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| They were only attending this particular recital in case their absence was noticed... |
Some books recommend others; some are
thereby recommended. In all honesty I was seduced by the clever, simple cover
design of the Weidenfeld & Nicolson hardback edition, and because I have nostalgic
feelings about a marionette and shadow-puppet version of Gogol’s Nevsky Prospekt
I saw hundreds of years ago in Chapter Arts in Cardiff – it was in Russian and
I understood little, but rather in keeping with the tone of Riviere’s debut
novel, it afforded me the opportunity to be seen experiencing this rare cultural
exchange and to enjoy the pyrrhic satisfaction of such a thin veneer of sophistication.
I am all class, but onwards then to the
obligatory but truncated plot synopsis.
In a near-future London, where drones
dot the skies and the world of published poetry has an improbably elevated
status, our narrator travels to a poetry festival where, in the space of one
evening, night and early morning in a Travelodge bar, he receives from a disgraced
double-plagiarist, and reports to the reader, the story of this great literary
crime.
Although I initially struggled to
reconcile Riviere’s unabashed borrowing of the title Gogol’s most famous novel,
wherein the poshlost protagonist seeks to purchase from local landowners
the rights to and therefore the tax obligations for deceased serfs (the titular
Dead Souls) in order to secure a dishonestly huge loan against them, it struck
me later that it was pointedly apt. But before I got to that epiphany, I had to
contend with the fall-out of what Toby
Litt reports as Riviere’s ‘Bernhard phase’.
The novel is written, like many other novels I’ve similarly ‘enjoyed’ over the years, as a 300+ page paragraph, without breaks. I have read that amongst the commentariat many have suggested this is a raspberry blown to the reader, and maybe to those lampooned by the satire, à la my favourite literary curmudgeon Thomas Bernhard. Riviere also uses italics for emphasis, which is the literary equivalent of someone shaking you to check you understand the dread significance of what they’re saying. And it repeats – boy does it repeat – just like Rudolph, the second-hand narrator of Bernhard’s great novel Concrete, or the narrator of Joseph Heller’s exhausting tragi-comedy Something Happened. Consider this single sentence:
A stupendous number of poets had assembled in the capital for FOC. They had spent the entire day attending recitals or giving recitals, listening to lectures or giving lectures, chairing panel discussions or participating in panel discussions, giving interviews or conducting interviews, buying poetry collections or signing poetry collections, asking long, meandering questions in the Q&A or attempting to answer long, meandering questions in the Q&A, and now they were ready to drink.
The one thing I will say is that Riviere’s comic raging is of the insufferably British variety when compared to Bernhard’s visceral and explosive disgust. Our unnamed narrator is caustic, dry, but never febrile. He also lacks empathy and is therefore not so much a picaresque character and comes across as somewhat robotic. However, he is unsparing with his criticism of poets, publishers, and the social media which surrounds them. His disgraced poet, Solomon Weise – make your own puns – laments the sycophantic insincerity of poets and editors, or the wholesale theft rife in poetry circles, and attempts to justify his own crimes by saying his is the only true art possible given the situation. But just how involved can the reader get in a fire set in the near invisible microenvironment of poetry publishing? Just what universal truth is Riviere laying out for us all in his improbable fantasy world?
These questions aside, none of this is to say, however, that such a niche satire is not brilliantly done or entertainingly written. For all the obstacles to enjoyment there is at the heart of it a really good novel, worthy of your time and effort. If the book is about lying (to yourself and to others), and intellectual insincerity, I reckon the title Dead Souls is a most brazenly appropriate appropriation, and to finish with some of the author’s own self-justification, perhaps there is a wider context to this vicious savaging:
When you’ve looked at the situation for long enough, one monstrosity becomes much the same as another, and it is of no consequence if one monstrosity comes to stand in for another monstrosity.
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