At 10:35 on an early summer's morning, John Lanchester sat down at his study desk, switched on his new Dell computer, opened up the word processing programme that the computer had come with and began

then discreetly plugged in my faithful friend, selected Dawkins’s tract and awaited the familiar greeting:

Audible – audio that speaks to you.

The God Delusion

by Richard Dawkins

Chapter One

However fast I ran, however far I ran, I could not escape the figure pursuing me. Its speed never increased, its mode of locomotion never altered from its terrible, maimed, partially limbless slither. I ran and ran, but it never fell behind me, and as night fell, and my strength began to fail, I turned and looked, and saw to my horror that the shape was now closer than it had ever been. It was close enough that instead of a gasp or hiss, I could now tell it was trying to speak, to utter a single word. It repeated the word several times before, with a sensation of ice spreading through my body, I realised what it was trying to say:

‘Listen … listen … ’

I've got a horrible feeling the 'moral' of this story will be that he is punished for not listening to people.

quick xpost to Chinaski. i do think, to try and be as fair as possible to Lanchester, he's deliberately not aiming for poetry or rhythm. this prose is to a certain extent his vision of the world - prosaic, lacking in conspicuous beauty or romantic notions of awe and the sublime. i don't think that has to mean that your prose is so club-footed or syntactically cross-eyed. successful humour is completely absent. it's a notoriously hard thing to do of course. but he does feel the need to *try* all the time.

And I mean there is intended parody in this story, but the intended stuff is all very bad. and the rest of the stuff that is all very bad isn't parody.

i think you are being too subtle for lanchester by observing (correctly) the undead nature of the prose and linking it to the subject matter. unfortunately too much of what is bad here is also bad in /Capital/.

Thursday (continued)

...

The following is what happened next.

I'm going to do JL the favour of assuming that *has* to be deliberate. The problem is it's fairly close to some of his other möbius strip sentences.

xpost to wins - no i don't think so. i think he's aiming for the flat, affectless prose you get in some 20th century writing. Remainder would be one example. Flatmate suggested Gertrude Stein's manner (which W Lewis referred to as the 'Stein stuffer', which influenced early Hemingway, and via him (always bizarre this to me) some of the UK's 20th Century humorists. You can also take it via Hemingway into Raymond Carver, say.

The specific humour he's aiming for, I think, relies on a reader who is both self-consciously knowing, but actually socially purblind. It's the sort of thing.. i'm trying to get it straight in my head, but you get it in conversations at work. It's effectively relying on social and observational cliches for your conversation and humour. The dentist is always something to be feared, buses never come singly etc - there's a sort of non-directional irritation and cynicism at play that completely lacks imagination.

That makes sense - was just a passing thought re a kind of deliberate parodic bumptiousness

it's reasonable, and 'parodic bumptiousness' is right, but i guess i'm not quite sure what 'Irish' would equate to here – obv Myles, but this is not that. none of the high flights of absurdity and enjoyment to be had. the narrator in this story is closer to an extremely moribund version of the Nabakov unreliable narrator, in Lolita, or The Real Life of Sebastian Knight say (or even Pale Fire.)

I was thinking of myles yes, and some Beckett, and uhhh darraghmac lol

basically he goes through another couple of paragraphs slagging the conference and a moderator 'with hooped earrings' and then he puts his earplugs i to listen to the simultaneous translation feed. this despite him already having plugged in his earphones at the beginning of the paragraph.

I inserted my earphones into the conference radio apparatus and settled down to listen

then about 70 words later, with no intervening action:

The three Europeans were all talking simultaneously when I plugged in the earphones

i've got a little bit of sunday evening / pre-week tiredness, but considering that (the inevitable 'why?' 'how?' 'have i missed something?') has just produced enough anger to wake me up i can tell you. fuck i've made a cup of tea and not brought it in. hang on.

lol the holy trinity yes.

ha ha 'I inserted my earphones into the conference radio apparatus and settled down to listen'.

it's like the thread title aaaaaargghgh.

