Authors: Nick Hornby

Ten Years in the Tub (73 page)

BOOK: Ten Years in the Tub

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Funder reviewed
The Lives of Others
in a recent issue of
Sight and Sound
, and argued persuasively that, while it was a great film on its own terms, it bore little resemblance to life as it was lived behind the Berlin Wall: the movie was too bloodless, and there never was and never could be such a thing as an heroic Stasi officer. Her book is personal and anecdotal: she tells the stories she has come across, some of which she discovers when she places an advertisement in a local newspaper in an attempt to contact former Stasi members. This approach is perfect, because you don't need anything other than personal anecdote to tell a kind of truth about the Stasi, because they knew everybodyâthat was the point of them. So who wouldn't have a story to tell?

I'd be doing you and the book a disservice if I recommended it to you simply as an outstanding work of contemporary history. I'm guessing that a fair few of you are writers, and one of the unexpected strengths of this book is the implausibility of the narratives Funder unearthsânarratives that nevertheless, and contrary to all perceived wisdom, seem to resonate, and illuminate, and illustrate even greater truths. Frau Paul gives birth to a desperately sick baby just as the Wall is being built; one morning she wakes up to find that it has separated her from the only hospital that can help her son. Doctors smuggle him, without her permission, over the Wall. He lives in the hospital for the next five years.

Frau Paul is given only agonizingly sporadic permission to visit her child, and she and her husband decide, perhaps not unnaturally, that they will try to escape to West Berlin. Their plans are discovered; Frau Paul refuses to cut
a deal that will endanger a young man in the West who has been helping her and others. She is sent to prison. Her son is nearly five years old when he is finally allowed home. (It's interesting, incidentally, that the central characters in
The Lives of Others
are all childless. I suspect children tend to limit the range of moral choices.)

There are, it seems, stories like this on every street corner of the old East Germany, insane stories, stories that defy belief and yet unfold with a terrible logic, and Anna Funder's weary credulity, and her unerring eye for the unimaginable varieties of irony to be found in a world like this, make her the perfect narrator. Believe it or not, there are some funny bits.

It was our prime minister's tenth anniversary recently, and by the time you get to read this he'll be gone anyway, so it seemed appropriate to give him a little bit of consideration. Not muchâGeoffrey Wheatcroft's polemic is only 120-odd pages longâbut the time it took me to read it was precisely the sort of time I wanted to give him. The title refers to your president's form of address during the disastrously revealing conversation Blair had with Bush during the G8 meeting in Russia last year, when an open mic revealed the true nature of their relationship to be something closer to the one between Jeeves and Bertie Wooster than that between two world leaders, although obviously Jeeves was less servile.

Wheatcroft overstates his case a little: however much you hate Blair, it's hard to hear that his soppy Third Way contains undertones of the Third Reich. But when you see the crimes and misdemeanors piled up like this, it's hard to see how we managed to avoid foreign invaders intent on regime change. It's not just Iraq and the special relationship with the U.S., although it's quite clear now that this is how Blair will be remembered. It's the sucking up to the rich and powerful (Berlusconi, Cliff Richard), the freeloading, the pathetic little lies, the broken promises, the apparent absence of any sort of conviction, beyond the conviction of his own rectitude. This book introduced me to a very handy word,
antinomian
. (Oh, come on. Give me a break. I can't know everything. Where would I put it? And think of all the other hundreds of words I've used in this column.) You are antinomian, apparently, when your own sense of self-righteousness allows you to do anything, however mean or vicious or
morally bankrupt that thing might appear to be. It's been a while, one suspects, since this word could be legitimately applied to a world leader; even Nixon and Kissinger may have slept uneasily for a couple of nights after they bombed Cambodia.

