David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

Cheeseman snonks: “Y’not my type, y’too white’n’too saggy.”

I see my reflection in the mirrored wall, and recall a wise man telling me that the secret of happiness is to ignore your reflection in mirrors once you’re over forty. This year I’ll be fifty. The door goes ping and we step out, passing a lean and tanned white-haired couple. “This place usedt’be a nunnery ,” Cheeseman tells them, “fullo’virgins,” and croons an early hit by Madonna. We shuffle along a corridor half open to the Caribbean night. A crooked corner, then 405. I swipe Cheeseman’s card through the lock and the handle yields. “ ’Snottalot,” says Cheeseman, “burra callit home.”

Cheeseman’s room’s lit by the bedside lamp, and the destroyer of my comeback novel staggers over to his bed, trips over his suitcase, and belly-flops onto the mattress. “Notteverynight,” flobbers monsieur le critique, as he succumbs to an onslaught of giggles, “I get escorted home by the Wild Child of British Letters.”

I tell him, Yes, that’s hilarious, and sweet dreams, and if he’s not up by eleven, I’ll call up from Reception. “Ammabs’lutely fine,” he drawls, “I truly, madly, deeply, truly, really am. Really.”

Arms outspread, the critic Richard Cheeseman passes out.

I ORDER EGG-WHITE OMELETTE with spinach, sourdough toast, and organic turkey patties, freshly squeezed orange juice, chilled Evian water, and local coffee to wash down painkillers and entomb my hangover. Seven-thirty A.M., and the air in the roofed-over courtyard is still cool. The hotel’s mynah bird sits on its perch, making improbable noises. Its beak is an enameled scythe and its eye is all-seeing and all-knowing. Were this a work of fiction, dear reader, my protagonist would wonder if the mynah bird intuits what he’s planning. Damon MacNish, dressed in a striped linen suit like Our Man in Havana, sits in a corner half hidden by The Wall Street Journal . Funny how the trajectory of life can be altered by a few days in a Scottish recording studio at the end of one’s teens. His girlfriend, who is still in her teens, is flipping through The Face . For her, their sex must be like shagging Sandpaperman. What’s in it for her? Apart from first-class air travel, five-star accommodation, minglings with the rock aristocracy, movie directors, and charity tsars; exposure in every gossip magazine on Earth, and modeling contracts to match, obviously … I only hope that if Juno and Anaïs scale Mount Society they’ll use their own talents and not just straddle the skinny thighs of a mediocre songwriter wrinklier than their dad. For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly grateful .

Can Literature Change the World? is the name of Cheeseman’s event. This urgent and timely commingling of the cultural elite’s finest minds is being held in a long, whitewashed hall on the top floor of the ducal palace, Ground Zero of Cartagena 2016. Things kick off when a trio of Colombian writers strolls onto the stage to a standing ovation. The three salute their audience like postwar resistance heroes. The moderator follows them — a twig-thin woman in a blood-red dress, whose fondness for chunky gold is visible even from my seat on the back row. Richard Cheeseman has opted for the English-consul look, with a three-piece cream suit and damson-purple tie, but just looks like a hairy twat off Brideshead Revisited . The Three Revolutionaries take their seats and we non-Hispanophones don our headphones for the English simultaneous translation. The female interpreter renders first the moderator’s greeting, then the potted biographies of the four guests. Richard Cheeseman’s biog is the scantiest: “A famous and respected English critic and novelist.” In fairness to whoever wrote it, Richard Cheeseman’s Wikipedia page is scanty too, though his “notorious demolition” of Crispin Hershey’s Echo Must Die is there, and connected via hyperlink to the Piccadilly Review website. Hyena Hal tells me he’s done his damnedest to get the link deleted, but Wikipedia doesn’t take bribes.

South American readings are audience-participative affairs, like stand-up comedy at home. My in-ear Babelfish provides synopses of the passages rather than a running translation, but now and then the interpreter confesses, “I’m sorry, but I have no idea what he just said. I’m not sure the author knew, either.” Richard Cheeseman reads a scene from his newest novel, Man in a White Car , about the final moments of a Sonny Penhallow, a Cambridge undergraduate who drives his vintage Aston Martin over a Cornish cliff. Cheeseman’s prose lacks even the merit of being awful; it’s merely mediocre, and one by one the earphones slip off and the smartphones come out. When Cheeseman’s finished the applause is lackluster, though my own reading yesterday hardly brought the house down.

Then the “round table” starts and the bollocks gets going.

“Literature should assassinate,” declares the first revolutionary. “ I write with a pen in one hand and a knife in the other!” Grown men stand, cheer, and clap.

The second writer won’t be outdone: “Woody Guthrie, one of the few great American poets, painted the words This Guitar Kills Fascists on his guitar; on my laptop, I have written This Machine Kills Neocapitalism! ” Oh, the crowd goes wild!

A file of latecomers shuffles along the row in front of me. So perfect an opportunity, it might have been scripted. Behind this human shield, I slip out of the room and clip-clop down the whitewashed stairs. Across the open-air courtyard of the Claustro de Santo Domingo, Kenny Bloke is reading to a hemisphere of children. The kids are entranced. Dad had a story about a party where Roald Dahl arrived by helicopter and told everyone he met, “Write books for children, you know — the little shits’ll believe anything.” I exit the ducal gates onto the plaza where Damon MacNish performed last night. Five blocks along the not-quite-straight Calle 36, I light a cigarette, but drop it down a drain before taking a single puff. Cheeseman’s given up smoking, and the tang of tobacco could be a lethal clue. This is serious shit. I’ve never done anything quite like it. On the other hand, no review ever killed a book as wantonly as Richard Cheeseman’s killed Echo Must Die . Plantains sizzle at a stall. A toddler surveys the street from a second-floor veranda, clutching the ironwork, like a prisoner. Soldiers guard a bank with machine guns slung round their necks, but I’m glad my money isn’t dependent on their vigilance; one’s text-messaging while another flirts with a girl Juno’s age. Is Carmen Salvat married? She made no mention.

Focus, Hershey. Serious shit. Focus.

STEP UP FROM the bright hot street into the cool marble-and-teak lobby of the Santa Clara Hotel. Pass the two doormen, who, one suspects, have been trained to kill. They assess clothes, gringocity quotient, credit rating. Remove sunglasses and blink a bit gormlessly— See, boys, I’m a hotel guest —but replace them as you skirt the courtyard, passing preprandial guests sipping cappuccinos and banging out emails where Benedictine nuns once imbibed deep drafts of Holy Spirit. Avoid the eye of the mynah bird and, beyond the sleepless fountain, take the stairs up to the fourth floor. Retrace last night’s midnight steps to the inevitable forking path. A sunny corridor leads around the echoey well of the upper courtyard to my room, where Crispin Hershey bottles out, while the crookeder way twists off to Richard Cheeseman’s Room 405, where Crispin Hershey extracts his due. A minnow of déjà vu darts by and its name is Geoffrey Chaucer: