The fault lies not in our stars . . .
Francis King
THE REMAKE by Clive James Cape, f10.95 The hero of this novel, an Australian called Joel Court, is an astronomer whose television appearances have caused him to be dubbed the David Attenborough of the Asteroids. But he is also a star-gazer in another sense, rapt by the spectacle of dazzling galaxies of the rich and celebrated out of reach above him. There is not merely comedy but pathos in the strenuous persistence — as of a child repeatedly jumping skywards to snatch at the Pole Star — with which he strives to be up there with them too. From Adam Faith and David Merrick to Eugenio Montale and Peter Geyl, he stuffs his narrative with 'in' names like a demented housewife stuffing her Christmas pudding with so many threepenny bits that her guests either break their teeth on them or suffer from acute dyspepsia. At one moment he refers to 'one of my three best sets of Jane Austen', as a nouveau riche might refer to `one of my three best sets of diamond cuff-links'. It is not enough for him to open a bottle of excellent wine, he must also specify that it is 'a Chateau Fonplegade Saint Emilion Grand Cru 1967'.
From the start one wonders how some- one able to discourse so fluently about, say, the astronomical history of Nova Lepantes is also able to discourse no less fluently and far more amusingly about such matters as Steve McQueen's movies, the influence of Bergson on Proust, and Flaubert's Parrot, Flaubert's Claret (an academic study of Flaubert's interest in red wine), and Flaubert's Garret (Atelier and Ivory Tower in Second Empire French Fiction). One's suspected answer to this question is only confirmed in the last two sentences of the book.
The high noon of Court's fame as the first television astronomer having begun to decline, he suffers the further disaster of being booted out of his Cam- bridge home when his rich wife has learned of his adultery with a blonde research assistant. He then takes up residence in the luxurious Barbican flat of a buddy oddly called Chance Jenolan — an Australian able to turn his hand to writing, acting and film-directing with a versatility and success which even James might envy. In the absence of his wife, a French film-star, Jenolan plays host to a girl student whose name, Antonia Blunt, has led to his nicknaming her 'the Mole'. The Mole — 'a Lulu played by Shirley Temple' — is a lesbian, but so far from this turning Jeno- lan and Court off, it merely turns them on. When, in one of the less successful pas- sages in the book (Court-James is always better at being derisive than rhapsodic) the Mole is at last brought to bed for what is described as 'the Big Tickle', the result is, perhaps inevitably, the Big Cock-tease. But clearly Court would rather be cock- teased by the Mole than satisfied by any other woman.
This wooing of a youthful, unselfcon- sciously attractive girl by an ageing, self- consciously intellectual man, provides most of what little plot this novel contains. In addition there is an account of how Jenolan embarks on a film of The Ring and the Book (with a cast which jokily includes Heflin Dustmann, Dean Harlowe, Christ- mas Day-Lewis and Gordon Auden), in- evitably comes a cropper, and then myster- iously disappears off a beach in Rio, never to reappear.
No one, it is clear, should read this novel for its story. Nor should anyone read it for its characterisation, which makes particu- larly apposite Court's quotation from Ju- lien Green's 1928 Journal: Voici la verite sur ce livre: je suis tous les personnages. James lacks the true novelist's ability which, of course, Green possessed — to know what it is like to be someone other than himself, with the result that every man in his book would seem to be a clone of himself and every woman no more than a life-size rubber doll inflated with the breath of his ego. Court's `Kangaroococo' style, as of Bill Sykes dressed up in the foppish clothes of Sir Percy Blakeney, is wholly his creator's. 'Good gimmick for a novel,' Court writes at one point. `Author gets so sick of his image that he puts it into the book as a character. So the character with his own name is the one least like him.' From time to time, indeed, this self-styled Widmerpool from Wool- loomooloo' lumbers into the narrative under his own name, as he is either seen or encountered jogging about the Barbican in `trainer shoes, sloppy joe and white shorts', his `excess bulk' making him in- stantly detectable.
This is not a good novel. But it is far more entertaining than many good novels. In it, we have James the travel reporter, evoking the steaminess of Brazil with the same lively precision with which he evokes the staidness of Biarritz; James the wit, describing a woman as looking like the top half of Lee Marvin or writing of an intellectually showy Cambridge dinner- party `Clive Sinclair was practically the dumbest man present'; and James the would-be Wilde, with aphorisms like 'Only the pretender strives to make himself believable'. Above all, there is James the critic, making brilliant fun of the modern experimental novel. He has, as he would put it, green fingers for a phrase; he also has an ability to make his characters hold forth as sharply and eloquently as if they were all squinting, James-fashion, at auto- cues of speeches which he had written for them.
In view of what Court has already said in dismissive criticism of the kind of novel which constantly plays tricks on its reader, one can only be surprised by the predicta- bility of James's trick at the close. Before he vanishes, Jenolan tells Court that he has written a new novel. Jenolan's novel, it then transpires, is the novel we have read. `I'll make you an astronomer,' are Jeno- lan's last words to Court about his central character. But essentially Jenolan has not made Court — or indeed himself anyone other than the Kangaroococo Kid.
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