Plume. Will Wiles
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Название: Plume

Автор: Will Wiles

Издательство: HarperCollins

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isbn: 9780008194420

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СКАЧАТЬ Correct Route Through Life had supplied its own built-in justifications, its completion had robbed it of purpose. My parents had spent their whole lives working dutifully, rewarded daily with the certitude that they were doing the right thing. The arrival of the real reward – comfortable retirement, two decent pensions, mortgage paid off, children through university and out of the house – had deprived them of the satisfaction of dogged, stately progress.

      They went a little crazy.

      When I was growing up, I never saw my parents argue. They disagreed at times, or frowned at each other, but never did they engage in that basic ritual of relationships, the big argument. Not in my sight, anyway. I have no inkling of what script discussions or creative disputes went on behind the scenes of their performance as Mum and Dad. But on stage, they were pros.

      In the first year after their retirement, they argued: long, flamboyant arguments with epic scope, stirring chiaroscuro and elaborate, intertwined plots and subplots. Late in life, they found that they shared a gift for holding a really poisonous row.

      They supplied their own reviews of these arguments. Ever since I turned eighteen, Dad had routinely taken me out for ‘a pint’ at the local pub. A pint, precisely: two half-pints of bitter, followed by a further two ordered with hints of wicked indulgence and declamations that that had never been the plan. After his retirement, those drinks turned into discussions of the arguments. ‘Your mum and I have been arguing a lot,’ he would say, every time, as if he didn’t say the same thing every time. He never criticised her, and I truly believe that it would never even occur to him to do so. But he would sadly acknowledge the fact of the arguments, without giving the slightest detail as to what might be causing them, and expect me to be sympathetic.

      (My sister reported that she was getting the exact same from Mum, often at precisely the same moment. Mum did criticise Dad, but only in the vaguest, most all-encompassing terms: ‘Your Father!’, uttered as if his very existence was an affront we had all quietly tolerated for too long.)

      Then, a transformation. After about a year of arguments, including the hellish Christmas of 2012, my parents decided they needed a holiday. For twenty-five years, French beaches had known their presence in the summer. Their knowledge of the French coast was probably rival to that of Allied high command, June 1944. But this time, in the spring of 2013, they went on a city break, to Brussels on the Eurostar.

      They stayed four nights and I received three postcards. Dad ate a horse steak. Mum ate a waffle sold from a van. They were photographed in front of the Atomium, the Palais de Justice, the Tintin Museum, the restaurant where Dad ate the steak, the van from which Mum purchased the waffle, and the headquarters of the European Commission.

      A mania took hold. An addiction, maybe. No city in Europe was safe. It didn’t really matter where this postcard came from, and I already knew the gist of what was written on the back. It would join a small pile of very similar postcards on the kitchen counter, next to a cork board thoroughly covered with a bright collage of classical columns, Gothic spires, Moorish palaces, Dutch gables and high pitched Nordic roofs.

      The era of arguments came to an end. So began the era of city breaks.

      Standing in the icy doorway for so long had completely thrown me off my stride. I opened another can of Stella, forgetting that I already had one on the go.

      All the cans in the fridge were empty by the time I left the house, and so were the half-empty cans I had found. I would have to pick up more, but then I would have needed to make a run in any case. Three cans or fewer was completely insufficient, dangerous. The horrible thought that there was no alcohol in the flat would be at or near the front of my mind all day.

      In other regards the morning was going well. I had showered, put on (mostly) clean clothes, and set out at a reasonable time. My bag was double-checked for all the things I needed: two digital voice recorders, my old one and my new one, and spare batteries for them. After the recent disaster with F.A.Q., I was taking no chances.

      Also in the bag were Pierce’s books: two novels, the mugging book, and the cash-in collection of non-fiction that his publisher had put out the Christmas that the mugging book was at the top of every broadsheet ‘books of the year’ list. Actors, MPs, television historians, baking competition hosts, they all exerted themselves to overstate how luminous, powerful, searing, important, draining, life-affirming, etcetera, etcetera they had found Night Traffic. I felt quite resentful about all this, because I had been reading Pierce for years. My copy of Night Traffic was the softback Panhandler Press edition with the cheap cover art, not the classy Faber edition that appeared when the award shortlists and reviews started to pile up, and which is still inescapable on the Tube.

      I had been reading Pierce since his first novel, Mile End Road, came out in 2009. This was a fairly conventional story of twenty-somethings finding love, losing it, finding it again and then losing it for a second and final time. But the few reviews it received praised its rendering of twenty-first-century London life and its (at the time) unusually realistic depiction of the mobile phone and social media habits of young Londoners. It was longlisted for a couple of prizes and did not trouble any bestseller charts.

      Pierce’s second novel, Murder Boards, had the good fortune to appear just before the 2011 riots. To capitalise, the post-riot paperback was given a sensational cover, with a movie-like strapline: THE CITY IS ABOUT TO EXPLODE. This bore little relation to its contents, 500 pages of non-linear narrative and cut-up technique told from the multiple viewpoints of its spectral cast of characters. It was concerned – obsessed, really – with missing persons and unresolved crimes, and steeped in police jargon and the imagery and phrasing of TV news. At times, it appeared to be deliberately opaque and confusing, as if the reader were an investigator confronted with contradictory accounts of events and inscrutable enmity between characters, between reader and author, between author and reality, with the objective truth of the past unknowable. To give up on Murder Boards was to play Pierce’s game, to take on the role of the indifferent bystander, the grazing TV viewer, the desensitised inquisitor, the impatient and unsympathetic bureaucracy. The reader’s natural frustration with a long and frankly exhausting experimental novel was thus subverted. Read to the end or put the book down unfinished – either way, Pierce won. Reviewers were divided. One-third of them hailed Pierce as a genius, another third called him a charlatan. The remainder made it obvious they did not understand the book, and maybe had not even finished it, by playing it safe with cautious praise.

      After the modest success of Mile End Road, Faber had poached Pierce from Panhandler and put out Murder Boards with much ballyhoo, but despite a brief life as an edgy fashion accessory and social media prop, it was a resounding commercial failure. Whatever happened, Pierce was back at Panhandler for his third book, Night Traffic. Maybe the big house took fright at the thought of releasing a long essay covering many of the same themes as the chunky, expensive literary novel that was stinking up its balance sheets.

      But since the appearance of Murder Boards, Pierce had acquired a small and eager following, myself included. His post-riots essay for 3AM Magazine, ‘Beneath the Paving Stones, the Fire’, had circulated on Twitter and Tumblr for more than a month, and was republished by the New York Times. Pierce had been writing essays about London for years, but now his writing became more adventurous, more scandalous, and funnier. He was able to arrange gonzo escapades that other journalists – again, myself included – could only dream about. A night spent with criminal fly-tippers, dumping trash on street corners and narrowly evading the police. Searching for forgotten IRA arms caches in north London back gardens. A memorably hilarious excursion with three Russian heiresses, the daughters of Knightsbridge-resident oligarchs, to find and consume authentic East End jellied eels.

      In the summer of 2012 – the ‘Olympic summer’, we journalists are now apparently bound by law to call it, although СКАЧАТЬ