And now for something very much the same
Tom Hiney
HEMINGWAY'S CHAIR by Michael Palin Methuen, £14.99, pp. 280 If Paul McCartney had gone to universi- ty, he would surely have grown up to be Michael Palin. Apart from being born with- in months of each- other, both now live under the shadow of their brilliant roles within Seventies counter-culture. Both are resented for not burning out 15 years ago `It's a John Fjord Western.' in consummate hazes of depression, drink or nymphomania. Palin lives with his wife and three children in North London and has become very successful in a sort of middle-brow polymath way; McCartney lives with Linda and sings quite catchy songs about love. Neither is really going to be allowed to put a foot right again. You can sympathise with them for that, but it doesn't mean you have to like the easy Radio 2-type material they keep turning out.
Hemingway's Chair (Palin's first and unfortunately 'serious' novel) is obviously going to make a good, well-trailered Sunday-night TV play. Like Around the World in 80 Days, a lot of people will end up watching it but very few people will rearrange their daughter's wedding in order not to miss it. It is the story of a 30- year-old man who lives with his mother in `Theston' on the Suffolk coast and who works at the old post office. Nasty men with mobile phones, bottles of champagne and a fax machine come down to this sleepy English town muttering nasty things like 'E-mail' and 'multimedia communica- tions centre'. Like the equally nasty railway companies that provided the plots for a hundred Westerns and half a dozen episodes of Bonanza, they want to destroy all that is dear to sleepy English towns (in Theston's case the old post office building), in order to clear the way for the heartless new world of techno-evil. But they haven't counted on Martin Sproale who, vicariously fuelled by Hemingway's belligerence, fights them with all he has, which is not much but evidently enough.
Love scenes are provided by Ruth Kohler, the American academic who has rented a cottage just outside the sleepy English town in order to write her opus on Hemingway and women (she hates Hemingway). Oddly enough, she and Mar- tin bump into each other, realise that they are probably the only Hemingway experts presently in East Anglia and get it together, Martin discovering bravery in passion and Ruth discovering life after cynicism. Class commentary is meanwhile provided by Mrs Harvey-Wardrell who drives a Bentley, has a son at Eton, seems to visit the post office every five minutes and is, needless to say, an absent-minded snob. (Can the creator of this dreary card- board dragon really be the same man who so brilliantly satirised the landed classes in Ripping Yarns?) One of the all too rare jokes in Heming- way's Chair involves a Customer Service video which Martin and his post office colleagues are forced to watch as part of the novel's 'technology and depersonalisa- tion' theme. John Cleese made several such corporate videos in the Eighties and one presumes that this is a dig. Personally, I'd rather watch Cleese telling me how to use a bar-code scanner for two hours than sit through any forthcoming adaptation of Hemingway's Chair.
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