Here is the best definition of a good novel I have come across yetâindeed, I suspect that it might be the only definition of a good novel worth a damn. A good novel is one that sends you scurrying to the computer to look at pictures of prostitutes on the internet. And as Michael Ondaatje's
Coming Through Slaughter
is the only novel I have ever read that has made me do this, I can confidently assert that
Coming Through Slaughter
is, ipso facto, the best novel I have ever read.

Regrettably, the pictures in question are by E. J. Bellocq, a central character in
Coming Through Slaughter
, which means that they have a great deal of redeeming cultural import (Susan Sontag wrote a brilliant introduction to a published collection of his work); when I read a novel that allows me to ransack the internet for prostitute pictures willy-nilly, this column will be awarding a prize worth more than any genius grant.

I had been having some trouble with the whole idea of fiction, trouble that seemed in some way connected with my recent landmark birthday; it seemed to me that a lot of novels were, to be blunt,
made up
, and could teach me little about the world. Life suddenly seemed so short that I needed facts, and I needed them fast. I picked up
Coming Through Slaughter
in the spirit of kill or cure, and I was curedâI have only read fiction since I finished it. It's sort of ironic, then, that Ondaatje's novel ended up introducing me to an important photographer anyway. (Oh, come on. Give me a break, I can't know everyone. Where would I put them? And think of all the otherâ¦ No, you're right. You can only use this argument seven or eight hundred times before it begins to sound pathetic.)

Coming Through Slaughter
, Ondaatje's first novel, is an extraordinary, and extraordinarily beautiful, piece of mythmaking, a short, rich imagining of the life of Buddy Bolden, a New Orleans cornettist widely regarded as one of the founders of jazz. It seems to me as though anybody who has doubts about the value of fiction should read this book: it leaves you with the sort of ache
that nonfiction can never provide, and provides an intensity and glow that, it seems to me, are the unique product of a singular imagination laying its gauze over the brilliant light of the world. Ondaatje writes about the music wonderfully well: you couldn't ask for anyone better to describe the sound of the crack that must happen when one form is being bent too far out of shape in an attempt to form something else. And Bolden's madnessâhe is supposed to have collapsed during a carnival processionâprovides endless interesting corridors for Ondaatje to wander around in. I am still thinking about this novel, remembering the heat it threw off, weeks after finishing it.

I am a literal-minded and simple soul, so since then I have read nothing but novels about mentally ill people. If it worked once, I reasoned, then there's no reason why it shouldn't work every time, and I was right. I have now taken a broad enough sample, and I can reveal that nobody has ever written a bad novel about insanity.

This is strange, if you think about it. You'd think the subject would give all sorts of people disastrous scope to write indulgent, carefully fucked-up prose asking us to think about whether the insane are actually more sane than the rest of us. Both Jennifer Dawson's
The Ha-Ha
and Clare Allan's
Poppy Shakespeare
miraculously avoid this horrible clichÃ©; to crudify both of these terrific books, the line they take is that people suffering from a mental illness are more mentally ill than people who are not suffering from a mental illness. This, given the general use the subject is put to in popular culture, is something of a relief.

The Ha-Ha
is a lost novel from 1961, recently championed by the English writer Susan Hill on her blog;
Poppy Shakespeare
was first published last year. Both are first novels, both are set in institutions, and both are narrated by young females attached to these institutions.
The Ha-Ha
is quieter, more conventional, partly because Jennifer Dawson's heroine is an Oxford graduate who speaks in a careful, if necessarily neurotic, Oxford prose. Clare Allan's N is a brilliant fictional creation whose subordinate clauses tumble over each other in an undisciplined, glorious rush of North London energy. I liked them both, but I loved
Poppy Shakespeare
. It's not often you finish a first novel by a writer and you are seized by the need to read her second immediately. Of course, by the time her second comes out, I'll have forgotten all about the first. But today, the
will is there.

Anyway, hurrah for fiction! Down with facts! Facts are for the dull, and the straight, and the old! You'll never find out anything about the world through facts! I might, however, have a look at this Brian Clough biography I've just been sent. Football doesn't count, does it?