Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

‘ “Fammos”?’

‘Yeah, from the famine, you know.’

‘An island would be better,’ Gary McCrum asserts. ‘With a self-sustaining farm.’

‘Oh, yeah, an island’s the ideal,’ Jocelyn says. ‘Though you’re probably going to have to cut back on your mercenaries a bit.’

‘Or get robot mercenaries?’ Kevin says.

‘Nice,’ Jocelyn says. ‘You should say that to Walter. He’d be well impressed.’

‘You think?’ Kevin says.

‘Might even sign you up for a place in the fortress,’ Jocelyn says. ‘You could look out the window and watch us all burn.’

Kevin beams, as though he would like this very much indeed.

At last a quiet moment presents itself. I use my mobile so the bank won’t record the call; the line is poor, and the girl who answers doesn’t seem to know anything about Paul. ‘You published his novel,’ I tell her. ‘ For Love of a Clown , surely you know it?’

The girl tells me, rather peevishly, that it must have been before her time, then puts me on hold. A moment later a second voice, a man’s, comes on the line. He introduces himself as Paul’s editor. Warily, as if he suspects some kind of scam, he tells me that while Asterisk Press did indeed publish Paul’s first novel, they have had no contact with him for some time.

‘Really?’ This strikes me as strange. ‘He has not been in touch regarding his new book, the story of an Everyman working in a mid-tier investment bank?’

‘No,’ the editor replies. ‘We haven’t heard anything from him at all.’

‘Hmm,’ I say, and then, ‘perhaps you have an address where I can contact him?’

‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘We can’t give that information out to strangers.’

‘Yes, but I am not really a stranger,’ I explain. ‘You see, I am the Everyman whose adventures will appear in his next novel.’

He apologizes again, invites me to leave a message which he can pass on, though he adds that Paul has not replied to any correspondence for several years, so they don’t know even if the address they have is the right one.

A series of phone calls to literary magazines and institutions in Dublin proves scarcely more informative; of the few people who remember him, one insists that he is dead, and refuses to be persuaded otherwise even when I tell him I recently had lunch with him. Nevertheless, a picture begins to emerge. One acquaintance makes reference to the writer’s disappointment over the reception of Clown ; several speak about a hostile review in the national press.

Once I retrieve this review, which is hidden behind a paywall, his retreat from the literary world becomes considerably less of a mystery.

‘ “How can something so trivial feel so exhausting? Reading this deeply unfunny, unintentionally depressing book, one might be tempted to conclude that the novel, like the circus, has simply had its day, and that novelists have come to inhabit the same territory as the clown chosen here as protagonist — once-beloved figures so outmoded that they now inspire only pity and incomprehension.” ’

‘Fucking hell,’ Ish says.

‘ “Yet this book comes on the heels of Bimal Banerjee’s masterful The Clowns of Sorrow , in which the obsolescence of these forgotten jokers gives them a tragic grandeur, confronting us with the unbreachable gulf between ourselves and the past …” ’

I fall silent, skimming down the page. Ish nudges me. ‘What else?’

‘There is a lot of stuff here about Banerjee continuing Joyce’s great hermeneutic project.’

‘What about Paul?’

Frowning, I read down to the last paragraph. ‘She thinks he should not write any more novels.’

‘Right, I got that.’

And it seems that, for many years, he took her advice. I think back to that first conversation, the ‘wall’ he said he’d hit with his work; now it appears in quite a different light. Yet these discoveries have brought him no closer, and we must resort to desperate measures.

‘What the fuck is that thing?’ Kevin says.

‘Telephone directory,’ I say.

‘Landlines?’ Kevin says. ‘Who still has a landline?’

‘I keep a landline for when I need to find my mobile,’ Jocelyn says.

‘We’ve got a maid to do that,’ Gary says.

There are ten men listed who have the same name as the writer. Whenever Jurgen isn’t within earshot, I go through them one by one. Over the course of the evening, I manage to make contact with a butcher, an upholsterer, a sound engineer, a data miner, and a retired army captain who served with the United Nations in the Biafran War. They know nothing about my Paul, yet I can’t shake the sense of them as facets of a crystal, different aspects of the same entity — the men he might have become in different circumstances, at a different time, with different choices.

As I put down the phone for the last time, I have one of those dizzy moments, the vertigo that comes when just for an instant you get an inkling of how vast the world is, how populous and unknowable … Then it recedes again and is gone.

‘What about that number there?’ Ish points to an uncrossed name at the top of the list.

‘It’s disconnected.’

‘That doesn’t mean there’s no one there. Think about it. If this was a book, where would the person you were looking for turn out to be? It’s always the place with the disconnected phone, right?’

She keeps prodding me until I look the address up. It turns out that 323 Superbia is only ten minutes’ walk from the Centre, and so, mostly to mollify her, I agree to pay it a visit.

‘When?’ she says.

‘Soon,’ I promise.

‘I can’t wait that long! The suspense is killing me!’

‘All right, all right.’

Taking the lift down to the plaza, I follow the tram tracks in the direction of the train station until I pass out of the Centre. And here, on the teeming road, are the Irish: blanched, pocked, pitted, sleep-deprived, burnished, beaming, snaggle-toothed, balding, rouged, raddled, beaky, exophthalmic; the Irish, with their demon priests, their cellulite, their bus queues and beer bellies, their foreign football teams, betting slips, smartphones and online deals, their dyed hair, white jeans, colossal mortgages, miraculous medals, ill-fitting suits, enormous televisions, stoical laughter, wavering camaraderie, their flinty austerity and seeping corruption, their narrow minds and broad hearts, their drunken speeches, drunken fights, drunken weddings, drunken sex, their books, saints, tickets to Australia, their building-site countryside, their radioactive sea, their crisps, bars, Lucozade, their tattoos, their overpriced wine and mediocre restaurants, their dreams, their children, their mistakes, their punchbag history, their bankrupt state and their inveterate difference. Every face is a compendium of singularities, unadulterated by the smoothing toxins of wealth and privilege; to walk among them is to be plunged into a sea of stories, a human comedy so rich it seems on the point of writing itself. For a moment I wonder, hopelessly, what the International Financial Services Centre can offer to compare — then I remember that this was his very point, that the storyless, faceless banks are the underwriters of all this humanity, that we are the Fates who weave the fabric of the day …

Coming from the Centre, with its clean lines and ubiquitous dress code, the chaos of detail is almost overwhelming; I take refuge in the map on my phone. It takes me off the thoroughfare and into a warren of flats and terraced houses. There are no cars, no people, just boarded-up windows, incoherent graffiti, detritus so random it seems deliberate. The further I go, the worse it gets, till the very molecules of the air and brickwork seem on the point of fraying, drifting apart to leave yawning rents of pure nothingness. And then, in the midst of this desolation, I come upon a large, glittering tower.