I've gone over a couple of JL reviews recently and have been on the alert to see whether any of this stuff has been called out at all. Just went to see whether Capital had been reviewed in the LRB - it hasn't interestingly, you'd've thought it wd've been. The most recently reviewed is Fragrant Harbour from 2002, which I got bought but haven't read (I thought it was factual), but this jumped out:

There are names within the novel, too, that Lanchester seems to have not quite worked out what to do with: it would be fine to give London’s newspapers aliases such as the Toxic, the Serious and the Sentinel, and it isn’t a bad joke, only it sounds slightly odd when the Mail and the Times and the Guardian are in there as well, with their normal names.

(it is a bad joke). this reminded me of something i noticed upthread in Capital:

"Besides, he had Sky Sports. The tackle which smashed Freddy's leg was shown, in the usual way, about ten times."

RONG.

Also, I don't understand Lanchester's methodology around nouns and proper nouns.

he has to refer to a 'west london club' but will also say 'Sky Sports' – and this isn't the only example of the oddly parallel or partially remembered universe he lives in. something Kasper Hauser-ish about it - like asking someone to recollect their society after they've suffered a brain lesion.

the generally trustworthy Nicholas Lezard's review of Mr Philips was also interesting:

I had my reservations about this one. Lanchester's previous and first novel, The Debt to Pleasure, I had left mostly unread; there was too much of an odour of Nabokov coming off the book. Still, reviewers loved it, and it won more prizes than I have space to mention. Now this novel is about its eponymous hero's thoughts and feelings as he wanders around London during the course of a single day. Mr Phillips is a reasonably kind-hearted, randy nonentity. What does that remind you of?

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If nothing else, one could be impressed by Lanchester's sheer cheek. Lanchester, an intelligent and trustworthy critic himself, cannot be unaware of the possibility of comparison. What on earth could he have been thinking of, apart from, "I know - I'll write a book that isn't as good as Ulysses "?

Still, many critics, including our own, loved this book to bits as well. Adam Phillips, whose opinions on such matters I used to revere, said it was "exceptionally funny"; Allan Massie said its "comedy" was "rich and humane", which is at least a more honestly decipherable way of saying "the kind of comedy which does not actually make you laugh".

I should point out that there may well be something wrong with me that prevents me from finding it as hilarious as everyone else seems to. (I did laugh out loud on page 168.) There are people for whom The Diary of a Nobody is not a comedy but a heartrending, Chekhovian tragedy, a book that cannot be read without hyperventilating with painful compassion; I'm one of them. And this might be the case here. I suggest that you go to a shop and read a couple of its pages of flat, busted English (the prose is almost a textbook example of style indirecte libre), and if you like them, then buy the book: it's like that all the way through.

I, for my part, am suspicious of my own suspicion. It is the kind of book that may turn out to be very good after all, but whose qualities are only revealed after days, weeks, or even years of thinking about it.

So I may well be missing something here. It reads as if it took about two weeks to write; three, if we include some research on double-entry book-keeping to give Mr Phillips's past as an accountant some plausibility.

I haven't read Mr Phillips either. it's interesting that Lezard (this 18 years ago) has the same uncertainty and suspicion of himself that is characteristic of approaching Lanchester today. Everyone else seems to like him, and he gets published, so it must be me, sort of thing. But he has at least two or three otm points there - the sort of comedy that doesn't make you laugh, the flat, busted English, and the sense that it must have been written quickly without much attention.

here's a pure bit of lanchester doing horror writing (mainly trying to channel MR James) - haven't read it yet, but i'm interested to see how he approaches it (btw just in case the description of him doing it twice in the paragraph wasn't enough, he's plugged into the conf translation feed):

I reached my lodging with my lungs bursting and my heart racing, unable to draw a full breath or think a clear thought. I do not believe that any man could have outpaced me through those streets. I tried to take comfort from that thought even as my mind wrestled with the impossible horror it had seen and heard. I found that it was difficult even to speak my own name. I am Pip Gargery, I said, or tried to say, but my mouth was so dry I could form no intelligent sentence.

And then I heard a noise, a noise I had never heard before and hope never to hear again. It was a noise of a body moving along the ground, propelling itself with audible effort. The lower part of the torso was wet and so the thing (I will not call it a man, though it seemed as though it had once been human), as it moved, made a slithering, sucking noise. It was a sound similar to a heavy man wearing waders and walking through thick mud. I felt an overwhelming sense of cold, not merely inside my veins, but as if all the air in the room was suddenly blowing with the coldest of north winds. The slithering, sucking, mucilaginous noise grew closer and louder and then as it came to the door there was a pause. The silence lasted for a few seconds. I hoped that the creature’s strength had failed. Then I heard its crying hiss, louder than ever, through the wooden frame that stood between us.

