Doctor Criminale (3 page)

So streetwise historians were announcing the End of History, journos like me were noting the Close of the Cold War, politicians everywhere were talking of the New World Order – especially
those in the New World. Marxism and the command economy were plainly dying of terminal exhaustion. On the other hand liberal capitalism wasn’t doing so very well either. There was budget
crisis in Washington, high-street recession in Britain, the fiscal jitters in Tokyo, and bank fraud all over the place. In Brussels Napoleonic dreamers were reinventing Europe, if they could just
find out where its edges started and stopped. There was conflict in Yugoslavia, independence rioting in the Baltics, ethnic and tribal tension everywhere. Over the European fringes, Saddam Hussein
(former Takriti street-fighter, and BBC World Service man of the year), thinking it was passing brave to be a king and ride in triumph through Persepolis, had sent a genocidal army to murder, rape
and pillage in nearby friendly Kuwait. Meanwhile the millennium was to hand, the polar ice-cap was melting, the ozone layer depleting. There were sexual plagues, floods, droughts, severe famines,
earthquakes, outbursts of boils and mass gatherings of locusts. To a nice upstanding young fellow like myself, in my green shellsuit and Reebok trainers, these were troubling days. They were also
my
days.

Meanwhile back in British fiction it was nostalgia time. Nearly all six novels in the Booker shortlist were what, standing there glowing in the eye of the camera, I unwisely chose to call Granny
Novels – novels by authors apparently all on the further side of eighty, nearly every one of them tales about adolescent love affairs conducted to a point well short of tumescence under
parasols on the beach at Deauville or Le Touquet (or just possibly in a punt on the Cam) in the long lovely summer of 1913. Think of it. Here was I, a young man born just before the year of the
moonshot, someone for whom anything before the invention of WordPerfect was retrospect. Hardly surprising that I considered these as historical novels – even though their authors,
understandably enough given their longevity, insisted they were entirely contemporary. Now I am a New Man, living in Camden (or Islington, as we prefer to call it). Of course I am never guilty of
sexism, racism, even ageism, or gerontophobia. I believe the elderly deserve their say, like any other disadvantaged group. But I’m also a citizen of dirt-and-detritus London of the late sad
century, where homeless people sleep in boxes, garbage piles up in the streets, a trip down the London Underground reminds us that life in our failing metropolis increasingly resembles existence in
war-torn Beirut, and the world of these novels was really not mine at all.

I’m older now. With the wisdom of hindsight I see I may have spoken a bit too freely, been a smidgen extreme, a mite extravagant, even laid it on a little. I was talking about books I had
at best skim-read, at worst digested simply by reading the blurb (to tell the truth, I found time to read some of them properly later, and they pleasantly surprised me). No doubt, as their authors
claimed, they were borne of the deep wisdom of a full human experience from the red-hot fires of the imagination. I now know it is often the young who are most nostalgic for the past they’ve
yet to acquire, and have a lively instinct for faking history. I have discovered through effort (how much effort you’ll see later, if you just read on) that even the lives of the old can be
complicated, their response to existence wise, that there are things about history we ought to remember. But imagine the setup, try to share it. I was still an innocent; here in front of me was the
television camera. And the problem with that is when the camera looks at you you think you are speaking to
it
, or maybe even to the pretty girl staring at you round the side of it, rather
than the wider world beyond. I belong to the age of instant reaction – thinking, eating, emoting on the hoof. It was my on-the-spot opinion TV asked for. It was my on-the-spot opinion TV
got.

