By the fourth paragraph it was clear that the novel had been produced by one of those writers who believe it is detrimental to their craft to read. It was prose that compelled you to move your lips, as the turgid, cringingly obvious lines plodded past like steel-mill workers heading out for the night shift.
I was once trapped in a beach house on the muggy, oily North Carolina coast as five elderly women around me spent almost an hour comparing notes on the best places to buy Thanksgiving turkeys. At once I knew who this book had been written for, who would buy it and spend half an hour explaining it to each other. Marla, Darla, Thelma, Velma and Rose-Geranium had no doubt already shelled out their $6.99 at their local Kroger and devoured its opening pages as they waited for their gargantuan turkeys to be wrestled through the cash point.
The plot was the usual goulash of Catholic paranoia and high school history: the Freemason president of the United States, an archeologist by trade, discovered secret hieroglyphs tattooed on his wife’s bottom, which correspond disturbingly with similar shapes, found simultaneously by Italian police, inked on the underpants of the Pope. It’s a race against time: will the code be cracked before the underpants get laundered by the Mafia? Can the leader of the free world, armed with nothing more than a trowel, brush and nuclear launch codes, visit every major European city in just 420 pages? And will anyone notice that three characters from the first half of the book simply disappear without explanation after the president trowels and brushes his way up through the top of the Chunnel and swims for the surface?
Obviously, I was missing something. Where was ‘the tightly wrought instant classic” promised by the Guardian reviewer on its back cover? Was this really ‘the sharp edge of contemporary fiction” as pronounced by a former Booker Prize winner? And why did I feel that the Telegraph was libelling me through its assurance that this was ‘the best book you’ve read all year”?
But, of course, blurbs have long since become divorced from the books they ride. Once, you could leave school at 15 and find gainful employment. Then Matric was necessary; then a degree; then a PhD. Today you need to have left school at 15 and gained 10 years of experience. But blurbs have stalled at the PhD phase: hysterical sound bites from gushing publishers mean little to the compulsive book-buyer. If it’s not a paragraph of air-kissing adjective abuse from a Nobel Prize laureate, it’s worthless.
No literature is safe from the rampant inflation wrought by this larceny. South African blurbs have been notoriously spare for decades: pick up an early Gordimer or Coetzee and one is likely to read that ‘this novel is readable, in the way that a Beano annual is readable. Best wait a few years and see if Mr Coetzee/Miss Gordimer makes anything of his/her limited talent.”
But today each new debut volume is described, without irony or shame, as the most important novel ever published in South Africa, usually by the person who, one year previously, was credited with writing the most important novel ever published in South Africa. When the most important novel ever published in South Africa finally does arrive, it will have to compete with shelves of pretenders, each chronicling the pensive musings of a young white person whose middle-class life has begun to rankle, and who travels to the Owl House at Nieu Bethesda searching for a spiritual rebirth before being drawn into an emotionally abusive relationship with a breeder of pitbulls called Ryno.
Of course, when the local messianic text does come, it will come unheralded, camouflaged by hyperbole. Perhaps someone will suggest, as one English critic did about Márquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, that it and the Bible should be required reading for all of humanity; but in all likelihood it will scrape through as merely ‘the most staggering achievement of literary genius, the masterpiece of a creative colossus who will straddle the globe, at least until 2006.”
Until then, I’ll stick to rereading my battered old copy of Conrad’s Nostromo, which is apparently ‘Splendid”. One word, spoken true.