The Coast of Everything by Guillermo Stitch

I thought it was a pun. The title.

     “You know the price of everything and the cost of nothing,” Lord Darlington quipped (or aphorised) in “Lady Windemere’s Fan”. Except he didn’t. He said: “You know the price of everything thing and the value of nothing.” Which means I wasn’t even slightly wrong. It’s an effective tautology. I’d misremembered the quote, misunderstood it’s meaning, and all to wedge a pun into the title of a book already swimming with, teeming with, elegant wordplay.

     Not for the first time this astonishing book made me feel like a proper ‘nana. 

Some quotes:

     “Brazen hintery.” Page 652

     “One should never make assumptions when it comes to colour splash.” Page 402

     “I don’t need to get into any kind of…villainy.” Page 393

     “Even sitting on the floor of this Tetris canyon was vertiginous.” Page 349

     “Not everything in the following chapters will be revealed to you. Somethings you will see and understand – some things you will see and not understand. And some things you will not see. I need you to be okay with that.” Page 333

     “The arrival of writers was where the rot set in.” page 305

     “Does such loose talk redound to our behoof?” page 216

     “You don’t smoke? What the fuck is the matter with you?” page 40 

     Most of those quotes come from The Tale of Three Voyages, the lengthy central section of Guillermo Stitch’s hallucinatory big beast of a book, which I’ve been lucky enough to read in manuscript form, ahead of publication.

      This part of the book details the slow disintegration of Liam Tead (pronounced Tead), an Irish insurance clerk-cum-Marlowesque Californian private eye. In keeping with most rough diamond cinematic loners – Liam is far more the Elliott Gould Marlowe than the Bogart one – he is an exemplary cook; you can easily imagine him shaving a truffle with a razorblade – and lives in a world of blistered white paint and endless blue skies. I see a perfect white espresso cup pressed against the brick red of a stubbly Irish chin, like an inverted Japanese flag. Liam’s waning inheritance allows him to cosplay a cinematic Shamus, despite his being shit at it.

     The worst thing that could happen happens: Liam gets a client. A proper client. A stupendously rich client. A client who, disastrously, has faith in him. Her faith will uproot him, send him across oceans and deserts, into the clutches of cartoon mayors, beautiful incestuous twins, a philosophical djinn who will explain everything over a half coconut of wine, beautiful women who beat and pet dogs that are also beautiful women, a flight with a Roc, and the story of the world’s most famous sisters, at least one of whom is a genetically enhanced super-magician. Almost from the beginning Liam hates all of it. It’s the most human – certainly the sort of human I am – response to the spiralling horrors of an action movie I’ve ever read. Liam is not a man to land a crashing plane. He’s unlikely to take to the airducts of Nakatomi Plaza in his bare feet. He has no faith in himself and cannot believe anyone else could have any in him. He knows who he is. He knows what he’s done. But Liam’s spinelessness, his craven selfishness and the useless guilt he carries with him, is his secret power. It will save his life at least once. And he is intuitive. His client is right to have faith in him – he witlessly, and with great cost to himself, gets the job done.

     These stories, and there many stories, each bleeding into another, tributaries searching for the sea, feature desperate, out-of-their-depth men, pitted against unknowable Dystopian forces: Billy Stringer takes on the oppressive monetized philistinism of Gripping Tails: a company that has, at last, found a use for literature, for art: you can use it to power an automobile!

     Billy’s friend and bookdealer, in a new sense, initially an asshole younger brother, becomes fastidious and a booze connoisseur, confronting the greedy and selfish nature of writers by having to share a flat with the ghost of Dickens. If there were ever a portrait of the author committed to these pages…

     In The Tale of the Isle of Truth, we glide in on the back of an albatross, a potent harbinger of what’s to come for a small island community abandoned by the distant and tyrannical Magistracy, embodied by one Jasper Fafl – whose monomaniacal stream of consciousness we are privy to – and whose intergenerational lust poisons his community like hexafluosilicic acid,  particularly the women in Arenaceous Nell’s life: his wife Izzy and his daughter, Lil. In a textbook Stitch move, Izzy’s sister, who disapproves of Arenaceous, is never named, though there are times the text is screaming for her to be!

     I found this part of the book especially moving. It had weight and the balance, the linguistic tumult and the emotional heft of Garcia Marquez. I cried for these characters and, worse, I liked them. The drunken genius, the steadfast, heretical best friend, the brave, stoic Lil, strong, stuttering Simon, the awful Cyres, Heft and fucking Pack. The pantomimic horror of Jasper Fafl, with his bad teeth and rubbing hands, and whom I can only picture as the actor Jiri Prymek. This story is, perhaps, the central text, containing as it does a story within a story – the Archival Survey Reviews – assiduously prepared by Lil and later Simon, which tell the story of the Magistracy’s attempt to rob the people of Sinn of their fictions while sitting at the fundament of all fiction: the Stone, the gateway to paradise. The story that starts all stories.

But, of course, all the stories contain stories. And those stories contain stories. The Tarot deck is shuffled again, the spread revealing fresh combinations, more fools and hierophants and lovers and worlds, in relentless cartomantic profusion.

     This is a huge novel. It’s also three novels. It may be as many as seven novels, depending on how you look at it. But it is definitely also a single novel – e pluribus unum – and I’m staggered by the way Stitch has corralled it, has allowed ideas and images to melt into one another: the Wahrberg becomes the Warburg, Frau Pfafl somehow linked to Jasper Fafl. All the Lils, the Litas, the Lias. The succession of strong men: Darius and Alphonse, all extrapolated from solid, silent Rolf. All the fairy tale props, the references to The Tinderbox, the allusions to the Tales from One Thousand and One Nights I don’t get, (because I’ve never read it) all the horror and the beauty, the satire and the substance, and the crippled girl lying on her train, the real Scheherazade, spinning the story, and the mad magician tearing down the trompe l’oeil castle, denying our heroine her ceiling – her little sky – as the real sky, infinite and unknowable, kills her muse.

     The Coast of Everything is a book about the death of books and the unkillable nature of stories. It’s also a book about freedom and faith. In people, in fictions. No gods need apply. “How plausible faith becomes when nothing else is available.”

     This book is an extraordinary achievement. He did it. He pulled it off. It’s epic, sprawling, baffling and beguiling. But the strings are pulled taut, measuring the horror against the beauty. This book made a grown man cry and laugh and really want to visit Tangiers.

Going in, I imagined the key quotation was: “Not everything in the following chapters will be revealed to you. Somethings you will see and understand – some things you will see and not understand. And some things you will not see. I need you to be okay with that.”

     Having put the book down – and exhaled - I feel like Liam, looking on in wonder. Looking up.

      “Even sitting on the floor of this Tetris canyon was vertiginous.”

     Dizzying.