paper, pages, pavements

This book started so well. Not the writing itself, which is way below average, but the strange coincidences surrounding my reading of it.

I bought a copy last week in my regular haunt, Bookmongers second hand bookstore on Coldharbour Lane, Brixton. I usually have to negotiate my way through a cavalcade of drug dealers, crackheads and beggars before I can step through the door into the the piles of dusty, spine-cracked and damp smelling books in the shop, but it’s worthwhile and dependable for a good book. There’s always good music playing in Bookmongers. I have no idea who or what the artists or genres are, but it’s usually some broken american guy plucking a guitar and bemoaning his misfortune. I look forward to the music in the background as much as leafing through the heaps of neglected novels on the shelves. Visiting Bookmongers is rather like visiting an orphanage. All the dog-eared, worn out books gaze at you from the shelves, pleading to be taken into a good home. And, like Madonna in Africa, I can’t take them all, so I just grab the prettiest one and leave.

This time it was Remainder by Tom McCarthy. A chunky hardcover for a fiver. It ticked the boxes for me: disillusioned / damaged / existential male in a metropolis trying to make sense of it all. I’ve bought countless novels based around that narrative scheme. I should perhaps just buy a mirror instead. Anyway, I leave the shop and cross Coldharbour Lane and go straight into one of my other regular haunts, The Honesty Cafe. It’s your typical organic posh-hippie liberal-mafia gaff. All carrot juice and vegetarian options, but they do a cracking all day breakfast thing and good coffee. They also have wide wooden tables so you can sprawl your newspapers, notebooks and novels about the place and fester in your thoughts for an hour or so. It’s a shame they had to take the ashtrays away, otherwise it would be perfect.

So I order food and coffee, pull the book out, start reading and right away I have a meta-fictional experience that would make Paul Auster proud. The main character in the book leaves his flat in Brixton and walks along Coldharbour Lane. Where I am. Right now. It’s a neat coincidence. I keep reading. The character in the novel arranges a meeting. At the Design Museum. I work at the Design Museum. The character goes for a meal in the Blueprint Cafe. I ate there last week. So, the bizarre coincidences are building up at a pace, reality and fiction blurring and intertwining and I’m thinking that this is The Book. I am the book. This is it. Someone I know is going to turn up in Chapter 3. By Chapter 4 I’ll reach enlightenment. Amazing.

Disappointingly, nothing else happens. In fact, nothing really happens at all. The character is recovering from an undisclosed, mysterious accident, has been compensated with 8.5 million pounds on the condition he never mentions the accident, then he carries out some indulgent and pointless re-enactments of other experiences until he becomes obsessive compusive and finally mad. Not mad in any interesting or revealing way, just, well, a bit stupid really. It’s not a good book at all. Pages 20 to 220 could have been conflated into a few pages for all the insight into the characters condition they provide. There’s nothing to be gained or learned from reading this book, the premise is a false promise and sadly I’ve wasted a few days valuable reading time. I made it to the end though, but only because I was holding out for another fiction / real-life overlap.