I
find it amusing that The
Teleportation Accident
nestled on this year's Booker longlist with Hilary Mantel's Bring Up The Bodies.
Mantel, of course, eventually won the prize with an unashamedly Tudor
novel, emphasising the importance of historical fictions in the current 'zeitgeist' – especially those which make a claim to
fidelity and accuracy. I'm thinking here not just of Mantel, but
everything from the ludicrous Downton
Abbey
to the glorious Mad
Men,
from Phillipa Gregory's The
Other Boleyn Girl
(historical romance endorsed by my own mother) to the Assassin's
Creed
video game series. And this is not even to mention the various
retro-isms that periodically wash over pop music and high street
fashion. History is in.
Beauman's
second novel is itself a historical one, of a sort. The plot flits
around interwar Berlin, Paris and Los Angeles, and demonstrates a
dizzying amount of research and detail. But research and detail do not make a convincing history. The Teleportation
Accident is
not trying to recreate history: it is trying to demolish it.
The novel concerns itself with the impossibilities of historical
fiction. Partly this decision is logical, epistemological even:
stories are not really the best way to preserve, to archive, to
recreate. A historical novel is just as much an accurate
representation of the past as a theme park.
I
suspect that Beauman also has an aesthetic agenda here, a disregard
for the current vogue for historical realism, and for realism in
general. And I tend to agree with him: I find something very kitsch,
and very dissatisfying in the Downton-type
of history. It's a stage dressing, not an insight. Characters in this
kind of historical fiction still think
like 21st
century people, however they think.
Beauman's
characters, of course, think like 21st
century people, to they extent that they think at all. They are, to a
great extent, surfaces, archetypes, bits from other novels. Beauman's
recreation of history is far more reliant on novels from history than
history itself. He produces the kind of historical novel you get if
you try and conceive of history through literature: shifting,
parodic, genre-aware, and, above all, fun as hell.
 |
| People in Downton Abbey doing their thing, whatever that is. |
This
use of other writers' works as props (in both sense of the word) has
its downside, though. It's really the only major criticism I can
offer of the novel, which is otherwise fantastic. Beauman is
especially good at plotting, by which I mean not crafting rip-roaring
adventures, but something rather more technical. He is great at
reintroducing and recombining all of the plot elements (scenes, objects, minor characters, books; MacGuffins generally) in
ingenious ways. It gives what could seem messy and overstuffed an air
of economy and purpose. The tightness
with
which he writes is hugely admirable, joyously ecstatic, and completely self-aware, a remark about the falsity of narrative tightness.
But
back to my criticism, which is, unfortunately, nagging and banal.
Beauman's hyper-inter-textuality (sorry) leaves him a little
stranded, a little identity-less. Reviewers seem to be incapable of
writing about The
Teleportation Accident
without referring to who they think Beauman's influences are, coming
up with a vast array of authors who have been studied, cribbed and
alluded to. And Ned himself, author of The
Teleportation Accident,
is left, to use a grotesque cliché, without a voice of his own. I'm
not really sure what this means; I think it's something to do with
tone. I am convinced that great literature, the really good stuff,
marks itself as unique, as the product of this
particular author, this
particular
style, when you read it. I am being prescriptive and limited of course,
but, I like to think, not completely wrong. Beauman isn't quite
there yet, hasn't yet found a way to forge a vast collage of writers
and sentences and styles and facts and details and history and life into a cohesive artwork. Undoubtedly, not having done so
is the point, and it's terribly and grossly New-Critic-y of me to
suggest otherwise. And it is. But I don't think the two are
irreconcilable; a cohesive collage, a themed scrapyard, if you will,
is an achievable goal.
