Oh my sainted satin slippers. What am I doing here?
Do not mistake this for a brash statement of universal angst. I talk not of this spherical cesspit; this choking-wheezing-stumbling-sickened planet of ours. Goodness no. I have long since ceased meditating over that pointless conundrum. My clumsy arrow of a question is aimed at a narrower target. In short, why am I allowing you, my dear reader, to sup on the sweetest selection of my words? What could have provoked me to once again lend a grubby exploratory hand to the sad dusty journal that is Underneath the Bunker? Have I not sworn, several times, never to respond to Georgy Riecke’s desperate requests with any other than an expression of extreme disdain? Have I not regretted, every minute of every day, having already sprayed the faint perfume of my genius on this dirty magazine one time too many?
I would throw myself at the mercy of the court, if only it were possible. Sprawled upon a scarlet divan, propped up by a multitude of tasselled cushions, lodged behind the small wooden table on which my personal computer rests, alongside a fulsome glass of the finest red, I am in a position – I fear – from which the act of ‘throwing myself’ anywhere would be quite impossible. Let me just… No. I fancy that my right leg is numb. So, no-throwing aside, let me consider another option. Let me lean toward your open ear and make what is commonly known as a confession.
I love literature. Not all of it, of course. There are some books I wouldn’t touch with surgeon’s gloves. Actually, I wouldn’t touch most books with surgeon’s gloves. All those horrid little books! Gosh, there is a lot of them, is there not? And rotten things they are too. Of course, my own contributions to English literature – aside from my imperious reviews, the like of which you are this minute perusing – may have been on the mouldy side, but they do not fester and fail with the best of them. With the exception of The Fires of Wilmeldestran, of which (you will know) I was not the only author; they were never truly awful – merely rather dreadful.
A pause whilst a single tear, guiltily glistening under the light of the cheap chandelier given to me by a portly Italian dowager in 1987, traverses the dimpled landscape of my similarly rotund cheek and rests, in all its saliferous obstinacy, on the ledge of my upper lip. No, it’s not that I have any real regrets. I’m a tad tired, that’s all. And, well… damn it. I do have one misgiving. A single lonesome lamentation.
The way I see it – which is, by association, the way of the world – I once had the chance to pen something wonderful. It was to be a novel, most likely the greatest novel ever, but, having been conceived in agonised circumstances, it was never truly born. It was, to be brunt, aborted.
Yes. I was young and foolish. Believe it or not (I advise the former) I was not at this time as sure of my brilliance as I am now and, in my youthful imprudence, allowed confidence to be sucked from me, like milkshake from a glass.
Who, I hear you enquire, was on the other side of the straw? Forsooth, it was my former agent and long-time drinking partner, Mr C B Jones, of Normanburgh Street. A fine man, in many ways (may he rest in intermittent peace) but, on occasion, a remarkably ignorant oaf. Here was I, glowing with self-satisfaction, on the brink of greatness, asking only for a word or two of encouragement for this concept that was, no doubt about it, a first-class corker. There he was, primed to stand in as stanchion for my scheme. And yet… alas, it was not to be. Mr Jones had been soaking himself, for too long, in a bath of small-minded cynicism. He was not open to my inspiration. Not even slightly so…
For a slender man, he owned a hearty laugh. And it was with such raucous chortling that my plans for my noble novel were received. Quoth the willowy villain: ‘Ropes: thou art a degenerate scab on the plump white leg of society. You cannot write this!’ Concurring with the first half of this statement, I queried the conclusion. What could possibly stand in the way of my intention to relate the fictional history of the good, simple people; the well-meaning, sober souls of our sweet earth? ‘Simple!’ cackled the emaciated agent: ‘This isn’t your subject. You’re the ambassador of debauchery; perversion’s trusted envoy. You don’t have a license to write about goodness. How can you write about what you have never known? There are plenty of charming fools lining up to write this sort of nonsense. Stick to what you know, Ropes!’
Idiot that I was, I took fright. I resisted, blithely, for a minute or so. ‘Is not fiction invention?’ I said, winking insanely, as I was wont to do (for I know it un-nerved him so). I argued that one didn’t need a license to be able to write. I was right to have done so. And yet the seed of doubt which Jones had planted in my soul was already growing into a gnarly-rooted, smelly-leaved shrub. My novel about goodness – a subject on which, all things considered, I am still quite unacquainted – was at an end, before it had even begun.
Here, take a tissue. Yes, that’s the spirit. Wipe away those rogue tears.