‘ … listen … listen … ’

The noise, terrible in itself, was followed by an abrupt crash. The thing had flung itself against the door, which shook and rattled and seemed set to give way.

‘ … listen … listen … ’

"crying hiss" is sheer class

lol that 'audible effort' is unfortunate as we've all been primed to expect 'propelling itself with the audible app that comes on my smartphone' by now.

ha ha 'crying hiss' omg. he really does just put down words without thinking what thing they are trying to put in your brane doesn't he?

also, it's not clear whether he's supposed to be channelling pip or himself. pip is (just about) 'sound similar to a heavy man wearing waders and walking through thick mud', 'mucilaginous' is not.

'through the wooden frame that stood between us'

was he frightened of saying 'door' again? he's not generally conspicuously averse to repetition normally. you can say door more than once ffs. it's what it is.

which shook, rattled, and seemed set to give way

really shouldn't put 'shook' and 'rattled' together like that unless you do want people to infer it's JL Lewis doing a 'you keep on knocking but you can't come in' turn.

The lower part of the torso was wet and so the thing (I will not call it a man, though it seemed as though it had once been human), as it moved, made a slithering, sucking noise.

AGAIN, 'as it moved' is in the wrong place, and directly after those cumbersome brackets as well. i think he must have originally written ' the lower part of the torso was wet and so the thing made a slithering, sucking noise', felt there was ambiguity, and attempted to *forestall* the ambiguity, rather than understanding how to write the sentence so it made decent sense.

he rushes out of the conference hall.

I had no choice except to get out of that room as soon as I physically could

this is something people say, so i'm probably being unfair here. but does physically *really* need to be there? its presence makes you think of what ambiguity he's trying to avoid, and so you end up exploring that as well. he does this a lot.

anyway he's locked himself in his room and is flying home tomorrow, so imagine all will be well...

guess what! he can't sleep. shit. i hope something bad doesn't happen. first, some laboured shit in case you hadn't really got what was going on:

I can understand having accidentally downloaded a corrupted version of Great Expectations, and I can understand how a bug in the Audible app might have overridden the subsequent purchase and download of a different ebook, and I can just about conceive that an ill-meaning hacker, one of the several people at this conference who dislike me and my ideas, might have tapped into the audio stream from the translators’ studio, but I cannot conceive how all these things could have happened to me in sequence, even in the most well-resourced and co-ordinated of conspiracies.

And now, another persistent after-effect of the day, is that in the settling noises of the sleeping hotel, I seem to be hearing things. It is as if, among the noises of people bidding one another goodnight, trudging up the stairs and down corridors, closing doors and curtains and running taps and flushing toilets, there is another sound, quiet at first but growing louder. It is as if I can hear the movement of a body which is not running or walking or crawling but instead – there is no other word for it – sucking and slithering along the floor. It was a faint noise when I first put out the light but, in the intervals of quiet when the other hotel noises die down, it seems to grow louder. It appears to be coming closer. Now for the first time I can hear other noises beside the muddy traction of a body along the floor, a hiss, or a noise of escaping air, which is, unless I am overinfluenced by what I was hearing earlier today, just possible to make out as a word:

‘ … listen … listen … ’

omg no way.

'the muddy traction of a body along the floor' tho

I have double-locked the door and put the chair against it, with its weight against the handle. Nothing is getting in that way tonight. And yet the slithering is getting louder, and the cry of ‘listen’ is getting louder too, and all along I can’t help feeling that this is bad, this is very very bad, this is rău, rău!, there is nothing I can do to stop this, listen, listen, it is coming it is coming it is co

(yes that's where the main narrative ends).

this is rău, rău

ah but!

