Who's Afraid of the Booker Prize?

Foreword

Amusing, perhaps, to transpose that human geometry found in a roman-à-clef to the solid planes of reality, yet this is not, reiterate not, a roman-à-clef. Characters resembling etc. living persons etc. are an amazing coincidence….

Foreword

Whether Zob really intended the commemoration of John Andrew Glaze’s death, and a celebration of his life, is open to question. A great deal went against it as a project, whose perils should have been eased through Zob’s profession – though that in itself is complicated. By whatever chance or accident, those of us at work on the ‘inside’ – so to speak in the boardroom of English letters – have come to know Marshall Zob as wholly constructed, borne up on the vanes and social wing beats first tested by his father – by Zob Senior – two men inclined to act depending on the scale of reward.

Worse still for me has been Zob Junior’s personal weather map, his London clouds – I mean his sullen brown drizzles – and at certain other times his tumble of intoxicated sunbeams, all bound up with his flight up the fastseller charts. This has made his house – or rather my former place of work – unpredictable atmospherically.

Astonishing, no – but it is ironic that Glaze should come under my pen, an instrument I’d hoped to keep free of any such taint. By contrast this is so unlike the golden quill the mercenary Zob is obliged to wield – this by his family’s rules of fortune – practically every working day of his life, in a padded cell. In just that ramble through another man’s life (and death) is an often unbearable strain on my nib, host to all kinds of opposing forces. This is the point, the sore point, that I note even now.

Do I feel embarrassment, discomfort, shame, when what I have spawned, under the privacy of my editorial lamp, is the full revelation, and of not just any diary? It’s my diary (excerpts below), a document I kept for scrupulously professional reasons. I cannot be blamed if it tends as its seed the fullest vulgar exposé. Plus there has also been the problem: how to contend with the sheer ineptitude of John Andrew Glaze’s death….

My name I shall hardly need to stress is Alistair Wye. A ragged-trousered visionary, up on a purple moor, has told me that numerologically this is a sign of passion – he means my name numerically transposed. Apart from that I have been, and I admit laboriously, Zob’s amanuensis. Marshall Zob, should you not already know, is the perfection of the dead Andrew Glaze, PhD, whose brightest student he was. This was back in the early 1970s, in the cloisters of Modern College, Exe University, where the writer and academic, and Blagueur Prize-winner (twice), the witty Zob Senior, had passed before him – many years ago.

So. Gloves are off. I shall refute mythologies. Shall prick that iridescent bubble, a falsified lament over Glaze’s death. Shall go on saying that this has been no loss, a passing that hardly caused me to put down my coffee cup, or extinguish my cigarette.

I drove Zob, in Zob’s silver Mercedes, to the stone parish outside Exe, while over preceding nights I had smiled patiently at his oration, which somehow he’d rehearsed with a straight face. The priest, a man in a newly ironed cassock, beamed throughout. He remarked of Glaze what bookish soil that gifted peasant had tilled, as a form of compliment – in truth a slight on the class origins of a respected academic. Zob, whose pallor through recent small hours was aghast, had reached that point of luring a procession of women into his lair. One, a red-haired girl of twenty, less than half the littérateur’s age, sought his assistance for a thin collection of poems, with an eye to his publisher. It meant that she, like me, had the pleasure of his funeral oration, though unlike me tested the tog of his duvet. Her night-long amplitude dispatched Zob throughout the next morning to the first, then to the second, then to the third bathroom, I later deduced in search of that cream, potion or palliative for his poor sore phallus. His redhead had tongued, petted, squeezed, caressed – once too often.

I slipped away before Zob’s last farewell, and with the engine running warmed up the Mercedes. By now I was well versed in that mendacious act over Glaze’s mortal remains, soon to be incinerated. Zob commended his fumes to the cosmos, assured of the ‘greatness’ of his achievement, for had he not laid down his lucid path, through ‘a continent of English culture’, for less certain feet to tread…? Perhaps depressingly that was so, though I cannot be fagged to talk about it now. Here should end the life, work and attainments of John Andrew Glaze, whose second journey out in a void I’d rather contemplate across the street, in the Forces Inn, where I could weep into some lovely local beer.

Therefore in some sense our latest Zob masterpiece – a novel he has tactfully called Gimme the Cash – is overshadowed by the demise of his distinguished tutor of Exe, a man wholly without insight. May the Lord protect his soul.

(By the way, Merle, what did you think of that capon?)

—AW, Highgate

[To Be Continued]