His master's voice
James Walton
REAL LIFE by D. J. Taylor Chatto, f14.99, pp. 265 DJ. Taylor is a brave man. Three years ago, he wrote A Vain Conceit, a work of criticism whose basic premises (if so self- contradictory a book can be said to have had basic premises) were that most con- temporary British fiction is 'frightfully bad' and that contemporary book reviewing is 'a racket.' Real Life, his first novel since, therefore presents a seemingly unmissable opportunity for the scorned racketeers to take revenge. So is it as bad as we hoped? The answer, frustratingly enough, is no. But the novel's undoubted success is achieved despite a breathtaking lack of originality. In A Vain Conceit, after the look-at-me-I'm-an-enfant-terrible bits, Tay- lor eventually admitted to liking some con- temporary novels after all, praising especially Graham Swift's Waterland and Martin Amis's Money. That praise now takes its sincerest form.
Real Life begins with the narrator, Martin Benson, in suburban Norwich, try- ing to forget his past. But, like Swift in Waterland, Taylor sees East Anglia as a place 'where the past refuses to lie down': 'You can tarmac over the hills. . . but you can't tame what lies beneath.' Sure enough, Benson's history is soon catching up with him, and as it does so, it turns out to be strangely recognisable to anybody who has read Money. Like Amis's anti-hero, John Self, Benson was a dupe in a world of cash, movies, pornography and low-life. Like Self, he is now tormented by anonymous phone-calls about events he can't remem- ber because he was too drunk at the time, but on which his fate depends. And Money's contribution to Real Life doesn't end there. The theme, that reality itself is essentially unreal, is straight from Amis as well. Moreover, Taylor's supporting cast have names like Frank Fellatio and Fat Eric (Money had Spunk Davis and Fat Paul) and include many an Amis yob; some of the jokes and observations ('Pornogra- phy has its own smell') are lifted directly from Money, and there is much Amisian rhetoric of repetition (Everything seems very dead and played-out now, very played- out and dead.') Taylor even copies Amis's habit of using italics every now and then for no apparent reason.
Meanwhile, other Taylor heroes receive their tributes too, with Ian McEwan's phrase 'stir like troubled dreamers', men- tioned in A Vain Conceit as a 'queer, luxuri- ant image,' turning up at one point, for example.
The reason for this relentless borrowing is not clear. It is obviously not accidental, nor likely to pass unnoticed. Indeed, it engenders such a distracting, occasionally overwhelming, sense of deja lu that parts of the novel read like the literary equivalent of a film remake, with familiar lines coming out of unfamiliar mouths. And all, remem- ber, from a man whose last book com- plained that 'a great deal of modern writing is derivative rubbish,' because literary nov- els have become 'stylised to a hypertro- phied degree', and 'all the same'. It is very odd.
But even odder is the fact that Real Life still works very well. In fact, it's a great read. How does Taylor get away with it? Primarily, I would say, because he is very good at providing the 'staid satisfactions' (Martin Amis again, I'm afraid) of plot, pace and narrative. His prose, while trans- parently a combination of Amis's fizz and
Swift's solidity, is impressive too and partic- ularly good at describing the 'detritus' and 'paraphernalia' (two of his favourite words) of his characters' lives. The result is a novel much better than it has a right to be. Derivative, it certainly is. Rubbish, it definitely, if mysteriously, is not.
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