Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

‘...translated into forty languages, read all over the world, crossing cultural barriers...’

Charles Dickens himself must have been the same kind of heroin addict. Not only had he published many of his novels chapter by chapter, and closely studied the public’s response before starting on the next one, he had also undertaken tours in which he read from his own books, and not with the shy distance to his own text of the intellectual author, the lovable diffidence of the humble man, but with a shameless passion that exposed not just his thespian ambitions and, as far as that went, his acting talent too, but also the avidity of his desire to seduce the masses, both high and low, regardless of their position and intellect. And had not that same Charles Dickens — the social reformer, the defender of the poor — been every bit as interested in money and social status as some of his own, less sympathetic characters? And yet it wasn’t this, as such, that Odd Rimmen objected to in Charles Dickens. It was that he had performed his art. Performed in the worst sense of the word. A combination of street trader and dancing bear, kept in chains by its owner so that it looks dangerous when, in reality, its testicles, claws and teeth have all been removed. Charles Dickens had given his public what it wanted, and what the public wanted at that particular point in time was social criticism.

Would Charles Dickens’s writing have been better — or let’s say even better — had he kept to the straight and narrow path of art?

Odd Rimmen had read David Copperfield and thought at the time he could have made a better job of it himself. Not a lot better, but better. But was that still the case? Or had his pen, his claws and his teeth lost the edge needed to create an art for posterity as a result of his submission to this circus? And if that were indeed the case, was there any way back?

Yes, he told himself. Because the new novel he was working was exactly that, wasn’t it?

Nevertheless, here he was, with seconds to go before he was due onstage, about to bask in the admiring gazes, and the spotlights, milking the applause as he mechanically delivered his truisms; in a word, get his shot for the evening.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been waiting for him, and now here he is...’

Just do it. Not only was this the best slogan ever for trainers — or for any other product — it was also the answer he always gave whenever young people asked for his advice on how to start writing. That there was no reason to postpone it, no preparations needed, it was just about putting pen to paper, and not metaphorically but quite literally. He told them they should start writing that evening. Anything, anything at all, but it had to be now, that very evening.

It had been like that with Aurora, when he finally managed to leave her, after the endless rounds of discussions, tears and reunions that always ended with him back at Start. It had been about just doing it. Physically walking out the door and never returning. So simple, and yet so difficult. When you’re addicted you can’t just cut down on it and take a little heroin. Odd had seen his own brother try that, with fatal results. There was only one way out, and that was to go cold turkey. This evening. Now. Because it won’t be better or easier tomorrow. It’ll be harder. Postpone things and you end up standing even deeper in shit. What difference is it going to make to put things off for another day?

From the wings Odd Rimmen stared into the blinding backlight out there. He couldn’t see the audience, just a wall of blackness. Maybe they weren’t there. Maybe they didn’t exist. And for all they knew, maybe he didn’t exist either.

And there it was. The liberating, redemptive thought. His horse. It was standing there in front of him. All he had to do was put one foot in the stirrup and mount up. Just do it. The other option was not to do it. These were in fact his only alternatives. Or alternative, if he was going to be grammatically strict about it. And from now on he would be. Strict. Truthful. Uncompromising.

Odd Rimmen turned and walked away. He removed the microphone and transmitter from around his neck and handed them to a technician who looked up in bewilderment as he walked past him. He went down the stairs to the dressing room where he, the interviewer Esther Abbot and the publisher’s PR had gone through some of the questions. Now the room was empty, and the only sound was Esther’s voice from up there, a wordless, hollow booming that echoed through the ceiling. He grabbed the jacket he had left hanging over the chair, an apple from the fruit bowl, and headed out towards the performers’ exit. Pushed it open and breathed in the London air of the narrow alleyway, a combination of exhaust fumes, burnt metal and cheese from the restaurant’s extractor fan. Odd Rimmen had never smelled freer, fresher air.

Odd Rimmen had nowhere to go.

Odd Rimmen had everywhere to go.

One could say that it all began with Odd Rimmen leaving the Charles Dickens Theatre just seconds before he was due onstage to talk about his most recent publication, The Hill.

Or that it began with the Guardian writing about it, and saying he had let the paying public down, the arrangers of the Camden Literature Festival and Esther Abbot, the young journalist who had arranged the interview and said how much she had been looking forward to it. Or you could claim it started when the New Yorker contacted Rimmen’s publisher and asked for an interview. When the publisher’s press office told them that, unfortunately, Odd Rimmen didn’t do interviews any more, the magazine had asked for his telephone number, hoping to try to get him to change his mind, only to learn that he no longer had a telephone. Indeed, that the publishing house didn’t actually know where Rimmen was. No one had heard from him after he left the Charles Dickens Theatre that evening.

This was only partly true, but the New Yorker wrote an article about Odd Rimmen in absentia in which other writers, literary critics and cultural personalities spoke of their attitude to the author in general and to The Hill in particular. Living at his parents’ summer place in France, Odd Rimmen could only react with astonishment at the list of famous names who suddenly seemed not only to have read him but to know him personally. That they should lie about their knowledge of his output in order to see their names in the pages of the prestigious New Yorker was perhaps no great surprise. And with a couple of days’ warning they had naturally had time to glance through a couple of the books in order to get the feel of them, or skim the outlines on some website aimed at students. But that they should also express themselves on his enigmatic personality and his very special charisma was more surprising, since he could just about remember having met these people in a professional setting — at festivals, book fairs, prize-givings — and exchanged professional courtesies in a business in which courtesy borders on paranoia. (Odd Rimmen’s theory was that writers are terrified of offending other writers because better than anyone else they know that a sensitive mind armed with a pen is like a child equipped with an Uzi.)

But in the light of the promise Odd Rimmen had made to himself to be ascetic and pure and to refrain from anything that might be construed as (correction: that might be ) selling out, intellectual swindle or self-aggrandisement, he had denied himself the right to correct the impression readers of the New Yorker might form of him as a kind of literary cult figure.

Regardless of where it began, it continued. And that was what his editor told him when she called him at his remote village home.