Curiouser and curiouser
Francis King
THE MEDUSA FREQUENCY by Russell Hoban Cape, £10.95
It seems likely that the computer is already taking over the function of the ouija board. Hunched before it, the oper- ator is first hypnotised by those dancing green phosphors and then sucked through the screen into the topsy-turvy Wonder- land behind it. Like his creator Russell Hoban, Herman Orff, also a novelist but a less successful one, works on a computer. The computer is an Apple II. Apple? In a novel by, say, John Braine, the name would indicate no more than that Orff had once been able to afford a powerful and pricy computer but, whether from conser- vatism or lack of funds, had not subse- quently traded it in for its even more powerful and pricy successor, the Macin- tosh II — of which the advertisements tell one that it offers you more memory options than a politician'. But in a novel by Hoban, a writer for whom nothing is solely itself, one wonders. The apple, as we all know, represents the Fall; and it is while he is working at his Apple that Orff suffers his private fall from reality to unreality, from fact to fiction, and (one guesses) from sanity to madness.
This fall comes about at three o'clock in the morning, with Orff, sitting 'like a telegrapher at a lost outpost', brooding on Eurydice, whom one presumes (this is a book in which one is obliged to make many presumptions) to represent both his lost mistress, Luise von Himmelbet, and his lost creativity. All at once, Orff is com- muning on the screen with the Kraken. But this Kraken is nothing so simple as the fabulous sea-monster first described by Pontoppidan in his 18th-century History of Norway. This creature vaunts itself, in capital letters, as 'ANCIENT OF THE DEEPS, MONSTROUS CEPHALOPOD, GREAT HEAD AT THE CENTRE OF MY MILES OF WRITHING TENTACLES'.
The following morning Orff finds a `flyer' (no, not a bird, not an insect, not even an airman, but what many of us would call a leaflet) on his doormat, with the announcement that an Istvan Fallok of Hermes Soundways has devised an EEG method, for those in need of inspiration, of reaching those parts of the head that other methods do not reach. Orff decides to avail himself of the offer. Having then had the 36 electrodes fixed to his skull, he finds himself, Alice-like, dropping down and down into a sea of blackness. When he comes to, it is in a world even odder than the one previously known to him.
To detail all the ways in which this world exhibits its oddnesses would require a review far longer than this. But the chief of the oddnesses is certainly the head of Orpheus, which intermittently materialises — out of a cabbage bought from a stall in the North End Road, out of a football belonging to two young schoolboys, out of a half of grapefruit in a restaurant — to engage Orff in conversation. In their sur- realist way, these conversations are re- markable — dealing with such typical Hoban themes as the nature of creativity, the transitoriness of love, and (most obses- sively of all) the fiction of reality. But it is not only as a fantasmal talking head that Orpheus has now lodged himself in Orff's consciousness. Orff's own name can be seen as a phoneme of the first syllable (or the head) of Orpheus's. At one time Orff has been employed by an adver- tising agency called Slithe and Tovey to write copy for Orpheus Men Toiletries. He is now asked by his employer, Sol Mazzar- oth, editor-in-chief of a magazine called Classic Comics, to prepare a strip-cartoon treatment of the Orpheus story, and by a film-director, Gosta Kraken, to prepare a scenario of it. He visits an Orpheus and Tower Bridge Club, he patronises a travel agency called Orpheus Travel.
But Orpheus is only one of many leitmo- tiven. To mention another at random, there is honey. Orff's lost love, Luise, smells of honey, Eurydice smells of honey.
One presumes (again one can do no more) that throughout the book honey is in- tended to represent the pheromone of female sexuality. There are recurrent re- ferences to Vermeer's famous 'Head of a Young Girl', here transformed into a Medusa, with snakes writhing from be- neath her blue and gold head-scarf. Orff is only one of three people who, having had recourse to EEG for a cure for his 'art trouble', succumb to heart trouble (angina).
The film-director, Kraken, bears the same name as the 'Ancient of the Deeps'. As names, incidents and images keep repeat- ing themselves in this way, one inevitably asks oneself whether this is merely a case of literary hiccoughs or whether there is some deliberate purpose. Since one knows Hoban to be a writer totally in control of himself and his medium, one must opt for the second of these alterna- tives. But to define that deliberate purpose is something that I find myself incapable of doing — and that I doubt if any reviewer will do, except in the vaguest of terms.
Certainly some clues are given in a passage, a third of the way through, when Orff draws up a list of 'SOME DRAMATIS PERSONAE' in what he calls 'the story of me'. The Kraken, this tells us, 'came into existence when the human mind needed another mind to hold the original terror'. Eurydice (or Wide Justice, justice every- where, as the name can be literally trans- lated) is the prototype of all the women whom Orff loses. The Vermeer Girl is the female principle, now Eurydice, now Persephone and now Medusa. But such hints do little to disperse the fog that seeps through the interstices of the book, blur- ring its edges. What nonetheless makes it amply worth attention is the exquisiteness of so much of its descriptive writing. 'The night is my best time,' Orff declares at one point, and night is Hoban's best time, inspiring him to passages which perfectly fulfil, in their measured, elegiac grandeur, his (or Orpheus's) claim that 'Art is a celebration of loss, of beauty passing, passing, not to be held'. Curiously, although these pas- sages are written in prose, they strikingly recall Eliot's Four Quartets, in their rhythms no less than in their imagery and their melancholy striving for consolation in another, higher order of being.
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