‘Do you use a Mac or a PC?’ ‘A Mac.’ ‘What exactly does Dark Jade mean?’ ‘It’s a title. Titles don’t have to mean anything.’ ‘Which modern writer has most influenced you? Nabokov, perhaps?’ ‘Ah, celui-là, non! Nabokov can’t see the wood for the trees and too often he can’t even see the trees for the mazy corrugation of their barks. It’s as though he tried to corner the market in adjectival ethereality. Just riffle through Lolita. Glossy, furry, honey-colored, honey-hued, honey-brown, leggy, slender, opalescent, russet, tingling, dreamy, biscuity, pearl-gray, hazy, flurry, dimpled, luminous, moist, silky, downy, shimmering, iridescent, gauzy, fragrant, coltish, nacreous, glistening, fuzzy, leafy, shady, rosy, dolorous, burnished, quivering, plumbacious, stippled, and so on, and so forth. Do you know what that fabled style of his has always reminded me of? Fancy-schmancy restaurantese. Not a tomato that isn’t sun-dried and honey-roasted! Not a scallop that isn’t hand-dived and truffle-scented! The man must have shat marshmallows.’ ‘How incredibly funny and outrageous. But tell me please, in your internal exile have you ever given up hope? ‘Ah, Tommy, mein Lieber, hope is as hard to give up as smoking.’
Düttmann finally enquired whether he was at work on a new novel. Slavorigin, now more than a little sozzled – he had also been taking a suspicious number of trips to the lavatory, accompanied by either Thomson or Thompson, it’s true – answered that, yes, he was. ‘Has it already got a title?’ ‘Not quite. I’m currently torn between The Smell of the Lamp – too Jamesian, perhaps? – and The Vanishing Bookmark – too Chestertonian? Or even Moon Drop. You get the allusion, I trust? In Latin virus lunare, a vaporous droplet shed by the moon on certain herbs under the influence of an incantation.’ ‘These,’ said Düttmann, prudently sidestepping the issue, ‘are all first-rank titles.’ ‘Thank you. That must be why it’s proving so hard to choose one over the other.’ ‘And may we ask what it’s about?’ ‘Certainly. Would you [addressing all of us] really care to hear?’ Nobody around the table dared to say no.
Now, it may have struck the reader that, throughout this memoir, I have been pretty rude about Gustav Slavorigin, even though, objectively speaking, and you needn’t take only my word for it, he was a truly awful person. But I am willing to admit that, drunk and all, possibly even drugged to the eyeballs, when he actually did proceed to relate the plot of his new novel to us he held everybody at our table and several others in the seemingly bilingual dining room as spellbound as Wilde when reciting one of his apologues at the Café Royal.
‘The book,’ he began, ‘consists of three separate sections:
‘A Foreword;
‘The Novel, plus Footnoted Annotations;
‘An Afterword.
‘In the Foreword the Author – let us call him G. – details the publishing history of the Novel itself. It was first brought out, he writes, by a small German-Swiss house based in Zurich, Epoca, as a work originally written in the German language and signed by the pseudonymous “D. J. Kadare” – no relation, needless to say, of the Albanian novelist and Nobelist-in-waiting Ismail. The following year, it was published in English by Faber & Faber as though it were a translation from the German. It then started to appear in various other European countries, translated not from the English original but from the German translation. G., however, declines to explain why these subterfuges were necessary.
‘He describes, instead, still rather enigmatically, his own personal need now to write an annotated version of this Novel, one which he realises is unlikely ever to be read by anybody but himself, at least in his own lifetime. It is, he insists, no mere authorial vanity which impels him to do so but a profound compulsion to commit to print the motive which had prompted him to launch upon such a book in the first place.
‘The plot of the Novel – I mean the novel-within-my-novel – is of no importance. Or, if I may put that more candidly, I haven’t yet decided what it’s going to be, and it would only complicate matters anyway. I assure you, though, this is very much less of a barrier to your comprehension of the book as a whole than it may seem. All you need to know for the moment is that its title is Apocalypso.
‘Of greater importance are the Footnotes. To start with, they mainly consist, as you would expect, of strictly informative annotations concerning the real names, places and events that are threaded through Apocalypso itself. Even at this early stage, however, the Reader notes a recurring tendency on G.’s part to confess that he took certain creative decisions – setting its opening section in a theatrical milieu, perhaps, and choosing a heterosexual protagonist – precisely because they belied his own public image as a homosexual theatre hater and baiter. It’s also in the Footnotes that he reprints, like so many literary outtakes, a number of arresting metaphors that he admits to having reluctantly cut from the definitive draft. In fact, as the Reader gradually becomes aware, in a disorienting reversal of conventional practice, they are written in a denser and more overwrought style than the body of the text.
‘Gradually, too, as they come to usurp more and more space on the page, the Reader discovers from the Footnotes that G., a much-lauded, best-selling, Booker-Prize-winning author, had earlier written an unpardonable book, a satirical denunciation of the culture and society of the contemporary United States whose closing chapter mercilessly debunked what he called “the burlesque cult of September 11”.
‘Even before the publication of that book, G. had had a handful of detractors like wolfhounds snapping at his heels. Now, because of it, there is actually a price on his head. A reclusive Texan billionaire, founder and funder of a nationwide network of ultra-patriotic, ultra-hawkish organisations, has offered the reward of a hundred million dollars to anybody prepared to “terminate”, to use his word, this arch-enemy of his beloved America. Since the threat could scarcely be more serious, G. at once goes to ground.
‘He spends the next several months being shuttled from one safe house to another, from Watford to Hendon, from Leighton Buzzard to Welwyn Garden City. From these havens he issues frequent public statements in justification of his book. He plays endless games of Scrabble with his minders. He turns briefly to the Cross, but realises that it offers, for the unconditional freethinker he has always been, a hopelessly inadequate crutch. And it’s when he has finally been driven close to suicidal despair by his nightmarish plight that a solution is proposed to him by an anonymous agent, known only as “Q”, from M16.
‘“There exists,’ says “Q” to G., ‘but one means by which we can guarantee to prevent you from being murdered.”
‘“Which is?”
‘“We murder you first.”
‘The logic, though maybe not immediately obvious, is nevertheless elementary. If the world were persuaded to believe – let us say, by an official statement of embarrassed regret from the British government – that G. has already been murdered, the Texas billionaire would undoubtedly call off his fatwa. G.’s facial features would then be remodelled by plastic surgery, he would be secretly transported out of England and assume a different identity in a different country.