Electric Letters Z [Paperback]

There are three central characters. The first of these is Marshall Zob, a literary celebrity whose social ascent takes him into the heart of London's most fashionable literary quarter, namely Hampstead, home also of politicians, TV personalities and rock stars. The truth of Marshall Zob is this: that a network of media contacts has ensured his high profile at every stage of his literary career, and through the force of promotion and advertising has turned his mediocre works of fiction into bestsellers. Zob's delusion is that his success is due to his genius.

Our second character is Alistair Wye. Wye's background, although bookish (he reads Nabokov, Nabokov, and Nabokov) is in computer science. Zob has hired him as an assistant, and it is from this perspective of assistant - that is, from Wye's point of view - that the story of Zob's eventual downfall is told. This brings us directly, for reasons which will presently become clear, to the third of our central characters, Professor Andrew Glaze, a man already dead when the action of the novel opens. Let us concentrate a little on Glaze.

Glaze has been Professor of English Literature at Exe University. This is a fictitious seat of learning, but has very obvious parallels with Oxford and Cambridge. Zob was a student at Exe University during the 1970s, and at that time developed a close relationship with his tutor Glaze. In fact Zob was not only his star pupil, but the son of Zob Senior, also a professor at Exe. When Zob Junior made it clear that he wished to pursue a career as professional writer, Glaze used all his influence with publishers, newspaper people and film producers to set his protigi on the right path.

Glaze's personal life hasn't gone well. A short while prior to the opening of the novel, his marriage has collapsed and his wife Samantha has fled to New York, where, after the anticipated divorce, she intends to marry one of New York's wealthiest bankers. Glaze takes this opportunity to follow her to America, ostensibly on sabbatical, where professionally he embarks on an ill-conceived lecture tour. A chance remark during one of his early lectures seems to indicate that he has conceived and is about to publish a startlingly new theory of literature. This is bound up with a semi-philosophical notion of time. For Glaze this is problematic, since philosophy is not a subject he cares for or has even studied.

Inevitably the lecture tour is a failure, and that and his moribund marriage drive him into mental ill-health. All of this is catalogued by Glaze himself in a series of letters and postcards that he sends to Zob during his time in America. Unfortunately Zob has been careless about filing these letters, and has them dotted about in no particular order in his extensive archive. Furthermore his replies to his friend Glaze have all been undertaken on an IBM-compatible using word-processor software he still doesn't quite understand. All those replies do still exist, and are there, somewhere on his computer disk system, but Zob has no idea how to retrieve them. It is a long time since he printed and dispatched them.

Why should Zob wish to retrieve these letters? It is because, at the outset of the story, Glaze has just recently committed suicide. Hacks in the literary world see this as an opportunity, and many of them are now at work writing lengthy obituaries and shop-window biographies. Zob decides that he will cash in too, with an annotated version of the correspondence between himself and Glaze during that American lecture tour. It is Wye's job to root out and order both sides of this exchange.

It is during this labour that Wye keeps a careful eye on Zob's three other preoccupations. The first involves the fabulous procession of womanhood which Zob lures into his bed, almost on a nightly basis. The second is his political infighting in the very brutish world of publishing and writerly success. The third is his obsession with public accolades, and his attempts to bribe his way into winning the 'Best-novel-to-be-published (this decade)' award. This is an award very much like the Booker Prize.

It is here that Zob eventually comes unstuck, since a new and even more mediocre novelist, Justin Simms, appears on the scene just as it seems certain that Zob will win his coveted prize. Simms's friends are as powerful as Zob's own, and at the last moment Simms seems likely to snatch that prize from him.

Quietly, Wye works away at the tasks set him by his master, yet takes the trouble to keep a diary of events. It is that diary which constitutes the text of 'Electric Letters Z', a novel through which it is the author's intention to show that the world of English fiction is not driven by its best practitioners. It is driven and ruthlessly controlled by an English old-boy network - one which all the propaganda tells us died or at least heard its death-knell in the more liberal 1960s. Anyone outside that network who has tried to publish a work of literature knows that not to be the case.

All this has to be said because in the opinion of many we are not seeing the best of the contemporary English novel in published form. That is a pernicious state of affairs, whose authority is hereby challenged.