Our Tragic Universe (10 page)

The Newman review came far more easily than I’d thought. I ended up just summarising his argument, which, like most long and complicated things, including great tragedies and anyone’s life story, sounded far more crazy and improbable in 800 words than it ever could in 80,000. In the end the book trashed itself. I told myself I was glad to be done with it;
Newman’s simulated post-universe, a ghost ship at the end of time, was really giving me the willies. But in fact, I wasn’t really done with Newman at all, since I was wondering if I could further trash his ideas in fiction. The post-universe wouldn’t work in a Zeb Ross novel, but it could easily become a sub-plot in my ‘real’ novel. Having some characters trapped in a frozen moment at the end of time was certainly way better than having them trapped in a sauna.

After I’d filed my review and been across the road to the cheap café for lunch, it was half past two. I logged onto my Orb Books email account and read the two proposals that had come in for Zeb Ross novels. One of the proposals was from someone I remembered from the last Torquay retreat, Tim Small, a faded-looking man in his mid-forties who’d relocated to Dartmouth ten years before with his wife Heidi who worked as an accountant at the Yacht Club and was having a long-term affair. The locals who responded to my poster in the Harbour Bookshop only came for six days. On the seventh day I worked with the ghostwriters individually on their particular project, which could be a Zeb Ross novel, a Pepper Moore novel or the next instalment of the Vampire Island series. The first six days were the same for everyone: an intensive trawl through Plato, Aristotle, Vladimir Propp, Northrop Frye, Joseph Campbell, Jung and Robert McKee. I gave students their own pair of Orb Books scissors, because there was so much cutting up and rearranging of bits of paper: so much fiddling with archetypes, complications, resolutions and helpers. The scissors had been my idea. So had the whole Vampire Island series, although I didn’t work on it very much.

Tim was the only local student who’d ever had an idea with
the potential to work in the Zeb Ross format. He’d wanted to write about a Beast of Dartmoor, and although he’d had in mind a middle-aged, cuckolded protagonist, I’d taken him aside and told him that if he made it a teenager then it was something we’d probably consider. The whole class had been excited about Tim’s Beast. How do you end a story about a Beast? We’d discussed that for hours. Chekhov said if you have a gun in a story it needs to go off. If you have a Beast in a story, does it need to ‘go off’ too? When? How? I was ashamed because I loved these discussions, with their implied neat and tidy narrative symmetry and clever devices, all endorsed by great writers. My novel, my bloody albatross,
The Death of the Author
, deliberately had no such symmetry, and I was constantly in turmoil because one minute it would have too much narrative: people desperately in love, or waking up from their comas, or lying in ditches contemplating great life changes and so on – just like a formulaic genre novel – then I’d fiddle with it and it would die: a species extinct before it has even begun. In order for a new species to evolve, an already existing species has to split in half, and somehow – genetically, or geographically – members of these halves must stay separate and not go on any dates or have sex for a few hundred or thousand years. If I had my formula fiction and all its dominant genes trapped on one side of a mountain range, and my novel on another, maybe my novel would have a chance to make it. I sighed and unbended a paperclip someone – probably me – had left on the desk. It snapped, and I was left with two useless bits of metal that I was reluctant to drop on the floor. I put them in my pocket. Tim’s proposal seemed pretty good, so I sent a note to Claudia recommending that we consider it at the next editorial board
in March. The other proposal was about a girl who eats her own parents, which I rejected.

At about three, my phone vibrated. I guessed it was Oscar calling from the paper; but all I ever got on my phone’s display was
Withheld number
, regardless of who was calling. As I hurried out of the library I wondered what was wrong with my review. Oscar was only in his early fifties, but acted as if he was a grumpy old man and all his reviewers were his naughty grandchildren, or his wayward pets. He only ever called if there was a problem, and he always smoked on the phone,
suck, suck, pause
, although on the few occasions I’d been to his office there was no evidence of his smoking anywhere.

‘I thought you weren’t there,’ he said in his mild, clipped Caribbean voice. ‘I was about to give up on you.’

‘I’m at the library. I can’t answer the phone inside or the librarians get really upset and shout at me.’

