The Digested Twenty-first Century

by John Crace

  The biographer might have convincingly left it at that, but the GMAN demands a more forgiving, less realistic ending. So Patty and Walter got back together and stayed friends with Richard, Joey stopped being a Republican, Connie was miraculously transformed from being a doormat and they too lived happily ever after and were reconciled with his parents. And even Jessica was allowed back into the book.

  Digested read, digested: Couples 2010.

  The Stranger’s Child

  by Alan Hollinghurst (2011)

  George Sawle gathered his breath. It was the first time he had brought Cecil Valance home and he was keen to distance himself from his family’s petit-bourgeois gaucheness.

  ‘You must be Cecil!’ shouted Daphne, George’s 16-year-old sister. ‘George is so excited to have met someone so aristocratically bohemian as you at Cambridge. Please read me some poetry about Corley, my country estate.’

  ‘Come, now,’ said Freda, George’s mother. ‘We must let our guest change into his pressed silk undergarments.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mrs Sawle,’ Cecil replied. ‘I’m happy to read some of my own verse after dinner. But first George and I should go for a stroll to ponder the imminent war with Germany.’

  ‘Few people ever enter this area of the woods,’ said George.

  ‘Then let me take you the Oxford way,’ Cecil smiled, stripping naked.

  ‘I thought you would never ask.’

  ‘Your poetry was wonderful,’ Daphne said.

  ‘You’re very beautiful,’ Cecil gasped, forcing his tongue into her mouth.

  ‘No, no! That’s not nice!’ Though in a way she felt it was.

  The Sawles felt a sense of deflation in their humdrum lives after Cecil’s departure. ‘Oh look,’ said Daphne. ‘Cecil’s left me a poem: ‘I’ve written a poem / That’s not very good / Though after I’ve died / It will give everyone wood.’

  * * *

  ‘Come on,’ said Lady Valance to her children, Corinna and Wilfie. ‘We must prepare for the great weekend when Sebby Stokes comes to Corley to talk to us all for his biography of Cecil. But we must not keep Sebby too long as he has to deal with the General Strike.’

  As the guests arrived, Daphne felt a sense of dread. It had felt normal in 1917 to marry Cecil’s brother, Dudley, after Cecil had been shot on the Somme, but she was now embarrassed by the attention she received as the person for whom the greatest ever war poem had been written. And Dudley had turned into such a brute, and was almost certainly having an affair with Eva.

  George looked sadly at Cecil’s tomb, remembering the length and strength of Cecil’s membrum virile. ‘Ah there you are,’ said his dreary wife.

  ‘I want to make love to you,’ said Eva to Daphne.

  ‘Good lord, you’re a lesbian, after all. I’m very flattered, but I shall have to decline as I’m hoping to elope with Revel, who I suspect may be a queer, but I’m hoping to turn him.’

  ‘I wonder what Sebby will put in Cecil’s biography,’ Dudley sneered brutishly. ‘I bet it’s not as funny as my book about him.’

  Daphne reflected on how the war had changed everything. It didn’t matter if Cecil had been a good or bad poet, Sebby would laud him anyway. After all, he’d almost certainly fucked him as well.

  * * *

  Paul Bryant looked at a colleague in the toilet. Once the Sexual Offences Act was passed, he’d be able to do what he liked with him.

  ‘I need some help in the garden,’ said Mr Keeping. Paul thought this was an unusual way for a bank manager to deploy his staff, but demurred.

  ‘I’m Corinna,’ said Mr Keeping’s wife. ‘Why don’t you come to my mother Daphne’s 70th birthday party?’

  Paul was transfixed as Corinna and Peter Rowe played a duet. ‘I love Cecil Valance’s poetry,’ said Paul.

  ‘Well, it just so happens that I teach at Corley, which is now a boy’s boarding school,’ said Peter, ‘so if you’d like to visit, we could bugger one another behind Cecil’s statue.’

  ‘Did you know that I went on to marry Revel before marrying someone else, leaving an impossibly complicated family tree that I don’t expect you to follow?’ said Daphne.

  ‘That’s just as well,’ said everyone.

  * * *

  ‘Did you hear about Corinna and Mr Keeping?’ said Paul. ‘Terrible news.’

