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  But it was no good. There it was. ‘No breathing. No pulse. There was a halo of blood under his head about nine inches across, and for some reason it did not grow larger.’ Then he gave a sigh of relief. A writer must be true to his inner nature. It was all he could do. Emboldened he picked up the copy of Quantum Physics for Beginners and began once more to rifle through its dog-eared pages. Outside the sun slid like a bloody disk over the weary horizon of the ground-down earth . . . [continues].

  BEATRICE AND VIRGIL

  YANN MARTEL

  THE SAD STORY OF YANN

  There was once a man named Yann. Several years ago, Yann wrote a novel called Life of Pi. And when the people read it they said ‘Hurrah for Yann!’, and a nice person at the Guardian said it was ‘suffused with wonder’, and the judges of the Booker Prize exclaimed, ‘We agree! Long live Yann!’, and Yann went back to Canada with an enormous suitcase full of money and was very happy. But of course, if one writes one book and the book is good it is then necessary to write a second one, and so Yann, who was a very meticulous and thorough person, sat in his room for weeks and months on end and wrote another novel.

  But whereas the first one had been about some animals on a boat, this one was very serious and grim and all about the Holocaust. And when the nice people in England who had published the first book read it they looked at each other with worried faces, and gave Yann a plane ticket to fly all the way across the big, blue Atlantic Ocean, and when he arrived in London they took him to an expensive restaurant, where, politely but firmly, they explained to him that, alas, the book was not very good and all the people, instead of saying ‘Hurrah for Yann!’, would say ‘Boo to Yann!’ and other things even less complimentary.

  And when Yann heard these words he was very cross, and he stamped his foot on the ground in his rage and went back to Canada, where he took to playing the clarinet and working incognito in a restaurant, although, being a very meticulous and thorough person, he continued to answer his fan-letters. And then one day, when these occupations had started to fail him, he began to write a story about a successful novelist called Henry (not Yann, obviously!) who writes a book about the Holocaust. And when his publishers read it they look at each other with worried faces, and they give Yann – I mean Henry – a plane ticket to fly all the way across the big, blue Atlantic Ocean, and . . . Anyway, one day Henry gets a letter from a fan who is writing a play about two characters called Beatrice and Virgil. When Henry goes to visit the fan, who is a taxidermist, he discovers that Beatrice is a donkey and Virgil is a monkey, and the terrible things that happen to them might just be an allegory for the Holocaust. As you can imagine, Henry is very excited about this.

  And Yann, being a very meticulous and thorough person, tried very hard to give this story about Henry and the taxidermist and Beatrice and Virgil some pizzazz. He included a fascinating section about the art of taxidermy, and some very interesting information about the howler monkey, whose roar exceeds that of the cry of a peafowl, a jaguar, a lion, a gorilla and an elephant. He put in some truly arresting sentences (‘Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field – but they’re all we have, I will try’) and a great many references to Flaubert, Diderot, Beckett and Apuleius and other classic authors.

  And then there came a day when Yann’s publishers got to see the manuscript. And they said to each other: ‘After all, he did win the Booker, and we must do our best with this.’ And so they attached a shiny sticker to the front cover saying ‘From the author of Life of Pi’ and they charged £15.99 for it, even though it was quite a small book, so that anyone who bought it would know it was literature. But alas, the reviewers cried in their hordes, ‘Boo to Yann!’ and ‘Boy, does this one suck!’ and ‘What does he think he’s doing?’ And Yann went back to Canada, only not with such a large sack of money, to ponder the two great dangers of novel-writing, which are the difficulties of working with allegory and animals.

  SOUTH OF THE RIVER

  BLAKE MORRISON

  Nat and Anthea sat in the Millennium Café, in sight of the London Eye, scanning the newspaper headlines about foot-and-mouth disease. Outside in the street the marchers protesting at the council’s plans to build a new Tesco filed noisily by. Nat knew that in the end he would have an affair with her. The spirit of the age – that sense of bright, Blairite purpose – ordained it. In the meantime they would talk about literature.