Our conversations usually began in this way, with him telling me off and me saying something amusing about the librarians, who had never, in fact, done anything amusing at all. Most conversations in publishing were vaguely Alzheimic, because everyone suffered from over-thinking and over-reading and no one could remember if this was the first time they’d said something today, or the fifteenth, and whether it was true or made up. You can identify someone who works in publishing because they tell every anecdote as if for the first time, with the same expression as someone giving you a tissue that they have just realised has probably already been used.

‘Well, never mind about that.’ He sucked and paused. ‘This is your strangest trick yet.’

‘What is?’

‘This review you’ve sent me. What were you thinking?’

‘You didn’t like it?’

‘I did like it. It’s pretty good. Very funny. What a nutter this Kelsey Newman is.’

‘So … ?’

‘Well, you’ve baffled me this time,’ he said. ‘You novelists are all the same.’

I couldn’t imagine what I’d done.

‘This book was published in 2006. Sometimes we’re a bit late with a review, but never two years late. Where did you find it?’

‘You sent it to me. Didn’t you?’

Obviously he hadn’t.

‘Don’t be so silly,’ he said. ‘You novelists don’t know the difference between fiction and reality; I’ve always said so. But don’t worry, I won’t write you off as insane this time. It’s not the first time someone’s reviewed the wrong book, after all. Don’t bother to review the book I did send, though. It’s too late now, and some extra advertising has come in for the next few weeks.’

‘God, I’m so embarrassed,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know how … I mean, it’s weird. I don’t know what happened.’ As well as being embarrassed, I’d just lost about
£
400, as well as all that time on Sunday that I could have spent writing my novel.

‘It’s a shame, really. It was a good review. Still, it’s given me an idea that you might like. We should put these books under the microscope, I think. Enough bloody people read them … I’ve got the proof of the new Kelsey Newman book here somewhere. It’s out this month. It’s not the kind of thing we’d normally review, but since you’ve read the other one … What’s
the new one called? What does the blurb say? Hang on.’ There was the sound of paper being shuffled around, and then more sucking and pausing. ‘Oh, here it is.
Second World
. It’s got quotes on it from a couple of wackos – oh, and one from your friend Vi Hayes. She says it “provides a blueprint for living based on what we have learned from the most well-loved fiction”. You could just review it – same sort of style as the one you sent today – or, if you felt like it, I could send you all the New Age, self-help, blueprint-for-living-style books I’ve got in the cupboard and you could do a two-thousand-word feature on this kind of phenomenon and the way these nutcases write about …’

Some deep part of my brain now started speaking to me in a calm voice, as if it was talking me – or, I guess, my ego – down from a thin ledge on a tall building.
Say no. Say you’d rather
starve. Write your novel. Don’t bring yet another species of commercial
writing into its fragile ecosystem. Say no. No. No. No
.

‘That’s such a good idea,’ I said. ‘The feature, I mean. It would be …’ I remembered last time I was in Arcturus, a New Age book and crystal shop in Totnes. I’d gone there to buy a birthday present for Josh and decided to browse some of the other crazy books while I was there. At the time, I was writing the third book in my Newtopia series. In these novels, which were set roughly fifty years or so in the future, a corporation has colonised everyone’s unconscious, so that people have two lives: one in the ‘real’ world, and another in a fantasy realm accessed via a chip in their brain. This alternative world has its own currency, fashions, language and conventions, and although many years ago people had to sign up for user accounts and choose to log into them, by the time my novels took place people had no choice about it: everyone was simply
microchipped at birth. Also, everyone was by then unaware that they were living two lives. The chip in people’s brains was programmed to make the best use of the mind’s down-time, and the minute someone’s brainwaves slowed down – during sleep, on a coffee break or simply between thoughts – they would be switched over to this alternative world, which I had called Newtopia.

