Doctor Criminale

By now, you could very well be wondering (of course you could equally well not) about me: my life, my literary attitudes, even my Weltanschauung in general. I could detain you with some random biography (parents, school, sporting interests, first fumbling love-makings), but I really prefer not to. Briefly, then, in the Mid-Eighties, that mysterious and now totally lost decade, I was an undergraduate at the University of Sussex, the Sixties-by-the-Sea. Here I was smart as a button, and here I acquired my literary education. It was the Age of Deconstruction, and how, there on the green Sussex chalk downs, we deconstructed. Junior interrogators, literary com­missars, we deconstructed everything: author, text, reader, language, discourse, life itself. No task was too small, no piece of writing below suspicion. We demythologized, we demys­tified. We dehegemonized, we decanonized. We dephallicized, we depatriarchalized; we decoded, we de-canted, we de-famed, we de-ma

He went, I recall, white, and stared at me in obvious historical dismay. This wasn’t the Sussex he thought he knew so well. But then his always sharp wits gathered, and he gave me a piece of advice I recall to this day, this very day. If, he said, it was random violence I was after, why not go into literary journalism? I told him that, having taken his course, I no longer liked writers or their work. He had proved to me conclusively that all literature had been written by the wrong people, of the wrong class, race and gender, for entirely the wrong reasons. Marvellous, he said; for a career on the modern book pages these were perfect qualifications. Then, reaching for the telephone on his desk, he dialled some freephone number and talked to one of his many journalist friends. So well did he sing my praises that within days I had been offered trial employment on a forthcoming Serious Sunday newspaper, which was seeking a fresh, youthful, irreverent but upmarket image. And I still recall the day at the final party for our class when, tears in his eyes, Sancerre in his glass, my tutor shook my hand for the last time, and urged me to go out into the world and do good hermeneutic work in the service of personkind. From that day until the night of the Booker, I’d dedicated my career to the high principles he taught.

My Serious Sunday was one of those neo-tabloids that are produced from computerized offices in cabriole-topped postmodern tower blocks just to the south of the Thames. Its sharp vital pages were made up of politics and sex, high finance and consumption, opera and custom number plates, country living and rap, intellect and gossip, thought and sneer, in such perfect combination as to make every sabbath a day of ideal leisure and pleasure. Among discriminating readers (and as we told our advertisers, we only had discriminating readers, like yourselves), my literary pieces – original, intellectual, radical, anarchical, topical, and above all oedipal – soon made their mark. Like my fellow New Age journalists who only profile well-known people they totally despise, I caught the note of the day to perfection. I wrote for the Nineties person: neat but alternative, streetwise but eco-friendly, book-aware but never dull. People called me a Punk Reviewer, though why my thoughtful columns should be compared to a kind of backstreet garage music I would never give CD time to I ca

So I made my way, the aspiring journo in the age of literary confusion. I did, I think, all the right things. I took a flat in Camden (Islington) in a basement so modest it was actually underneath another basement. I lived off fast-food outlets and bought myself a microwave oven and a mountain bike. I had girl-friends who wanted to take out joint mortgages on Docklands apartments with me; I explained I want to remain a person of temporariness not permanence, journey not arrival. I wrote, but not books (far too monumental). I wrote fragments, in fact I wrote everything: solemn pieces for the Times Literary Supplement, essays on South American fiction for the London Review of Books, lyrics for pop songs, scripts for radio com­mercials. I reviewed and I columnized, picking up titbits about authors that would make your ears crinkle. I interviewed, I opined. I freelanced, I free-styled, I free-loaded, I freebied. I also worked part-time in a winebar in Covent Garden, and sold gossip to New Musical Express. And so I made my way, till the night of the Booker, when my life quite seriously changed.

By now, back in our mise-en-scène at the Guildhall, the room was full of folk and noise. An MC appeared, gaveiled for silence, and asked us all to proceed into the Banqueting Hall beyond. In a great restive flock the authors round me surged off, herded here and there by their various Fionas. I jostled my way through the elegant diners pushing for the trough to find the table plan, to see what good company had been picked for me in the prime part of the evening. I saw I had not been placed on the top table, where all the places had been assigned to people somewhat better known than myself: an ex-Prime Minister, the leader of the opposition, two Nobel prizewi

‘Ah, it’s you,’ I said. ‘And it’s also you,’ she said. ‘You know who I am,’ I said, ‘I don’t know who . . .’ ‘I’m Ros,’ said the girl, ‘Short for Diana.’ ‘How did you like the interview?’ I asked. ‘Brilliant,’ she said. ‘I was good?’ I asked. ‘You were terrible,’ she said, ‘Worse than Howard Jacobson.’ ‘Come on, nobody at the Booker’s ever been worse than Howard Jacobson,’ I said. ‘They have now,’ she said. ‘Okay, what was wrong with it?’ I asked. ‘You were mean, crappy and selfish,’ said Ros. ‘Well, I’m young,’ I said. ‘I’ll say,’ said Ros, ‘Do you want to come to the sca

So Ros and I stepped out of the Guildhall, leaving behind the bright lights and the glitz of the great and the good, and started walking in wind and driving rain through the City of London, its great financial towers, the pride of the economic Eighties, rising high above. We walked through the land of fiscal wizardry, turned down a mean sidestreet, and entered an unmarked green van, parked in shadow at the end of a dirty alley. Above rose the great bank office blocks, where in vast galleries money-shufflers sat before computer screens, sca