Notes by Dr Frances Scott

Director of Acute Inpatient Mental Health Services, Maudsley Hospital

The preceding document was found on the desk of a 58-year-old man, Professor Merritt Watkins, who is now a patient in my care.

oh yeah that last bit was part of the diary too wasn't it? lol at him writing in his diary right up until the last minute while the rău-rău stuff was going down.

and it was all a dream

i think Dawkins might have a case for libel here maybe

Professor Watkins has been my patient for three months. He responds to sedation but not to other forms of treatment and is docile for much of the time but is still prone to visual and auditory hallucinations. As sudden onset psychotic illnesses go, it is an unusually abrupt and fully developed case but not an unprecedented one. The prognosis is guarded to poor.

i'm assuming that last bit - 'guarded to poor' - is a thing that doctor's say. 'guarded' seems a bit weird. 'i am being guarded in what I say' yes, but a medical prognosis? don't feel lanchester wd get this wrong tho.

hahaha I had thought the previous bit was the end

fucking hell the end bit really veers off into wtf territory.

One symptom in this case is, to my knowledge, unique. The professor, however heavily sedated, cannot bear to be in the presence of any kind of paper with writing on it. This psychosis immediately had the most florid manifestations. His symptom is triggered by the merest fragment of script on a postcard, is worse with anything printed, and is unbearably acute whenever he catches a glimpse of a book. The staff here have to go to great lengths to avoid this happening, because the distress it induces in the patient is both intense and long-lasting. It manifests itself in one particular symptom: he puts his fingers in his ears and starts shouting. He always yells the same set phrases escalating in volume until he has to be restrained and forcibly sedated. ‘I can’t hear you,’ he shouts, as if to the book. ‘I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you. You are inaudible.’

so hang on. is this all a comment on audio books? that 'you are inaudible' is really making me pull a face.

whoomp there it is.

really really bad.

that last bit is like drinking a disgusting cup of coffee.

it would disgrace a third rate tales of the unexpected

i don't know if it's meant to be a moral, or a shaggy dog story punchline. Neither option stands up to any scrutiny.

no exactly. it has the tone of both.

ghost stories and this sort of i'm going to say 'sly wit' but ykwim don't make for good bedfellows

and it's interesting you mention Myles, wins, because i was reading some of O'Dolan's pre-Myles student stuff recently. and it's not really very much like his later stuff, relatively factual - actual student reporting - and fairly underdeveloped in terms of his later style, but it's still got it, whatever 'it' is. he's got a tense capable eye and a great ear.

regarding that 'door'/'wooden frame' thing (which implies that there is an *empty* wooden frame. one of the remarkable things about lanchester is the way he can be extraordinarily lazy in some respects but at other times really takes the long and laboured way round.

it's clearly meant to be a punchline (probably a moral too) but it's obviously not funny, or witty, or clever. its not even a pun of any kind.

nothing about that end gestures towards anything in the story (sokal type meets count magnus). it’s just “u listened to an audiobook” and at the end he was just listening to the conference feed. nothing really precedes anything. capital was a bit like that too, and his sentences are scrambled by a parallel cause-effect problem.

Even ignoring everything else, as a straightforward James pastiche/homage it doesn't work. The monster itself doesn't do it for me - too clearly described or too gory? Not sure, this could be personal taste, I've never found anyone (e.g. Le Fanu) who can spook me like James. But the mechanism and the moral, these are confused and unclear. Is Vlad coming after our man because he was uncouth enough to do some 4g downloading in the presence of Vlad's grave, or because he is a smug & blinkered know-it-all? With James it would be one or the other (and unlikely the latter, his demons rarely have such fine grained morality, either being straightforwardly retributive, punishing the merely curious, or simply arbitrary). If the former, well, why? What is Vlad's problem with 4g? James doesn't always offer explanations like that but when he does they are usually clear & simple.

It's got a strong whiff of Aickman about it, too - but where Aickman (and James) grant space and allow the unknown and the abject to invade and colonise, Lanchester seems to want to overpopulate - with daft gewgaws and pointless repetition.

I found my old GameCube at Christmas and keep reading "Listen" as Link's fairy.

This whole story belongs in Thog's Masterclass: http://thog.org/thogmatic.php

also, i'm wondering whether US documentary journalism has something to do with it:

“On a pancake-flat stretch of land not far from the Mississippi River, Illinois farmer Jerry Gaffner thumbs through weather forecasts and crop reports on his tablet computer, searching for clues about when to market his soybean crop.

A Ghost Story, now available as a podcast - read by Toby Jones: https://www.lrb.co.uk/audio-and-video

Berberian Sound Studio, it ain't.

oh no.

‘Listen...’