7 SEPTEMBER 1991, Page 34

The modern Carlyle

John Whitworth

MAO II by Don DeLillo

Jonathan Cape, £14.99, pp. 241

This is a smart book written in short sentences. Often without verbs. Like advertising. Brita is a photographer who does writers. Nothing else. She makes a living at it, God knows how.

She photographs a writer named Bill who is very famous.

The book goes in for short paragraphs too. Like Hemingway brought up to date. People say things like, 'Fear has its own ego, hasn't it?' and 'To withhold a work of art is the only eloquence left.'

Bill is oldish (63) and hasn't published anything for ages, though he has a book ready. There is an acolyte named Scott who doesn't think he should publish this because of the withholding business. Brita photographs Bill, who hasn't been photo- graphed for ages, like the famous Amer- ican novelist Thomas Pynchon, who re- commends this book strongly on the back cover. But then you know what Mandy Rice-Davies said. Brita and Bill talk a lot about Art. Well, everybody in this book tends to. Brita likes watching television with the sound off (an American habit perhaps?). She watches the young fans at Hillsborough being crushed to death and admires the composi- tion. There's the photograph to show us what she means. Now, if I were Mr DeLillo I would have baulked at the photograph, but then to him the whole thing happened a long way away, which is how everything in the book seems to be treated anyhow.

This is the stuff about how television processes events into soap opera, though I must say it didn't seem like that when fat Boris climbed onto a tank recently to make a speech that might well have been his last on earth, but then I kept the sound on. There is a girl called Karen loosely attached to Scott. She is an ex-Moonie, a beautiful idiot terrific in bed and very trying on the page. All these people, though American, could certainly bore for England, and things don't really improve by a scene-shift to the Middle East, bullets and bombs punctuating the portentous remarks. The book is called Mao ll after a picture by Warhol which decorates the dust cover. It is full of images of terrorism, with the wily oriental gentleman in the middle. Karen, incidentally, has never heard of Warhol. Good grief! I am afraid that what we have here is a poetic novel. It is put together, rather like the Warhol artwork, from significant cut- out ingredients: the great writer who can't write any more; his acolyte; the photo- grapher who thinks only in visual images and lacks a moral centre; the Dostoevskian Idiot (these last two are the eternal femi- nine — sexist crap surely?); the hostage and his teenage captor in Beirut. There are actual photographs: the Hillsborough one, mourning millions round the body of Khomeini, two Arab children in a trench, smiling and giving victory signs. The photographs are certainly better than the ostentatious prose that surrounds them and the elliptical conversations where I keep forgetting who says what. There is the ghost of a plot involving Bill, the writer-shaman who understands the terrorist rage as all novelists do (Kings- ley Amis?). The people are empty, no more than their encapsulated descriptions, and this is presumably part of the point, but I don't buy it. The writing is meretri- cious narcissism, the whole weary wind- baggery and I should never have made it to the end but for the call of duty and curiosity to see if anything actually. hap- pened. It doesn't. After all this poeticism, let me end with an anonymous verse: As I was laying on the green A small volume it chanced I seen. Carlyle's Essay on Burns was the edition — I left it laying in the same position.

DeLillo is the modern Carlyle and I can't say fairer than that.