truthful impostor
John de Falbe
LOVING MONSTERS by James Hamilton-Paterson
Granta, £15.99. pp. 308, ISBN 1862074259
It is a tribute to the power of Loving Monsters that, on finishing it, I ignored the plaintive pile of unread books on the bedside table and instead hunted down and read some of the author's earlier work. Although he is always entertaining and persuasive, it is Hamilton-Paterson's thematic consistency that marks him as an original writer. His new book reverts conspicuously to the mental and moral territory of his 1989 masterpiece Gerontius. a novel about the elderly Elgar going up the Amazon.
In Loving Monsters, an aged English bachelor called Jayjay (Jerningham-Jebb) buttonholes the narrator/author in the supermarket they both use near their respective homes in Tuscany and informs him that he is 'probably going to write my life'. Curiosity makes H-P visit Jayjay for an initial talk, at which he is hooked by the man's charm and his description of himself as an impostor. Over a series of subsequent encounters, Jayjay relates the story of his early life. Born in 1918 in Eltham in southeast London, he attended the local school and then, wishing to escape suffocation in suburbia where his father is the Tooter par excellence', he left for Suez. Within a year he left his position as clerk in a shipping firm and started dealing in pornography, which he continued to do in Alexandria while engaged as private tutor to an Italian boy, and then in Cairo during the war. The narrative moves with aplomb from the coal, fogs, chickens and laburnums of Eltham and Sidcup to a Suez flophouse and the backstreets of Cairo, where the pickled turnips are Inauvy-pinkish lumps fished dripping from earthenware jars'. But though Jayjay's story is always vivid with the raw reek of experience. H-P cannot help wondering why he is telling it. 'Mean old faggot, if that is what he is. What is he? Why did I agree to this?' Something is missing. 'Like most people he thinks unconstrued events are enough in themselves.' The 'narrative stands in urgent need of complication,' H-P observes — and it is provided.
Jayjay's account is broken up as the author gets impatient with him, or has to leave for a while to pursue his own projects and prior commitments. We gather that he has spent a period as a spear fisherman on a Philippine island, and is currently working on a book about ex-dictators and assorted monsters. Like Jayjay, he has 'lived almost everywhere but in the land of our birth', but he finds 'this sense of sitting on the heaped-up past ... greatly consoling. It gives significance to our gestures.' However he appears to reject it, the past remains ever-present as loss, defining him: and so a fact emerges about Jayjay's past in Eltham which has shaped his life and what he feels about it. It cannot be ignored, because 'disenfranchising the past [involves] damage to the moral self.
With Jayjay in mind, the author writes, 'This compromising of our respective roots maybe gives us all a more panoramic moral view, or at least one in which being condemnatory is no longer an option.' He thinks this while sitting at lunch with an exgeneral who is known to have used curling tongs on his captives. Shouldn't we condemn the 'Lord of the Tongs' for his crimes? If him, then why not the pornography-touting Jayjay, who is monstrous too in his own way? Yet we, like the author, are inclined to love this self-constructed rogue rather than condemn him, because of the way in which he has loved and been loved. I'm a truthful impostor, you must never forget that,' he insists at one point. It's not about morals. It's all to do with the art, with knowing how to live.'
The central concern of Playing with Water, Hamilton-Paterson's extraordinary autobiographical book about living on a deserted Philippine island, is also learning how to live. His remark there that the English culture is 'obsessed with loss' is amplified in Gerontius, towards the end of which Elgar (artist and quintessential Englishman) writes in his journal, 'Whatever it really was is cut off & we're left with pieces of tune wriggling in the foreground like shed lizard tails. We work from haunted memories of nothing (but 0! such nothings!).' In watching this grand, vain old artist assess the moral coherence of his life we learn something about ourselves and about our country. Returning to such themes in Loving Monsters, James Hamilton-Paterson is not rehashing old material: the book is fresh with the imaginative vigour and moral urgency that make him an important writer. If it is the case that Jayjay was a real person (as the book states plainly that he was — but we are all used by now to Umberto Eco-like literary hoaxes), then it is thematically appropriate that his life should be presented as a work of art. It is a proof of the work's success, however, that the question seems utterly irrelevant.
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