Chekhov and son
Charlotte Moore
FELIX IN THE UNDERWORLD by John Mortimer Viking, £16.99, pp. 247 his is a novel about a novelist. Felix Morsom, a widower and lonely without knowing it, leads a quiet life as 'the Chekhov of Coldsands-on-Sea.' He spends his days staring at ornaments on his desk, nursing his writer's block, and indulging in lustful thoughts about his literary agent, Ms Brenda Bodkin.
Out of the blue — or rather, out of the grey, given the standardised tawdry desola- tion of Coldsands-on-Sea — an anonymous tape arrives. It tells the woeful tale of one Gavin Piercey, nabbed by PROD (The Parental Rights and Obligations Depart- ment) for non-payment of maintenance for his alleged son, thrown into a police cell and buggered by a large man wearing a crumpled blue suit and a signet ring. Felix dismisses the story as irrelevant to his own life, but before long his fate and Gavin's become, in the words Gavin himself would use, inextricably linked.
Felix is shoved out of his uneventful observer's role into a real-life plot far more improbable and dramatic than anything his fiction has dared to attempt. Like Gavin, he becomes a quarry of the faintly Orwellian PROD, and from then on every step he takes proves to be a misjudgment that leads him so far astray that eventually he finds himself wanted for murder.
In flight from the law, Felix finds himself in the London underworld, dwelling with tramps and rent boys and philanthropic vicars. Poverty was always 'that part of life that Felix feared most', especially noisy, urine-soaked, alcohol befuddled poverty; he is now forced to confront his horrors, and I suppose we are meant to think that he emerges a stronger man. The only demonstration of his strength, however, is his willingness to take on the child he is accused of having fathered, and this seems to be as much to assuage his loneliness Ms Bodkin remains elusive — as anything else.
As one would expect from John Mortimer, Felix in the Underworld is a thoroughly professional novel. The plot is intricate, but its movement is swift, with enough clues dropped — the blue suit and the signet ring turn up again — to keep the reader hungry without giving it all away. The ironic position of the novelist who has written himself out of life is handled deftly. The many minor characters are sharply in focus — the raddled solicitor feasting on brains; bespectacled Ian, the love-child who nobody loves, with his determination and his dry humour — though Mortimer doesn't seem to be able to resist a little wallow in cliche when it comes to describ- ing policemen.
There is a problem, though, with the love-interest — indeed, with the like- interest. Felix's wistful pursuit of Brenda Bodkin (who, it seems, is so named because of one heavy and necessary Hamlet joke) is more interesting in the closing stages than in the first chapter. Mortimer has been too successful, with Felix, in creating a disengaged character. The mildly unhinged Gavin, pursuing Felix via a radio phone-in, demands, 'Do you rely on other people to have the big, dramatic moments for you?' The answer being yes, the reader switches off from Felix as readi- ly as the bored DJ switches off the prolix Gavin.
`Name?' 'John Legg. "Occupation?' Electrician.' And your specialised subject?' `Fixing spotlights.'
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