There is a fairground game which, like the best fairground games, is as fine a metaphor as it is a thrill. It takes many forms, I am told, but the one to which I am accustomed involves eight round holes, from which mechanical ferrets pop their robotic heads at irregular intervals. The aim of the competitor is, by way of a mallet brandished, to whack the metal mammal’s noggins, a task for which they are given only fractions of a second. Klammerfrettchan!, I believe, is what they call it on my side of town. It is a test of hand and eye co-ordination – and I am (I fear) a poor exponent of the art, once bagging but a single ferret after three minutes of malleting.
And yet, of course, my mind on these occasions is so rarely focussed on the physical aspect of the game. No – I prefer to grapple with the mental allusions. One’s mind wanders, like a curious kitten, into the realm of those medieval knights, armour-clad, poking helmeted heads over the parapet of their European castles. They had no fear of hammer-grasping giants (a pitifully rare sight, even in those times) but for lesser, though far from ineffective weapons. Arrows were one: arrows of outrageous audacity, cutting through the air like a machete through a watermelon. Those poor soldiers. The lesson is easily learnt. One doesn’t stick one’s head over a parapet unless one is entirely confident that all the bowmen in the district are as adept with their weapons as I was with mine.
Here the allusions fly. Fly, my little darlings, fly! I may have been a pitiable crusader, or a pathetic ferret, but I am no weakling when it comes to mental soldiering. In this arena, I am more than happy to poke my head over the parapet. Admittedly, I don’t always do it with great enthusiasm, nor great speed. So my heroics have never been on tap – whose are? Nevertheless, I would like to think that, whilst some critics have spent the majority of their mostly meaningless careers nestled in the grotesquely comfy armchair of safe commentary, I have always been amongst those willing to open the front door and step out, sans l’imperméable, into the hail and sleet. This may be one of those occasions. However, I am not about to stretch my intellect to propose a complex idea that flies in the face of common thought. No: today’s heroic act is a humble one. My proposal is that, in regards to the book under debate, I have no real idea at all.
It is no mistake, I know, that Jean-Paul Xengho’s two thousand page opus Yellow, Red has come to be one of the last of my greatest novels to go under review. The truth is that I have struggled to find anyone willing to tackle it. It’s not simply a question of getting through the number of pages, so much as the content of a single one. I, for one, like big books (and I cannot deceive you). I also like challenging books. But at what point does the challenge end? At one point are you allowed to give a book up, content that you can squeeze nothing further from its pages?
This, as a certain neurotic once surmised, is the question. How far does one go before giving up? What follows, therefore, is the testimony of the journey I took before reaching the conclusion that this novel is, all things considered, a mystery to me.
I might say from the off that I did not personally select this novel as one of the greatest novels. And, curiously, I have yet to find anyone who has. This seems to be par for the course so far as Jean-Paul Xengho goes. No one is confident enough to deny his brilliance – yet no one seems to be standing in proud defence of it either. Where are his fans? It’d be easier to find a lolly stick in an iceberg. They are rumoured to be here, there and everywhere: the reality is somewhat different. The busy dragonfly of gossip has been bringing news of Xengho’s genius ever since the publication of Yellow, Red in 1997, but I’ve been struggling for some time to discover who let the insect out. You speak to someone, who heard from someone else that the book is brilliant. You track down that someone else, who turns out never to have read it, but takes someone else’s word that it is the best thing they’ve ever set eyes on. That someone else is nonplussed, but manages to turn you over to another someone else. The chain never ends. Everyone has heard of someone who seems to think that Yellow, Red is great – yet no one ever is that someone.
What do you do? You do what you should have done in the first place. You turn to the book itself: the beginning and end of every review. That’s the essential thing. Problem is, you can’t seem to find a way in there either. Something doesn’t quite ring true. Everything is in place, but somehow you can’t quite fathom it. The sentences seem to make sense – or do they? You put the book aside, planning to re-read on a day on which you’re feeling a little less tired. That day never quite comes. Instead, you try a spot of active reading (as practised by any sensible reader). Will the book make any more sense read with a glass of brandy between one and two in the afternoon? What about up a tree? How about reprinted on green paper? Or with a fluorescent pink, diamond studded cover? This may seem excessive, but sometimes a reader needs to go to certain lengths to make the best of a book. I don’t mind making these sacrifices: I positively encourage them. Nonetheless, as suggested, there comes a point when one has to think about stopping. There may be endless permutations to active reading – and I would sincerely love to explore as many of them as I can. I am not, however, immortal. And this review was never going to write itself.
