How to describe A Reliable Narrator? Its opening chapter resembles the concluding chapter of a whodunit, 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. Or, rather, an alleged murderer. For, as the reader comes to realise, there has occurred a gross miscarriage of justice. The real murderer (A Reliable Narrator is written in the first person, as if we were inside this murderer’s head) has eluded the law, has, as they say, got away with it. But therein lies his dilemma. It transpires that the murder he committed was no more than a parenthesis, open then closed again, in an otherwise suffocatingly dingy existence. The protagonist was a nonentity before he committed it and, never having had the chance to bask in the limelight of guilt, never having enjoyed his fifteen minutes of infamy, he has become a nonentity all over again. Just imagine the agony of his frustration. To have destroyed a fellow creature, to have barehandedly squeezed the last breath out of ‘a whorehouse miscarriage, a lying, foul-mouthed, poo-flinging ape’, yet to gaze into his shaving mirror every morning and see gazing back at him the same old pre-murder loser – this becomes so insufferable to his self-esteem that he howls out his guilt to anybody who will listen to him. But nobody will. Nobody but the reader, of course, who alone knows.
Hence the title. That 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.
A Reliable Narrator was published to a set of reviews, not only in Britain, that most writers would die for. Which is undoubtedly why its author was invited to Meiringen by the organisers of its first Sherlock Holmes Festival. (Why he agreed to go is another question.) And which is also when my own part in his story begins.
* The ‘g’ of his surname, hard in Bulgarian, was eventually palatalised by the wear and tear of English usage.
† It was dedicated to the Scottish (gay) poet Edwin Morgan, ‘my spectral mentor’.
‡ Plus, published by Granta, an unrewarding and most cruelly selective autobiographical fragment, A Biography of Myself – composed, significantly, in the third person – and a theatrical squib, Enter Godot, staged at the 1993 Edinburgh Festival but never revived.
§ ‘It is too often forgotten,’ read another passage, ‘that the cultural glory of the contemporary United States has always been its high, not its populist, art.’ And he singled out for praise the poets Stevens, Eliot, Pound, Frost, Marianne Moore, etc, and the novelists Hemingway, Faulkner, Salinger, Gaddis, etc, if less so the ‘much-overrated’ Fitzgerald.
¶ Even so, he regarded these as exceptions. The Hollywood movies which he truly adored, and which he dated meticulously as belonging to a three-decade Golden Age that stretched from 1929 to 1959, were almost all, so he tendentiously asserted, made by European immigrants, cultural and political refugees: i.e. Lubitsch, Lang, Hitchcock, Siodmak, Curtiz, Ulmer, Preminger, etc. And I recall how he enjoyed teasing his fellow film-buff students at Edinburgh with the (in fact, true) statement that he had never bothered to catch up with either Godfather I or II. ‘The Mafia as Borgias, no thanks!’ he would sneer. Or ‘Why should I go see a film in which Marlon Brando hams it up as a big dumb thug with cottonwool in his cheeks?’
|| The subject of the original had been a small earthquake in Chile.
** Emphasis mine. In the original the aside is rendered all the more provocative by the omission of italics.
†† Trees and newspapers, after all, form two successive generations of the same dynasty, the latter being the literate offspring of the bluff, inarticulate former, like college-educated children of peasant stock.
<p>Chapter One</p>
