Nicholas Spice

Sometimes what is left out of a poem or a story creates a more arresting sense of reality than what is left in. Keats’s poetic fragment ‘This Living Hand’ ends with the hand thrust towards the reader: ‘See here it is/I hold it towards you.’ The poem’s rhetoric conjures a space in which the spectral hand appears like a hallucination, hovering somewhere...

This brief, disconsolate and in certain respects disagreeable novel starts with the funeral of the anonymous (eponymous) hero and ends with his death. The circularity in the narrative is a powerfully expressive feature of a book whose formal intricacy could be thought the most interesting thing about it. Of course, we only fully appreciate the novel’s structural virtues once we have finished reading it, and if we came to it fresh from the invigorating experience of Sabbath’s Theatre or the American Trilogy or The Plot against America, and were hoping for something less well-behaved than structural virtue, we will have had a lot of adjusting to do. Resolute about facing up to the bleakest facts of the human condition (the progressive deterioration of the body, the miseries of illness, the humiliation of old age and, at the end of it all, death’s unrefusable invitation to oblivion), Everyman defines itself in Roth’s ebulliently productive oeuvre precisely by what is missing from it of his irreverence and vitality.

“To be moved by Desdemona’s death we must in one way believe in it totally, while knowing that it would be absurd to leap onto the stage and stop Othello suffocating her. The child who knows that Father Christmas is his father but does not allow this knowledge to spoil his belief in Father Christmas does the same thing as an adult at a play or a patient in psychoanalysis. The complication for the patient in analysis, however, is that he himself is acting in the play; and his difficulty is that he is both Bottom and the ass.”

An item in the 11 May 1889 edition of the Pall Mall Gazette, quoted by Ruskin in a footnote to Praeterita, reports ‘extraordinary’ events in some allotments in Leicester. Every evening for several days a nightingale has been singing in a thorn bush above the mouth of a railway tunnel on the Midland mainline, attracting so large a crowd of listeners (some of whom have stayed regularly until the early hours of the morning) that the Chief Constable has seen fit to draft in a number of policemen ‘to maintain order and prevent damage’.‘

I met Vikram Seth by chance, he met me by mistake. He sat down next to me at an occasion he had never meant to attend. It was 6.45 p.m. on Thursday 25 March at the Royal Society of Literature in Bayswater. Seth had come to hear a friend of his read. I had come to hear the Minister for the Arts describe the Government’s support for literature. At 7 p.m., as the Minister began to speak, Seth looked nonplussed and started for the door. It was too late, he was trapped.