to the Alaskan landscape, he allows himself the occasional indulgence, offering up delightful passages, such as in later story Ketchikan. where Roy returns to meet someone from his father’s past:

At thirty, I rode the Alaskan ferry past the coastline of British Columbia, past white-ringed islands, forests extending beyond the horizon, gulls and bald eagles, porpoises, whales, all in close, rode past sunsets over the open ocean, lighthouses, small fishing villages, into Alaskan waters where mountains sloped steeply upward out of fjords, and on, to the town of my childhood, strung narrowly along the waterfront, drenched perpetually on mist, the place of ghosts, I felt, the place where my dead father had first gone astray, the place where this father and his suicide and his cheating and his lies and my pity for him, also, might finally be put to rest: Ketchikan.

Interestingly, the stories that make up the book would feel of little importance if it weren’t for the centrepiece, the novella Sukkwan Island which drops the first person for third and tells us of a time where Roy and his father headed out to the wilderness for a year. Ill-equipped for the experience, but too stubborn to call an end to the endeavour, we regularly see the closed off personality of Jim Fenn break down into late night bouts of tears as he confesses his inadequacies to his son.

God, I felt bad. I felt sick all the time. But I kept doing it. And the thing is, even after seeing all that that did, and all it destroyed, I don’t know for sure that I’d act any differently if I had the chance again. The thing is, something about me is not right. I just can’t do the right thing and be who I’m supposed to be. Something about me won’t let me do that.

This novella is the best thing about the collection as it shows that Vann is capable, after a few reflective stories, of pacing his writing, and the drama created from its limited cast shows much to commend. What’s particularly special is that it goes some way toward ensuring that Jim Fenn, as a man, remains ungraspable. As Vann tries to unlock aspects of Fenn’s personality he does so in a way that opens up contradictions between the stories, slight differences that go some way to producing the myth behind the man rather than the other way around.

For the author it must have been a therapeutic experience to tackle the real suicide that underlies this fictional representation and the slightly maddening way that he comes at the same subject repeatedly, yet in unusual ways, ensures that the reader is given a window into the confusion. “Memories are infinitely richer than their origins” we are told at one point and in the end these private memories are what keeps the legend of Jim Fenn going, as answers are never conducive to keeping mysteries alive.

It’s unfortunate that Roberto Bolaño isn’t around to see his star in the ascendency in the English speaking world, following on from the acclaim given to recent translations, The Savage Detectives and 2666. The English translations began in 2003, the year of his death, with Chris Andrews’ translation of By Night In Chile (2000). And the translations are set to continue with more books - novels, short stories, and essays - scheduled to appear in the next year. What makes the volume of work surprising is that Bolaño turned to fiction late in his life, before passing away at fifty.

By Night In Chile is the feverish confession of Father Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean priest, literary critic, and poet with a shady past. Believing himself to be dying, he sets out one night to recall the major events of his life, relentlessly delivering his story as a lengthy rant wrapped up in a single paragraph. A paragraph that runs for a 130 pages. A contender, perhaps, for the longest known ‘famous last words’.

Father Urrutia begins his confession:

One has to be responsible, as I have always said. One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one’s actions, and that includes one’s words and silences, yes, one’s silences, because silences rise to heaven too, and God hears them, and only God understands and judges them, so one must be very careful with one’s silences. I am responsible in every way. My silences are immaculate. Let me make that clear.

With all his talk of taking responsibility and mention of silences, we are immediately alerted that we are in conversation with an unreliable narrator and that we are going to have to tread carefully as he “rummage[s] through [his] memories to turn up the deeds that shall vindicate [him]”. Quite what those deeds are maintain interest as the narrative takes us on a dizzying journey from receiving God’s call at age thirteen through the political turmoil that affected Chile in the 1970s.

The moments recalled are extremely vivid. We spend some time with Farewell, “Chile’s greatest literary critic”, as Urrutia learns his craft and comes into contact with some figures of Chilean letters, such as Salvador Reyes and Pablo Neruda. There’s an extended piece where Opus Dei sends him to Europe to report back on the methods used to preserve dilapidated churches and finds pigeons are at the heart of the problem. The solution appears to be falconry, with many of the Old World priests adept in the art, an art which presages the impending Pinochet regime. Its delivery comes as a prose poem that, as befits Father Urrutia’s lyrical and feverish mind, lingers long and indecisive on details in a stream of consciousness, such as this example from a visit to Avignon:

