David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

“Yeah? He did a sodding good job of hiding it.”

“Anthony Hershey was an upper middle class Englishman born before the war. Fathers didn’t do emotions. The sixties loosened things up, and Tony’s films were a part of that loosening, but some of us were better than others at … deprogramming. Crispin, bury that hatchet. Hatchets don’t work on ghosts. They cannot hear you. You only end up hatcheting yourself. Believe me. I know of what I speak.”

A hand clasps my shoulder and I spin around to find Hyena Hal smiling like a giant mink. “Crispin! How was the signing?”

“I’ll live. But let me introd—” When I turn back to Levon Frankland, he’s been swept away by the party. “Yeah, the signing was fine. Despite half a million women wanting to touch the hem of some crank who writes about angels.”

“I can spot twenty publishers from here who’ll regret not snapping up Holly Sykes until their dying days. Anyway, Sir Roger and Lady Suze Brittan await the Wild Child of British Letters.”

Suddenly I’m wilting. “Must I, Hal?”

Hyena Hal’s smile dims. “The shortlist.”

Lord Roger Brittan: onetime car dealer; budget hotelier in the 1970s; founder of Brittan Computers in 1983, briefly the U.K.’s leading maker of shitty word processors; acquirer of a mobile phone license after bankrolling New Labour’s 1997 landslide, and setter-upper of the BritFone telecom network that still bears his name, after a fashion. Since 2004 he’s been known to millions via Out on Your Arse! , the business reality show where a clutch of wazzocks humiliate themselves for the “prize” of a £100K job in Lord Brittan’s business empire. Last year Sir Roger shocked the arts world by purchasing the U.K.’s foremost literary prize, renaming it after himself and trebling the pot to £150,000. Bloggers suggest that his acquisition was prompted by his latest wife, Suze Brittan, whose CV includes a stint as a soap star, face of TV’s book show The Unput-downables , and now chairperson of the Brittan Prize’s panel of uncorruptible judges. But we arrive at the canopied corner only to find Lord Roger and Lady Suze speaking with Nick Greek: “I hear what you’re saying about Slaughterhouse-Five , Lord Brittan.” Nick Greek possesses American self-assurance, Byronic good looks, and I already detest him. “But if I were forced at gunpoint to pick the twentieth-century war novel, I’d opt for Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead . It’s—”

“I knew you’d say that!” Suze Brittan performs a little victory jig. “I adore it. The only war novel to really ‘get’ trench warfare from the German point of view.”

“I wonder, Lady Suze,” Nick Greek treads delicately, “if you’re thinking of All Quiet on the Western— ”

“ What German ‘point of view’?” huffs Lord Roger Brittan. “Apart from ‘Totally bloody wrong twice in thirty bloody years’?”

Suze crooks her little finger through her black pearls. “That’s why The Naked and the Dead is so important, Rog — ordinary people on the wrong side suffer too. Right, Nick?”

“To put the shoe on the other foot is the novel’s chief strength, Lady Suze,” says the tactful American.

“Bloody shoddy product branding,” says Lord Roger. “ The Naked and the Dead ? Sounds like a necrophilia manual.”

Hyena Hal steps in: “Lord Roger, Lady Suze, Nick. Introductions are hardly necessary, but before Crispin leaves—”

“Crispin Hershey!” Lady Suze holds up both hands as if I’m the sun god Ra. “Your event was totes amazeballs! As they say.”

I manage to lift the corners of my mouth. “Thank you.”

“I’m honored,” brownnoses Nick Greek. “In Brooklyn there’s, like, a whole bunch of us, we literally worship Desiccated Embryos .”

“Literally”? “Worship”? I have to shake Nick Greek’s hand, wondering if his compliment is a camouflaged insult—“Everything you’ve done since Embryos is a crock of crap”—or a prelude to a blurb request—“Dear Crispin, totally awesome to hang out with you at Hay last year, would you dash off a few words of advance praise for my new effort?” “Don’t let me interrupt,” I tell the trio, “your erudite insights about Norman Mailer.” I bowl a second googly at the young Turk: “Though for my money, the granddaddy of firsthand war accounts has to be Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage .”

