Website of Aiden O'Reilly

Its style has little in common with Hunger, and it is only after dozens of pages that certain common preoccupations become apparent.

A mysterious stranger arrives to stay at a hotel in a small town. He is reticent about his purposes, but it appears he has some business interests and also needs a holiday. This information emerges indirectly, Nagel himself only gives vague answers. He befriends a sort of village idiot called The Midget, and treats him with great respect. He goes for walks around the town and gets invited to society gatherings.

Nagel – while revealing little about himself – displays a keen interest in recent events in the town. He has a powerful psychological intuition, and picks up on tiny details to penetrate right to a person’s soul. There has been a suicide recently, apparently a rejected suitor of a certain Miss Kielland. The narrative resembles a detective story, with Nagel pushing polite conversation to the edge of rudeness in order to extract information. He even takes notes of names in his notebook.

Although there are sections which narrate Nagel’s inner thoughts, the reader doesn’t gain any clear notion of his plans or his background. In fact Nagel is plagued with thoughts, they spew out of his head and he does not prioritise them. He questions every small action and rakes through obscure memories. He is intensely aware of tiny blushes and hesitations and the glances people give him. He conducts arguments with imaginary opponents. He has moods of extreme exhilaration. Things he sees – a white dove frenzied by the sun – often seem to resonate like symbols. He has moments of rapture which swoop to become contempt for the solid burghers in 3-storey houses filling their leisure with alcohol and politics. He could well agree with Barbusse’s hero: “I see too deep and too much.”

Nagel seems to operate to the motto Whatever it is, I’m against it. He rails against hypocrisy, phoniness, Gladstone, and the notion of “great men”. He is against the secularisation of society, not out of any religious conviction apparently, but because there is nothing to gain by robbing life of its symbolism.

For the first hundred pages or so it looks like Nagel’s curiosity is leading to some revelation about the town. But as the story proceeds, it becomes less certain where events are going. Lots of ‘key characters’ are introduced, but there will be no grand plot to tie them together. Instead the story veers further to the subjective – more tales and daydreams from Nagel. More useless ruthless honesty dredged up from inside, more digging beneath motives. It makes for a sort of concrete illustration of Sartre’s notions of consciousness being in its nature always in “bad faith”. Nagel has no sense of shame, no ‘mask’ to present to others. He seems to be resentful that others have beliefs and convictions to defend. He plays purposeless mind games with people, pretending to be devious, and thus in fact being devious, but to no benefit to himself.

He becomes obsessed with Miss Kielland’s beauty and torments her, even though he fully accepts she is happily engaged. At the same time he whimsically pretends to fall in love with another woman, whilst also making passes at the maid.

It might be the wrong approach to ask what the aim of this novel is. It depicts a certain type of mind. One viable conclusion is that Nagel’s cast of mind is a mistake. That such a multi-layered but impotent consciousness is a deformity of nature – a mental disability. A strange disability, in that the afflicted person can (for long periods) replicate the behaviour of a healthy person, and even solve problem which the healthy person cannot. But a disability nonetheless, in that the afflicted is less able to thrive in the world. Nagel understands that everyone needs a little self-delusion to function. Much good it does him.

One consistent aspect of Nagel is he often defiantly defends superstition and romantic notions against the onslaught of reason. But it is a despairing, contrary and capricious defence – encapsulated in his bizarre tale of how at a speech on economics, when Gladstone (the personification of progress and reason) makes the calculation 17 x 23 equals 391, Nagel stands up and shouts that it is 397 – though he knows this is wrong. He wants to believe it because it is absurd. He want to sacrifice his reason. “I’m a living contradiction, and I don’t understand it myself,” he says.

And yet the novel is full of recurring (sublime | quirky | visionary | paranormal) moments. They intrude with no rhyme or reason to them, no presumption that such moments are a key to a “higher” understanding. These moments have no foundation in any religious belief, notion of soul, or ART, or transcendence.

It might also be wrong to think that Nagel’s lacerating insights reveal the town’s inhabitants to be hypocrites and hollow. Nagel thinks so, at times anyway. But ultimately Nagel himself causes unnecessary pain and disruption. I take the ending to be a bit misleading. I don’t have any sense that “Nagel was right after all”.

