Spoken of in this context were several survivalist communes in the Anaconda Mountains of Montana. A white supremacist group which held covert recruiting sessions in a desert motel, the Clandestine Inn, located seventy miles or so from Reno, Nevada, and owned by a former Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan. The Neo-McCarthy Brotherhood, anti-Jewish, anti-black, anti-Muslim, anti-Catholic, anti-French and, although one assumes just for old times’ sake, anti-Communist. The Knights of the White Camelia, a fraternity of Doomsday prophesiers whose mailing address was a shopping mall in Eugene, Oregon, and all of whose members, running their respective businesses on a pleasantly profitable day-by-day footing while in anticipation of the looming Rapture, belonged to divers Rotary Clubs and Chambers of Commerce. These and many, many others had benefited from HHV’s inexhaustible munificence.
Then, suddenly, the website began twitching with a whole new set of instructions to the faithful. Nothing connected with HHV, however, was ever straightforward. If you sought to decipher them, you had to print out each of the site’s four pages, cut them up into two unequal halves, unequal in one and only one fashion (i.e. one fat oblong and one thin one, each oblong being parallel to one of the four sides of the rectangular page itself, and no two widths being identical), then paste them together again, but differently, like the four individually incomplete and independently meaningless segments of a pirate’s treasure chart. Once they had been successfully recombined, and it had all fallen into place, the very first change to catch the eye was an unexpected refinement of the site’s typeface, causing its name now to read For a Trans-World America. What was the point, you asked yourself for a moment, of those five ugly bold-type caps? But only for a moment. A moment later enlightenment irradiated the screen. F.A.T.W.A.
The acronym was patently intended to remind impressionable bloggers of the Salman Rushdie affair, an affair which, for most of us, seems already to belong to a dim, nearly unknowable past when (in a narrative that Chesterton would not have repudiated) a significant fraction of the planet’s population had actually set off, by plane or by proxy, in pursuit of a single hapless human being. In a world in which terrorism itself has become globalised, we are all potential Salman Rushdies now, are we not, so who could be the object of this new personalised fatwa?
It was of course Slavorigin – Slavorigin who had blasphemed against the American creed, who had lampooned its prophets (‘the so-called, pompously so-called, Founding Fathers whose fabled Constitution is about as relevant to the contemporary world as the Ten Commandments’) and spat upon its martyrs (the fallen of September 11).
If the website’s cunning dynamics still made it impossible to know for sure who was calling the shots, even a technological duffer, blessed with a modicum of patience and luck, would have been able to work out what was at stake. All it required of the committed hacker was a diligent bout of clicking, copying and pasting. Then, assuming a few booby-traps had been sidestepped, the screen would display a cute little rebus whose pictorial clues, including a popular coconut-filled chocolate bar (simple), the forementioned town of Eugene, Oregon (even simpler) and a movie by the director Sam Peckinpah (a bit trickier), would, when aligned in the correct order, end by generating the unequivocal message: ‘A bounty of one hundred million dollars for the head of Gustav Slavorigin’.
One hundred million dollars! That put those stingy mad mullahs in their place. And yes, before long, through deepest cyberspace coursed the Chinese whisper that scores of claimants – at least one of them said, with a tremor of excitement, to be a woman – were boarding trains and planes, were heading for London, had already landed at Heathrow, on the first stage of the million-dollar crusade.
What happened next everybody knows. Like Rushdie before him, Slavorigin instantly went into hiding. Withdrawing from circulation, from the social and literary circus of which he had been both cynosure and clown, he found himself escorted, in the weeks that followed, weeks that would drag into months, and months into years, from one safe house to another.
During his long internal exile he was, however, neither idle nor suicidal. The despair he must initially have experienced – the more so as, to nobody’s surprise, the American government, taking its lead from the British, refused to intervene – began to be cushioned, after a rigorously cloistered first year, by an occasional dinner in town, at the Caprice or the Ivy, by a starry gala première at Covent Garden, the sole sign of his unannounced attendance being the proximity of two hefty minders wearing wraparound dark glasses night and day, pacing up and down outside restaurant or theatre rain and shine.
Then, almost exactly two years into his ordeal, he completed another book, a shortish thriller (of sorts, naturally).
How to describe A Reliable Narrator? Its opening chapter resembles the concluding chapter of a whodunit, one that just happens never actually to have been written. Thus the reader of Slavorigin’s book (I mean, the book which was written) cannot hope to comprehend the picturesque twists of this first-chapter denouement since, of the murder which has clearly taken place, the only detail to which he is made privy is the identity of the murderer, a murderer who has already been apprehended, charged, tried, found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. Or, rather, an alleged murderer. For, as the reader comes to realise, there has occurred a gross miscarriage of justice. The real murderer (A Reliable Narrator is written in the first person, as if we were inside this murderer’s head) has eluded the law, has, as they say, got away with it. But therein lies his dilemma. It transpires that the murder he committed was no more than a parenthesis, open then closed again, in an otherwise suffocatingly dingy existence. The protagonist was a nonentity before he committed it and, never having had the chance to bask in the limelight of guilt, never having enjoyed his fifteen minutes of infamy, he has become a nonentity all over again. Just imagine the agony of his frustration. To have destroyed a fellow creature, to have barehandedly squeezed the last breath out of ‘a whorehouse miscarriage, a lying, foul-mouthed, poo-flinging ape’, yet to gaze into his shaving mirror every morning and see gazing back at him the same old pre-murder loser – this becomes so insufferable to his self-esteem that he howls out his guilt to anybody who will listen to him. But nobody will. Nobody but the reader, of course, who alone knows.
Hence the title. That first-person protagonist is no canonic unreliable narrator, such a tired old cliché of postmodernism now, but a perfectly reliable narrator, except that not a single soul is prepared to rely on him.