Ta Gueule appeared again like a lightning bolt, or the abstract idea of a lightning bolt, and stooped on the huge flocks of starlings coming out of the west like swarms of flies, darkening the sky with their erratic fluttering, and after a few minutes the fluttering of the starlings was bloodied, scattered and bloodied, and afternoon on the outskirts of Avignon took on a deep red hue, like the colour of sunsets seen from an aeroplane, or the colour of dawns, when the passenger is woken gently by the engines whistling in his ears and lifts up the little blind and sees the horizon marked with a red line, like the planet’s femoral artery, or the planet’s aorta, gradually swelling, and I saw that swelling blood vessel in the sky over Avignon, the blood-stained flight of the starlings, Ta Gueule splashing colour like an abstract expressionist painter, ah, the peace, the harmony of nature, nowhere as evident or as unequivocal as in Avignon, and then Fr Fabrice whistled and we waited for an indefinable time, measured only by thebeating of our hearts, until our quivering warrior came to rest upon his arm.

Long sentences like this are par for the course in By Night In Chile, but are not the only means of expression. Bolaño changes the style throughout, throwing in patches of terse sentences to juxtapose the longer, recanting conversations (”And Farewell said:….And I:…”) without getting annoying, and hitting the reader with a salvo of Urrutia’s rhetorical questions. The book may be a single paragraph, but its patchwork of styles keep it engaging throughout.

Bolaño’s focus for the novel is the literary intelligentsia of Chile, as epitomised by Father Urrutia. When drafted to lecture the newly formed junta on Marxism, so that they may know their enemies better:

Was it all right? Did they learn anything? Did I teach them anything? Did I do what I had to do? Did I do what I ought to have done? Is Marxism a kind of humanism? Or a diabolical theory? If I told my literary friends what I had done, would they approve? Would some condemn my actions out of hand? Would some understand and forgive me? Is it always possible for a man to know what is good and what is bad? […] Then, before I knew it, I was asleep.

With misplaced concern - look how long his questions keep him awake! - Urrutia’s path to self-denial continues as he seeks to prove he has done nothing wrong, all the while haunted by his conscience which he fears because it tries to make him address the truth. His self-assuredness of innocence does create doubt and he constantly seeks assurance:

Farewell, I whispered. Did I do the right thing or not? And since there was no reply, I repeated the question: Did I do my duty, or did I go beyond it? And Farewell replied with another question: Was it a necessary or an unnecessary course of action? Necessary, necessary, necessary, I said.

The scorn for the literary class of Chile comes in their inactivity under Pinochet’s regime. All around them people were being tortured and killed and the writers did nothing. They never rebelled. What should have been happening by night in Chile didn’t happen.

We were bored. We read and we got bored. We intellectuals. Because you can’t read all day and all night. You can’t write all day and all night. Splendid isolation has never been our style, and back then, as now, Chilean artists and writers need to gather and talk, ideally in a pleasant setting where they could find intelligent company. Apart from the inescapable fact that many of the old crowd had left the country for reasons that were often more personal than political, the main difficulty was the curfew. Where could the artists and intellectuals meet if everywhere was shut after ten at night, for, as everyone knows, night is the most propitious time for getting together and enjoying a little unbuttoned conversation with one’s peers. Artists and writers. Strange times.

While By Night In Chile is a powerful rant by Urrutia about defending his complicity in what transpired amongst Chilean writers, Bolaño’s subtext is a condemnation of such actions. During one crucial incident the priest notes that “all horrors are dulled by routine”. That may well be true, but the engaging way Bolaño maintains the narrative ensures that the horrors of silence are in no way, as the priest begins his account, immaculate.

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.

While I’ve read a number of Gilbert Adair’s recent books, the older titles from his back catalogue are out of print. One of these titles, The Death Of The Author (1992), has thankfully been given a second lease of life in the United States, thanks to Melville House Publishing’s new Contemporary Art of the Novella series, a companion to its Art of the Novella, a series showcasing the likes of Joyce, Flaubert, Proust, and Tolstoy.

But the Contemporary range is no stranger to lesser known names itself - The Pathseeker, by Nobel laureate, Imre Kertész was the flagship title So, good company indeed. And, when my copy of The Death Of The Author dropped through the door, so impressed was I by the production values (glossy cover with flaps, bold colour, and nicely tactile pages) that I made the snap decision to purchase all the others within the series, with the intention of subscribing to future releases too.