  ‘If you were writing a novel about the state of England in the period 1997–2002,’ Anthea wondered, as the sound of Definitely Maybe erupted from the café’s jukebox, ‘what would you put in it?’ ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Nat told her, ‘the important thing is not to chuck in too many obvious symbols.’ On the television screen above their heads, they could see David Beckham, prone on the carpet of green turf, flick his foot against an Argentine player. ‘Too many lists of what people were listening to, or watching or reading.’ He smoothed the pages of his copy of Nick Hornby’s About A Boy with the fingers of his left hand. ‘Or the kind of thing that was in the newspapers at the time. That tends to annoy people.’

  ‘That reminds me,’ she said, ‘I had a lot of money invested in Equitable Life, and they say there’s no compensation.’ ‘A pity,’ he agreed, ‘but about that novel. You should never blind readers with the depth of your research. I was out sailing the other day, by the way, and the bowsprit tacked amidships over the jib. Or something. On the other hand’ – he paused to watch a giant badger emerge from a dustbin on the café’s forecourt and go scuttling down the street – ‘you do need an enduring image, an animal even, something that can thread its way through the plot and make a decent cover.’

  ‘That’s very interesting,’ she said. ‘But surely there are some issues that real people would have talked about at the time.’ ‘Oh certainly,’ he said, ‘but you need to strike a balance between the mundane drift of ordinary lives and the big events rolling on along the horizon. God, verrucas are hell. And I’m really upset about the Middle East.’ ‘I think I see,’ she said, spilling a copy of the Hello Princess Diana memorial number out of her handbag.

  ‘What about race?’ ‘Has to be there,’ Nat assured her. ‘Black character absolutely mandatory these days.’ On the jukebox the strains of Definitely Maybe had given way to The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony. Outside the marchers had been replaced by a convoy of fuel protestors. ‘And what about sex?’ she asked. ‘I thought you’d never ask,’ he said.

  Back at her flat, she arched hungrily above his flaccid body in a maelstrom of passion broken only by the sound of a motorcycle courier delivering their invitation to the Millennium Night party at the Dome . . . [continues for 500 pages].

  FINAL DEMANDS

  FREDERIC RAPHAEL

  With a copy of his latest devastatingly brilliant screenplay, About Myself, Once More, pressed against the lapel of his suit, the famous novelist Adam Morris stepped across the yellow stripe and approached the immigration officer.

  ‘Anything to declare?’

  ‘Wilde always said that he had nothing to declare but his genius, didn’t he? I suppose with me it’s my genus. There may be subtler ways of acknowledging your Jewishness, of course. Some races make a virtue of their inconspicuousness. I suppose we’re just inconspicuous about our virtues.’

  ‘What brings you to America, Mr . . . uh . . . Morris?’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say I was brought. Impelled, maybe, or perhaps only pro-pelled? It’s a fine point. Like a biro. Though I’m more of a felt tip man myself. If I had any tip left to feel, that is, after a flight to LA. The journey as spiritual ether. Didn’t Norman Mailer say that we leave our illusions behind in departures and pick them up again in arrivals?’

  The immigration officer sank bank exhausted. Adam could see Rachel and her black friend waiting for him in the arrivals hall. She looked unimaginably beautiful and brilliant. The black friend was tall and black. Outside there was blue sky and white concrete. Descriptions were always the most boring part of n
ovels, he thought. What people really liked was sparkling dialogue.

  ‘Mr Raph . . . I mean, Mr Morris,’ the black man said, shaking Adam’s hand. ‘You’re one hell of a writer, sir.’

  ‘Ah, assault and flattery. Wins out every time. Didn’t Socrates say that we compliment the people we secretly dread? Or dread the people we secretly compliment? I can’t remember. But then the only stamp on my passport’s the state of Amnesia. Now, you must be my daughter.’

  ‘Kierkegaard said that there is no “must”.’

  ‘But then Kierkegaard had never seen a rogue elephant, had he? Darling, you’re so chic I could shriek. LA suits you. Symposia were always cosier in 90 degrees . . . Bill’s dead, isn’t he? You don’t have to tell me.’