Where else to go? One’s thoughts turn, not without misgivings, to the author. Would meeting him make anything clearer? Alternatively (and this is, I would say, a much more attractive option) would it help to have seen things he has seen, stayed in places he has stayed, eaten food he has eaten and slept with women he has slept with? This still depends, yet, on knowledge of the man’s life: on facts that went into, but needn’t be an essential element of the novel this man has written. I’d much rather I didn’t have to go foraging like some clumsy mushroom hunter in the foreboding forest of the author’s life, but Yellow, Red seemed to have left me with no option. Divorced from the details of its conception, it made little sense. Perhaps I could have got something more from it with perseverance. I dare say I could. In the meantime I searched for a hook.
Jean-Paul Xengho’s reputed strengths (and ‘reputed’ is very much the operative word here) are neatly contained within his name – and that of his spuriously prized novel. Here is the cross-cultural warrior; blessed not only with a French mother and a Chinese father, but with illustrious – and intellectually intriguing – parentage too: his mother taught Ethics at the Sorbonne, whilst his father worked for the Chinese government in Shanghai (Xengho looks, according to a friend of mine, like a young J-P Sartre in a 1980s martial arts movie). As the novel suggests (again, ‘suggests’ is the important word) he is alert to the complexity of his position – politically and nationally – and not afraid, it seems, to confront the relevant issues. Clearly he is himself a clever man; he holds a thesis in political economics, speaks and writes in around fourteen languages – and is said to have wide interests in all fields, from circuitry to cookery. This shows in the novel, to a certain extent, with few aspects of life untouched in one form or another. Having said that, you could just as well go the other way and say that few aspects of life are appropriately touched upon: Xengho has that effect. I would say that he writes about everything and nothing in particular, were it not for the fact that such a statement seems to ring false. Again and again I am drawn back to this mysterious reputation of his. Is the problem with him or with me? Can I not understand him – or can he not be understood?
Another perspective pops up, like the aforementioned ferrets. Maybe I’m not the right audience. Most reviews are written by literary folk – but who are all books written for? Often, sadly, literary folk who, in theory, though not always in practice, are meant to be the greatest book lovers. There’s nothing saying, however, that a great novel shouldn’t be one that isn’t tailored to the traditions and wishes of the literati. With this in mind, I made sure to pass Yellow, Red onto a potential target audience: someone with a closer understanding of Xengho’s environment. For this task I selected my political economist friend (if I can call him that, though his real name is Terence), who passed the book back almost immediately. It was, he assured me, more in line with ‘Economic Sociology’ – not his field at all. I asked him where I could find an economic sociologist (should such a thing exist). ‘Shrewsbury’ said he. It was not a joke (that isn’t the political economist’s way). He was in fact directing me to Professor Karl Luzny, an expert on this subject, residing in Shrewsbury – a veritable hotbed of economic sociology.
It took a week for Luzny to reply. I couldn’t say, yet, that he hadn’t given the project his full attention. Indeed, this was his main complaint. ‘I spent the good part of four days on the first chapter,’ he wrote back, ‘and remain unconvinced as to its meaning. Have you thought about contacting someone specialising in Franco-Chinese trade in the 1940s? Yours, Professor Karl Luzny…xx’
As it happened, I hadn’t thought about contacting someone specialising in Franco-Chinese trade in the 1940s. Nor did I decide to pursue this avenue, for fear (justified, methinks) that it would prove to be another dead-end, with directions to a by-way, which would in turn leave me in a state of further, steadily increasing perplexity. As I said, for all the joys of an elongated journey, there are some adventures from which one has to pull out before the end. Sometimes it takes more bravery to take the decision to leave than it does to carry on towards an impossible summit. We are altogether too fond of those tragic failures who plunge into the unknown just for the sake of it. Echoes of my own name have rebounded from these cavernous walls: some say I often go too far myself. You say yes, I say maybe. On this occasion, nevertheless, you may be certain that I am not constructing crags from knolls. Rather I am intimating that, against waves of uncertain yet widely held opinion, we should be digging a hole through the mountainous reputation of Mr Xengho.
