All too ordinary
Hanif Kureishi’s latest novel pegs writers as consumers rather than artists. More’s the pity, finds Chad Taylor.
LONDON AUTHOR Harry Johnson doesn’t want to write a literary biography but is bullied into it by his publisher Rob to avoid ‘‘being so f . . . . . you have to work as an academic’’ or ‘‘even worse . . . teach creative writing’’.
Harry’s subject will be the literary celebrity Mamoon, whose ‘‘sarcasm, superiority, scrupulosity and argumentative persistence’’ make him famously difficult. ‘‘Think Kafka, Greene, Beckett,’’ Rob presses.
Harry sets off by train to Somerset where Indian-born Mamoon has made a home. The great writer is ‘‘diminutive and dressed in his tweedy clothing, greens and browns,’’ his wife Liana ‘‘dressed almost entirely in fur, the tails of dead animals dripping down her chest’’.
After facing off with the old man in a game of tennis, Harry moves into his ‘‘little upstairs room’’ to conduct his research.
He has supper with Mamoon, then lunch, then supper again; embarks on an affair with the housekeeper, brings up his girlfriend from London, flirts with Liana and so on.
The actions are secondary. All significant events are in the past. The Last Word is entirely about the dialogue between the two men and the ideas they toss about: one long verbal tennis match between an amateur and a retired player who is too old to run. It’s a premise that would usefully nail the characters to a stage, but in a novel the theatre becomes claustrophobic. Against the shallow backdrop of the pleasant countryside, the real world is something only talked about. When Harry visits India for two and a half weeks, the experience is related entirely in terms of Mamoon: without him, the country vanishes.
Kureishi’s England is stacked with references from other fictions: books, characters in books, critics’ opinions and quality TV. ‘‘Harry had begun to feel like a Bloomsbury Scheherazade.’’ He calls the two of them Prospero and Miranda. Refers to a woman’s ‘‘corpse-like, Mrs Danvers visage.’’ Does this