  ‘Tales of the unexpected are always expected in the end, aren’t they? Essentially determinist? Or maybe only determinedly essential. You know, when I saw him stretched out on the slab I thought of that line of Beckett’s.’

  ‘Sam, or Tom?’

  ‘Sam. I know you’ve never liked him since he pipped you for the Prix Goncourt that time.’

  ‘Waiting for God-awful, I know. But tell me about Bill?’

  ‘Well, watching him lying there groaning I realised you were right when you said there’s a fundamental difference between nostalgia and elegy.’

  ‘Poor Bill. He should never have come to LA to hang out with all the goys. Did he have any last words?’

  He said to me: ‘Raitch – tell Fred . . . I mean Adam that he really is a genius. Not like dumb little also-ran me.’

  ‘Bill said that? Oh, the vanity of the humiliated. You know, there’s a kind of conceit in serial self-deprecation. Didn’t Nietzsche once say that the only terrible thing about the play of life is that there are no entr’actes?’ [continues for thousands of pages].

  CONSTITUTIONAL

  HELEN SIMPSON

  Sometimes they talked in the car and sometimes they talked a lot.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Am I allowed to say spermatozoa?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. Have you got your inhaler? And the cheque for the ski-trip?’

  ‘Mum.’

  He was the only one in the world who listened to her, Ariadne reflected, and did what she said. Not like Patrick, her husband, who lay in the bath worrying about his pension contributions. Misery was like a tree, she thought: the topmost branches might hang far above you, but they still had the capacity to fall on your head.

  ‘I remember when I was at school,’ she said, wondering what had happened to the Coldplay CD. ‘My mind was full of girlish dreams, and the summer afternoons seemed to roll on for ever like the squares in a patchwork quilt. But now . . .’

  ‘You’re a loser, mum,’ her daughter Tallulah had told her the other day. ‘Xanthe’s mother’s got a shop in Bruton Street selling designer jewellery, and Araminta’s mum’s having an affair with Pete Doherty.’

  Sometimes the terrible struggle of the school, this merciless crawl through foul air and the black talons of malevolent rain, gave her, Ariadne, pause. The journey took forty-five minutes, forty-two if you took a devious left-hand turn along Murgatroyd Avenue, forty-six if you stalled at the roundabout.

  ‘Mum,’ said Toby again, from the back seat. ‘Will you test me on my Hebrew?’

  They turned right into the Finchley Road, past the shop that had those nice hanging baskets and the deli that did the goats’ milk cheese.

  ‘Mum,’ said Tallulah. ‘Can I have my nose pierced? Can I?’

  It was so hard, Ariadne reflected, so nutritionless, this cramped bourgeois existence. Lying awake at night in your mid-terrace semi, negotiating the M25 in your BMW, pondering the landscape from the window of your gîte in the Dordogne, your mind ran away with you, constructed unappeasable phantoms for you to chase. And then you came awake to find the au pair had measles and the French windows were jammed shut. Stalled, stymied, silenced.

  The school gates loomed, the 4X4s tussling before them like embattled dinosaurs. Silently the children disembarked. Deserted, she thought, abandoned, bereft. Suddenly Toby’s face appeared at the window.

  ‘Spermatozoa,’ he said. ‘Bye, mum.’

  The brief, epiphanic moment hung above them in the dense and terrible sky.

  ON BEAUTY

  ZADIE SMITH

  One may as well begin with Kiki in the delicatessen.

  ‘What I need,’ explained Kiki, hauling her mountainous two hundred and fifty pound African-American ass towards the counter, ‘is a homey, warm, chunk-filled, pastry-lovin’, finger-lickin’, hot-doggety, down home kind of pie.’ She recalled being invincible and truth-loving and twenty years old, and thinking that if she could only be honest about the kind of pie she wanted, then she could emerge moist-eyed in the light that would drench her and those around her in its languorous aura.

  ‘Hey there,’ said the brother behind the plastic sneeze-guard. ‘Heeey there. Ain’t I seen you some place before?’