Over a hundred years since it was written. There are incidental things which a modern reader might notice: The way the wealthier classes have lots of time for socialising and there is nothing unusual about Nagel spending a few summer months relaxing. Also the casual manner of treating hotel staff and other social subordinates. Several times Nagel makes a pass at the maid in the hotel; she reacts with an earthy certainty. Blushes and layered consciousness are not for the peasant classes.

This novel is alive in a way few others are. Marvellously rambling and digressive.

Souvenir Press have brought out most of Hamsun’s work using Munch’s art for the covers.

This is a wilful return to naïve novel-writing, where you simply describe the protagonist’s exploits minute by minute. It’s very easy-going, and doesn’t linger long enough on one scene for things to get boring. One of the blurbs describes Dyer’s writing as similar to being in the company of a new friend who is just as silly but a bit more clever than you. He gets to Venice and runs into several journalist friends. Everything is on a surface level. I don’t want to use the word ‘superficial’, because the word carries connotations that a deeper level exists. Jeff’s wanderings from party to party and on to gallery feels like the lead-in to an art-world thriller. But this is not that kind of novel. In fact it’s a love story of sorts, but – as suggested – above all it’s a couple of days wandering around in the company of Jeff. He is lightly ironic about some of the art, he meets a very attractive woman, there’s plenty of name-dropping of (real) artists and curators, a few trips by vaporetto, more galleries, and a cocaine party.

Jeff describes the trip thus in his thoughts:
“You came to Venice, you went to parties, you drank up a storm, you talked bollocks for hours on end and went back to London with a hangover …”

And when thinking about the greater importance of ambition over talent:
“The work may have been puerile, but the hunger to succeed of which it was the product and symbol was ravenous. In different historical circumstances any number of these artists could have seized control of the Reichstag or ruled Cambodia with unprecedented ruthlessness.”

To me it feels like watching a seventies TV serial, where you catch a glimpse into life in the fast lane, where everyone is beautiful, there is casual sex with no fear of AIDS, everyone offers a drink at any time of the day, and every time a character turns a corner he’ll by chance run into someone he knows. I suppose this sounds a bit dismissive, but I fact it’s a pleasure to read this account which is not trying to hide things, but, in keeping so close to Jeff’s moment by moment experiences may well prompt the reader to pose the questions which don’t occur to Jeff himself.

At one point, when the narrative builds up tension about whether there will be free risotto, Jeff voices some thoughts that sound harshly critical of such shallowness. But a few pages later the story of the free risotto, and whether there was any at all, crops up again as a source of much wit and fun. I kept feeling that new depths would be revealed. Jeff is in his mid-forties, the reader might suspect the constant partying and hob-nobbing is beginning to jade him. And it does jade him, but not to any great existential level.

He describes a party on board a boat:
“all the people aboard were part of the international art crowd, intellectuals, artists, connoisseurs and appreciators of the fine things in life – which meant basically that everyone wanted to drink champagne and snort coke.”

And so it goes. In the second half you travel with Jeff to Varanasi, and see the funeral pyres and ghats and have narrow escapes from pickpockets. I kept waiting for Laura to re-enter the story and the plot to resume. After dozens of pages I realised the narrator of this trip remains unnamed and seems to be older than Jeff in Venice. Presumably it’s Jeff a few years later. I was a bit annoyed at this ambiguity, which sent me searching back through the text to see if I had missed some obvious pointer.

(Incidentally Jeff vividly describes the Ganges View hotel where he is staying. The real author Geoff has an article in The Guardian where he also describes this hotel. I came across it be chance when I googled the name.) Jeff is an affable travel companion, it’s hard to dislike him. Some readers however will get bored with the journey and check out early.

But what to make of the blurbs by some famous literary writers? I’m genuinely confused. It’s not a bad novel, it’s fun and a kind of male equivalent of chick lit. But chick lit novels don’t usually have accolades such as “rare voices in contemporary literature” “this is serious fiction” “a post-modern Kingsley Amis” “a national treasure”.

The novel + blurb combo poses questions about the literary world and how it operates. What are these writers doing lavishing such high praise? Very few novels have such a battery of support. Maybe Geoff has written weightier novels and they are throwing in their support of this new work.

If Jeff took a three-day visit to the literary world he would no doubt poke fun at it, but without getting seriously annoyed.