Flipping the bird at answers

I struggled with My Idea of Fun for a while, and nearly gave up on it when I got sent a more interesting manuscript to read¹. I even got to the point where I had written a short note about where the book had gotten up to, and the reason I was abandoning it, so that if I decided to crack it out of the Time Capsule of Books I Couldn’t/Wouldn’t/Didn’t Finish, I would know where I had left off.

But I decided to give it one more crack: I was halfway through; some of Will’s other writing has greatly affected me; and I have this weakening sense of obligation to complete books, because I know how much heart and effort go into making them; and the language of My Idea of Fun is interesting enough for me to want to keep reading, simply for the joy of learning all these fucked up words, like ‘eidetiker’ and ‘quisling’ and ‘adamantine’.

And I am now immensely glad that I continued reading, because Will might have drawn a fictional parallel with a quite-serious problem in modern society, and because he has done so we might be able to avoid suffering from that problem, anymore than we already are. This is why I want to marry literature – because it can help us lead better lives.

I say that he ‘might have drawn’ a parallel because I haven’t finished the book yet, but I’m going to speculate anyway, because if I have it wrong, this would at least make a cool idea for a novel.

On the surface My Idea of Fun is about an eidetiker – that is, someone with an eidetic (or photographic) memory. His name is Ian Wharton, and his idea of fun is violent sex crimes. I’m pretty sure this wasn’t always his idea of fun – I think this developed as a result of his condition, as a result of his visually perfect recall.

Thing is though, Will has pushed this idea to an absurdist extreme: he gives Ian the faculty of ‘retroscendence’, which appears to be a fictional ability to perceive the true nature of things, by gaining insight into the history of objects. Ian is also in marketing, so this is pretty handy.

This ability is absurd, of course, but Will surrounds Ian’s experience with such vibrant language, characterised by a highly esoteric vocabulary and lofty ideas, that it kind of feels like it could make sense: this is magic realism at its most superb – making the absurd seem real, so that we are forced to question what is real at all.

Trouble is, Ian’s ‘real’ world gets pretty boring pretty quickly when he knows everything about everything. And the impression I’m getting is that by illustrating that Ian Wharton’s life has been rendered banal by his eidetic abilities, Will has gone some way to justifying that Ian’s idea of fun is committing violent sex crimes: he is so bored with everything that he literally has to rip things open to feel anything.

This is where the parallel occurs. Much of our world’s mystery has been exposed (dissected, then reassembled and presented to us in an approximation of reality) to the extent that some people must go to greater and greater extremes to feel anything new – to avoid getting bored, basically.

Sex is the most obvious example here, considering Ian’s messed up idea of fun: with pornography just a key stroke away, the mystery of nudity, sexuality and sexual intercourse are taken away from us, we become desensitised to the private, intimate nature of sex, and we begin to think that sex can be solicited without love or compassion.

Some people don’t understand that this should not extend into the real world, and these people become sexual predators.

For these people, when sex is rendered banal, they think they have a right to it – that there is nothing special about it, so they don’t have to earn it from others, respect it, or engage in it according to a shared system of values. They think they can just take it. Ian Wharton certainly seems to think he can. And his fictional life is a cautionary tale.²

Like I said, I may be wrong about this interpretation, as I haven’t finished the book yet, and I understand that there might be a twist to come that will uproot my tentative opinion of this book. Whatever. Here’s a taster, from the Prologue, until I get there.

He’s just been asked about his idea of fun, by a woman at a dinner party. I include such a long quote because after the whole above idea dawned on me, I read this passage to the friend I was talking to about it, and it was a bit of a lightbulb moment – this passage really sums up the above theme, which I guess I had been missing the whole time:

My idea of fun? This woman – who I don’t even know – she wants to know what it is? Hey, if only she did know … Ur-her-her … If only she could see … but then, that could never be. See me tearing the time-buffeted head off the old dosser on the Tube. See me ripping it clear away and then addressing myself to his corpse. See me letting my big body flop over his concertinaed torso, and then see me arching like a boy whose hard little belly muscles provide him with a fulcrum when he leaps on to a metal post.

That’s what I was thinking and at the same time I was wondering, idly speculating, how I could convey this particular sensation to her, this idea of fun. She’d probably never even seen a neck without a head on it, let alone felt one. I could have told her, though – using an analogy she’d readily grasp – It’s a bit like a mackerel, a bit like a mackerel in that all the tissue, the sinew and the muscle, is packed into the dermis quite tightly. Putting my hand around that neck was just like grasping the silvery skin of a fish and feeling the compact rigidity of its body. That’s why I had to hoist myself right up on top, I needed all my weight to penetrate the still-seeping stem. And the dosser’s head, that fitted into the analogy as well; as I worked myself up and around, as I sucked in and out of his ribbed ulcerated gullet, I stared down into his face – nose wedged in the rubber runnel that ran along the carriage floor – and watched his personality, his soul, his identity? What you will. I watched it retreating, going away. It was a mackerel’s pointed countenance, freshly caught but already dulling, losing its lustre and fading into a potentially battered finger – away from being a life form at all.

Even so, even given my painfully acquired powers of description, such as they are, I don’t think I could have done justice to the experience. All that would have struck this woman, this nameless woman, an acquaintance of an acquaintance, adrift with me for a few hours on the sociable sea, would have been – what? The horror of it all, the ghastly anti-human horror? The studied contempt involved in such an action? But could she have seen it, as I do, as the moral equivalent of a cosmological singularity, the Holocaust writ small? Could she appreciate the almost celestial cloud of despair that gusts out from my insides? A cloud bearing catatonic spore, seeds for a new but even more fatal speciation.

I doubt it – she was passing me by. This encounter was so slight it might never have been; the very moment we met we were speeding away from one another – goodbyeeeee – screaming children on time’s train. A more likely outcome, were I to have vouchsafed to her my idea of fun, would have been for her to say to someone else a week or so hence, ‘I met a man at a dinner party the other night, it was very strange. We were all talking about having fun. You know, “having fun”, really kicking back your heels and letting go, and he said to me that his idea of fun – stressing that this was just one example he could summon up – was fucking the severed neck of a tramp on the Tube. Well I mean black or what! I mean that-is-black, it just is. The things that people will say nowadays, simply because they think that they can get some kind of a rise out of you.’

1. by young writer Nic Low, which I will post about once I’ve actually finished it [↩]
2. Strangely, I now realise that some editions of My Idea of Fun (though not mine) were packaged with the subtitle: ‘A Cautionary Tale’. [↩]