Not-So-Innocent Abroad

Conventional literary wisdom nowadays decrees that, in fiction particularly, the author is irrelevant to the work produced.

James Hamilton-Paterson, the author of “Loving Monsters,” has great fun standing this notion on its head. His narrator--also named James--includes in his acknowledgments thanks to persons who recur as characters in his text. James is researching the biography of a mysterious but elegant old codger called Raymond Jerningham Jebb, known as Jayjay: the first thing we’re confronted with is a full-page photograph of Jayjay’s tombstone, complete with name and dates of birth and death. His death also rates a mention among the book’s acknowledgments. The Italian town where Jayjay, James and (it would seem) their author live, Castiglion Fiorentino, exists on the map. Other photographs, including shots of family members and local scenes, are scattered through the text. What are we supposed to make of all this?

Though he has been writing fiction for 30 years, Hamilton-Paterson is a singularly elusive character. What we learn from various dust jackets and his other books only adds to one’s perception of his elusiveness. He was born in 1941. He studied at Oxford, but we’re not told what. He also won the Newdigate Prize there (a distinction he shares with Oscar Wilde), but we’re not told when. (Research shows it was in 1964, when he was 23, which suggests graduate status.) On internal evidence he’s clearly a globe-trotter. He writes a science column for Das Magazin in Zurich. One of his books, listed as “children’s fiction,” is in fact a terrifyingly internalized account of a neglected and institutionalized child. His poetry is complex, quasi-surrealistic and subversive of surface appearances.

Hamilton-Paterson also writes extremely well, and the tributes to him from various literary figures are well-deserved. In 1989 he won the Whitbread First Novel Award for “Gerontius,” a fiction based on the mysterious six-week trip made to the Amazon by Sir Edward Elgar in 1923. This not only showed him to have a rare understanding of music but may help one in dealing with “Loving Monsters,” since he obviously feels very much at home in that no-man’s-land where fact and fiction overlap. In his present work, the categories are deliberately, and mischievously, muddled. We can’t tell whether what we’re reading is fact or fiction or a mixture of the two, and that’s just the way, by the look of things, that the author planned it.

So, what about Jayjay, the self-proposed subject of James’ biography, who is on his Italian deathbed when we meet him, dropping names as liberally as a London cockney drops his Hs? He has a signed photo of Henry Kissinger in his downstairs loo. He gets notes from Margaret Thatcher about her proctoscopy. He’s had the Queen Mum to stay. But what he’s anxious to unload on James and does, at length, is not this high-flying second half of his life, spent as a favored hanger-on of court and diplomatic circles, but his beginnings--Betjemanite memories of sooty, foggy outer London, followed by teenage escapes to a very different world in prewar Egypt, where Jayjay plunges into a swirl of voyeurism, pornography, bisexual experiment, blackmail and top-secret adolescent passions.

Once again, names are seemingly named. August Moll-Ziemcke, the German desert anthropologist who supplies Jayjay with a promising line in porno photos, is represented as having actually existed, and bibliographical details of his book are given. Jayjay is, he says, “a truthful impostor”: no lies, just “versions and the occasional omission.” I’m not so sure. Ambiguities again. On the other hand, the exotic foreign (and some local) inhabitants of Cairo and Alexandria here are at least as authentic as those of Olivia Manning or Lawrence Durrell.

The real trouble is that nothing much happens, even when the war comes. There’s no “English Patient” here, and Jayjay’s emotional secret, when it finally emerges, is a damp squib. Never mind. Jayjay may be in his anecdotage, may have no real story to tell, but his gossip is racy; you can smell and taste his Cairo back alleys, and he never for one instant bores you. This, alas, is more than can be said for James, who keeps bowing out of their interviews to attend to another life, one that’s surprisingly like his author’s.