Doctor Criminale (2 page)

In the summer Alan Burns became the university’s first writer-in-residence. He was a lawyer who had written some critically successful experimental novels that were not widely read. I have the impression that his time in Norwich turned his life around; he gave up the law and became a creative-writing teacher. He gave me a paradoxical warning: not to be influenced by writers I had not read. He gave me Beckett’s early stories,
More Pricks than Kicks
, and also the trilogy. I immediately understood what he meant. I was being ‘unconsciously influenced’. I was becoming enslaved to cadences whose origins I did not know. It was a useful note.

This surrounding literary community continues in Norwich to this day: ‘a significant climate around writing’, as Malcolm described it somewhere. I know very few novelists who have not been to the University of East Anglia to read. It was largely through Malcolm himself – along with Jon Cook and his colleague Christopher Bigsby – that Norwich gained its international reputation as a place where writers and would-be writers alike are treated well. To create, round the business of writing, a community that is essentially friendly is a large achievement.

Such are the tricks of memory that when I think back on those times, the people I knew appear in perpetual good moods, their voices unusually loud, their gestures wildly exaggerated. The city itself was in a good mood. By 1971 the Sixties had spread up across the fens to take the town. There was, of course, an ersatz, second-hand quality to this new atmosphere. Somewhere in my archives is a hand-out inviting the citizenry to attend a ‘smoke-in’ in Chapelfield Gardens, where, it was earnestly predicted, clouds of cannabis smoke would envelop and confound the ‘fascist pigs’.

At the end of the year Malcolm sent one of my stories to
Transatlantic Review
and it was accepted. By then I had written most of the stories that were to make up the volume
First Love, Last Rites
. More than any lesson – or the benefit of a ‘course’ – had been the simple fact of having been taken seriously. During the Seventies the UEA course established itself. I don’t know how I would have got on in the tougher, more paranoid milieu of twelve or fifteen competitive colleagues. I might well have faded out, and this was the extent of my luck in 1970 – to have had it all to myself.

In the late Seventies, Angus and Tony used to lend me their remote Suffolk cottage for months on end while they were in the States. As for Malcolm, we met from time to time at the British Council conference he was chairing. Like Howard Kirk, the academic Machiavel of
The History Man
, Malcolm liked a good party. Just as that novel is structured round social gatherings, so were the literary gatherings over which he presided. A Cambridge college, a German monastery set in a desert of potato fields, a disintegrating Polish palace were some of the settings for the best intellectual revels of the Eighties and Nineties.

But music, dancing and sex were not conspicuous ingredients. The business was talking and drinking – complementary human pleasures in which Malcolm took serious delight. The last seminar of the day completed, writers far from home with nowhere else to go, a delicious freedom in the air, limitless wine – these were the preconditions for a long journey into the night across unknown territory.

During these colloquia, Malcolm’s tentative, judicious style granted a licence to younger writers. He was fair, so we could be savage. As a critic he lacked the killer instinct. He was a celebrator, rather than a destroyer, of reputations. However late it got, he’d be one of the last to get to bed. What he relished was a conversation with a direction, a beat. Gossip was fine too.

Another bottle is opened. A certain writer, so someone says, no longer does interviews. Only press conferences. Publicity hunger versus reclusiveness bring us to Pynchon, until the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, the world’s most hunted writer.

‘Inflated, whimsical, a world view stifled by paranoia,’ someone says recklessly.

Malcolm hears this out, then defends. ‘Only to a certain cast of English mind. To some novelists paranoia is not a disabling mental condition, but the motor of ingenious plot-making.’

By way of Melville, through Kafka, we arrive at an eminent contemporary novelist. The consensus among the young around the table is that her sentences are no good. ‘Cliché-rich, unrhythmic, no surprises.’

‘Therefore, she is no bloody good at all.’

Malcolm champions her. ‘It’s true up to a point about the sentences, but there’s a certain kind of writing that gives pleasure through its design, its architecture. In the geometry of these moral schemes there’s a beauty that no individual sentence can yield.’

Can a good novel be written badly?
We’ve been around this before.
And who are today’s best sentence-makers?
Malcolm makes the case for Martin Amis by means of some exquisite examples he has by heart. Two weeks before, Martin has given Malcolm a finely executed pistol-whipping in the
Observer
for his novel
Rates of Exchange
. The critic remains scrupulously detached from the workaday resentments of the novelist.

Just two years before his death at the end of 2000 I had an encounter with Malcolm that still haunts me. In the dazed hour immediately after winning the 1998 Booker Prize I was surrounded by excited voices and pulled from press conference to interviews, and from crowded rooms to answer questions in television trucks and radio cars. At some point I lost the Booker publicity people, or they lost me, and I stepped through a door by mistake into an empty hall. I went through another door, and found myself in a long, straight, ill-lit corridor.

Coming towards me, from some distance away, were Malcolm and his wife Elizabeth. We approached each other as in dream, and I remember thinking, half-seriously, that this was what it might be like to be dead. In the warmth of his congratulatory embrace was concentrated all the generosity of this gifted teacher and writer. His artful reticence and his passion for literature transformed my life.

F
OR
D
OMINIC
(
A
N
INETIES PERSON
) –

Contents

1

I first met her at the Booker Prize for Fiction . . .

2

How did I become so involved with Doctor Criminale?

3

Vienna smelled of roasting coffee and new gingerbread . . .

4

In his wing collar, Gerstenbacker sat there . . .