But to the book. Adair’s work - his fiction, anyway - tends to fall one of two ways: the light entertainment, like his Evadne Mount trilogy; or the heavier entertainment, erudite, but still light. All come with an element of postmodernism. And The Death Of The Author, falling on the erudite side, is a postmodern book about postmodernism.

Although my reading of the book went without knowledge of the events that inform it, I daresay it’s not necessary in enjoying the novella. The reference point is Paul de Man, the Belgian literary theorist whose work had a different light shed upon it when it was discovered  he had written collaborationist articles during World War II, including one of an anti-Semitic nature. De Man’s life story, of living during wartime and teaching in the States, is given here to our narrator, Léopold Sfax.

Sfax is a celebrity in the world of literary criticism, having published two books, the first a study of Yeats:

That book, whose appearance produced quite a commotion, I may even say a scandal, in the advanced academic circles of the day, was Either/Either - I realized I had “arrived” when the Partisan Review reviewer wrote of it as having been wildly overrated, for to be described as overrated by one critic meant after all that I had been highly rated by several.

In it, Sfax argues that literary meanings are not intentions of their authors, no matter what they say - that it’s the reader and their interpretation, be it this or that, that makes the meanings. Following on from this book is the one that makes his career, The Vicious Spiral, the book whose arguments, not given a name, become simply known as ‘the Theory’.

The more closely a text is studied the more insidiously is it drained of sense or legibility, just as the more fixedly a word is stared at on the page the more too is it drained of legibility or sense, striking the increasingly bewildered eye as a mere weird disconnected sequence of squiggles. Words are far older and fickler and more experienced than the writers who suffer under the delusion that they are “using” them. Words have been around. No one owns them, no one can proscribe how they ought to be read, and most certainly not their author.

If de Man is the template for Sfax’s life, Roland Barthes is the inspiration for the Theory, being an echo of his essay Death Of The Author. And it’s the popularity of this book that brings us to the opening scene as Sfax talks with a female student of his who would like to write his biograph. Of course, rather than have someone else tell his story, The Death Of The Author becomes his autobiography, and he meanders off on events in his life, coming each time to the moment that spurred him to sit down and write in the first place.

With any Adair book, being vigilant is part and parcel of reading him, for his texts are not without their games, and there’s always that delight on realising, one again, that he is one, sometimes two, steps ahead. In The Death Of The Author he more than delivers, his games bringing together a beautiful spoof of literary criticism and memoir that, toward the end, adds a murder mystery that fulfils the promise of its title. And, when this cauldron of fun comes to the boil, Adair adds a stinging twist that had me screaming, “you bastard!”

To read The Death Of The Author is not unlike what it must be like to have subscribed to Sfax’s Theory:

The world had been turned upside-down - what had always been true was false, what had been important was marginal, what had been meaningful was meaningless - and it made sense, it made sense!

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.

Patrick McGrath’s debut novel, The Grotesque, tells the story of Sir Hugo Coal, a paleontologist who, after a fall, has become a vegetable. Able only to watch the world around him, Coal sits in his wheelchair and relates recent events at Crook, the family home, although the thread of his narration is warped by his own bias and imaginings.

Prior to his fall, Sir Hugo, over the years, has been spending more time with his dinosaur bones and not been attentive to his wife, Harriet. But when the butler Fledge comes to Crook, Sir Hugo takes an interest in the man, mainly because the new employee would seem to be spending perhaps too much time with the lady of the house. Based on his actions (whispers here, smirks there) Sir Hugo believes that Fledge is out to usurp his place as head of the house. And when Sidney Giblet, fiance to Sir Hugo’s daughter, goes missing Fledge tops the list of suspects in Sir Hugo’s mind, although he’d rather not tell his worried daughter what he thinks, especially since there’s no real evidence.

The Grotesque is a piece of subtle fiction shot through with lashings of black humour. Perhaps not as subtle as the other McGrath I’ve read, Dr Haggard’s Disease, but there’s so much going on within the novel and the truth, once you realise that Sir Hugo’s account of life at Crook is not reliable, has to be discerned from careful reading between the lines. I’m sad to say that some of the details of the story were lost to me although that didn’t affect my overall enjoyment of the story and I’m sure a reread will offer up new meanings and understandings. Like Lolita, it’s almost a novel that needs to be read again, if only to find all the seeds planted before you realised their relevance.

