Vydáno: 2010
Obsah:
The novel begins with Grublock sending Kevin to check up on a private investigator. Kevin finds him dead. He also finds a note written to a man called Dr Erskine from Adolf Hitler thanking him for his "kind tribute". Grublock has mentioned a boxer called Seth Roach, though Kevin has no idea how he might be connected. When Grublock is killed, Kevin must try to find out.
What follows is a gripping and clever story, as Kevin reconstructs the events that led to the letter from Hitler, and uncovers the tragically doomed love affair between the eugenics-obsessed entomologist Dr Erskine (he provides the beetles) and the Jewish boxer Seth Roach. Along the way we meet rabbis, small-time gangsters, town planners and, memorably, another entomologist who carries bedbugs around in a glass vial, "which every night he tipped out onto his hairy thigh so they could feed on his blood". There is a brief history of invented languages, a discussion about dissonant music and its relationship to capitalism, and an analysis of what is wrong with new towns (among other things, there are too many roundabouts).
While the frame narrative occasionally strays too far into postmodern whimsy, as the mostly cheerful Kevin is driven around handcuffed to a dashboard by a Welsh hitman ("When I am in a stressful situation, I often like to ask myself: what would Batman do in my place?"), the 1930s are wonderfully evoked, and the historical sections of the novel are taut, thematically rich and extremely well written. One chapter begins: "The morning light peeked in through the windows of the mortuary, pasty and trembling like the sort of ghoulish little boy who would rather see a dead girl than a naked one." Elsewhere, the "tepid April rain fell on London with all the sincerity of a hired sales gimmick for umbrellas". A girl's character and appearance is summed up with this: "She had so many freckles that Erskine wondered if she might have stolen some from other children."
The "well-made" realist novel has been thoroughly picked over lately, and many commentators have wondered why writers persist with, as Coetzee puts it, "its plot and its characters and its settings". Some have said the realist novel is dead, or just boring. But the best kind of realism is not the literary equivalent of a new town with too many roundabouts, and signposts that don't allow you to get lost. Great realist fiction has always been about messing with reality – exposing it, heightening it, exploring it, smashing it up a bit, turning it inside out and shaking it to get a better look at it. It doesn't always have to be "realistic", but it does need to be compassionate, and to acknowledge that, because we are all flawed, no one is a villain. It's relatively easy to write a clever essay, or a piece of fiction that rejects plot, character and setting. But it takes a real skill to make a tragic hero out of the five-foot, nine-toed, alcoholic Seth Roach, for whom sex is an extension of boxing and "posh cunts" are there to exploit and beat up.
Almost everyone else in this novel is even less appealing – in theory – than Seth, but it is possible to identify with all of them and to care about what happens to them next. Because we are emotionally involved in the drama of the novel and its characters, we can more meaningfully engage with its thematic questions. What does it mean to feel you have to hold someone or something in contempt? What is true progress? What would it mean to breed a super-race of anything (beetles with swastikas on their wings, for example) and to stamp out any kind of mutation?
It's clear from this compelling debut that Beauman can perform the complicated paradoxical trick required of the best 21st-century realist novelists: to take an old and predictable structure and allow it to produce new and unpredictable connections.
Skóre: 8/10
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