It was while he was still an undergraduate at Edinburgh University, where we were contemporaries, that he wrote and published his first novel, Dark Jade, a semi-autobiographical account of a fiery homosexual relationship which instantly made his name and saw him chosen as one of Granta’s Twenty Best Novelists.† That was succeeded, three years later, by what I and most people have always regarded as his very best piece of fiction, The Lady from Knokke-le-Zoute, about a Belgian divorcee in her late thirties who, after being mugged in the forecourt of the railway station at Nice while on solitary vacation, despoiled of her passport, travellers cheques, credit cards and suitcase, rapidly subsides into first destitution then prostitution. In the hands of another writer, a short-order romancer whose brilliance depends upon his remaining ceaselessly aware of his own limitations, a Zweig or a Bunin, it would have constituted no more than a twenty-four-carat gem of a short story. What Slavorigin made of this slim yet promising premise was a multi-character fresco stretching to three hundred dense pages, a ‘scathing indictment’, as more than one hack reviewer was pleased to describe it, of the moral bankruptcy of globalised capitalism. It won him – and it would have provoked a scandal had it not – that year’s Booker Prize.
There were to be four subsequent novels.‡ (He was not a prolific writer and, the heir to one of Eastern Europe’s greatest fortunes, he never had to be.) The first, A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Causes, the account of a deadpan young madman who, in the book’s opening paragraph, scrawls ‘Not to be. That is the answer.’ on the back of an unpaid phone bill and, in its closing paragraph, swallows, one by one, a jumbo tube of barbiturates, disappointed all but his unconditional admirers by its absence of humour and its flirtation with the dated fad of magical realism: ‘turgid’ was a word that began to be applied to his style. The second, The Boy with Highlights in His Hair, a surprisingly soggy coming-of-age tale and more of a novella than a novel, passed almost unnoticed (although it was the only one of his works to be filmed – wholly unsuccessfully, I might add). But it was with the third that he enjoyed a spectacular return to critical favour, even if it sold considerably fewer copies in Britain and the United States than he was accustomed to. Wayfarer, a vertiginously synoptic six-hundred-page-long overview of his native country’s twentieth-century history, traces the individual destinies, some of them interlinked, some not, of thirty-eight school-children who posed in the nineteen-twenties for an end-of-term class photograph which its protagonist disinters exactly half-a-century later while searching through his papers for his own birth certificate in order to prove to the authorities, of whom he has fallen foul for a never specified reason, that he is one-hundred-percent Bulgarian. The novel’s formal and stylistic maestria was undeniable, and Slavorigin was once more nominated for the Booker (he lost out to a Caribbean writer whose name the world has already forgotten), although I have to say that I personally tried twice to finish it and failed both times. (I doubt even God – who sees, and presumably also reads, everything – managed to get to the end.)
What followed was three years of silence. It was an all very relative silence, though, as he seemed to be seldom out of the newspapers, partying at Annabel’s, holidaying in Elton John’s Riviera villa with his newest boyfriend in tow (to his great credit, he never sought to conceal his homosexuality: the famous first sentence of Dark Jade was the brave and noble ‘I have always pitied any man who wasn’t gay’), firing off regular broadsides in the Guardian at the increasingly repressive policies of the Blair government. Then, when his peers were just beginning to forget that there had once been more to him than the playboy polemicist, there appeared – precisely, out of the blue – the book that was to transform his life and propel it to its premature and horrible end, Out of a Clear Blue Sky.
So much has been written about that book, even the most motivated of readers may well believe that this is one stepping-stone which can be leapt over. Yet I repeat: to comprehend what followed, and what follows in this memoir, we really must immerse ourselves twice in the same river.
