The Teleportation Accident (2012) by Ned Beauman

I never expected to enjoy a work of fiction published in 2012 and, horror of horrors, long-listed for the Booker prize – and yet, here we are. Ned Beauman rehabilitates himself after the disappointing ending that spoiled his otherwise near-brilliant first novel, Boxer, Beetle, by dispensing with plot resolution altogether: instead of resolving, he dissolves. It jars at first, but on closer inspection works rather beautifully.

The book follows Egon Loeser, first a theatre set designer in 1931 Berlin, through an unlikely odyssey which takes him to Paris and then Los Angeles in pursuit of his former pupil, the deliriously fuckable Adele Hitler (no relation). Egon has foolishly missed a very narrow window of opportunity when Adele was his for the asking, and so he becomes obsessed with getting another chance. Adele remains out of reach as, year by year, his sexual deprivation mounts to monumental proportions, all the while gathering tangential subplots which range from surrealist to bizarre.

Loeser (for which read ‘loser’, obviously) and his journey have a lot in common with characters from Barth and Pynchon, except that Beauman has a much lighter touch: being British, he does not have to do the American thing and prove his intellectual credentials by using longer words and more convoluted syntax than strictly necessary. That said, the scope of his research for the book is impressive, and his writing, full of extravagant similes that only rarely misfire, owes more to another American, Raymond Chandler (There was enough ice in her voice for a serviceable daiquiri – a definite wink here). The effect is almost always amusing, sometimes dazzling.

An unlikely subject that’s obviously important (Beauman brings it across from his debut novel) is city planning and (this time) public transport. It boils down, of course, to where the hell this civilization is going, and strangely enough (for a man who writes for The Guardian) Beauman is pessimistic on that account. In an epilogue (there are four of them), the much older Loeser sums up, in reference to his book on Nazi death transports: If you leave an Enlightenment running for long enough, eventually, one way or another, it will become preoccupied with the moving around of large numbers of people. It is a curious echo of Aickman or at least Priestley. The implication is that there is not that much difference between rush hour subway and the Belsen trains. If this seems a far-fetched conclusion, the book is nothing if not far-fetched: events behind the scenes are stage managed by Roosevelt’s sinister Secretary of State Cordell Hull who never appears in person but is known to take H. P. Lovecraft for a chronicler of facts. I wonder if Hull’s obsession with Lovecraft can have any basis in reality or if – much more likely – this reflects the author’s symbolical perception of that scoundrelly figure. Beauman is presumably Jewish, and both his novels are highly oblique treatments of the Holocaust, among other things.

The already numerous readers’ reviews, while mostly raving or strongly positive, often seem to run down to a sort of bafflement as to what the book is actually about. To the extent that such a multi-faceted novel could be ‘about’ any one thing, I would say it was about the chthonic forces lurking just outside the Euclidean plane and breaking through every so often in one form or another. In one of the L.A.-set chapters, Professor Bailey’s youthful experiences form what seems to be the most intrusive and irrelevant subplot in the book, introduced jarringly out of the blue. I choose to see this rough handling as an intentional shift into borderline otherness. Curiously, Bailey’s father, who delivers him into the void, reminded me of Aickman’s father in The Attempted Rescue. Bailey’s insane credo – There is a void in things – is as close to defining the subject of the novel as Beauman can explicitly take us.

The Girls: A Story of Village Life (1986) by John Bowen

 

Jan and Sue live together outside a small English village where they keep a shop. They are lovers; Jan is the older by 10 years and thus something of a mother figure to Sue. After seven years of this quiet Lesbian domesticity, Sue is unsure whether her life is on the right track. She goes to Crete for a holiday to ‘find herself’, leaving Jan unhappy and lonely. Jan goes to an Inland Waterways meeting (this is 1975, and Robert Aickman may well be around) and meets Alan who is younger but just as lonely. They have a one night stand which is pretty much a fiasco as far as Alan’s skills are concerned, but it is enough to leave Jan pregnant. Sue returns tearfully home more than ever needing Jan’s care. When Jan gives birth to Butch, they plan to bring him up together in blissful harmony. But then Alan turns up, and from here things take a sticky turn.

The book is neither a mystery nor a thriller, so it won’t be a spoiler (especially given that no one’s ever going to read it) to say that it turns out to be a paraphrase and/or inversion of… Hitchcock’s Psycho, of all things. The parallels are hidden so skillfully that it’s only towards the very end, after an explicit reference, that this becomes clear. Unfortunately, it reads like a Ruth Rendell thriller written by Hope Mirrlees: almost like a fantasy from a never-never land. It’s an interesting approach which possibly could be made to work, but somehow didn’t. The writing often gets too precious, while uncomfortable or horrific details are stated matter-of-factly in a jarring counterpoint; the effect is artificial and tiresome. Yet this language is obviously a conscious choice, so at least the author knew what he was doing. The experiment might have been more successful in less mannered prose.

But then there is one further twist, of sorts, on the very last page of the book, which shakes up the picture and introduces an unexpected angle. They are a haunting couple of paragraphs, and though I read the book mostly longing for it to be over, its bittersweet aftertaste will linger in memory. It’s like there was another, completely different book in there, which the author elected not to write; a reference to a gap on a library shelf.

Aura (1965) by Carlos Fuentes

This somewhat famous novella by Carlos Fuentes made enough impression on the literary world to be translated into English, published in a very slim separate edition, reprinted in a dual-language version, and to elicit from the author an explanatory essay on its creation. To this reader, it is an unreadable mess of unbearably florid, purple language bogged down with junk metaphors, pretentiously monotonous prose rhythm and the unnecessary gimmick of narrating the whole in the second person singular. It is one of those books which make me wonder if their admirers hail from some other planet where different criteria of literary taste hold sway. As for the story, it is about a young historian hired to edit the memoirs of a long-dead general by his decrepit, dying widow who lives with a young niece whose eyes "are sea green and... surge, break to foam, grow calm again, then surge again like a wave". Given that this comes under the grotesquely overrated label of 'magical realism', you've probably already guessed the ending. It's a bit like an Aickman story gone horribly wrong.