  ‘I can’t say that I had,’ Peter replied. ‘And neither will anyone else, because that’s the nature of other people’s lives. You seldom find out everything.’

  ‘The trouble is that now we’re in the 1980s, the reader has realised we’re not nearly as interesting as the characters in the first half of the book. Still, I’d better press on with my biography of Cecil. My hunch is Corinna might have been Cecil’s child, even though that would mean she had a 14-month pregnancy.’

  ‘Cecil would fuck anything,’ said George, ‘though you’d better not trust me, as I’ve got Alzheimer’s.’

  * * *

  Rob was looking for someone to cruise at Peter’s funeral. ‘Isn’t that Paul Bryant, the famous writer over there?’ he said to a stranger. ‘Didn’t he make his name writing a biography of Cecil Valance, the crap poet?’

  ‘Yes. Though I’ve heard Paul tells lies about himself, too.’

  Digested read, digested: Cecil Gay Lewis.

  The Sense of an Ending

  by Julian Barnes (2011)

  There were three of us and Adrian now made the fourth. I would tell you the names of the other two, but they are of little consequence. Besides which, my memory is most unreliable and so it is possible I have not even remembered their names correctly and it would be a shame to burden you with even more potentially inaccurate information.

  Suffice to say we were all rather smug public schoolboys, though Adrian’s sense of entitlement was perhaps the greatest, given as he was to making remarks such as: ‘History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.’ The only challenge to our self-satisfaction occurred when a boy named Robson committed suicide after getting a girl pregnant, but fortunately it wasn’t long before Adrian was able to put us right. ‘Eros and Thanatos,’ he said. ‘Camus believed suicide was the only true philosophical question.’ Or maybe he didn’t say that at all.

  Who knows?

  Adrian naturally went on to Cambridge while I continued my less than average life at Bristol. There I met Veronica Ford, who was to become my first girlfriend. Though when I say girlfriend, I don’t mean that in quite the sense you may think, as though this was the 60s. The 60s didn’t really happen until the 70s for me. If then. I’m still not too sure. But Veronica and I kissed now and again, and she once invited me to her home in Chislehurst for the weekend. It wasn’t a great success. Her father and brother were stand-offish, Veronica appeared ashamed of me and only her mother was in the least bit pleasant. Though I didn’t understand what she meant when she said: ‘Don’t let Veronica get away with too much.’ But then, she might not have said it anyway.

  I could go on, but as I can sense you might quickly tire of the flatness of my prose, the absence of any emotion and the repetition of the unreliability trope, I propose to keep this short. I did eventually sleep with Veronica, after we had split up, but it wasn’t very satisfactory for me so I split up with her again. In any case she had shown rather too much much interest in Adrian on the one occasion they had met. At least that’s how it all seemed, though I can’t really have cared too much as I went travelling to America after I left Bristol. I came home to discover Adrian had committed suicide. My sense of grief was overshadowed by one of awe for his wholehearted embrace of Camus.

  There’s not much to say about the next 40 years. I got a job, got married to Margaret, had a child and then got divorced after my wife left me. I’m surprised you haven’t left me as well. Though maybe you have and I just don’t remember. I was living on my own when a letter arrived informing me I had been left £500 and Adrian’s diary in Veronica’s mother’s will
. The money duly arrived, but the solicitor informed me there was a problem with the diary.

  I called Margaret to ask for her help. ‘Do you think I loved Veronica?’ I said. It might seem a strange question; stranger still that I chose to ask it of my ex-wife. But the one thing I have never forgotten is that I am almost catatonically disconnected. ‘You’re on your own now,’ Margaret replied. Which was also odd, as I was under the impression I already was.

  It fell to me to contact Veronica by email. Veronica’s behaviour was even stranger than my own, arranging to meet me and then leaving me without saying a word and then taking me for a drive past a group of care in the community people, also without explaining why. And as I am a doormat, it didn’t occur to me to ask. Not that I can remember anyway. It also turned out I had sent a rather bitchy letter to Adrian when I realised he and Veronica were attracted to one another, and that Veronica had burned his diary, apart from one page. From this I guessed that one of the handicapped adults must have been Adrian and Veronica’s child.

