Literary satire walks razor edge without dulling blade

IN Lost for Words, Edward St Aubyn has written a contemporary satire that touches on universal problems of culture and value.

THE marvel of Lost for Words does not lie in the fact its pleasure-per-page quotient beats that of any other novel I have read this year. Nor does it have to do with the accuracy of the author’s swipes at everything from current British politics to the Gallic addiction to theory.

What Edward St Aubyn has done is tougher than that: he has written a contemporary satire about a literary prize that touches on universal problems of culture and value. It is a work whose cleverness never declines into cynicism, whose wickedness never departs from some baseline decency. It walks the razor’s edge without dulling the blade.

Present-day London remains a world capital of publishing even if, as some characters moan, little else these days. And it is here that Malcolm Craig MP, an obscure Scottish backbencher whose ambition exceeds his intelligence and political nous by some measure, accepts an offer made by an old mentor, a Foreign Office knight of advanced years, to chair the Elysian Prize: the Commonwealth’s grandest and richest award for literature.

Any resemblance between the Elysian and the Man Booker is wholly intentional. Just as the original Booker Prize was established by a Guyana-based conglomerate determined to shake off associations with colonial-era slavery, Elysian is a maker of ‘‘weaponised agricultural agents’’ whose largesse is a high-minded bit of corporate PR.

The make-up of the judging panel, a backroom-manufactured entity assembled in faux-deference to democratic inclusiveness, will also be familiar. There is Jo Cross, the obligatory media personality, a ‘‘veritable geyser of opinions’’ whose ruling passion when it comes to choosing a winner is that slipperiest of terms, ‘‘relevance’’; and the token Oxbridge academic, Vanessa Shaw, a passionate advocate for ‘‘good writing’’ who is supervising a thesis on the history of a semi-colon.

Penny Feathers, a third-rate crime writer and former girlfriend of the octogenarian who got Malcolm the job, is a particularly unsuitable candidate for the jury, though not as unsuitable as bookish actor Tobias Benedict, whose mellifluous voice and handsomeness hardly forgive his ongoing absence from the judges’ meetings.

On the other side of the narrative divide are authors whose prize entries range from drug-addled tales told in the urban vernacular of post-industrial Scotland to historical re-creations of Elizabethan figures of note (you sense St Aubyn’s real-life targets giggling behind these generic veils), along with a gargantuan epic of Indian life, The Mulberry Elephant, self-published by a clearly psychotic maharajah.

Only two books appear to have real virtue: The Frozen Torrent, by hypersensitive and creatively paralysed Sam Black, whose first published novel, ‘‘a bildungsroman of impeccable anguish and undisguised autobiographical orig­in’’, reveals St Aubyn as an author only too happy to puncture his own balloon; and Consequences, by Katherine Burns, a beautiful and sexually voracious young writer whose talent has already been widely acknowledged.

St Aubyn guides us through the judges’ deliberations with a level of malice appropriate to the grandstanding, horse-trading and petty riv­alries that characterise them.

In their meetings, patently insincere political correctness is wielded like a cudgel, and favourites are pushed for every reason aside from literary worth.

When Malcolm explains that the £80,000 prize must be given on the basis of ‘‘social responsibility’’ to ‘‘someone who really needs it’’, the panel’s sole bluestocking is aghast:

‘‘It’s lucky Proust or Nabokov aren’t competing this year,’’ said Vanessa, ‘‘or Henry James, or Tolstoy, or anyone who ever sold a novel because word got out that it was worth reading, like Dickens, or Thackeray, or …’’

‘‘All right, all right,’’ said Jo, ‘‘we all know that you’ve read every book under the sun, but I think Malcolm has a very good point. If I had my way I would add, no pseuds and no aristos.’’

Even better are intermittent passages of pastiche that re-create, in ludicrous detail, the texture and tone of those writers moving in the Elysian orbit. There is a po-faced eco-novel, A Year in the Forest, in which a banker turned woodsman establishes ontological interface with a peregrine falcon (‘‘Gary knew it had spotted its prey moving on the shore of the lake, and he felt his own body grow tense with anticipation as he stretched out his mind and merged it with the peregrine’s perspective’’); and a fictional life of Shakespeare written in full ‘‘hey nonny, nonny’’ mode. A standout is Didier, French lover of Katherine, an incorrigible semiotician whose intellect comes wrapped in a prose of exquisite opacity.

The novel’s plot is panto, plain and simple, but surely that is the point. All you have to do, St Aubyn suggests, is give reality a couple of turns of the satirical screw and the facsimile of seriousness provided by our licensed media ravers and focus-grouped pollies collapses into farce. Yet some things remain sac­red, and the surprise of the book, for all its tweaking of fashionable literary genres, is that writing literature itself may be honest and good, even if those who sit in judgment on it are anything but.

That St Aubyn is willing to risk lavishing real feeling on some of his characters is significant, a lead weight tied to the helium-filled silliness of the Elysian crew. At one point, Vanessa Shaw, the only judge granted the author’s full sympathy, is asked by her emaciated teenaged daughter to edit a manifesto she has written for a pro-anorexia website. The piece is powerfully written yet terrible in implic­ation, more meaningful than the ‘‘impure and compromised’’ stuff loaded on to the prize shortlist.

Submitting to despair, a memory comes to her unbidden, of King Lear after Cordelia’s death, raging, ‘‘Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,/ And thou no breath at all?’’:

And then she found herself wondering why any book should win this f..king prize she had become involved in unless it had a chance of doing what had just happened: coming back to a person when she wanted to cry but couldn’t, or wanted to think but couldn’t think clearly, or wanted to laugh but saw no reason to.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.

Lost for Words

By Edward St Aubyn

Picador, 266pp, $34.99 (HB)