Review, The Sandpit by Nicholas Shakespeare

The Sandpit is a kind of skittering romance of a book that has narrative cul de sacs and improbabilities that would make … I don’t know … Jeffrey Archer blush.

Published 16/10/2004 British writer Nicholas Shakespeare

Nicholas Shakespeare has done everything and known everybody in his time. As a boy in Argentina, he read to Jorge Luis Borges­; as a literary editor in London in his early 20s, he published­ reviews by Dirk Bogarde; as a biographer, he wrote a reliable account of that starry bewilderment of a man Bruce Chatwin; as a novelist, his The Dancer Upstairs was turned into a film directed by John Malkovich.

He wrote an absorbing book, Priscilla, about his aunt during World War II, and a non-fiction masterpiece, Six Minutes in May, about how Winston Churchhill seemed to be doing his best to lose the war at the outset and then suddenly, improbably, rose up as the man born to win it.

Now he’s written a weird kind of thriller, or subversion of a thriller, The Sandpit, set in the vicinity of a prep school in ­Oxford.

Shakespeare, now in his early 60s, used to spend part of every year in the wilds of Tasmania, but then he moved to Oxford because of the excellence of the school he had attended himself, before he was shipped off to one of the legendary ones, Winchester.

The prep school in this novel is called the Phoenix. The protagonis­t, John Dyer, has an 11-year-old son there, the child of a South American woman. The boy, Leandro, is bullied by a brutish­, white-haired son of a Russian oligarch.

The Sandpit, by Nicholas Shakspeare

Dyer makes friends with an Iranian physicist who also has a bullied son. The physicist looks (or does he?) as if he might have solved the problems of the world — as well as how to blow it up — by way of cracking the code of fusion physics.

He confides the formulae to Dyer, who hides it and puts to use the poetry of that great Northum­brian poet Basil Bunting, who, having been a journalist in Tehran who fell foul of some regime, joined the Persian crowd who chanted “Death to Bunting!”.

There is a revelation that involves a sandpit at ­Oxford, which in turn reminds the hero of his now best friend who had pointed out, 50 years ago, where the bullies had buried his beloved model aeroplane.

He hasn’t seen the friend, whose background was South American, since they were 20, but then he turns up like a revelation as a homeless person who has spent the intervening years searching for enlightenment, for that self beyond the self that will bring things to their consummation.

Does that sound mad enough for you? The Sandpit is a kind of skittering romance of a book that has narrative cul de sacs and improbabilities that would make … I don’t know … Jeffrey Archer blush. It’s a sort of Ferris wheel of narratological possibilities that begins by seeming to be written in soft-focus novelese and ends as an almost absurdist whirligig of closed doors and open doors and doors half-shut.

There are stretches when you imagine the author has lost the plot entirely and others where you think he is a master manipul­ator of how not to be confined by plot, how to make the susurration of plot your servant.

It’s a very peculiar book, with stretches of apparent blandness as well as intricately wrought sections where you think you’re in the hands of a fiction maker who knows all about everything except­ how to put the jigsaw puzzle together.

Dyer is researching the early colonisation of Brazil and we find that believable. We also more or less accept the story of why he quit mainstream journalism (because of a self-sacrificing deal he struck for a woman, an allusion to an earlier Shakespeare novel).

But The Sandpit is a novel that presents itself as a thriller by someone who seems not remotely interested in writing that kind of book and –– although he knows how the machinery works –– is especially uninterested in the kind of tight control and manipulation­ of momentum that a yarn spinner needs.

Shakespeare, who a lifetime ago tutored poet Peter Porter’s daughter for her A-levels, intimates at one point that a decent middle- (he means upper-) class education is one of the few things left that Britain can give.

Well, The Sandpit has, among other things, a convincing account of the atrocities that might be visited on the wife of a rogue physicist by the Iranians. And it has an account of how the dark, despicable lords of high finance can manipulate governments to wield power and make their spoils and then lose them too.

He also has a rhapsodic but expert description of how a father might take his son fishing and impart to him the wisdom of his own father, who taught the hero the mysticism of fishing: first the grandeur of the catch and then the greater epiphany of letting the great one get away.

What does seem to be lacking is any sense of how these things fit together in terms of anyone’s experience or apprehension, ­including the reader who wants to be told a story that’s about what the language indicates and the expectation set up.

At a certain point, though, you give up and surrender, a bit like you do with the author’s namesake in his last plays. If the particulars glitter enough, they will bestow sufficient coherence.

It’s clear what the affinities and influences are here. A transparent popular style, with a spick-and-span clarity, miming a trashmeister’s ease as in the later and greater Graham Greene. Yes, but Greene never let the plot go every which way.

Shakespeare’s other affinity is a bit opposite. It’s with the arty side of John le Carre in those difficult, impossible-to-categorise or comprehend books such as The Naive and Sentimental Lover or The Little Drummer Girl, which consistently elude the reader because they seem so close to the great craftsman’s heart.

Peter Craven is a cultural critic. The Sandpit by Nicholas Shakespeare (Harvill Secker, 429pp, $32.99).