Skip to main content

Boxer Beetle Booker

This week, while daily commuting to London and back, I’ve been getting some reading done. Shakespeare, Sewall’s biography of Dickinson, and - at last - some non-required reading.

Ned Beauman’s addition to this year’s Man-Booker Longlist for The Teleportation Accident reminded me of my long intention to read his first book, Boxer Beetle, written at the disgustingly unripe age of 24. I have had my suspicions that Beauman is – with this tremendous head-start – going to go very far indeed, perhaps as another Amis. But those Beauman shows the same precocity, his realization is rather different.

Boxer Beetle is at heart a ripping piece of genre fiction – a mixture of mystery and smut. It has the enjoyable pace of a cheap yarn. This is not to degrade it: Beauman has attempted to marry a vividly fluid prose with a bright and curious mind which is evidently drawn to the tawdry.

The novel is the story of a modern-day Nazi-memorabilia collector who is pulled into a mystery involving a gay Jewish boxer, a plummy entomologist-eugenicist, and a ring of 1930 fascists. This is a woefully inadequate summary, and much like the one given on the back of the book, but to say much more will spoil the ride. It’s a collision of disciplines - twentieth-century history, genetics, fascist politics, Judaism, atonal music, and constructed linguistics – which brashly shows the fruitfulness and range of the author’s mind. There is the inevitable postmodern cameo from the author’s own namesake, an online presence named ‘nbeauman’ who briefly appears and bows out.

I’ve learned to judge a book’s verve from its first sentence – a trick I’ve learned from my friend K, who’s memorized the first lines of all her favourite books. Beauman’s is a keeper: ‘In idle moments I sometimes like to close my eyes and imagine Joseph Goebbel’s forty-third birthday party’. Narrated by an odorifous young man named Kevin, the novel prances along, veering between the modern-day and the inter-war past, with regular digressions, as befits the habit of talented young male writers with the hots for Lawrence Sterne.

However, Beauman gives away his youth and inexperience – or perhaps his own taste – by writing two-dimensional characters which are not unlike their genre-bound counterparts: the rich fat hoarder; the mysterious ‘Welshman’ with a gruff voice and a gun; the priggish English gentlemen (who is all too afraid of admitting his own homosexual leanings); and young women who prance and strike others smartly with their umbrellas. The sexual encounters are written with the gaudy tastelessness of Romance fiction, and there is altogether too much shouting, yelping, screeching, screaming which carries the novel from the antic to the hysteric and hyperbolic.

That being said Boxer Beetle is a success, especially for a first novel. It was difficult to put it down between Tube rides. I’d recommend watching Beauman’s productions carefully from now on.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

When the Lights Go Out

Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel A Single Man is nothing less than a modern masterpiece and, I have no doubt, will turn out to be one of my favorite books of 2010. The novel follows George as he struggles through a single day in 1960’s Los Angeles following the death of his lover. George wakes up, goes to the university where he teaches literature, goes to the gym, has dinner with a friend, gets drunk at a dive bar, swims in the ocean, and arrives at the end. George is “three quarters human,” a machine trying to keep himself alive until it is time not to be. Like an actor, he is absent from humanity. When he looks at his neighbors, at the suburban families, he thinks "They are afraid of what they know is somewhere in the darkness around them, of what may at any moment emerge into the undeniable light of their flash-lamps, nevermore to be ignored, explained away. The fiend that won't fit into their statistics, the Gordon that refuses their plastic surgery, the vampire drinki...

Natural Love

We sadly miss the beauty and silliness of medieval cosmology: “The sun, moon, and stars go still round…for love of perfection. This love is manifest, I say, in inanimate creatures. How comes a loadstone to drawn iron to it? jet chaff? The ground to covet showers, but for love? No creature, St. Hierome concludes, is to be found…[that does not love something], no stock, no stone, that hath not some feeling of love. ‘Tis more eminent in plants, herbs, and is especially observed in vegetals…the olive and the myrtle embrace each other in roots and branches if they grow near…” Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy .

The School of Hard Knocks

It is my current hope to go to graduate school for English literature next year: a certain school in a certain place, both a goal and an insurmountable challenge. Having been out of college for a year already, and having graduated as a music major, I am rusty. Trying to compensate, I googled “books every english major has read” but have had a difficult time finding a list that suggests what every (generalized) English major should have read by the time of (undergraduate) graduation. As a person who attended a high school whose meager syllabus prescribed the study of one novel, one play and four poems a year, and who could only scrape enough college literature credits for a minor, I feel woefully behind. Most American kids got a head start in AP English (seriously – who are those freaks who read Ulysses in high school?). American high schools may have their weaknesses, but a strong and ambitious push to read literature consistently is not one of them. There are gaps, and I fear that wh...