Edward Aubyn - Lost for Words

She already knew what to expect from Didier as an ex-lover. When they had last separated he sent her emails that were little essays on the changing meaning of romantic and erotic love since the eighteenth century, indistinguishable from his published work, and indeed, after taking out the ‘dear Katherines’, he had published them.

And there he was again next door printing out more of his effortlessly opinionated prose. Katherine realized that she must get out of the flat as soon as possible. Perhaps she should ring John Elton after all and take him up on lunch. The fact that she would be immune to any of his advances now struck her as an advantage. She noticed yet again her loyalty to Angela and to her women friends in general, and its contrast with the ruthlessness of her behaviour towards men. In the Dodge City of romantic love, crowded with betrayal, abandonment and rejection, it was better to fire first than to take the risk of being gunned down. She felt the rapid pulse, the metallic taste, and the little razor cuts of the paranoid mentality that lay behind the apparent suavity and dominance of her love life. It suddenly horrified her that she couldn’t send a kind word to Alan, who had lived with her and left his wife for her, and who was clearly falling apart, but she couldn’t bear to linger on her remorse or her vulnerability for long, and so she threw off the bedclothes and got up briskly, determined to leave the flat as soon as possible.

Penny was on her way to Debenhams to buy an Extra Large Kettle. The Extra Large Kettle (or ELK) had been one of her main innovations at the Foreign Office. Even some members of the old guard, who had taken a sceptical, not to say frankly hostile view of her promotions during David Hampshire’s time, were forced to admit that an extra cup of tea could make all the difference to a meeting that started out looking as if it might be very sticky indeed. She had a hunch that an ELK would be just as great an asset in the literary arena as it had proved to be in the foreign policy field, with many an Elysian meeting brightened by a seemingly inexhaustible supply of piping hot builder’s tea.

With the pressure of so many books to read, Penny had decided to buy the audio versions of the Long Listers she hadn’t got round to, and listen to them being read by an actor with a lovely famous voice. As she downloaded wot u starin at and The Greasy Pole onto her poor overburdened iPad, she was reminded of a heart-breaking photograph she had once seen advertising a charity for maltreated Spanish donkeys. The dear little thing in the photo, thin as a stick, had been carrying burdens three times her own bulk, back and forth along dusty Spanish roads, until Donkey Rescue saved her from her cruel owner, renamed her Lollipop, and allowed her to end her days in donkey heaven, on a lovely farm run by a thoroughly practical English spinster who had retired to Andalusia. Penny had been so moved that she sent in a cheque for five pounds.

Although she didn’t like the sound of A Year in the Wild , she was doing the responsible thing and had it in the passenger seat next to her, being given a chance. Her appetite for people, like the hero of this novel, who chose to live on roots and berries, was strictly limited. Some practical part of her wanted to send him down to M&S Simply Food to get one of their excellent ready-made meals. She was always delighted to see grizzly bears salmon-fishing in one of David Attenborough’s splendid nature films, but she drew the line at grizzly bears lumbering into a novel in order to turn bankers into noble savages.

As a responsible driver, Penny always gave her full attention to the task at hand. Consequently, it wasn’t until she came to a long queue of traffic approaching Marble Arch that she finally gave herself permission to listen to the rather hypnotic rendering of A Year in the Wild .

As spring returned to the frozen land, the great thaw began. It bewildered Gary with its clamour and its swiftness. The grey branches outside the cabin’s southern window had hardly cast off their high narrow walls of snow, before they started to break out in bright green leaf. As soon as patches of ice melted on the lake, honking Canada geese landed on the fresh stretches of open water. The frozen stream he had crunched across in his snowshoes a few weeks before was transformed into an uproarious torrent that could only be forded by the big rock, or the Lynx Rock as he had named it in January. He had met a lynx there, completely still beside the rock, its triangular ears sharpening its attentiveness. What made it stand out against the snow was the fresh blood on the light brown fur around its mouth. He had stared at the lynx, and the lynx had stared back at him, with the calm savagery of its yellow eyes; animal to animal, predator to predator; he with a dead hare in his game bag and the lynx with a dead hare at its feet; his breath and the lynx’s breath steaming in the crystal silence of the northern woods.

Oh, do get on with it, thought Penny. All this description was driving her potty. The author clearly had a bad case of the Doctor Dolittles, starting to talk to the animals because he had turned his back on his fellow man. If there was one thing Penny was sure of it was this: man is a social animal through and through, and nothing could be gained, except a reputation for eccentricity, by cutting yourself off from the rest of the human race. That was why she was on her way to Debenhams to buy an Extra Large Kettle, rather than chatting to a herd of caribou in the wastes of northern Canada. She fast forwarded to the next chapter, but missed the beginning because she was now being swept along by the traffic rushing around Marble Arch.

Soon enough, there was another jam waiting for her at the beginning of Oxford Street and she was forced to listen to more of Jo’s exasperating novel.

… the yarrow with its feathery white and pink flowers and the bright red berries of the poisonous baneberry bush …

Oh, for heaven’s sake, thought Penny, more description. She fast-forwarded again, just to confirm her suspicions, but her mind was made up: the author had written a guidebook to the fauna and flora of the Canadian outback, without the slightest concession to a novel’s need for fast action and cliff-hanging suspense.

He drank the cool water from the swift-running stream and then lay back refreshed in the tall scratchy grass. A peregrine falcon circled above and then came out of its gliding motion and began to hover, holding its position above the ground with the scooping beat of its wings. Gary knew it had spotted its prey moving on the shore of the lake, and he felt his own body grow tense with anticipation as he stretched out his mind and merged it with the peregrine’s perspective.

Dear, oh dear. Penny could only hope there was an adequate cottage hospital nearby where Gary could get the help he needed before he completely lost the plot.

‘Excuse me; I think I’m a peregrine falcon,’ she said, staring, wild-eyed into the rear-view mirror, and allowing herself a burst of derisive laughter.

So much for A Year in the Wild . As to Outrage , another one of Jo’s Long Listers, once she had read the synopsis, Penny decided that she wasn’t going to listen to it. It was written from the point of view of an eight-year-old boy living in a Johannesburg slum on the eve of South African independence. After his father is shot dead by a white policeman, the poor boy watches his mother being killed by the gang that has just raped her. He loses the power of speech but his ‘traumatized stream of consciousness is a powerful meditation on the politics of gender, race and African identity’. All very impressive no doubt, but frankly life was quite depressing enough without listening to a story like that, which didn’t even have the merit of being factually true.