Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

I confine myself to pouring the coffee.

‘Look, I don’t want to pull rank, but I would respectfully remind you that I’m the artist here. You commissioned me to direct your life artistically and now I must respectfully ask you to let me do my job.’

‘I am not stopping you from doing your job. I would love to see any evidence at all of you doing your job.’

He gasps, then there is a silence. I glance over my shoulder, but he is not looking at me. Instead, he seems to be staring at something on the far side of the room.

‘Claude, what is that?’ he says.

‘What is what?’

‘That, on the table there.’

‘That is a novel by Bimal Banerjee, called The Clowns of Sorrow .’

‘I can see that. What I’m asking is what it’s doing in your house .’ His tone is that of a wronged lover who has discovered traces of a rival in his mistress’s boudoir.

‘I am reading it,’ I say, feeling apologetic all of a sudden without knowing quite why. ‘It’s about circuses,’ I add, thinking this might endear the book to him.

‘I know that, Claude. I know because that fucker completely ripped me off .’

He is genuinely angry; it surprises me, especially as Banerjee’s book has only very superficial similarities to his own.

‘Are you kidding? They’re both about circuses! They both have clowns in the title, for God’s sake!’

‘Yes, but your novel is a bittersweet romance about a clown and a starchy office worker, for which the circus provides an occasional backdrop. The Clowns of Sorrow is’ — I turn to the back of the book for assistance here — ‘ “both an allegory for the poverty and wonder of the India of the early twenty-first century, and a brilliantly constructed arena in which language itself is set to perform breathtaking feats of daring and imagination.” ’

Paul listens to this with his head bowed and his hands on his hips, like a truculent footballer receiving a telling-off from the referee. ‘You don’t get it, Claude,’ he says. ‘This is a writer thing. I spent years putting together the first serious clown novel — breaking down that wall, opening people up to the idea of a book about that world. And then he sweeps in and takes all the glory!’

It is true that Banerjee’s novel received praise and prizes that Paul’s did not; however, both books came out at the same time, so it is difficult to see how the Indian could have deliberately stolen Paul’s idea.

‘Exactly!’ Paul pounds his fist into his palm. ‘How?’

‘What I meant was, it seems more likely that he didn’t steal your idea.’

‘Oh, he stole it all right. He stole it, he sold it, and then he disappeared with a big pile of money before anyone got wise. And nobody’s seen him since.’

‘Mmm.’ I am not sure whether I should tell him or not; but I suppose he will find out sooner or later. ‘Of course, he hasn’t actually disappeared. He has a new book coming out.’

‘What?’ Paul goggles, flushes, goggles some more, until he looks rather like one of the creatures in Rainbow Mystery Epic .

‘There was an interview only a few days ago — you didn’t see it?’ I wake my laptop, and a moment later a caramel-skinned man with thinning hair and opalescent gold eyes is glowering out at me. ‘Here we are — Mary Cutlass meets the award-winning novelist Bimal Banerjee.’

‘Mary fucking Cutlass,’ Paul says disgustedly. ‘That’s the witch who slaughtered my book.’

‘This is what she says: “After seven long years, the most brilliant writer of his generation has made his triumphant return. His new novel, Ararat Rat Rap , is a work so masterful and compendious as to make everything else written in the last twenty years seem redundant —” ’

‘Oh Christ,’ Paul says.

‘ “— with the exception, that is, of his own The Clowns of Sorrow , a groundbreaking imagining of India and the originator of the ‘circus-novel’ genre, subsequently much imitated —” ’

‘What!’

‘ “The new book, to whose scale and ambition only the work of Tolstoy comes close, presents both a pulverizing denunciation of the last three thousand years of civilization, and, in its inexorable beauty, its jocundity and its breadth of emotion, a glimmer of hope —” ’

‘ “Jocundity”? What the fuck is “jocundity”?’

‘ “I travelled to London —” ’

‘This woman writes like a fucking hernia,’ he expostulates. ‘It’s like they gave a fucking hernia a weekly column and told it to be as excruciating as possible until all of their readers have hernias too.’

‘ “I travelled to London last week,” ’ I read again, then stop. ‘Well, that is not technically how hernias work.’

‘What?’ Paul says.

‘Reading a hernia’s column could not possibly give one a hernia. Perhaps a better likening might be to a virus, which passes itself on to everyone it comes into contact with.’

‘Everyone’s a critic!’ Paul declares to the ceiling.

‘ “I travelled to London last week to meet the writer. Still a young man, Banerjee is exotically handsome, his leviathan intellect complemented by the looks of a Bollywood idol and a surprisingly powerful frame. I asked him how he had spent the past seven years.” Banerjee replies: “Writing, writing. People ask, how can it take seven years to write a book, but to me, clock time, calendar time, is mere shadow play. The true marker of time is the creation of the novel. Each is as it were an oak-ring in the tree-trunk of my soul.” ’

‘Aaagh!’

‘Do you want me to keep going?’

He gurgles; I take it as a yes.

‘Mary Cutlass: “ Ararat Rat Rap takes as its starting point the Armenian genocide of 1915 —” ’

‘Oh, so that’s what’s got her so excited,’ Paul chimes in sardonically. ‘Genocide, that’s what she most loves to read about as she chomps on her croissant in her enormous fucking mansion in genocide-free Killiney —’

‘ “— travelling forward in time to the present-day follies in the Middle East, and backwards to the days of the Old Testament — all of it seen through the eyes of an uncommonly talented rat. Did you find it difficult to keep so many disparate strands together?” Banerjee: “No.” ’

‘That’s all he says? “No”?’

‘ “ Difficult is not the word. It was agonizing, heartbreaking. So many pages were lost because my tears made them illegible. Yet, even then, the novel continued to sing to me, and by listening closely I found I could go on, just as by following his own song Jephot finds his way through the maze of history.” ’

‘Well, that’s just meaningless,’ Paul says. ‘That just doesn’t make any sense.’

‘Mary Cutlass: “Jephot is the narrator and hero of the novel, a rat with a gift for rapping who becomes a hip-hop superstar. His voice is brilliantly achieved. Like Banerjee himself, Jephot the rat is charismatic yet unknowable, seductive and at the same time capable, one feels, of brutal force —” ’

‘Jesus, just give him your knickers, why don’t you?’ Paul, who is now lying on the floor, exclaims. ‘Stop, Claude, I can’t take any more of this.’

This irrational hostility to a fellow author’s success does not seem to me the attitude of a man who has turned his back on writing for ever. I don’t draw attention to it, just note ingenuously, ‘According to this, the new book is published by Asterisk Press — didn’t they publish your book too?’

From the floor comes a short, ironic laugh. ‘Sure did. Daresay my old editor’s behind this one. He always was a sucker for a fast-talking Indian with a novel about a singing rat.’