Ready?
So, here I go again. A license to write? From whence had this depressing proposal sprung? One doesn’t need a license to write about what one necessary doesn’t have much experience of. Or does one? As long as the audience does not know of the author’s background, this should not even be an issue. Modern audiences, however, know a lot. Magazines are full of authors carelessly revealing to the nation their darkest secrets, from favourite colour (fuschcia, dear reader) to parental relationships (parents, what parents?). The bridge between creator and creation is thus made visible. Which is where these blessed licenses come in. A young man writes a story from the perspective of an old woman. It’s a long bridge. It stretches from the crest of a hillock to the craggy summit of a mountain. You can walk along it, sure, so long as you don’t jump up and down.
I feel weary. These laboured metaphors wear me out. A lifetime of them has wrecked me. I am the Hesperus.
So, yes, a license to write. Who gives it? Is it needed? Should you write about what you know? And – once more – why in Apollo’s name am I addressing these questions in the first place?
Like I said, I love literature. Every now and again a book appears which near blows my head off. About eight years ago, such a book poked its head out of the desert of indifferent literature. It was called On, Xavier! and it was by a Spaniard by the name of Fernando Aloisi. I might have read the novel without knowing a thing about this man. The book refused to let me do so, as its front and back cover both paraded the proof – if needed – that the creator was just as interesting as the creation.
So wake up, dear friend, and read of how the great Fernando grew up on his uncle’s farm in Villamanrique de la Condesa (outside Seville), spent his childhood tending goats, only to rise, when in his teenage years, through the ranks of the local swimming squad, leading to an international call-up at the tender age of seventeen. Read of how he represented the Spanish at the European cup; of how he set a national record in the butterfly, a world record in the breast-stroke and of how he almost single-handedly led his team through the relay. Then read of his fall from grace, of the discovery that he was using illegal drugs, of his subsequent disqualification, of pride wounded, of lies told, of allegations made, of this and that and (most importantly) of that and this.
Read on, my dear friend. Read of how… Incidentally, before we go on, I fancy I failed to do full justice to the author’s physique. Not usually the kind of thing one hears of in reviews, I know, but I shall not let the opportunity pass, irrelevant though the information may be. Aloisi was an international swimmer, you have heard of this; of Spanish farm stock and, consequently, in possession of a fine body, the like of which most writers do not, nay cannot even dream. Here is a truly muscular novelist, a worthy doppelganger for Norgo’s Dopxcis (which you will know, no doubt, from Paternini’s sculpture in the Palazzo Orcesi – or if you don’t, get thee to an airport, onto a plane, onto a train, to a bus, a short walk up a steep hill, down a step or two and into the entrance hall and see, yes see what it is you have been missing, you arrant knave). Yes indeed. A fine figure of a man.
Now, that may – or may not – have something to do with the drugs, for which he was so infamously ‘busted’ (what a frightful word that is). Well, it comes to us all. But for sportsmen, I am told, this is an especially no-go area. A little unfair perhaps, say I, with an iniquitous grin. For have not great works of art been made on drugs? Why ban one set of artists and not the other? You cannot talk of equality surely? We shall never approach that, not in any game.
Fernando, oh Fernando, shame of the Spanish goat-farming community – what were you playing at? According to the man himself – nothing. He did not know how it was the guilty substances entered his body, he said, settling at last on the probability that his coach (of whom he was as fond as I was of the agent Jones) had hid them in the beef pies that formed a large proportion of his diet. Is this a lie? Perhaps not, or if it was, it was not a conscious lie…. Yes? No? Do you see what I am saying? I mean to say, my friend, that Aloisi’s full frame was not made so simply by steroids, but that his proud chest was also pumped with confidence. Pure confidence, the like of which was able to overpower one’s grasp of reality and flood the soul with the perception that, whatever is said or done by the body and brain was and is, and evermore shall be true. Even if it’s a lie.
Fernando Aloisi is a model of confidence. Of this I am certain. He would not have choked at the criticism of C B Jones. He would not wither in the light of any enemy. And nor, for that matter, would Xavier, his fictional counterpart… But we’ll come onto that. For now, let us stick with the following statements: Aloisi, ex-swimmer, sculpted from the stone of self-belief, conceivably a swindler, certainly an egoist. A potential conman, out of a job. A great writer-in-waiting.
How many sportsmen go on to be successful novelists? Don’t throw statistics at me, for I will only blow them away. There is on earth no damn that I will give for the answer to that question. Maybe there are not many. Well, by the soft hand of Apollo, I wish that there were more.