Don’t Look Now and Other Stories (1971) by Daphne du Maurier

Five longish short stories linked together by their supernatural subjects, their misanthropy and the recurring motif of losing control.

Du Maurier's gift, if any, seems to be for inventing incident, but decidedly not for character, detail, or language. Her writing is adequate at best, dreary and banal at worst, with some clumsy turns of phrase here and there suggesting a one-draft writer (this last abortive ten days that ended so abruptly, or the murderers for whom the police sought). Her characters are cardboard cut-outs, defined in the most general terms, in crude strokes. But the famous twist at the end of the title story is probably no fluke: the author does seem to know how to create, at times, a striking scene, a haunting turn of events. That is certainly not enough to lift her into the first rank of literature, but sometimes enough for her subjects to linger in memory.

The story I liked best is The Way of the Cross, in which a group of English tourists from the middle and upper-middle class find themselves in Jerusalem during Passover. Through a combination of external circumstances and their own character flaws, all of them are put to a test and find themselves frustrated and failing in the performance of their social function. All have to re-examine their self-images which prove to be distinctly separated from reality. Perhaps the most striking - even bizarre - portrayal is that of the substitute vicar, who is inexperienced at guiding this sort of party, and thus completely inefficient, yet highly arrogant with his democratic ideal of a working-class parish where the 'lads' may be rough but closer to a communal Christian spirit than the more-or-less leisured Jerusalem lot. The hint of latent homosexuality is not the most disturbing thing here: the vicar suffers a man's ultimate humiliation in the Temple of the Holy Sepulchre, shitting himself due to some acute bowel disorder, and thereafter reflects that perhaps Jesus on the Cross, in his fear and loneliness, suffered it, too - and this sort of not unsubtle but certainly misanthropic black humour seems to be characteristic of Du Maurier.

Not After Midnight is an interesting story with a rather Aickmanesque subject, but resolved a little clumsily, perhaps, with the reader being told simultaneously too much and not enough. A Border-Line Case is a female sexual fantasy of sorts; it links sexuality with some darker aspects of the human nature in a curious way which does not quite work dramatically and leaves an unpleasant aftertaste, but definitely disturbs as must have been the author's intention. The last story in the book, The Breakthrough, is the most overtly fantastic - almost sci-fi - and at the same time the most conventional, with a plot which might have been borrowed from a 60s TV episode.

The title story makes a shocking impression in comparison to the film - in the sense of being shockingly inferior. It is the least atmospheric of the lot, despite being set in Venice, and its prose is commonplace even for Du Maurier. But more strikingly, it turns out that most of the incidents that fill the film are interpolations by the screenwriters. Virtually nothing of the film is present in the original: the early scene in the restaurant, much curtailed - the visit to the police - the walk back to the two sisters' pensione - and the final twist, of course, but that's it. Much of the story - and it's not a particularly short one - is filled with John's quite tedious thoughts and perceptions and with inconsequential exchanges like the long discussion of possible ways of travelling back to England. There are no visual patterns of any kind, or thematic patterns, for that matter, either. Why is a frozen pond flat? has the touch of brilliant obliqueness totally lacking in Du Maurier. Two other vital elements are missing from the story: the love and the tragedy. The death of John and Laura's daughter is only treated in retrospect, and the trauma of it is not an overwhelming presence. There is even an implication that John is not too seriously affected by the loss. Neither the love between the couple nor their love for the dead girl is in evidence; in fact, based on the story, it is not even clear that the couple have enough imagination to suffer much. What happens in the story is just a supernatural muddle, or at most a macabre joke of the misanthropic sort. In retrospect, after the other stories have been read, a certain crudeness in Du Maurier is obvious, and being stabbed by a grotesque dwarf mistaken for a child becomes an incident of the same sort as shitting oneself in church. Indeed, in the story's last line John perceives his death as a humiliation, in the same way as the vicar in the other story takes his own bizarre ordeal. The story's ending is the final insult to the film, the crowning disappointment. Instead of a rhythmical bang, a transcendence of language, such as one expects from the masters of the form, the text of the story dwindles into inconsequence just as John's life does.

The Victorian Chaise-Longue (1953) by Marghanita Laski

If ever I read a more boring book, I cannot remember it offhand. A young middle class wife and mother recovering from TB has her consciousness transposed into the body of her unmarried counterpart in 1864. The unpromising idea is developed in a stultifyingly monotonous narrative which drones on and on without a single character developed enough to make him interesting, without a memorable or unexpected line of dialogue, without a word that enlivens the page. It's not that Laski is a bad writer, exactly; she just seems no kind of writer at all. Funnily enough, she (or her main character) spends some effort on pondering the paradoxes of time, in line with Houghton's book I have just finished, but those speculations couldn't be more inane. Maybe this all-embracing boredom results from the fact that Laski aimed not at telling a story but at making a point (Milly, the 19th century girl, is denied acceptance for all the things that the 20th century Melly takes by right and without a second thought). The ending is finally horrific and out-of-balance with the routine writing, but even that does not dispel the boredom, or the suspicion that Laski herself couldn't care less about her story or her characters.

The only thing that I knew about Laski up to now was that she'd hated the Ripley books as a reviewer and publicly advised Highsmith to bury the character as soon as possible. Now that I've come across her own notions of storytelling and character development, I am not surprised.