The thrust of both works is the same: “All men are potential rapists”; but the subtler treatment and shifting perspective make Love Remains by far the more accomplished.Nicholas and Chloe fall passionately in love at university. His first novel, Hope, was a passionate polemic against pornography and the violence it engenders towards women. Part of this is to do with Litt’s technical skill: his far-fetched file of crosses and double-crosses, covert affairs, jealous wives, secret pregnancies and gangland vendettas is consistently redeemed by sheer ingenuity. A similar dexterity attends one or two of the relationships on display, in particular Conrad’s nervily dispassionate fling with Anne-Marie, his girlfriend’s old chum from a modelling agency.Ultimately, of course, the thriller format simply elbows Litt’s literary ability out of the way.
(When did psychology ever survive a car chase?) But the fragments of it that survive are worth any amount of James Hawes’s lads-grow-oldphilosophising – and the dismal spectacle of an intelligent man slumming it in the men’s-mag bargain basement.D J Taylor’s life of Thackeray is published by Chatto. Love Remains, by Glen Duncan (Granta, £15.99, 277pp)
Love Remains, by Glen Duncan (Granta, £15.99, 277pp)
Glen Duncan might well be the literary descendant of one of those 19th-century Tolstoyan sects which castrated themselves as a defence against male sexuality. Gratuitousness (epic descriptions of bullets winging through flesh etc) waves shyly from the doorway while psychological switchbacks (notably our hero Conrad’s transformation from retiring everyman into demon amateur detective) march proudly into the party.Curiously enough, however, the whole thing narrowly succeeds. His conclusion, after a life-changing encounter with one of the now deceased Harry’s old Fenian babes, is that “we might as well enjoy it for what it is while we can, because it’s all we’ve got”. I am sending this to Alain de Botton in the hope there’s time to include it in his forthcoming The Consolations of Philosophy.On first inspection, Corpsing looks set to fall into exactly the same category: clever chap steeling himself to write something of sufficient awfulness to get him profiled in FHM.The plot – downbeat, pork chop-and-beans kind of guy dumped by actress survives assassination attempt in which she dies – is entirely preposterous: drugs, guns, hitmen, high-speed car chases and burned-out flats.
Pints are downed, drugs ingested, people run over, police called, and yet what really irks is not so much this pattern gratuitousness as the rambling attempts at seriousness.Left to his own devices the narrator, Ben, is a reflective soul, prone to indulge himself in furrowed-brow reveries about kids, wives, mortgages, the semi in Peckham, God and so on. The theme, as so often in the Bloke Novel, is Bohemian class reunion. Three late-thirtysomething survivors of a more expansive and less responsible age assemble for the jolly convened each year by their mate Harry, a TV archaeologist, to commemorate his “fake birthday” – the side-stepping of an age regulation that blagged him his first academic job.This year’s destination, in an atmosphere soured by the thought of approaching 40th birthdays, is Ireland, and a rendezvous with some of the bleaker elements of Harry’s dodgy past. One consequence, oddly, is a kind of perfunctoriness about the adhesions of sex, drugs and violence, many of which seem to have been inked in with one eye on the kind people at GQ rather than any sort of aesthetic template.This type of writing by numbers – even in such a desperate and posture-ridden genre as the British Bloke Novel – was always going to have mixed results. Perhaps the author of Dead Long Enough really is “the funniest British novelist writing today” (Observer) – certainly, I laughed a great deal though, alas, not in the places Hawes intended. Why else should Great Expectations sport an alternative “happy ending” that defies the whole aesthetic temper of the book? No doubt the commercial stakes are that much higher now, but James Hawes’s Dead Long Enough and Toby Litt’s Corpsing have a horribly factitious air.
The products of highly intelligent, youngish men – Hawes used to be a lecturer, Litt has already been marked down as “the most exciting talent on the literary scene” – each looks to have been more or less deliberately written to appeal to the vast male constituency that exists, or is supposed to exist, somewhere between newspaper style sections and the upmarket men’s magazines.Certainly, the sense of clever boys pulling their punches in pursuit of slightly less clever boys is a bit too strong for comfort. The potential readership may range from a handful of intimates to a giant cross-section of the public, but the effect is the same: a trammelling, whether unconscious or deliberate, of what the writer wants to say in the interests of what the readers want said. Or what it may be assumed that readers want said.All this is perfectly respectable. Dickens’s novels, to take a rather too obvious example, were habitually framed with one eye latched to the sensibilities of the mid-Victorian family hearth.
However shocking this statement may sound at first glance, it is only a way of acknowledging that practically every writer who commits a novel, poem or lyric to paper does so with an audience in mind. Dead Long Enough, by James Hawes (Jonathan Cape, £10, 314pp) Corpsing, by Toby Litt (Hamish Hamilton, £9.99, 374pp)
Dead Long Enough, by James Hawes (Jonathan Cape, £10, 314pp) Corpsing, by Toby Litt (Hamish Hamilton, £9.99, 374pp)
The works of a few spectral geniuses and rapt monomaniacs excepted, most forms of literary activity are, in the last resort, market-led. In 1997, Larry’s Party won the Orange Prize for women’s fiction. Carol Shields lives in Winnipeg, where she is Chancellor of the university..
