Whether Edward St Aubyn has ever been lost for words, it’s certainly not evident in his hysterical new novel, LOST FOR WORDS.
Setting his compass towards the Pacific of publishing and the land of literary awards, this intrepid word slinger scythes a satirical slash through the agenda infested jungle of arts gongs.
There is not a wayward word from the beginning to the end of this rollicking bollocking of the literati and the competitive machinations behind the glittering prizes.
In LOST FOR WORDS, The Elysian Prize is the Everest of writing awards and the groups assembled to get their publications and their pen-persons to the pinnacle are not in concert.
The Chair is a bored Opposition back bencher, Malcolm Craig, “whose moment in the pallid Caledonia sun as Under Secretary of State for Scotland had been the climax of his career so far”.
His judging panel comprises well known columnist and media personality, Jo Cross, an Oxbridge academic in the form of Vanessa Shaw, Penny Feathers, a former foreign office Mandarin, and a less than famous actor, Tobias Benedict.
Each connives, cavorts and cajoles to secure their chosen books at least onto the short list. Craig is particularly championing an Irvine Welsh-like book called ‘Wot u starin at.’, which he claims as a work of gritty social realism, but the Oxford don, Vanessa, defines as a piece of surrealistic satire,“An art based on impact rather than process, structure or insight, doomed to the jack-hammer monotony of having to shock again and again.”
Her penchant is for The Frozen Torrent by Sam Black. “It had what she wanted to call an experience of literature built into it, an inherent density of reflection on the medium in which it took place: the black backing that makes the mirror shine.”
All this waxing literary lyrical while Thespian Toby has a hard-on for the hardback, All the World’s a Stage, a mock Tudor tome about the board treading Bard.
And what of the writers? St Aubyn focuses on three and filters some others through a rapturous rhapsody of parody which may elicit flattery or flattening by collegiate novelists. Brave man. Bravo!
The author most focused on is Katherine Burns, whose novel, through an appalling error by her publisher, is not entered into the competition.
“She thought of an empty train shooting through an empty station at night, an image of her mind without words. How beautifully unnecessary they seemed at that moment, but soon it would be rush hour with hardly enough words getting off the crowded train to allow any words from the crowded platform to get on. Everything congested with words, everything spoken for…pretending that nothing existed without them”.
Katherine suffers from “the special affliction of the novelist, of wanting to be the author of her own fate and take charge of a narrative whose opening chapters had been written by others with terrifying carelessness.”
If one of the books short-listed in St Aubyn’s imaginary awards is described by the author as “Fiction artfully disguised as culinary fact India’s Laurence Stern.”, then LOST FOR WORDS can similarly be describes as fiction artfully umasked as literature by a Twenty First Century Stern heir apparent.
Depth, beauty, structural integrity and an ability to revive our tired imaginations with the precision of its language, LOST FOR WORDS is a hoot.
LOST FOR WORDS by Edward St. Aubyn is published by Picador
