Edward Aubyn - Lost for Words

‘This imbecile she used to live with,’ Didier explained, ‘sent a cookbook to the judges instead of her novel.’

‘What?’ said Sam, who thought he must have misheard.

‘No, no, it gets better,’ said Didier. ‘They put the cookbook on the Long List. This is no joke. We are entering the Dark Ages, my friend, but this time there will be lots of neon, and screen savers, and street lighting. This is the Dark Ages with light pollution: with the pollution of the Enlightenment! The pigs are wandering among the temple ruins; women are being raped on the steps of the forgotten Senate; there are only two or three monks who can still read in the whole of Europe; all of that, naturally, but this time it’s going to be on TV! This time it’s going to be famous! It’s going to give interviews: “It’s not so easy being the Dark Ages, there are many problems: I think I need some therapy, et cetera.” You get the picture? Only Lacan can do justice to this over-illuminated Dark Age, because only he has the obscurity to survive!’

‘Did you say, “used to live”?’ asked Sam tenaciously. ‘Do you mean Alan Oaks doesn’t live with her any more?’

‘Evidently, she has thrown him out,’ Didier confirmed.

‘So, are you still seeing her?’

‘She doesn’t want to see anybody,’ said Didier, ‘but we are old friends, and so she allows me to bring her some food, some wine: the bare necessities.’

‘I see,’ said Sam.

‘She knows she is living at the end of civilization,’ said Didier, ‘because I am the one who told her!’ He burst out laughing. ‘Everybody thinks they understand the joke of reality TV, but the real joke is that there is no other reality! There can be no civilization because we are living in the desert of the Real. All our experience has been mediated by a system whose tyranny is precisely that no one controls it. Its tyranny is the absence of the tyrant! We have made a catastrophic progress since Bentham’s Panoptic prison: we no longer need the supervision of The Other, we are prisoners of our own gaze! When we think we are having an original thought, we are in fact remembering an episode from the soap opera of global capitalism. Our most private fantasies have already been marketed…’

‘Yes, well, never mind the end of civilization,’ Sam interrupted him, ‘what about the end of my relationship with Katherine?’

‘That is a personal matter,’ said Didier. ‘Ask me about the nature of the human condition, or the limits of language, but you and Katherine, this fragile human relationship, it’s too complex.’ Didier allowed himself a little giggle at the idea that there was a subject too complex for his critical capacities. ‘But what is love, really?’ he went on. ‘When we speak of the game we call “love”, what…’

Sam said goodbye hastily, before hearing Didier’s views on this important topic. He needed to take in all this news. He was delighted that Katherine was no longer living with Alan, but annoyed that Didier was still sleeping with her. On the other hand, she couldn’t be expected to put up with his preposterous theorizing for much longer. Sam realized that he would have to keep in touch with Didier in order to choose the right time to re-submit his application to Katherine. If she went off with some entirely new lover, his access to her would become even more tenuous.

He got up from his desk and collapsed, with a sigh, onto the sofa in the centre of his living room. In that moment of slight exaggeration, Didier’s last question returned to him reproachfully, and he couldn’t help wondering whether love could really consist of an unpleasant combination of obsession, self-pity, rivalry, lust and daydreaming. These characteristics didn’t seem to distinguish it from the rest of life, except by their intensity. He was allowing Katherine to act on him like one of Didier’s absent tyrants, rather than another suffering human being. He must pull himself together and make an effort to imagine what she was going through.

He sat upright and rested his eyes contemplatively on the empty fireplace. She must be feeling miserable about Consequences , after five years of work. It can’t have been simple to throw Alan out, after he had left his wife for her. Sam’s empathy ground into action, and as he imagined the details of Katherine’s personality, it started to take on subtlety and depth. He gradually filtered out his private relationship with the emotions he imagined she was having. His whole state of mind became sharper and more generous. This still wasn’t love, but it was an environment in which love could prosper, unlike the self-centred misery of the last few days. If only she were with him now and could see how much love he had to give, surely she would be asking for his forgiveness, as she unbuttoned his shirt, right here on the blue sofa.

Sam keeled over and sprawled among the cushions, groaning.

Although the hostile response to the Elysian Long List had exceeded his expectations, Malcolm still felt that a certain amount of media indignation was not only inevitable but desirable. It showed that his committee had the courage to choose fresh, original and exciting new voices and not just hand out free tickets to the darlings of the literary establishment. Vanessa Shaw was the exception, doing her best to promote the interests of the old guard. Although her three choices were now the favourites at Ladbrokes, Malcolm had no intention of being dictated to by writers, academics, publishers, readers, journalists, booksellers, literary critics or, least of all, betting shops. The Greasy Pole was languishing at 25–1, which was a gross distortion of its artistic value as well as its standing among members of the committee.

In politics he spoke in paragraphs he had been using for decades, or deployed old arguments that could effortlessly be adapted to modern occasions, but at the announcement of the Long List, he suddenly had a feeling of being publicly exposed and vulnerable in a way he hadn’t experienced since the first time he represented Aberdeen Grammar School in a debating contest. He was supposed to be arguing in favour of Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence. He was told that by arguing for a cause he vehemently opposed, he would hone his pure debating skills. Instead, it left him feeling blank and fraudulent, just as he had at the press conference. The journalists asked questions about books he hadn’t read that were on the List, as well as about books he hadn’t read that weren’t on the List. In the end, which was not far from the beginning, he just snapped.

‘That’s our List — like it or not.’

The press enjoyed pretending that the selection process took place in an atmosphere of antagonism and incompetence, whereas in fact the meetings had been perfectly friendly so far, thanks partly to Penny’s obliging nature, to some skilful deal-making between Jo and himself, and to Tobias’s total absence. Vanessa’s pedantic championing of literary tradition and her undergraduate lectures on the art of the novel did no real harm, although she was going to be in for a rude awakening when it came to carrying her three candidates forward to the next stage. He would let her keep one, preferably The Frozen Torrent , whose author was the least well established.

Right from the start, Malcolm had laid down some ground rules with a speech he made about ‘social responsibility’.

‘We have eighty thousand pounds at our disposal, as well as the promise of several hundred thousand pounds which the winner can expect to earn over the next few years, and to me it’s of paramount importance that the money goes to someone who really needs it.’

‘It’s lucky Proust or Nabokov aren’t competing this year,’ said Vanessa, ‘or Henry James, or Tolstoy, or anyone who ever sold a novel because word got out that it was worth reading, like Dickens, or Thackeray, or…’