Electric Letters Z [Paperback]

'Electric Letters Z' is a novel set in the literary London of the early 1990s. It is a comedy, and like all comedy has an underlying seriousness of purpose. That purpose is to call into question many assumptions regarding the business of writing that readers and book-buyers are expected to make.

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.

The world of publishing has polarised and is now beginning to fragment. At one extreme are the conglomerate firms who have the resources and distribution networks that enable them to invest - almost with impunity - into the floss of self-fulfilling prophecy. They are able not so much to predict a best-seller as to manufacture one. At the other extreme are the small presses, varying in quality, who cannot invest in expensive publicity and distribution, and who turn out short-run productions by whatever financial means they are able to muster. CentreHouse Press is firmly in the small and short-run category, and views 'Electric Letters Z' as striking a blow not only for down-trodden, unsung genius, but for the soul of publishing itself.

One might argue politically that a free press has never really been established - historically anything so dangerous as human expression is seldom tolerated. It's not that the writer (or at least the Western writer) now finds himself up against intransigent monarchs, or is proselytised into the Church, or is duty-bound to uphold public morality, or is instructed by wiser elders to disseminate the secret codes of a developed civilisation, or is compelled even to exercise his skill through good community works ... All now is swept in the train of commercial self-interest, as a kind of last thrash for personal security in a society whose economy and demographic configuration make that security non-viable for the masses. It is in the jaundiced glare of this disease that anything like a free press has been appropriated by privileged persons such as newspaper proprietors, campus academics, middle-class professionals (almost always with a trite social message), individuals of public repute seeking to enlarge that cachet, retiring politicos, and of course plain commercial adventurers (of which there are depressingly many). Any concept of the literary artist has been lost. And yet. This is an ethos I will not submit to.

Top English novelist Marshall Zob has engineered his flight up the fastseller lists. His chronicler and one-time assistant, Alistair Wye, records every calculated step as his employer faultlessly positions himself at the hub of the literary establishment. Inquisitive, haughty, intolerant Wye certainly is.Yet could he also be subversive, mad, or even dangerous? Comic, resolute, the narrator stalks through every page, scattering his pearls with an imperious hand - while an unsuspecting Zob ensures perfect conditions for the chronicler of his downfall.

Peter Cowlam is a freelance editor and author, who has worked in both the publishing and the computer industry. Among his other published works is the collection of poems 'The Valleys of Babel' (Hub Editions). Two new works to look out for are his novel 'New Suit for King Diamond', and his collection of poems 'Camera Ready Copy', both of which are to be published by CentreHouse Press.

Whether Zob really intended the commemoration of John Andrew Glaze's death, and a celebration of his life, is still I find open to question. A great deal went against it as a project, whose demands should have been eased through Zob's own profession - although that is in itself complicated. By whatever chance or accident, those of us at work on the 'inside' - so to speak in the boardroom of English letters - have come to know Marshall Zob as wholly constructed, borne up on the vanes and those many social wingbeats first tested by his father - by Zob Snr - two men inclined to act according to the scale of likely reward.

Worse still for me has been Zob Jnr's personal weather map, his London clouds (I mean his sullen brown drizzles), and at certain other times his tumble of intoxicated sunbeams (all bound up with his flight up the fastseller charts). This has made his home - or rather, my former place of work - unpredictable atmospherically.

Astonishing? No - but it is ironic, that Glaze should come under my pen, an instrument I'd hoped to keep free of any such taint. By contrast this is so unlike the golden quill the mercenary Zob is obliged to wield - this by his family's rules of fortune - practically every working day of his life, in a padded cell. In just that ramble through another man's life (and death) is an often unbearable strain on my nib, host to all kinds of opposing forces. This is the point, the sore point, that I note even now (do I feel embarrassment? discomfort? shame?) since what I have come to spawn, under the privacy of my editorial lamp, is the full revelation of not just any old diary, but my diary (extracts below). That document of course I kept for scrupulously professional reasons, by which I mean that it isn't my fault that it tends as its seed the full and vulgar exposi. Plus there has also been the problem: how to contend with the sheer ineptitude of John Andrew Glaze's death

My name I shall hardly need to stress is Alistair Wye. Apart from having been informed, by a certain ill-dressed inhabitant of a certain misty purple moor, that numerologically this is a sign of passion (my name's numerical transposition), I have been, and I admit laboriously, Zob's amanuensis. Marshall Zob, should this not already be known to you, is the perfection of the dead Andrew Glaze, PhD, whose brightest student he was. This was way back in the early 1970s, in the cloisters of Modern College, Exe University, where the writer and academic, and incidentally Blagueur Prize-winner (twice), the witty Zob Snr, had passed before him - many years ago.

So. Gloves are off. I shall refute mythologies. Shall prick that iridescent bubble, a falsified lament over Glaze's death. Shall go on saying, that this has been no loss, a passing that hardly caused me to put down my coffee cup, or extinguish my cigarette.

I drove Zob, in Zob's silver Mercedes, to the stone parish outside Exe, while over preceding nights I had smiled patiently at his oration, which somehow he always managed to rehearse with a straight face. The priest, a man in a newly ironed cassock, I recall beamed throughout, and remarked of Glaze what bookish soil that gifted peasant had tilled (that slightly sanified reference to the proletarian origins of a leading academic). Zob, whose pallor through recent small-hours liaisons I should describe as aghast, had reached that point in his 'literary' success of luring a fabulous procession of womanhood into his Hampstead lair. One, a red-haired girl of twenty (less than half the litterateur's age), sought his assistance in finding a publisher for her thinnish collection of poems - so that she, like me, had the pleasure of his funeral oration. Unlike me, she tested the tog of his duvet. Her night-long amplitude dispatched Zob throughout the next morning, to the first, then to the second, then to the third bathroom, I later deduced in search of that cream, potion or palliative for his poor sore phallus. His redhead had tongued, petted, squeezed, caressed - once too often.

I slipped away before Zob's last farewell, and with the engine running warmed up the Mercedes. By now I was pretty well versed in that mendacious act over Glaze's mortal remains, so soon to be incinerated. Zob commended his fumes to the cosmos, assured of the 'greatness' of his achievement, for had he not laid down his lucid path - through 'a continent of English culture' - for less certain feet to tread Perhaps depressingly that was so, but can't be discussed now. For here should end the life, work, and attainments of John Andrew Glaze, whose second journey in a void I should much rather contemplate across the street, in the Forces Inn, where I could weep into some lovely local beer.

Therefore in some sense, our latest Zob masterpiece - a novel he has tactfully called 'Gimme the Cash' - is overshadowed by the demise of his distinguished tutor of Exe, a man wholly without insight. May the Lord protect his soul.

(By the way, Merle, what did you think of that capon?)