  ‘. . . A kind of back-porch kind of pie, do you know what I mean? Nothing sour . . . or sassy.’

  ‘Sure I have. You been in one of them Zadie Smiths novel, sister.’

  ‘I don’t . . .’

  ‘Yes you have. Can tell. First there’s the way you speak quite ordinary sentences but sorta emphasising quite arbitrary words, kind of like you was compensating for their dullness.’

  ‘It ain’t . . .’

  ‘Sure it is. Pretty soon you’ll start talking in CAPITAL LETTERS, like it was some PRETTY IMPORTANT THING you was wanting to say. Only it AIN’T. Then, ’fore I know where I am, there’ll be some huge, multi-cultural family jes’ sashaying in from nowhere with names like Jerome ’n’ Levi ’n’ Zora . . .’

  ‘Hold on there . . .’

  ‘And the whole structure just insisting on its complex derivation from existing literary sources. In this case, sister, Mr E. M. fuckin’ Forster. I mean, what is it about that girl? And her on the Man Booker shortlist an’ all.’

  Suddenly, to her abstracted relief, Kiki found that Jerome, Levi and Zora were collected in a familial huddle at her side. She clutched them to her, affixiating them in the quaint caverns of her armpits.

  ‘Yeah and I’ll tell you some stuff about them. Like, one of them’ll really be into black street culture . . .’

  (‘. . . Yo my man,’ Kiki now heard Levi greet her, as they swapped a bunch of high fives. ‘Bin hangin’ with my homies in the hood is all.’)

  ‘. . . And check out the chick with the college education, dropping some big fancy names . . .’

  (‘. . . And I’m, like, saying to the poetry class,’ Zora presently informed her mother, ‘surely Foucault has negated all this’)

  ‘You hear what I’m saying, sister? Now, I knows it ain’t easy for a girl to get herself in the newspapers every time she write a book. She gotta get herself looking real nice and have some fahn photograph that the editor of the Daily Telegraph’s gonna love. Like she was in Destiny’s Child or something. But, believe me you got a difficulty . . .’

  But Kiki had seen the pie, golden and in the centre a red and yellow compote of sticky baked fruit. She thought of her husband, weaselly white-guy Howard, and whether she had quite done loving him. Still she managed to raise her face again towards the sneeze-guard.

  ‘What kinda difficulty?’

  ‘Sister . . . It ain’t my place to say so, but you’re generic.’

  ‘What so bad about that?’

  The brother wrinkled his nose. ‘Well, curiously enough, in this particular case, nuthin’. I mean, honey, you read the chick in the Times Literary Supplement? Where it say that “On Beauty’s most interesting ethical endeavour is the way it fits itself so perfectly – happily inhabiting its own apparent slightness”?’

  ‘What that mean?’

  ‘Seems to me it means “We have a problem here only I’m too polite to say so.” But relax, honey, it ain’t your fault you’re campus-lite. Only it ain’t gonna last for e
ver. Someone gonna see through the trick that girl playing, and then what, huh?’

  Kiki exhaled vertiginously. ‘At least I’ll have the pie,’ she said.

  THE LIGHT OF DAY

  GRAHAM SWIFT

  . . . Rain outside again. Its hiss. The noise a crisp packet makes when you open it. That a biro makes when, regretfully, you lay it down. I notice things. He said that, once before. The agent. ‘You notice things, Graham.’

  ‘It’s my job,’ I said. ‘Noticing things. I’m a writer. Take water, for instance. It’s just melted ice.’

  ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘I like that.’ I could see his point. He knows what he likes, the agent. Maybe he likes what he knows, too. Like Genesis, in that song.

  The agent. A man in an office. At the end of the Northern line. Outside, the rain again. April showers. Niagara Falls. I live in Wimbledon. After Putney. But before Raynes Park. You’ll have been there. It’s somewhere to write about. And in the early days I even liked walking round it. Leaving the house. Taking a stroll. Seeing the sights.

  She puts her head round the door. ‘Good day, love? Written much?’