Another review: Gilbert Adair: And Then
There Was No One January 4th, 2009 Stewart
Gilbert Adair,
in the third of his Evadne Mount novels, changes tack and disposes with the cosy
Christie model subverted successfully in The Act Of Roger Murgatroyd and less so in A Mysterious Affair Of Style, by opting to throw
himself into the mix and tell the story of And Then There Was No One
(2009) as a fictional memoir. Set in 2011, Adair has found himself at a literary
festival in a Swiss town by the Reichenbach Falls, setting for Conan Doyle’s
attempt at ridding himself of his popular detective character.//The influence of
Sherlock Holmes plays as much a part in And Then There Was No One as
that of Agatha Christie has for the triptych of Evadne Mount novels, and fans of
Holmes may be interested to know that Adair reproduces, in full from his
fictional new book of Sherlock Holmes stories, his take on The Giant Rat Of
Sumatra, first mentioned in The Adventure Of The Sussex Vampire
(cf The Casebook Of Sherlock Holmes) as “a story for which the world is
not yet prepared”.//The reason for this change in the style of the novels comes
late, but is worth mentioning, as Adair regularly talks about his novels, past,
present, and in translation throughout.[...] Adair begins by playing with
the conventions of the murder mystery genre. Where the murder didn’t occur until
late in A Mysterious Affair Of Style, the murder has long since been
wrapped up here. The victim is Gustav Slavorigin, a Booker Prize-winning
author sent, after publishing a collection of incendiary anti-American essays,
into hiding....//The prologue, seemingly extraneous to the mystery itself, fills
in details that, to a first read, seem dry and dull, and in doing so recalls
both the introduction to Eco’s The Name Of The Rose and the short
foreword to Nabokov’s Lolita. This in itself is strange, given that
Adair has mentioned in the
past that Nabokov has “become something of an albatross about [his]
neck”. The details of this chapter deal with the history of Slavorigin - his
early days at university, with Adair, through the rise, fall, and infamy of his
writing career. One notable book, and the reason Slavorigin is making a rare
public pitstop, is his new thriller, A Reliable Narrator, which gives
the game away without, if you catch my drift, doing so.//
"How to describe
A Reliable Narrator? Its opening chapter resembles the concluding
chapter of a whodunnit, one that just happens never actually to have been
written. Thus the reader of Slavorigin’s book (I mean, the book which
was written) cannot hope to comprehend the picturesque twists of this
first-chapter denouement since, of the murder which has clearly taken place, the
only detail to which he is made privy is the identity of the murderer, a
murderer who has already been apprehended, charged, tried, found guilty and
sentenced to life imprisonment."
The idea of a reliable narrator is played
around with too, as is Adair’s playful style. Personal views come into the fray,
such as calling the forty-five minutes of literary festivals “so much
hassle for so little result” and his description of a book as being “a fat,
virtuosically executed novel by one of that new breed of American
wunderkinder who, I would be lying if I denied it, are positively
bloated with talent but who are also just too fucking pleased with themselves.”
As a fictional Adair, he’s able to get away with it, even if, with reference to
Slavorigin’s book:.// The first-person protagonist is no canonic unreliable
narrator, such a tired old cliché of postmodernism now, but a perfectly reliable
narrator, except that not a single soul is prepared to rely on him.//The usual
alliteration, literary and cinematic in-jokes, and postmodern trickery are
present and accounted for in And Then There Was No One. The unashamed
use of puns (’Google Gogol’, a delicatessen named ‘Salvador Deli’ and a few more
Nabokovian references, ‘Son of Palefire’ and ‘Adair or Ardor’) adds to
the fun, and I’d like to think that only Adair’s style, like a British
eccentric, could get away with a metaphor like “the train tranquilly unzipped
the country’s flies from Oxford to London”.// Amongst the answers at that
session there are some interesting insights that, if we believe the reliable
narrator, into Adair that show And Then There Was No One as being that
personal work...