The whole series had been inspired by a news story I’d seen where two fat people were divorcing in real life because their thin online avatars had both married other thin avatars that stood in place of other real-life fat people. I’d wondered what would happen if it became so normal to have this kind of second life that people were unaware they were even having one. In my Newtopia novels, a girl-hero discovers The Truth, which is more or less to do with something called the Corporation, which has colonised everything in sight and beyond, and then she sets about finding other people who Know. Between them they find a way of hiding their unconscious selves on the edges of the cells in the mobile-phone network, although they can’t do this for long each time before they are discovered. They have adventures and relationships between the two worlds, with various dramas to do with unconscious betrayal, confused identities, awakenings and the rising arc of the greed and power of the Corporation. In the third book I thought I’d explain exactly how this unconscious world was structured, and I’d had some crazy ideas about the Corporation colonising something like the astral plane. I knew nothing about such things, but Arcturus was full of books about the astral plane.

Two women had come into the shop just after me. They
browsed the astral plane books too, before moving on to books about co-dependency and ‘not loving too much’, photographing your own aura and developing magical powers. ‘I’ll get you this one, love,’ the older woman said to what must have been her daughter, probably in her thirties. The younger woman was holding about three other books and had just opened her purse. ‘I’ve got five pounds left on this credit card,’ she said. ‘And about seven pounds fifty on this one. So if you get me that one as well, then …’ ‘I’ll get you two, love,’ the older woman said. ‘And then we’ll get the bus back. I know you need them.’ What were these four life-changing books? I never got to see.

‘I’ve got it!’ I said to Oscar. ‘I’ll do like a first-person thing.’

‘How?’

‘Send me the books and I’ll pick maybe four or five of them. Each one will tell me to do or think something different, and each one will promise that my life will change because of it. I’ll do what each one says and see what happens. Then I’ll write about it. It’ll be a kind of gonzo project. Almost an ethnography, if I meet some weird people.’

‘Excellent. I love it.’ He paused. ‘Make it funny.’

‘Oh, I will.’

‘Deliver at the beginning of April,’ he said. ‘Make it three thousand words if you like. We’ll do a double-page spread with a picture. Paul is very into first-person features just now.’ Paul was the editor of the paper.

‘OK. That’s great. Thanks, Oscar. Sorry about the fuck-up.’

‘That’s all right. I know what you novelists are like.’

Then he was gone. Before I put my phone away I checked my credit. It was down to fifteen pence. Still, my mistake had
worked out quite well. I had lost
£
400 and some weekend time, but gained about
£
1,500 and whatever I could get from selling the New Age books afterwards. But by the end of the process I would have lost a lot more time.
You should have said no
, said my brain. Perhaps I could recoup the lost time by using the research in my novel somehow. Could my poor, bashed-about protagonist, once metafictionally called Meg, but now nameless, also do a first-person, almost-ethnographic project? The novel could always take new layers, especially as I was always stripping them out. I was a big believer in layers, and taught a whole day on them on the retreats, emphasising to the students that a novel is never one storyline, but many layers of storylines. Something like an ethnography – and I could make it full-blown in the novel – would enable my protagonist to do things she wouldn’t normally do, which would be good. Lately I couldn’t motivate her to even go out of the house. Perhaps she could be an anthropologist who objects to exoticism and therefore decides to do an ethnography of her home town: that would give her an excuse to be out taking part in life and I wouldn’t need to mess around with rainforest locations and tribespeople. But that must already have been done. I had long ago realised that I needed a love-interest too, but my protagonist wouldn’t fall in love with anyone normal. Maybe an older man?

I thought about writing a few notes, but when I took the lid off my pen I just sat there with it poised in midair while the fluid of my conversation with Oscar drained out of my mind. Once this had happened I thought I’d be able to work, but instead I found I was left with a great amount of sediment which amounted to this: where the fuck had the Kelsey Newman
book come from? How in God’s name had I managed to review a book Oscar hadn’t even sent? I’d messed up reviews in all sorts of ways in the past, but I’d never reviewed the wrong book. I sighed. Perhaps Vi had sent it. It didn’t seem likely; I doubted Vi would send me anything ever again. But if she’d blurbed it, she’d definitely read it. But how could she have blurbed it? It sounded like the kind of project she would hate. Then again, what was it doing with a note from Oscar in it? For the rest of the afternoon my phone kept vibrating and whoever it was left messages, but I didn’t have the funds left to pick them up, or call anyone back.