Over the hill and far away
Peter Ackroyd
Exterminator! William Burroughs (Calder and Boyars £2.85) A Sense Of Survival Kevin Casey (Faber and Faber £2.75) There are'no flies on William Burroughs, he shoots straight from the hip. You would feel the sinews rippling beneath that nonchalant prose, if it weren't for all those nerve-ends. Exterminator! is a Baedekker of wishes, dreams and lies! (And, just to show I mean it, one for the road:!) On the eighteenth-century notion that ruins are more sublime than the real thing, this is a novel only by default. It is a continuing series of vignettes, which is an unhip way of saying spliced interfaces. But they all have one thing in common: they are mercifully short. • Heterogeneous people are yoked violently together, and like divers they emerge from Burroughs's shallows more bent than alive. There is, for example, the homosexual Audrey Carsons who has a disgusting habit of dreaming of things to come. Of course I was shocked, horrified, disgusted by, and my stomach turned over at, Mr Burroughs's mild romanticism. Only a romantic would raise sex into lust, and only a romantic can be both amusing and savage without pausing for breath. But you can't keep on pouring old wine into new bidets. Burroughs's fantasies are from the Eisenhower era, when all good Americans went to Kerouac before they died. And the bad Americans? They stayed in Paris.
Burroughs is at his best when he looks into his mirror and writes. There is a clever satire on a tired old trendy, 'The Coming Purple Better One', who wouldn't say boo to a goose. Especially when it takes the form of a youth-cult, marching en masse and demanding its rights. But this portrait of an innocent at home is the only whiff of clean air among all the cocaine. Much of the novel flirts with 'experimentalism', on the principle that fake diamonds are a writer's best friend. Burroughs's flashes of montage and the occasional rash of block capitals (a variation on plaster of Paris) have the unmistakeable flavour of what the French used to call 'staircase wit', or the lines you should have said before you left the party. Or what Burroughs might call that sinking feeling many times removed. Experimentalism is, nowadays, generally after the fact and most Americans must tiptoe where the French and Irish have already stamped.
There is a desperate conventionality about this 'novel', as if it could explode but only just. Not so much an orgy, as a midnight feast in the dorm. There is the photograph of Mr Burroughs on the jacket, looking as though he would never raise his voice in a restaurant, let alone anything else, and certainly no candidate for his favoured "insect lust". And there, in the bottom left-hand corner of every page, just to remind us, is the magic word Exterminator! It is not that the book is too familiar to be interesting; like all stereotypes, those of Burroughs have a firmness of outline and a stridency of shading that almost bear repeating. Forgive me for thinking of the word, but the 'moral' seems to be that deep down (where it doesn't really matter), we are all homicidal perverts waiting to jump from behind locked lavatory doors and turn the green ones pink. This, of course, is taking Hobbes far too literally and the only Leviathan in Burroughs' work is literary history (From the gang who brought you Stein and Hemingway . . .) and nothing more numinous. He does sound a few variations on the old theme: "Present time is a film, and if you are on set and in present time you don't feel present time because you are in it," which is phenomenology practically for the birds. I would rather read it in the original.
And from Burroughs's old playground, Tangiers, comes another less breathtaking view of modern life, A Sense Of Survival. Fortunately, Mr Casey has not been blessed with a sense of humour and so keeps a tight hold on everything but appearances. There is very little to do in Tangiers, except complain of the heat and wonder what harsh fate led you there in the first place. It is the home of drunks and bores, and I am afraid that Casey's protagonists are often both. They don't do very much about either, however, and Mr Casey practically rides a horse and carriage through their respective consciousnesses in order to explain howasmuch and wherefore. Fatunately, they are all sweating under the same roof and Casey can avoid undue complexity.
Mr Bannister, for example, wakes up every morning to the prospect of middle-age and landladies, and the narrator — who is no more percipient than his puppets — handles Bannister's understandably mixed feelings with the same deadpan prose as he describes objects and landscapes. This is known as getting down to business and telling a good, oldfashioned story, and there is a lot more to come.
Enter Traynor, ex-guest and odd man out, and exit horizontal. His murder, in the usual fictional way, stirs ebbs and flurries among the other expatriates — leaving them to consider the meaning of it all. A meaning which goes from bad to worse: "Looking for peace one found a new kind of sadness, an inability to make things matter." Which is a reasonable epilogue to the book itself. All of the characters go around repeating maxims to themselves, either singly or in groups, which is not my idea of a holiday. Analysis and commentary alike pepper that seedy and uninviting town, and none of us is any the wiser at the close: "She drew a child's ship on the sand : a big funnel, three portholes, a flag." Or how to make a mountain out of a sandhill.
Peter Ackroyd is Literary Editor of The Spectator.
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