5

So where were you when the Eighties ended?

6

Budapest is not one city but two . . .

7

Never take an international literary conference lightly . . .

8

Criminale gave the room the centre it seemed to lack . . .

9

The Villa Barolo has long been associated with writing . . .

10

The Gran Hotel Barolo was pleasant enough . . .

11

Lausanne was a quite different kind of world . . .

12

I do not know whether Bazlo Criminale recognized me . . .

13

In 1991 I found myself in Buenos Aires . . .

14

In an excellent restaurant in the Grand’ Place . . .

15

There are many reasons why I will not forget that evening . . .

16

That should have been the end of the story of Criminale . . .

As it happened (and most of this did more or less happen), I first met her at the Booker Prize for Fiction. We both turned up at the great autumn prizegiving dinner in the
London Guildhall; she was there to tell one kind of story, I was there to tell another. She was an assistant producer on the live television coverage for the BBC’s ‘Late Show’,
which for once was going out earlier than usual; I was covering the great event for the What’s Happening section of the Serious Sunday newspaper I worked for – which, since the Booker
Prize beanfeast fell on a Tuesday, meant that my copy was going out later than usual. And in the event it did not go out at all, for my Serious Sunday, as Serious Sunday newspapers seem to have a
way of doing, went bankrupt in the interim.

So she was wrapped up in all the modern technics, the ducts and cabling, the lamps and dollies, the backpacks and betacams, that we need to turn real life into a technological fiction so that we
can perceive it as reality again; I had a Biro and a spiral notepad in my pocket. She was red-haired, and clad in low-cut and thong-tied black, as if she were about to attend some erotic funeral;
I, because no one at the Serious Sunday had warned me that the Booker is a monkey-suit job, was rigged out in my usual green shellsuit and Reebok trainers – for ours, as you know, is an age
of colour. She had arrived at the glittering London Guildhall, and as I was to discover from experience would later also leave it, in a long, low chauffeur-driven contract limousine; I had
padlocked my mountain bike to some fine City of London lamppost or other and deposited my cycling helmet in the Guildhall’s great downstairs marble-vaulted loo. She, wired for sound and
clipboard in hand, was already on duty in the bright glass-walled entrance lobby, halting the brightest and best of the great and the good as they entered, and asking them to give the cameras a few
sprightly words on the likely winning novel. And I, having wheedled an unwilling press-pass from the frosty guard-girls on the hostess desk, was following an ancient rule of my even more ancient
profession, and heading through the lobby to the reception salon to get my frosted hands around a warming drink.

So she was media wise, and I was word foolish; and it seemed that nothing in this weird wayward old celesto-system of ours could possibly have destined us to meet. But meet we somehow did.
‘You look like a nice upstanding young man,’ she said, halting me with her clipboard, ‘Wouldn’t you like to have your picture taken for the television?’ Now to this
day, this very day (and by this I mean the day I sit down to write this, not the day when, with usual readerly lethargy, you sit down to read it, which could be years from now), I can’t
understand why she took the fatal decision to stop me rather than someone else, why she supposed that the snap opinions of a totally unknown literary journalist (if she even knew that that was what
I was) on the year’s prize fictions would be worth a groat to the tired evening viewer. Except of course that I can, because I was indeed a nice upstanding young man (and still am, I assure
you, to this day, this very day), while most of the brightest and best of the great and the good, who were passing by in their ancient, wine-soaked evening finery, were very definitely not.

No more can I understand why, when asked, I consented. Except of course that I can, for who among us, however wise in other things, is not fool enough to be seduced by a little media attention,
or doesn’t suppose that by appearing on television our lives will somehow be made more real? I should have known better; but, frankly, there is nothing in this world more erotic than the
searching, sucking lens of the television camera, especially when its claims are backed by the lure of a red-haired, low-cut, thong-tied, smiling female advocate. So she smiled at me brightly, I
consented to her warmly; and then she took my hand and led me aside to the camera set-up, tucked away just round a corner. Here she presented me to the presenter, who, like all ‘Late
Show’ presenters that year, was henna-haired, female, and heavily pregnant, set me in position before the truculent dark lens of the camera and its truculent dark camera-man, tilted my head,
tousled my hair, dabbed an acned spot or two on my face with powder, rearranged my legs a little, and left me to my fate.

Now to this day, this very day, I really cannot imagine why I then went on to say what I then went on to say. Except of course that I can. Because this particular Booker Prize happened to fall
right in the lull or dark hollow between the Entrepreneurial Eighties and the Nervous, Nebulous, Nailbiting Nineties. In the Big World, out there beyond the formal London Guildhall and the new,
postmodern financial towers of the City of London, more than forty years of history were daily coming unravelled. The Berlin Wall had only lately toppled, and was already starting to fetch high
prices on the art marketplace (especially if you could find a piece that had actually been signed by Honecker). It was now Bush and not Reagan who presided over the golf-courses and budget deficits
of the United States; but on the throne of Britain Margaret Thatcher was still in power, and in the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev still survived, the great architect of the age of glasnost and
perestroika. Right across Eastern Europe the statues fell and the busts tumbled, of Lenin and Stalin, Ceaus¸escu and Hoxha, now scrap metal, wasted history. Frontiers opened, half Albania was
on the boats, independent republics were declaring themselves, Germany was shaking hands with itself in reunification, and everyone everywhere was talking about the Great Turn of the world.