2016 wasn’t a busy year on this blog, largely because I was occupied with other things – including a new book. So I was pleasantly surprised when, a few weeks ago, a couple of people mentioned being switched on to Lawrence Osborne by my post about him, which went up in May. One of them went so far as to say that I should write pieces of that kind more often.
I doubt that this will happen much in 2017, but I thought I’d mention that the best novel I’ve read recently is David Szalay’s All That Man Is. I’d previously read Szalay’s melancholy Spring and not been very taken with it, but All That Man Is feels thrillingly ambitious.
It comprises nine narratives, the first and last of which are clearly linked. Other than that, the connections are only thematic, albeit sometimes rather didactically underlined. With their nine male protagonists aged between seventeen and seventy-three, the stories share a concern with boredom, failure, transience… and of course masculinity and the threats it faces.
Although written before the UK’s referendum on EU membership, All That Man Is also seems like an elegy for the fluidity of movement (and identity) possible in a pre-Brexit Europe. As Dwight Garner commented in the New York Times, ‘This book is a demonstration of uncommon power. It is a bummer, and it is beautiful.’
Inspired – or perhaps provoked – by Szalay’s most recent novel, I turned during the final days of the year to his first, London and the South-East (2008). This struck me as a hybrid of Kafka, J. G. Ballard and Glengarry Glen Ross, with a nod to Hamlet and a heavy helping of The Office. That perhaps risks making it sound more brilliant than it is as well as more derivative, yet it manages to be – and I mean this as praise – rivetingly dismal.
The main character is Paul Rainey, an ashen-faced, booze-addled, borderline impotent schlub who’s somehow also a slick ad salesman, punting space in one of those desolate business magazines you can never quite believe exist. With a fine sense of the absurd, Szalay evokes the crushing drabness of Paul’s life. It says a lot that the chief redeeming feature of his existence is his stepson’s talent for snooker, which has to be nurtured in environments every bit as grim and crapulent as Paul’s professional world.
Because of his interest in the textures of banality, and because of his recently obvious dissatisfaction with the conventions of the novel, Szalay has been compared to Karl Ove Knausgaard. London and the South-East has some of the Norwegian’s propensity for darkly obsessive self-examination and painful humour. But the most memorable thing about it is its patient scrutiny of the realities and indignities of the modern workplace.
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