“I didn’t read that,” Nick Greek admits, “because—”

“So many books, so little time, I know,” I drain the fat glass of red that elves placed in my hand, “but Crane remains unsurpassed.”

“—because Stephen Crane was born in 1871,” counters Nick Greek, “ after the Civil War ended. So can’t really be firsthand. But if Crispin Hershey esteems it,” he whips out an eReader, “I’ll download it right now.”

My gammon lunch repeats on me. “Nick’s novel,” Suze Brittan tells me, “is set in the Afghanistani war. Richard Cheeseman raved about it, and he’s interviewing Nick on my program next week.”

“Oh? I’ll be glued to the set. I heard about it, actually. What’s it called? Highway 66 ?”

“Route 605.” Nick Greek’s fingertips dance on the screen. “Named after the highway in Helmand Province.”

“Were your sources any more firsthand than Stephen Crane’s?” Obviously not: The closest this pallid boy ever came to armed combat was group feedback on his creative writing MA. “Unless, of course, you were a literate marine in an ex-life?”

“No, but that’s a fair description of my brother. Route 605 wouldn’t exist without Kyle.”

A small crowd, I notice, is now watching us, like tennis spectators. “I hope you don’t feel overly indebted to your brother, or that he doesn’t feel you’ve exploited his hard-won experiences.”

“Kyle died two years ago.” Nick Greek stays calm. “On Route 605, defusing a mine. My novel’s his memorial, of sorts.”

Oh, great. Why didn’t Publicity Girl warn me that Nick Greek’s a sodding saint? Lady Suze is looking like a Corgi just shat me out, while Lord Roger gives Nick Greek a fatherly squeeze on the biceps: “Nick, son, I don’t know yer, and Afghanistan’s a total bloody cock-up. But your brother’d be proud of yer — and I know what I’m on about, ’cause I lost my brother when I was ten. Drowned at sea. Suze was saying — weren’t you Suze? — that Route 605 is my sort of book. So yer know what? I’ll read it over the weekend”—he clicks his fingers at an aide, who taps a smartphone—“and when Roger Brittan gives his word, he bloody well keeps it.” Bodies come between me and the haloed ones — it’s as if I’m being towed away on casters. The last familiar face is that of Editor Oliver, cheered by the future angle of Route 605 ’s sales graph. I need a drink.

HERSHEY IS not going to vomit. Did Hershey not pass this broken gate earlier? A hunchback tree, a brook that won’t shut up, the puddle reflecting the BritFone holo-logo, the acid reek of cowshit. Hershey is not drunk. Just well oiled. Why am I here? “So far up his own arse he can see daylight.” Gulp it down. The pavilion was a bottomless pit. The mascarpone trifle was ill-advised. “That wasn’t Crispin Hershey, was it?” My shortcut across the car park back to my comfy room at the Coach and Horses has trapped me in a Möbius loop of Land Rovers, Touaregs, and slurping hoofed-up mud. I thought I saw Archbishop Desmond Tutu and I followed him to ask about something that seemed important at the time but it turned out not to be him anyway. So why am I here, dear reader? Because I need to keep my author profile high. Because the £500,000 advance that Hyena Hal extracted for Echo Must Die is gone — half to the Inland Revenue, a quarter to the mortgage, a quarter to negative equity. Because if I’m not a writer, what am I? “Anything new in the pipeline, Mr. Hershey? My wife and I adored Desiccated Embryos .” Because of Nick sodding Greek and the Young Ones, eyeing my place in the throne room of English Literature. Oh, rum, sodomy, and the lash: Mount Vomit is ready to erupt; let us now kneel before the Lord of the Gastric Spasm and all pay homage …