The decline and fall of practically everything
William Scammell
THE WEATHER IN ICELAND by David Profumo Picador, i14.99, pp. 320 Richard Slide, the last Duke of Lon- don, sits in Switzerland in the late Nineties Con the cusp of the millennium') writing his memoirs. Born in Shrewsbury, mid- century, he is heir to Spellbrook, the family seat near Godalming, and all the appurte- nances that go with his exalted station such as a nanny, a groom, a butler, an exotic black gamekeeper called Charlie Sanga (`he had no interest in pronouncing his opinions, but preferred . . . to tell stories'), a beautiful dreamy mother and a distant, tight-lipped father burdened with a myste- rious past who attacks the thistles in the park with useless ferocity.
First of the stations of the cross, after an idyllic early childhood, is Richard's prep school, Stockhill House:
The feeling of abandonment was novel, and at first it simply did not sink in. When Mr Smedley, the deputy head, approached us, the parents now safely on their way, the six of us instinctively gravitated together like trout in a restaurant tank as the waiter closes in, grasping his dip-net. Smedley advanced, rub- bing his hands energetically together like some dreadful party entertainer, and announced, 'That's it, then, boys. Time we were setting sail. Welcome aboard. Let's go and find your berths, shall we?'
Next comes Eton — oh dear yes, this novel goes to Eton — then a season of deb- hunting and debauchery, and then a settled raffishness at Oxford, though our hero reforms just in time to snaffle a miraculous First and translate himself to Cambridge in order to research the Augustans.
Woven into this rake's progress are nar- ratives about the republican revolution that has overtaken Britain, the disbanding of the royal family, the rabid pollution that `engineered an ecodystopia', the 'whisky duke's' present fortress lifestyle in tight lit- tle Switzerland, and several Julian Barnes- like disquisitions on a number of learned topics such as spiders, barbed wire, and the nature of the weather in Iceland, which last delivers up analogues for the weather in the British soul circa 1992:
My father was quite right: the weather in Ice- land goes round and round, its clouds dash- ing past the sugarloaves, the table tops and the lateral moraines as the climate chases itself by the tail. It is a microcosm of the
`We just feel that the ability to answer three riddles is no basis for a lasting relationship.'
unpredictable New Weather we now enjoy across the planet . . . You'd get all four sea- sons in one day, but after centuries of this you just accepted that it did not make much sense ... They say the inhabitants are always anticipating a summer that never quite arrives, and dreading a winter that doesn't really materialize. Meanwhile, they live exhausted by hope and fear, as the elements run rings around them in an eternal, mes- merizing circus.
The remainder of the novel is taken up with the duke's disastrous business ven- tures, which yet leave him 'rich as a rock star', his acquisition of Aston Martins, Lamborghinis and sexual thrills — they seem more or less interchangeable — his doomed marriage and son Peter (`Already an Aston, a Lambo amongst babies' — the commodification is relentless, alternating with Barriesque sentimentality), and some melodramatic plot developments that kill off his son and reveal the grisly source of his father's melancholia.
Slide is not so named for nothing (nor is anything .else). By the end he is armed with guns and ranting about 'cress-eating liber- als'. His descent into chaos and misery is clearly meant to illustrate and parallel the larger collapse of English politics into a sort of fascism. Shades here, perhaps, of Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. One of several problems is that Profumo only manages to distance himself from this per- sona in fits and starts; much of the time he is simply a vessel for standard, lightly- disguised gouts of autobiography. Stylistically too the novel veers between mandarin, New Journalese, Firbankian camp (`the Clutton-Brown family tradition that all daughters were deflowered on their 16th birthdays by their own fathers'), and stabs at the Martin Amis school of pert- ness. Cigarettes are `lungfuckers', condoms 'foil-wrapped love-puppets', and as for teenage masturbation, A couple of times a day I would take Rose Palm and her five daughters to the eyelid movies, and every night without fail I would enjoy a hand-raised pork-pie before sliding sideways into sleep.
There are enjoyable moments in all this, and some well-written slabs of info, but the novel never makes up its mind whether to tell its stories from the inside, and make them matter, or settle for high jinks and the quick returns generated by sly plotting and a wide vocabulary. The chief casualty is real, believable feelings. Slide/Profumo is so anxious to impress that all the big emo- tions get smothered in verbiage and retro- panache. Pound told Eliot once (whose shade flickers across the closing page) that if he was going to write urbane couplets they'd have to be at least as good as Pope's. Similarly, writers who opt for a Nabokovian hall of mirrors, or the mixed- media collages of Julian Barnes, need a stratospheric IC) in order to infuse their contraptions with something resembling the flesh and blood that fuels real-life experience.
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