I chattered. Words like sentimental, parochial, traditional freely passed my lips. After a few sentences the henna-haired presenter cut me, rather curtly, I thought, off, the cameraman checked
the tape, the girl in the low-cut dress said ‘Brilliant’ (later on I discovered she said that all the time, about all matters, good or bad). Someone else rolled up with the next victim,
who was John Mortimer, or if not he someone of his size, mien and standing; and I, stupidly glad to have had my moment of media fame, my time in filmic eternity, went on my way to the vast, vaulted
reception hall, decked out with fine oil portraits of great London worthies, to gather my just reward in the form of a life-enhancing drink. Here frilly-aproned waitresses stood waiting, as if glad
to see me, on the wide stone steps, holding out silver trays laden with the condiments that sauce these great occasions: champagne or its near relative, orange juice, bottled water, bright
gins-and-tonics into which the ice-cap was Antarctically melting. I gathered up two glasses of champagne, one for myself and the other for some putative companion; after all, I belong to that
brilliant new generation who thinks that at parties you never know your luck. I would be among writers, who notoriously consider a drinks gathering a prelude to general adultery. I pushed my way
into the penguin-suited room.

It took a while to realize I had seriously misjudged the whole occasion. The fact is, at the Booker, the glitterati are not the literati at all. The first person I spoke to said he was Neil
Kinnock, and I realized later he very probably was. Perhaps that is why my fascinating chatter about experimental fiction in the post-postmodern world did not go down very well. Someone else said
he was Richard Rogers, whom I probably
should
have talked to about Post-Postmodernism, not about filmstars who rode horses. Someone else claimed to be the Governor of the Bank of England;
someone else explained that he farmed some of or possibly the whole of the West Country. There were more bankers, businessmen, politicians, ambassadors from various countries where they read books.
Altogether we made a strange combination, the great and the good in their black and their white, their orders and decorations hanging bluely beneath their bow ties, I in my green shellsuit with the
Reebok trainers. I was with the chattering classes, who chatted the chat the chattering classes like to chatter when they are just chatting: of the ERM of the EMU, of hard ECUs and soft landings,
of holidays and health farms, of their charming villas in the Dordogne and their undying hatred of the French.

At last, impatient, I stopped a passing penguin suit – he turned out to be John Major, though he probably did not know that himself then – and asked to be directed towards some
writers. After a moment of thought, he smiled affably and pointed me in the direction of the far, portrait-hung wall. He proved (on this question certainly) entirely in the right. Up against the
wall, in a terrified herd, I found the shortlisted six, the authors whose books were being weighed against each other for the prize. They were huddled together, drinking glasses of orange juice and
surrounded by sad-looking literary agents and publishers’ publicity girls, every one of them called Fiona. As I expected, they were mostly elderly ladies, though one was a very young girl
just learning the granny trade, another a male author from the Antipodes suffering from terminal jet-lag. Some of the ladies had permed their hair, though most preferred to leave theirs in a state
of gay disorder. Some carried plastic shopping bags, one was already weeping a little, another complaining she had taken more orange juice than was good for her. All appeared bewildered, as if no
one had properly explained to them why, just for this once, they had been let out. The only way they resembled writers was that all of them were sulky and spiteful, and clearly detested each other.
By now the five judges, their deliberations completed, were back in the room and spreading the result among their spouses or other consorts. But, the game of the Booker being to keep the authors
themselves in suspense as long as possible, to raise the drama of the event, the writers themselves had no idea of the outcome, and so didn’t know which of their group to detest the most.

I summoned up my charm (maybe I should say that from time to time I do have some) and approached the Fionas, saying I wanted to interview their charges on the influence of Dirty Realism on their
work. Speaking as one Fiona, they refused point-blank, explaining no interviews were allowed until the result had been announced. Then the winner would be presented to the press, and their
remaining candidates abandoned, presumably, to their various miserable fates. Even now I’m not sure whether the Fionas told me the truth, or had correctly judged that an article by me was
unlikely to be an act of pure homage. In fact I’d already intended to show that between the Booker writers and me lay a wide culture gap. They were writers who called the novel their
‘medium’, and the women in them still had just one breast; I came from the world of the media – how true, how true, that would prove – and the women in my life made no bones
or flesh about having two. They were stuck in the age of the puritan singular, I came from the age of the permissive plural. Yes, thinking back, those Fionas were probably just good at their
jobs.