  Even a novella requires an ending, so I suppose I had better cut to the chase. With an improbable piece of deduction based on an equation Adrian had written, I realised the handicapped person must have been Adrian and Veronica’s mother’s child. So Adrian’s suicide wasn’t so heroic. Or was it? After all, why should I be any more reliable now than I was at the beginning?

  Digested read, digested: The Sense of Familiarity.

  The Marriage Plot

  by Jeffrey Eugenides (2011)

  Let us start with Madeleine’s books. Jane Austen, George Eliot and Edith Wharton. Yes, she is an incurable romantic, but there was nothing romantic about her on this, her graduation day, from Brown University. She was dishevelled from the night before; her dress had an awkward stain and she was trying to avoid her parents’ disapprobation by spending time with her friend, Mitchell.

  ‘I still don’t fancy you, but I thought you should know that me and Leonard just split up,’ she said. ‘Why am I supposed to care?’ Mitchell replied, a question readers would soon be asking themselves.

  So how did Madeleine’s love life get to this point? In her first year at Brown in 1979, she had had many admirers, but had remained faithful to her fictional male leading characters, but at some point during the semiotics option she had been persuaded that everything was text and that since she herself was a character in a novel there was no real need to differentiate between Mr Darcy and any of the other students. There followed 50 pages of Barthesian banter and an equally masturbatory relationship with a boy named Billy, which ended when the mirror being held up to the reader broke. For a while thereafter, Madeleine sought comfort in Mitchell, a religious studies student, and might even once have allowed him to have sex with her, had he not been so frozen by her beauty. As it was, the moment passed and she began an affair with Leonard, a dazzlingly semi-detached science undergraduate.

  ‘I love you,’ she said, as he came inside her.

  ‘Barthes says that once the first avowal has been made, ‘I love you’ has no meaning,’ Leonard replied. Rather than recognising that Leonard was a bit of a tosser, Madeleine fell even deeper in love with Leonard, as she had read that Barthes had also said that love is extreme solitude. So their relationship continued until he stopped going to seminars three months before graduation. Madeleine chose to deconstruct his absence as him having dumped her and so it was that she had allowed another student to come on her dress.

  ‘We must hurry, or we’ll be late for graduation,’ said Mitchell.

  ‘Haven’t you heard?’ said her room mate. ‘Leonard has been in a mental hospital for the past three months.’

  ‘Marry me, Madeleine,’ Leonard begged, as she entered the psych ward.

  Any number of thoughts might have entered the reader’s mind at this point. How did Madeleine fail to realise Leonard was bonkers from the start? Why did she not bother to find out Leonard was in hospital earlier? And was this the dullest love triangle in literature? But we cannot allow ourselves to enter the realms of sub-text or meta-text; instead we must stay with text and pursue our characters through to the bitter end.

  Mitchell was alone in a Parisian hotel, pining for Madeleine, whom he had kissed just before he left New York. How had he got there? Well, he’d set off to Europe, armed with loads of books on which he would frequently discourse at length with his friend Larry, who had come to see his feminist girlfriend but turned out to be gay. Meanwhile, Leonard was trying to lose weight. How had he got to that point? Well, he’d become distrustful of the lithium and the steroids he had been prescribed and had been trying to wean himself off the drugs, both so that he could get a decent erection and to clear his mind for his research.

  Madeleine wondered why she had married Leonard. A not unreasonable question, one might have thought, were it not that the narrative was going to take yet another backward leap to again fail to explain why. Like Leonard and Mitchell, she was stuck in a fictive trope and condemned to be a stylistic, one-dimensional irritation.

  Mitchell too was in despair; not so much because he had been unable to persuade Madeleine to leave Leonard, but because he knew he was getting on everyone’s nerves by going on for 70 pages about his religious enlightenment and Mother Teresa, yet was powerless to do anything about it because he didn’t really exist. He might have felt a little better if he had known Leonard was also feeling the same way. How he longed to say he wasn’t just a cocktail of drugs and bipolar symptoms and that being depressed didn’t mean he had to be so depressing.

  Finally, Leonard cracked. ‘I’m divorcing you, Madeleine,’ he said.

  ‘I guess this is the moment in romantic fiction when you decide you’re in love with the good guy,’ said Mitchell. ‘But this is a postmodern romantic novel, so I’m going to leave you to be happy by yourself.’

