Vydáno: 2012
Obsah:
Living in Berlin just before the second world war,
everything goes wrong for Egon Loeser, and it has nothing to do with the Nazis.
In Ned Beauman's terrific second novel, longlisted this week for the Booker,
his protagonist, a German set designer, is too sex-starved, self-pitying and,
usually, hungover to notice that history is happening all around him. At one
point, just before he leaves Berlin to chase a girl named Adele Hitler (no
relation), Loeser sees a group of what he thinks are students holding a bonfire
outside the library. He assumes it is "some sort of silly art
performance" and joins in, cheerfully burning the books of writers he
envies. This comes at the end of a section titled Literary Realism – a dig at
the one genre that doesn't know it's a genre – after which the book veers
gleefully through hardboiled noir, SF, murder-mystery and romance, distorting
each in turn.
Although each chapter is set in a specific year, in a
specific place, there's a sense that time and space are slipping. In Weimar
Berlin of the early 30s, parties take place in abandoned factories and ketamine
is becoming fashionable, its users "flexing and humming in the
grass". This could be modern east Berlin or east London. Ketamine was
first developed in 1962. Spotting historical dislocations becomes one of the
book's pleasures – it gives the feeling that, as a lizard from the far-future
at one point observes, "all time was one instant, all space one
point."
Here's how the narrator puts it: "Compare the Venice of
the late renaissance … to the Berlin of Weimar … to whatever city would turn
out to be most fashionable in 2012, and you would find the same empty people
going to the same empty parties and making the same empty comments about the
same empty efforts, with just a few spasms of worthwhile art going on at the
naked extremities. Nothing ever changed. That was equivalence." A hipster
for every era.
It's lucky, as the book is built on likenesses, that Beauman
has such a talent for metaphor and simile. I started underlining and
asterisking the quotable ones and now my copy is pretty much unreadable. Here's
Loeser on a particularly bad faux-champagne: "It's as if they've decided
to incorporate the eventual hangover directly into the flavour as a sort of
omen." In the LA chapters there are turns of phrase that would sit happily
in a Raymond Chandler novel: "There was enough ice in her voice for a
serviceable daiquiri."
In a fun and extensive supporting cast, there is one
character in particular, Colonel Gorge, who embodies the novel's drift between
past, present and future, between real and imagined. He suffers from extreme
visual agnosia and is unable to distinguish between things and the
representation of things. As his butler has to explain: "That is not a
pickle, sir, that is only a drawing of a pickle in black ink on a napkin."
The Colonel greets the portraits of his ancestors in his hallway as if they are
real people and yet, in the context of the rest of the novel, this starts to
seem pretty reasonable. There are echoes of Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut in
the mix of unhinged digressions and moral mad-science. The narrative voice is
limber, allowing for references to Lucretius, Lovecraft, Heidegger, Rilke,
"Hem" and "Jimmy" (Hemingway and Joyce) alongside a seam of
exceptionally smutty jokes.
It's the jokes that help us support Loeser, who can be, as
the opening paragraph of the book suggests, "a total prick". Loeser
assumes that Adele Hitler, because she is good-looking, is a good person. As a
friend tells him, he and the Nazis share a belief that "goodness has some
causal kinship with beauty". His chasing her across Europe and America is
a byproduct of his cognitive dissonance, his inability to think about the
millions dying, off page.
There is so much pleasure in the unstable elements of the
story that I couldn't help feel a loss as the wheels of the plot started to
turn. Luckily, the setting up of various false leads, reveals and tricks are
worth it for the brilliant finale. If there was ever any worry that he might
have crammed all his ideas into his first book, the prize-winning Boxer,
Beetle, this makes it clear he kept a secret bunker of his best ones aside.
Skóre: 9/10
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