His life forever amber
Janet Barron
THE MARRIAGE OF TIME AND CONVENIENCE by Robert Winder Harvil4 £14.99, pp. 224 t certain moments in our lives, we become all too well aware of the inexorable fact that we are mortal. In The Marriage of Time and Convenience, Robert Winder takes his hero Luke's brush with death as the starting-point for a comedy of errors. A near run-in with a London bus makes him wonder, though not in any coherent fash- ion, what he is doing with his life. Luke is what his girlfriend Carmen calls a man who can't say no, the human equivalent of a `trained mouse'. He does not do things, they happen to him. A visit to a super- market makes him awe-inspired by the wealth of consumer goods on offer from around the world, in strange and mind- boggling concoctions, whilst it also faces him with the more down-to-earth matter that the things you actually want to buy are furthest from the door.
Luke is a computer expert, by accident. He enjoys the simplicity of computers, and their tendency to think of things in black and white, when the human mind is so much grey matter. He wants to make deci- sions between yes and no, but can only come up with maybe. His job is to design traffic-light systems, which ought to be straightforward, but never are. The prob- lem, he finds, lies not in red or green, but in amber, which Robert Winder takes as a metaphor for the mind, a perpetual state of indecision. Somehow, he has landed him- self a job in Rome, and does not know if he wants to go or not. The novel details the myriad happenings of the hours before he is due to fly, the 'phone calls that haven't been made, the unposted letters, the urgency of the flight and the sense that nothing has been sorted out. He finds him- self on the way to the airport pestered by his father, who wants the groceries bought, and posed with the question of whether or not to marry when Carmen proposes the option to him. Will he or won't he go to Rome? He has the disturbing information that at night the Romans turn off the traffic lights and leave motorists to fend for themselves.
This is a brief, breezy, exhilarating novel, playing with questions of time — and of
convenience, both commodities in demand. It is written with informal ease, and at a pace which makes the reader laugh at what cannot be put into a narration. At the outset, Winder tells us that it will take three hours to read, but it takes far longer to relish the wit and irony. Luke wants to be known as 'Cool', but the closest he gets is `Lucozade'. He is a man for whom it seems champagne is destined not to pop. Taking pleasure in its pages, the reader is seduced by his or her own musings and meditations on the scheme of things, or lack of it. Although the content is philo- sophical, it is in the funny yet serious vein which gave us the picaresque flavour of works like Rasselas. I recommend it to any- one contemplating a short plane flight this summer, as something which can be read and chuckled over, and as a way of taking one's mind off the atrocious food. It is very close in style to the early Anthony Burgess of the Enderby phase, with Enderby's bafflement as to what life is all about. Thinking of which, I recently received a driving licence from the DVLC in the name of Anthony Burgess, and I am not using a pseudonym: the sort of coincidence of which Robert Winder could make a very funny novel. All in all, an excellent, read- able, unpretentious comic talent, and greatly to be applauded.
Janet Barron is currently adapting Tristram Shandy for BBC 2.
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