  ‘At last,’ said everyone.

  Digested read, digested: The Marriage Plod.

  Bring Up the Bodies

  by Hilary Mantel (2012)

  ‘It is a great honour to receive you here at Wolf Hall, your majesty,’ says old Sir John Seymour, fresh from tupping his daughter-in-law’s quinny. ‘Though I had rather been expecting you some three years ago, when the first book came out.’

  Thomas Cromwell observes Henry’s eyes lingering on Jane Seymour’s heaving, virginal bosom. ‘The King is tiring of Anne and there is no male successor,’ he thinks to himself. ‘A wise Master Secretary would do well to prepare the way for a third marriage –’

  ‘A wiser Master Secretary would do better to ruminate for a while on the death of his wife and daughters, and conduct imaginary conversations with Sir Thomas More in which he expresses regret that the former Lord Chancellor refused to swear the oath of succession and thus condemned himself to the block,’ Hilary interrupts urgently.

  ‘And why should I want to do that?’ Cromwell snaps, his mind already on how much money he can make from the dissolution of the monasteries.

  ‘Because I’m trying to rewrite you as Mr Nice Guy, you moron,’ Hilary says. ‘Instead of the hard bastard you undoubtedly are.’

  ‘Come, Crumb,’ yells Henry. ‘I need my finest pair of ears to return to court with me.’

  ‘Gosh, sire, you are much too kind. I just pootle around trying to do silly old me’s inadequate best,’ Cromwell replies. He finds maintaining this self-effacing Stephen Fry shtick annoying, though he has to admit it does make his opponents underestimate him. And Hilary keeps assuring him that the readers love it. ‘But first I must retire to my house in Stepney. This present-tense narrative is making me breathless.’

  His spies tell Thomas that Catherine is dying. The news is not unexpected but it is timely, for the Emperor will surely not contemplate making war with Britain once the former Queen is dead. ‘Send my condolences,’ he says. ‘I shall miss her.’

  ‘You could at least sound as if you mean it,’ Hilary whispers.

  ‘Would it help if I were to lament the loss of my wife and daughters again?’ />
  ‘You learn fast,’ she replies.

  ‘Ah, there you are, Cremuel!’

  Thomas looks up, trying to disguise his irritation. The Queen has addressed him thus ever since the King bought her the Pink Panther box set and he doesn’t find it funny. ‘Gosh, yes, your majesty. Pray tell me what silly old hopeless me can do to help you.’

  ‘I require an audience with the King.’

  He nods, though he has no intention of securing one. Since her latest miscarriage, her days as Queen are numbered. And not a moment too soon, though obviously he balances this thought with regret at how much he misses his own wife.

  ‘Tell me, Master Smeaton,’ Thomas asks of one of the Queen’s courtiers.

  ‘Did you make love to the Queen?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ squeals Smeaton.

  ‘And you’re not just saying that because I’ve put you in the Tower near the torture chamber?’

  ‘Oh no, my Lord! Her Majesty is a right goer. She’s shagged absolutely everyone, including her brother.’

  The Master Secretary sighs. He does not want to see so many go to the block when his wife’s death’s on his mind, but if they will confess of their own free will, what can he do? He walks purposefully towards the King’s bedchamber and tells him: ‘The Queen’s head has unfortunately become detached from her body. Your marriage is annulled and you are free to marry Jane.’

  ‘I knew I could rely on you, Crumb,’ Henry laughs.

  Thomas retires to Stepney to count his royalties with Hilary. ‘Please take your time over the last volume,’ he begs her. ‘I’d like some time to enjoy my wealth before I, too, get the chop.’

  Digested read, digested: Bring Up the Booker.

  Lionel Asbo

  by Martin Amis (2012)

  2006: Dear Jennaveieve, I’m havin’g an affair with my Gran. The sex is grea’t but Im worried that my uncle Lionel will thin’k there is somefing wron’g wiv me shaggin’g hi’s Mum. I dont know why cos shes only 39 as she ha’d her fir’st child when she was 12 and me own Mum had me at 12 so I is actua’lly startin’g well late as I am 15. Your’s Desmond Pepperdine.