Edward Aubyn - Lost for Words

‘Would I had a play to sell,’ said William, ‘and we would have roasted capons withal, but I only started one this morning and shall not finish it till the morrow.’

‘What is its argument?’ asked Ben.

‘Why, ’tis a Roman play,’ said William. ‘It tells the tale of Anthony and how one of the three pillars of this world was made into a strumpet’s fool.’

Penny couldn’t help admiring the way it made you feel you were really in a tavern with William Shakespeare and his pals. That was the wonderful thing about historical novels, one met so many famous people. It was like reading a very old copy of Hello! magazine. She read on eagerly.

‘Speaking of strumpets,’ said Thomas, ‘is that not Mistress Lucretia that comes hard upon us?’

‘Ah,’ said William, ‘now let us speak of Africa and golden joys. She comes so perfumed that the winds are love-sick that follow her.’

The fair Lucretia hoisted up her skirts, the better to straddle William’s legs.

‘Fye, William,’ she said, clicking his golden earring against her teeth, ‘where is that sonnet you promised me?’

‘Why, ’tis in my codpiece,’ said William, ‘for a man is a fool who keeps not a poem in his codpiece, and a codpiece that hath no poem in it is indeed a foolish codpiece.’

‘It is a naughty codpiece,’ said John, ‘for it hath naught in it.’

‘Ho-ho,’ said goodly Master Jonson, draining his tankard of sack, ‘a battle of wits!’

‘With this naught,’ said William, clasping Lucretia by the waist and pulling her towards him, ‘I shall make a copy of thy fair face; I shall so plough thy field with this nothing that it will yield thee a crop of Lucretias. With this round O I shall make thy belly round, and by my death,’ he added, shuddering and sinking backwards in his chair, ‘I shall make thee immortal.’

‘Fye, Will,’ said Lucretia, arching backwards and pulling William towards her, ‘keep thy wit for thy plays, for wit is a poor actor that comes on and plays his part and leaves the stage and is heard no more, but the part I would have you play hath more will in it than wit.’

Penny was definitely going to give All the World’s a Stage the thumbs up. It was chock-a-block with colourful characters and period detail, just like her other favourite, The Enigma Conundrum , a real page-turner about the ‘Enigma’ code-breaking operation at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, which included a marvellous portrait of the brilliant, but alas gay, Alan Turing, the Cambridge mathematician who had done the thinking behind the computer. There was also a portrait of the unsung hero who had built Colossus, the first actual computer, right here in Britain. After the War, this ordinary postal worker had simply got on his bike and gone back to repairing people’s telephones. No commercial fortune, or Nobel Prize, or knighthood for him, just the quiet pride of knowing that he had served his country in its hour of need. Marvellous, inspirational stuff, so unlike today’s attention-seeking, get-rich-quick culture, in which people did things they were completely unqualified for just to get their name in the papers. The novel’s portrait of Churchill was utterly convincing — you could almost smell the cigar smoke and the brandy on his breath!

Apart from anything else, one actually learned something from such a well-researched book, which was more than could be said of the neurotic musings of a lot of writers stuck at home, reading, writing and thinking about literature. Why didn’t they get out and do something for a change? Work in public service, or in a factory, or teach in a school; get out of their narrow little worlds and meet some real people; anything rather than sit at home all day writing.

It was a strange experience for Penny to be seeing Jo Cross in the flesh. Although she rather avoided Jo’s op-ed pieces, sounding off on every subject from Abortion to Zimbabwe, Penny was a huge fan of The Home Front , Jo’s weekly column complaining about her husband and children. Jo was a strong advocate of a novel called The Palace Cookbook , published by an Indian firm with only one other book on its list. That was enough to get Jo to take up the cudgels on its behalf, sticking up for the underdog. She appeared to have made a deal with Malcolm, winning his support for The Palace Cookbook in exchange for supporting wot u starin at . Jo was also keen on a book called A Year in the Wild , a Canadian novel about a disillusioned hedge-fund manager who leaves his power-crazed life on Wall Street in order to build a log cabin in the wilderness of British Columbia. Jo said that with the financial meltdown and the state of the environment, it was one of the novels that had come top in her ‘relevance’ test.

As well as wot u starin at , Malcolm had chosen The Bruce , an action-packed novel that really brought Scottish history alive, and The Greasy Pole , the story of a working-class lad from the Highlands who goes into politics and, without giving the plot away, ends up becoming Prime Minister of Britain, which was a remarkable achievement.

The only member of the committee Penny really found it hard to take was Vanessa Shaw. She was so frightfully intellectual, but not in fact, in Penny’s opinion, really that clever. She was mad about a novel called The Frozen Torrent , which Penny had been unable to make any headway with. The whole thing was, according to Vanessa, ‘built and unbuilt’ on systematic self-contradiction, just as life was built on the contradiction of death (ugh!). Not only did the text (as if it had just popped up on her mobile phone!) show a deep reading of Beckett, Blanchot, and Bataille (whoever the last two were), but also brought to this ‘self-corroding sensibility’ (good God!), the richness of a profound and original psychological novel.

In other words, the author had stolen all his ideas and didn’t just contradict himself by mistake (which, let’s face it, happens to all of us, now and again) but actually set out to contradict himself! It made her blood boil to think that this charlatan, with his second-hand ideas and phrases, and his absurd habit of self-contradiction, was going to get his wretched novel on to the Long List.

Penny glanced at her watch. She’d better get a move on. It was no use dawdling at home daydreaming about past meetings when she was due at the most important meeting yet: the one that would finalize the Long List and take the prize into a whole new phase.

Now that it was his turn to sit hunched in her armchair, his collarless shirt bulging and contracting with the grief that shuddered through his body, Katherine realized how little she knew Sonny. When she let him in to her flat he had barely greeted her before casting himself down and beginning to sob.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

‘What’s wrong?’ said Sonny. ‘I’ve been robbed of this year’s Elysian Prize.’

‘I didn’t even know that you’d written a novel,’ said Katherine.

‘I’ve written an enduring work of art,’ said Sonny, ‘and they haven’t even put me on their Long List!’

‘ Consequences isn’t on the Long List either, thanks to my idiotic publisher,’ said Katherine. ‘He gave my novel to his assistant to send round on the day of the deadline and she sent your aunt’s cookbook instead. Any other committee would have realized that there’d been a fuck-up and sent the cookbook back.’

‘I’m sure you deserved to be on the Long List,’ said Sonny. ‘But I deserved to win!’