There is a quality to Aloisi’s fiction that is not found elsewhere. There is carefree-ness. There is confidence; unbridled, uninhibited, unrestrained confidence. It seeps through every sentence – and I love it. The central character, as is obvious, is Xavier: another conman, of sorts, whose identity (at first) is not a long way from Aloisi’s. He is a goat doctor. That is, until one day he finds himself on a boat, in conversation with a pretty young woman. Mishearing his career as ‘throat doctor’ she asks him whether he might help her a little trouble she has been having with her oesophagus. He barely thinks twice: ‘I could just tell her that this wasn’t my speciality – or I could just get on with the job’ he says. This is why he is a ‘conman, of sorts’. For in his own estimation, there is no conning going on. He has so much confidence in his ability that he thinks he is not conning anyone. He truly believes that he can be a throat doctor – that he can, in short, be anything.
Aloisi shares this monumental assurance. A license to write? Ha! This man should not be able even to set words down on a page, let alone deal with people, places and ideas of which he has no (nor ever attempted to gain) significant knowledge. And yet he does it, because he is driven, like a rocket, by his belief that he can do anything and everything.
Happily, merrily, does he go into the mind of women, of dogs, a dead fish, children and inanimate objects. Cherrily does he provide long descriptive passages of cities to which he has never been, of which he has not researched beyond a line or two picked up, one may suppose, from the internet (or a children’s encyclopaedia). He talks of science, corresponding to no real logic; of philosophy, with a similar disdain for sense. He is as committed to fine research as any child surfing the internet for the answers to history homework. Aloisi’s grasp of clever ideas is as firm as the grasp that those unfortunate squirrels have on the well-greased piece of timber that attaches my bird-table to my lawn. Ah, how I love watching their eternally fumbled efforts to ascend to the summit of this avian haven. If I just stretch across a bit, I can probably see one n…. No, I can’t stretch that far. Alas. Later, perhaps, I will treat myself to a little squirrel-taunting. For now, I can only imagine the sight of one slipping and tumbling, like poor idiotic Icarus, onto the cold wet grass.
But the fleeting plummet of the squirrels is tangible. They try again – forever the furry fools! – but they also lose again. Aloisi, meanwhile, gives only the impression of falling. In one reality he stumbles. It is in this same reality that he remains the farmer’s son, the disgraced international swimmer who can barely string a sentence together, who has no respect whatsoever for the honest trade of the novelist. In another reality, however, he ascends with grace. And he does so not because he is a skilled climber, but because he thinks he is a skilled climber.
Hang research! Hang learning! Hang the earnest brows of the over-educated ninnies, the four-eyed researchers bent over reference books; the sober and solemn apes, whose fictions are cunning, well-constructed, fed with the fruit of experience and knowledge, pondered over endlessly, self-consciously, with anxious, well-meaning expressions plastered on grave and prudent faces! Hang them all with a thick, well-knotted rope! And, please, please, get me a ticket for the front row. Not a seat behind a pillar, I tell you, I’m talking about the front row!
Write about what you know? By all the moons of Jupiter, all the rings of Saturn and all the grapes that go to make a fine bottle of wine, no! Wipe this hackneyed drivel from the dusty blackboard of your brains. Write about what you’ve got the guts to write about – that’s real advice! Yes indeed!
Ahem. Let me just…um… straighten my cravat. So, as I was saying, write about what you’ve got the guts to write about. Or don’t, as the case may be. Honest to the great god Pan, I’m not here to dispense advice to young writers. I’m here to make noise about something that has already been written. Fernando Aloisi’s On, Xavier! – the most superbly under-researched novel of modern times, product of the most perversely confident character of any time. Aloisi, my dear Aloisi – he does what he wants, that’s what he does. I tell a tale of the man who does not care about what he is, but trusts in what he thinks he can be. His book? A gem, a gem, a gem. Brainless and depraved, insensitive and (oh yes) unlicensed. Yes, it is all of these four (it was four, wasn’t it?) things. As some critics have written of it (and, to judge from the fact that I have been asked to write this review, as the general consensus would seem to be): it ‘really doesn’t add up’. True. But if you say 2 + 2 = 5 with enough confidence, not everyone will believe you, maybe, but a lot of people will want to believe you. And I’m in the queue, perhaps even at the head of it (provided someone can lift me from my divan) shouting as loud as the rest of them. On, Aloisi, on!
Review by Lucien Ropes
Further Reading:
