Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

‘Yes, there’s certainly a lot to think about,’ Paul interrupts in the oddly wispy voice into which he has lapsed. I have the strange impression there is less of him, as if over the course of the lunch little pieces of him have been stolen away, like twigs taken by birds as they build their nest, one by one by one … ‘Sounds like I’d better get back to the drawing board! Tell you what, I’m going to take the rest of the afternoon off to think about these suggestions of yours.’

‘Frankly, I think the book will be much better this way,’ I say. ‘The bank robbery idea was perhaps a little de trop , like we say in French.’

‘It probably was,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking. Well — see you tomorrow.’

‘See you tomorrow,’ I say.

But Paul does not come in tomorrow; nor does he appear the next day. The weekend goes by without word from him; Monday morning turns into Monday afternoon and still there is no sign.

‘Maybe he has writer’s block,’ Kevin says.

‘Maybe his muse has deserted him,’ Jurgen says. ‘This is what happened to Gerhardt, the leader of my reggae band, Gerhardt and the Mergers. After his receptionist transferred to head office in Frankfurt he did not write a single song.’

‘I am his muse,’ I point out. ‘I have not deserted him. I am waiting for him right here.’

‘Yes, it is perhaps the less familiar situation of the artist deserting his muse,’ Jurgen says, frowning.

‘I wouldn’t worry about it, Claude,’ Ish says. ‘Didn’t you say he was doing plot changes?’

‘He was trying to think up new directions for the book.’

‘There you go then,’ she says. ‘These things take their own time. You can’t push the river, that’s what my Uncle Nick always tells the people in the dole office.’

In fact, Ish is almost as eager to see Paul herself, in order to share a discovery she has made about the island of Torabundo. ‘Today it’s basically the Financial Services Centre, only on a beach and with bigger spiders — but it used to be part of this really famous kula ring.’ She looks at our blank faces. ‘The gift economy? Malinowski, Marcel Mauss, all that?’

‘Are you having an acid flashback?’ Kevin says.

‘Gift economies are how everything worked before we had markets,’ she explains. ‘Instead of buying things from each other, people would just give each other what they needed. You give me a calabash of milk, I give you a shell adze, you pass the adze on to my cousin, I share the milk with your grandmother, and so on, and so on.’

‘You are talking about barter,’ Jurgen says. ‘The system that existed before money was invented and people no longer had to carry around adzes looking for someone to swap them with.’

‘Not barter. They didn’t exchange things. They gave things. Whenever anthropologists travelled to places where people still lived like that — without markets, I mean — instead of barter they found these gift circles. And one of the most famous examples was this island about a hundred miles from Torabundo, called Kokomoko. I actually went there with Tog a few years back, after we studied it in uni. A French anthropologist wrote a book about it. What she found was that people on Kokomoko didn’t hold on to anything. No one owned anything. Instead everything just cycled around constantly. Small things, like tools and food and clothes, but big things too. Kokomoko was famous for these beautiful necklaces, for instance, and they’d give them to the tribes on the neighbouring islands. Like, they’d sail over to Torabundo and there’d be a gifting ceremony with a big feast. But the Torabundans wouldn’t keep them, they’d sail on to the next island a few months later and pass the necklaces along to the tribe there. And that tribe would pass them on again, to the next island. And meanwhile there were other gifts from other tribes — cowries or arrowheads or whatever it might be — going from island to island in the opposite direction. That’s the kula ring. All of these islands, hundreds of miles apart, brought together by gifts.’

‘What was the point of that?’ Kevin says.

‘What was the point of what?’

‘Of just randomly giving each other things for no reason.’

‘Well, why do you buy a round of drinks in the pub?’ Ish says. ‘Why doesn’t everyone go up and buy their own drink?’

‘I have often wondered this very same thing,’ Jurgen says. ‘Financially speaking, the Irish mania for “rounds” makes no sense. Particularly if I am drinking a relatively inexpensive Pilsner lager, and I must be forking out for someone else’s costly whiskey and Coke. Even if they then buy me a beer, I still incur a net loss.’

‘Yeah, but that’s the point,’ Ish says.

‘That I incur a net loss?’

‘If I buy something from you, you hand it over and we both walk away and that’s the end of our relationship. That’s the market economy in a nutshell. But if I give you something, even if it’s just a drink that I know you’re going to get me back, then there’s a bond created between us that carries on into the future. Like, a social bond. So on these islands, gifts were a way of tying everybody together, like the different families, the different tribes, and so on. Not just them either, but the dead and the living too, because they believed that when you give a gift, a part of your soul goes with it, and joins with whoever else’s soul that gave it before. And at these feasts they’d recite the histories of the arm shells or the necklaces or the cowries or whatever it might be, and the stories of their ancestors who were still present in these magical objects. So instead of just walking out of the shop, they stayed connected, over generations.’

‘What if you didn’t want to stay connected?’ Kevin says.

‘Why wouldn’t you want to be connected?’

‘Because you don’t feel like handing over all your stuff.’

‘Look, say you’re living on an island in the Pacific, and your next-door neighbour needs an awl to tool some leather, and you’ve got an awl, you’re not going to keep it from him, are you? Because you know some time down the line you’ll need something from him, like food or a knife or a pair of shoes. Or just a friendly word, someone to look in on you if you’re sick. You know it’s important to preserve that relationship, in short.’

‘I’d just tell him to go to the awl shop and get his own,’ Kevin says.

‘Right, and for the rest of your life you wouldn’t talk to anyone around you and you’d just curl up every night alone with your awl, would you?’

‘I’d have a really good one,’ Kevin says.

‘I think what Kevin is saying,’ I interject, ‘is that we can see what they are trying to do with these networks of exchange. But they do seem to introduce a lot of unnecessary complication.’

‘Claude, we’re working in, like, the epicentre of unnecessary complication.’ She waves a hand at the glass towers, their thirty thousand inhabitants. ‘And what’s it all for?’

‘It is precisely to ensure that moneyed individuals can continue to stockpile wealth in peace,’ Jurgen says. ‘Without constantly being interrupted by neighbours and similar nuisances looking for awls and other goods.’

‘I wish you could see this place,’ Ish says wistfully. ‘Then it’d all make sense to you.’ She looks out the window, and for a moment her face takes on a radiance quite different from the cold grey early-morning light lifting in from the river. ‘Anyway the point is Torabundo dropped out of the kula ring to be an offshore tax haven, so now you’ve got the gift economy and its absolute diametrical opposite side by side. That’s bound to be something Paul can use, right? Like he could contrast the simple tribal island ways on Kokomoko with our miserable complex affluent ways. That sort of thing.’