By now, you could very well be wondering (of course you could equally well not) about me: my life, my literary attitudes, even my
Weltanschauung
in general. I could
detain you with some random biography (parents, school, sporting interests, first fumbling love-makings), but I really prefer not to. Briefly, then, in the Mid-Eighties, that mysterious and now
totally lost decade, I was an undergraduate at the University of Sussex, the Sixties-by-the-Sea. Here I was smart as a button, and here I acquired my literary education. It was the Age of
Deconstruction, and how, there on the green Sussex chalk downs, we deconstructed. Junior interrogators, literary commissars, we deconstructed everything: author, text, reader, language, discourse,
life itself. No task was too small, no piece of writing below suspicion. We demythologized, we demystified. We dehegemonized, we decanonized. We dephallicized, we depatriarchalized; we decoded, we
de-canted, we de-famed, we de-manned. When the course reached its end, I went to my tutor – a young but sad, bedraggled late-Marxist figure, drained of nearly all life by the academic
dismantlings of the Thatcher Age – and said I had made my choice of career. Was it, he asked ironically, banking, accountancy, the law, a Harvard MBA, a course in creative writing at some
even more distinguished new university? No, I said, like several of my friends, I wanted to join the army. After all, there would be no war, and I thought nothing could be more amusing than
spending the rest of my days sitting drinking beer in Bavaria.

He went, I recall, white, and stared at me in obvious historical dismay. This wasn’t the Sussex he thought he knew so well. But then his always sharp wits gathered, and he gave me a piece
of advice I recall to this day, this very day. If, he said, it was random violence I was after, why not go into literary journalism? I told him that, having taken his course, I no longer liked
writers or their work. He had proved to me conclusively that all literature had been written by the wrong people, of the wrong class, race and gender, for entirely the wrong reasons. Marvellous, he
said; for a career on the modern book pages these were perfect qualifications. Then, reaching for the telephone on his desk, he dialled some freephone number and talked to one of his many
journalist friends. So well did he sing my praises that within days I had been offered trial employment on a forthcoming Serious Sunday newspaper, which was seeking a fresh, youthful, irreverent
but upmarket image. And I still recall the day at the final party for our class when, tears in his eyes, Sancerre in his glass, my tutor shook my hand for the last time, and urged me to go out into
the world and do good hermeneutic work in the service of personkind. From that day until the night of the Booker, I’d dedicated my career to the high principles he taught.

My Serious Sunday was one of those neo-tabloids that are produced from computerized offices in cabriole-topped postmodern tower blocks just to the south of the Thames. Its sharp, vital pages
were made up of politics and sex, high finance and consumption, opera and custom number plates, country living and rap, intellect and gossip, thought and sneer, in such perfect combination as to
make every sabbath a day of ideal leisure and pleasure. Among discriminating readers (and as we told our advertisers, we only
had
discriminating readers, like yourselves), my literary pieces
– original, intellectual, radical, anarchical, topical, and above all oedipal – soon made their mark. Like my fellow New Age journalists who only profile well-known people they totally
despise, I caught the note of the day to perfection. I wrote for the Nineties person: neat but alternative, streetwise but eco-friendly, book-aware but never dull. People called me a Punk Reviewer,
though why my thoughtful columns should be compared to a kind of backstreet garage music I would never give CD time to I cannot understand.

So I made my way, the aspiring journo in the age of literary confusion. I did, I think, all the right things. I took a flat in Camden (Islington) in a basement so modest it was actually
underneath another basement. I lived off fast-food outlets and bought myself a microwave oven and a mountain bike. I had girlfriends who wanted to take out joint mortgages on Docklands apartments
with me; I explained I want to remain a person of temporariness not permanence, journey not arrival. I wrote, but not books (far too monumental). I wrote fragments, in fact I wrote everything:
solemn pieces for the
Times Literary Supplement
, essays on South American fiction for the
London Review of Books
, lyrics for pop songs, scripts for radio commercials. I reviewed and I
columnized, picking up titbits about authors that would make your ears crinkle. I interviewed, I opined. I freelanced, I free-styled, I free-loaded, I freebied. I also worked part-time in a winebar
in Covent Garden, and sold gossip to
New Musical Express
. And so I made my way, till the night of the Booker, when my life quite seriously changed.