If this sounds violent, forgive me. And if this sounds cautious, I invite you to grumble softly, for I am, indeed, being somewhat guarded in some of my assumptions. Yellow, Red is not an easy novel to attack. It is as if it were protected by a kind of intellectual magnetic field. No one who would like to knock it has ever had the guts to go ahead with the task. The fear hangs over us all, like a cloud in a Netherlandish landscape. The achingly insistent voice of paranoia swings in with the winds. A lot of ‘clever’ people are holding onto Jean-Paul Xengho, just in case he comes up trumps. They can’t pinpoint the genius in Yellow, Red, but they’re convinced it’s in there somewhere. There’s far too much risk in pushing it aside, let alone drawing people’s attention to the possibility that the book is, ultimately, an incomprehensible tract, jam-packed with meandering, fundamentally hollow judgments, and wrapped with as much finesse as a fish and chip dinner around a plot that could well crumble when poked with a moderately sturdy fork. No, you’d be a fool to say that Yellow, Red is culturally insensitive, emotionally vapid, stylistically strained and about as amusing as an early evening sitcom. Woe betide the nincompoop who says that Xengho is far less gifted than everybody thinks he is: that his writing represents a piece of hoodwinking the size of Hungary. One imagines the writer’s response. It will, of course, be coated with his sharp-as-sharp intellect, containing words as powerful as a hundred and forty two guided missiles put together. It will be so thick with references that the fingers and toes of thirty young novelists will be insufficient when it comes to counting them. It may well be so damn clever that no one but the man who said it will understand it.
Herein lies the problem. Perhaps I should put it this way. I can’t say that Yellow, Red won’t, in a few decades time, come into its own. Who knows what the future may bring? Xengho’s mind, writing style and sense of a good story may be years ahead of mine. And if he should be championed in 2050 as Europe’s greatest novelist, I will not be unhappy. I will not weep a reservoir. Nevertheless, I feel it is a little foolish to always be imagining novels as they may be considered in forty or fifty years time. This has become an all too popular pastime, on account (one imagines) of the aforesaid fear of critical failure. On the fear, I might say, of sticking one’s head out of the parapet. I might add at this point that a one colleague of mine has quietly voiced the suspicion that Yellow, Red could be a satire: a pitch-perfect spoof of an impenetrable, politically-motivated-yet-simultaneously-aimless novel. I doubt that she is right, but I do wish that she might be confident enough to be wrong a little louder. As it stands, the lack of any critical commentary on Yellow, Red – beyond the general conception of it as a masterpiece – is remarkable. Never has a book stood so forcefully on such soft ground.
I need hardly say it again, but it remains the case: Xengho’s novel is just as hard to criticise with care as it is to praise with precision. The best you can say about it is that it’s a masterpiece in so far as it gives the appearance of being one. Words work in a weird way in this book. It’s our language, used in a perfectly familiar way. It seems to make sense. Then you think back over what you’ve read and realise that you haven’t the faintest idea what is going on. This applies not only to the first reading, but to subsequent readings also. Possibly the brilliance begins to blossom later on, around the fifteenth and sixteenth readings. Unfortunately I stopped at fourteen. A man has to stop somewhere (whatever Johannes Speyer said) and I do so, not only because I was tired of the work (and because someone needed to write this) but because I foresaw the brilliance probably wouldn’t merge later on. I can’t be sure of this, but rest assured I’m sure enough to hint at it here. I’m not saying that Jean-Paul Xengho is not a clever man, rather that Yellow, Red is not half the book we think it is – and serves best, I think, as an illustration of how far an author can travel on a mysterious reputation alone, whilst his words subsist in a state of almost complete perplexity, understood by no one that I know – and quite possibly no one at all. Should I have made an error in this, and overlooked a sizeable party of Xengho aficionados to whom Yellow, Red not only makes sense, but is just as great as the rumours suggest it is, I will not hesitate to withdraw these comments.
So, you hushed fanatics, now is the time to come out of the woodwork, armed with direct critical comments – not this wishy-washy presumption-within-gossip nonsense. Come all ye worms, come to the surface! Wiggle your way through the dirt of literary whispers and suppositions and break through the topsoil of fear. Anxious of the famished starling? Aren’t we all? The ferrets are no doubt anxious of the mallet, just as the knights were anxious of the arrows. A world of silent ferrets, however, would be a sight for sore eyes – offering few thrills, and just as little critical penetration. So come to the surface! Tell us what it is we’re missing! Reveal the hidden wonders of Jean-Paul Xengho!
As I suspected. Not a worm or ferret in sight.
Review by Georgy Riecke
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