Fine: Some Notes

  I undersell my books. People ask me about them and I make jokes. I bat away interest. I apologise for them, as though they are an embarrassment to me. They're not. I've written three books and I'm proud of them, because they're very good. 

No, it doesn't sit right with me. I DO believe this, but my social training won't allow me to say it, or even type it. So I've written these notes, so I can learn them and talk about the books, my intentions, properly. Ask me what the book's about, why I wrote it. This is what I'll say.  

                                                                 Fine

Fine is a comedy of failure. It’s a story about loneliness, the slump of middle-age and the discovery that your peers are old and the same as the old people who were old when you were young. It's also a novel about quiet defiance and not giving up in the face of certain defeat, humiliation, and miscommunication. It's about resistance even when resistance is useless because resistance is never useless, just ask your physio. It concerns one Paul Reverb, a classic "little man" protagonist. Little men were all over late 19^th and 20^th century literature. "It is the nightmare of having to present to the world from morning till night as superman, our universal petty ideal, the grovelling subhuman we are." So said nobody's funboy, Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Mary Renault said, admittedly egregiously out of context, "the coward is the natural man, the hero the fable.".

     The Russians gave us this literary archetype: Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin from Gogol's The Overcoat being a perfect example, and also lent us the little man's better-connected cousin, the superfluous man, someone who might be both talented and intelligent, but who doesn't quite chime with society, a sort of halfway stage between the Byronic figure and the angry young man. I would call Bertie Wooster a comic version of the superfluous man. So would his Aunt Dahlia. The Wooster of the books is one of the more intelligent and capable members of his milieu, though he does associate with some awful duffers. Bertie is savvy enough to keep a shimmering household god on staff to get him out of his endless scrapes and to mix him the occasional Prairie Oyster.

     James Thurber's stories in The New Yorker (from a hundred years ago) present us with a modern, urban, little man bent into hoops by society, prohibition, and the battle of the sexes. In cinema, the great silent comics were a succession of worn-down tramps, deadpan acrobats, and four-eyed, one-thumbed daredevils. None of them were heroic in a square jawed, chin-biffing sense, but their stoicism and indefatigability always won both the day and the girl by the final reel. As we drift closer to the parts of the 20^th Century where I might actually have been alive, carefully swerving Norman Wisdom or Kenneth Connor, both little men and both pains in the arse, we find the little man becoming a staple of the sitcom: Albert Steptoe, Reginald Perrin, Phillip Roath from It Takes a Worried Man, possibly the most desperate and forlorn of the lot. It Takes a Worried Man was one of my favourite TV shows growing up. I thought it was the plight of every adult male to work in an office, wear a nasty grey suit, get divorced, lust after his secretary, and have mental issues. That's what all my sitcom pals were like. I didn't realise that this was what the people who'd been to Oxbridge, and who were writing these sitcoms, imagined lower-middleclass lives might be like. 

     The daddy of them all, with writers who met at a tuberculosis clinic instead of university, was Hancock's Half Hour. Anthony Aloysius St. John Hancock contained multitudes. Which was why he had all those names. He was poor, he was noble, he was pompous, he was deflated. He was educated and an ignoramus, clever and easily duped, a star and a nobody, he was, to quote another vainglorious little man, "a trained actor reduced to the status of a bum". The writing was smart, silly, satirical, and full of bathos. It was never sentimental. Hancock never pleaded for affection. He was grumpy, glum, stand-offish, unworldly and mean. Classic leading man material. The effect was sublime. He was the apotheosis of what the English knew they really were: run-down, seedy, supercilious, and sexless, thriving on cups of milky tea and rock salmon from Sid James' El Chippo fish 'n' chip bar. Paul Reverb, Fine's protagonist, could have sprung from Hancock's loins though Hancock's loins are, necessarily, a bit of a grey area. He's down-at-heel, overlooked, his aspirations, though pathetically small, are regularly crushed. He's lonely and unloved, except for a bristling, wire-mother of an aunt, and his romantic aspirations come to nothing. He dreamed of being a popstar. He dreams of being a writer. Nothing happens. He works in an office where he is the constant butt of jokes. His social life consists of two other men, an angel and a devil on his shoulders, and all they can think to do is drink heavily. He can't even masturbate without getting his door kicked in by window cleaners. Not a euphemism. Why would anyone want to read a book about him? Increasingly, I think that's a valid question. Paul is not a standard male character in a book. I doubt he's ever fired a gun. You wouldn't trust him to diffuse a bomb or rescue the President from a burning plane. He would be terrible at that. He's flawed, he's practically constructed from flaws. His personality flaw is his personality. But I would suggest that Paul has a redeeming feature: he doesn't give up. He keeps going. In the face of all the indignities life throws at him, that I throw at him, he keeps at it. On some level, he believes he can improve. He can get better. Even in his mid-fifties, he doesn't want to turn in on himself and assume young people are all wrong, and the past was better and, actually, Nigel Farage makes a lot of sense…He wants to understand the modern world, to engage with it. He doesn't think he's over. The future must contain more and better and kinder than the past because, after all, how shit was the past?

     There are a couple of self-conscious literary influences on Fine. It can't all be '70's sitcoms. There is some roughage. The first is Italo Calvino's story The Naked Bosom from the book Mr. Palomar, in which Palomar encounters a topless sunbather at the beach and, worried his looking or not looking, indifference or interest, might be taken the wrong way and, indeed, be harmful to society, walks back and forth next to her, looking and not looking at her until she gathers her things together and stalks off in a huff.

     The second is Joris-Karl Huysman's With the Flow, the story of lowly Parisian clerk Jean Folantin's dyspeptic misery. The novella follows his efforts to try and enjoy any single aspect of Belle Epoque Paris. He's unable to do so. He can't find a consistently good restaurant or bar. Friends start to chafe and bore. He fights with his cigars and wallpaper. He starts each fresh endeavour with tentative hope – this will be the change that will turn his life around, but hope soon curdles, sours. Everything turns to shit in his hands. His only recourse is to give up and be subsumed by the mediocrity of life, to go with the flow.

     The difference between Folantin and Reverb is that Paul doesn't go with the flow. He spends the book fighting, exhausted, against the current. He may be foolish and self-obsessed, delusional and a drunkard, but he is heroic. He endures.

     Now, endure him.