Ned Beauman - The Teleportation Accident

14-12-628
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

 

Ned Beauman - Boxer, Beetle

14-07-623
Vydáno: 2010
Obsah:

Kevin Broom, also known as "Fishy", suffers from trimethylaminuria: a rare condition that means he smells of rotting fish. He doesn't get out much, except to run sinister, after-hours errands for wealthy property developer Grublock who, like Kevin, collects Nazi memorabilia. (The Nazi memorabilia message boards are "brisk with shared endeavour and healthy competition", which is more appealing to Kevin than the "depressing" trimethylaminuria support groups.)
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