Nabokov's lost text

The Original of Laura By Vladimir Nabokov Secker And Warburg, 320pp, $55

The Original of Laura
By Vladimir Nabokov
Secker And Warburg, 320pp, $55

THE story of Vladimir Nabokov's last novel is richly operatic. Marked by plot twists and sudden reversals, interrupted by arias of agonised deliberation, the narrative of how the final, unfinished work by the mid-20th century's greatest writer came to be published has reached a volume that threatens to drown out the frail melody that inspired it. Having read the posthumous work, a cynic may say that this was the intended effect.

According to biographer Brian Boyd, Nabokov had barely completed Look at the Harlequins! in 1974 when the idea for a fresh fiction came to him. This work, tentatively titled A Passing Fashion, was interrupted by illness but continued with renewed vigour during the early months of 1975. By February, Nabokov recorded in his diary: "The new novel is more or less completed." It consisted of 54 handwritten index cards, plus notes and drafts, and was now called The Original of Laura.

Nabokov maintained that the story in its entirety was inside his head and needed only transcribing. Sadly, other obligations and more serious illnesses intervened and when the author died in July 1977 the novel, although longer, remained incomplete. Foreseeing this possibility, Nabokov had asked his wife, Vera, to burn the work. But the redoubtable woman who had once saved the manuscript of Lolita from incineration by its hyper-critical author could not bring herself to act.

After Vera's death in 1991, the Nabokovs' son, Dmitri, became sole executor of his father's literary estate. In the decades that followed he oscillated wildly on the subject of the unfinished work. From time to time, Dmitri would allude to cards locked in the strongbox of a Swiss bank vault and offer glimpses of their contents. He even permitted some visitors to examine portions of the text. Then, in an interview last year, Dmitri announced that, while Laura was "a spellbinding thing", it was also "a terrible thorn". He admitted toying with the idea of "being a dutiful son and destroying the manuscript".

It was the worldwide outcry aroused by this threat that apparently settled it: The Original of Laura would definitely be published. However, the ink was barely dry on the publisher's contract when Ron Rosenbaum, the journalist and author responsible for initiating the campaign to spare the manuscript, changed his mind and publicly wondered whether it should not be destroyed.

Although Dmitri has a dig at Rosenbaum's many changes of heart in the acknowledgments of The Original of Laura, everything about this long-belated and handsomely produced book indicates wider uncertainty. From the pre-emptively defensive blast of its introduction to the gimmickry of its physical format (the original manuscript cards are reproduced with perforations above each page's transcription), the text speaks of a concern that readers will respond to it with ambivalence.

Like a page of studies by an old master, only some details have been sketched to a necessary sharpness. The rest are partial, tentative, shading into empty whiteness. Some images are needlessly replicated or abolished by the creator's pencil: the eye is not led so much as shunted between isolated vignettes.

This much is clear: The Original of Laura concerns the relationship between a corpulent yet eloquent and gifted academic, Philip Wild, and his promiscuous wife, Flora. This slender, coldly beautiful and much younger woman won the rich old man's heart by an accidental resemblance to a former love of his, Aurora Lee. But her infidelities have since been revealed in the pages of a roman a clef written by a lover, in which she appears as a character named Laura.

While Flora shares his house, spends his money and occasionally submits to his advances, she leaves Wild much to his own devices which, within the limited frame of the narrative, appears to involve lying in bed and performing mental exercises that prove capable of dissolving his physical body. Like some "imperial neurotransmitter" of the mind, the experimental psychologist believes that he has taught thought to "mimic ... an awesome messenger carrying my order of self-destruction to my own brain". It will be suicide made a pleasure, hence the novel's subtitle, "Dying is fun".

But, really, these fragments represent just a shadow of even Nabokov's notably bleak and etiolated late works. The conceit of an affair revealed by a novel embedded within in the larger fiction was used by the author in Transparent Things in 1972, while Flora's marital masochism returns us to the Berlin-era fiction Laughter in the Dark. The tropes are tired, the language is toneless and flat, and the sense of a great imagination ebbing is surely borne out by the information that Flora's creepy stepfather is called Hubert B. Hubert, a mere letter away from Lolita's sleazy swain.

If anything, these notes are fantasies of convalescence by a sick man. The desire to cut off the offending portions of a malfunctioning body is common among the elderly and infirm; and when, during a section entitled Medical Intermezzo, Wild learns that he is harbouring a tumour on his prostate, that is drawn directly from Nabokov's own medical history. (He had a benign adenoma removed in 1975, and continued on the novel during what Boyd calls a slow, agonising recovery.)

In his introduction, Dmitri Nabokov reaches for the loftiest of registers to justify the project: for him, it is an act of full disclosure that will settle various pseudo-scholarly canards about his father's private life and it is also one in the eye for those "lesser minds" who would take the old magician at his literal word about the necessity of destroying the manuscript. Lacking his father's twinkling genius, the performance comes off as so much verbal bulldust.

The Original of Laura will not hurt Nabokov's reputation - it is a fetish object, a curio, which will be forgotten by the January book sales - but neither does it reveal anything new about one of the 20th century's truly great writers. It is not a case of Prospero breaking his staff so much as an old man begging for pain relief.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian's chief literary critic.