Gothic in tone, The Grotesque, is dense with description, yet is highly readable and the adjectives piled upon other adjectives in no way makes it a slog. And Sir Hugo’s voice maintains its charm for the duration without once slipping out of character:

So one afternoon I set off with a flask of whisky and a stout stick, and after tramping down a soggy cart track between thick growths of birch and alder I found myself beneath a vast gray sky with miles of flat, boggy fen before me and a lake in the distance. The air had a smoky, autumnal tang to it, I remember, and as I picked my way over the rough damp clumps of peat and moss, all tufted with marsh grass and bristling in the wind, and puddled between with rank, black water, my heart exulted at the stillness and desolation of it all. Wildfowl rose from their nests in the weeds and with a great honking flurry went flapping off towards the water, and I came squelching on through in my Wellington boots, with my thick tweed cap pulled low against the bite of the wind.

The characters in The Grotesque, as told by Sir Hugo, are all lively and believable, their Dickension names adding to the humorous gothic atmosphere. Who they are and what they want is of course hard to define since we aren’t given a clear depiction of them. But it’s fairly easy to read them based on their actions despite the presentation given. Fledge, the main concern of Sir Hugo, is the biggest concern of Sir Hugo and it’s rather plain to see that his disdain for the man is not due to any fear of the man but denial of his own feelings towards him.

Although I enjoyed The Grotesque I didn’t appreciate it as much as Dr Haggard’s Disease and felt that there was much left unsaid. That may just because I didn’t read between the lines well enough. But this tale - this comedy, even - is a masterpiece of prose, something that McGrath obviously takes great care with when writing novels. So while there’s unplumbed depths as far as I’m concerned, it’s well worth reading. Just don’t believe a word of it.

For months now, a number of people have been reading Patrick McGrath and talking him up. The novel they’ve usually read is Asylum but, just to be contrary, I thought I’d try a different introduction to the man. Thus I chose Dr Haggard’s Disease, McGrath’s third novel.

Set in pre-war London, the novel is based around a monologue from the eponymous Dr Haggard. Haggard, a general practitioner living in a house on the southern coast of England, is a man who has loved and lost. But, when the son of his former lover pays him a visit old feelings are renewed, former loves remembered, and madness begins to show from beneath the cracks.

Crucial events in Dr Haggard’s Disease, being those that shape the later narrative, happened years before in Haggard’s life when he was a promising young surgeon under the tutelage of Vincent Cushing - a nod perhaps to a couple of actors well known for playing doctors in low-budget horror movies - and under the spell of the senior pathologist’s wife. But it’s the events now, as recalled by Haggard, that drive the narrative on. And, being just ever so slightly mad, there are many moments in which you doubt his version of events, if not everything he has to say. And rightly so. He’s crazy! But ever so poetic with it.

The tone is a modern take on the Gothic, so while there are no clanking chains, ghostly castles, and other supernatural happenings as in previous centuries, there are grim hospitals and dark, rugged coasts with waves crashing against the cliffs. The language here is exemplary and showcases McGrath’s ability to turn a phrase. As an example, one only has to look at the novel’s opening:

I was in Elgin, upstairs in my study, gazing at the sea and reflecting, I remember, on a line of Goethe when Mrs Gregor tapped at the door that Saturday and said there was a young man in the surgery to see me, a pilot. You know how she talks. ‘A pilot, Mrs Gregor?’ I murmured. I hate being disturbed on my Saturday afternoons, especially if Spike is playing up, as he was that day, but of course I limped out onto the landing and made my way downstairs. And you know what that looks like - pathetic bloody display that is, first the good leg, then the bad leg, then the stick, good leg, bad leg, stick, but down I came, down the stairs, old beyond my years and my skin a grey so cachectic it must have suggested even to you that I was in pain, chronic pain, but oh dear boy not pain like yours, just wait now and we’ll make it all - go - away -

It’s testament to McGrath’s ability that he manages to continue this style for nigh on two hundred pages, right up to the gruesome denouement, making the book an absolute delight to read despite the dark subject matter. The characters, while we only have Haggard’s account of them, are strong and easily envisaged - both as the doctor sees them and as we, looking between his words, see them. But however certain Haggard is about his story, as readers our reflections upon them will always be cast in doubt.

As a portrait of a man falling into madness brought about by the ignition of past passions, Dr Haggard’s Disease does no wrong (and if it did, I was too busy enjoying the prose) and its dark tone, tinged with erotica and horror, create an almost perfect novel. Almost, because there were times when I did find the lengthy paragraphs overwhelming, despite their quality. But, now that I’ve joined the ranks of those gushing over McGrath, I know that the next time I need to get away from my usual fare, I’ll be running for Asylum.