How to Disappear: A Memoir for Misfits [Hardcover]

Is Duncan Fallowell's seventh book How To Disappear: A Memoir for Misfits his actual life story? True, he confesses on p236 to an impressive 40 `sexual partners' in the month following Princess Diana's death, `including a group of women in a naturist Jacuzzi in Brighton.' And certainly he liberally seeds us with tantalising glimpses of private multi-generational Duncan, including the nosey little boy whose first instinct was always to boldly go and duff up any mystery. But be clear: this is no autobiography.

It is instead something much more... typical. It is, for the dorky genre-spotters, a mongrel private parts book - `part memoir, part travelogue, part biography,' to quote his unusually accurate latest publisher Ditto Press. In other words, How To Disappear is not unlike, in form and style, his other classic private parts books To Noto, St Petersburg, `New Zealand' (Going As Far As I Can): each a brilliant self-portrait of the feral Duncan Fallowell on location, as spotted in the looking glass of adored or maligned travelled nation.

Is he then a narcissist whose World Atlas serves exclusively as his mirror? Well, I'll come back to that.

Let's just not get ahead of ourselves. There's the business of the cryptic title: How To Disappear. The early dread threat of a self-help book from California soon gives way to compelling true-life stories of strangeness: each of the four of the five long pieces comprising this book cradles a social Houdini, a personality once great or associated with greatness, who has performed a public disappearing act and now lurks shyly in the shadows awaiting (willing or unwilling) rediscovery by Fallowell.

Will force be necessary to open up these exotic clams? These misfits? Part of the joy of this book lies in wondering whether.

There's reclusive Alastair Graham who was Evelyn Waugh's ex-boyfriend; and the elusive social climber Bapsy Pavry (aka Lady Winchester); not forgetting the absent Maruma who bought the alcoholic Isle of Eigg; and who could forget dead Diana? DF himself `disappears' in `Sailing To Gozo' where a ubiquitous, faintly menacing stranger haunts Fallowell's way on a quaint island yester-world.'''
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Like the little boy he once was, DF the man is first drawn to mystery or it is drawn to him. Not any mystery, mind. The mystery is usually well-connected and/or old world glamorama. And if his overriding instinct is to dispel mystery then his fix is to be found in the tricky process of unravelling it.

Take the case of Alastair Graham, for example. Fallowell first chances on the old dipso in a pub in New Quay and only later discovers who he is (or was) precisely. Sherlock Holmes himself would be impressed by the lengths to which Fallowell goes to track down witnesses for enlightening demystification: awe-inspiring. In the case of poor old Pabsy, who spent her life in posh hotels hustling for royal party invitations, Fallowell's decades-long quest begins with the discovery of her potted bio in a book in India: he's hooked by her sad eyes in the accompanying photo, he must meet her!

Fallowell's dazzling analyses and asides (the book could be subtitled, But I Digress...) do not spare his own primal motivation: ghosts of a sort, such as the subjects of his book, absorb him. He is drawn to `the disquieting state in which someone is neither present in one's life nor absent from it.' He is the ghostbuster in the `abyss which can open up between being here and not being here.' In his Bapsy piece, the spectre metaphor is bettered by reality when Fallowell has what could be an actual supernatural experience. He remains agnostic on what it is; but to risk ridicule from literary followers of the atheistic faith by writing about it at all is most admirable.

Fallowell's ghosts come in all shapes and sizes and dead places sometimes tickle his inner Madame Arcati. He adores Pompeii as a zombified still of disinterred pagan sexuality while sluttish ever-dying Venice is subject to such a fantastic Fallowell flogging (a `desexed city') that doges in the Roman Catholic hell must be planning revenge should he ever convert.

As ever, Fallowell seduces with an electric prose style which straddles knowledge high and street like a whore plugged in to a well-stocked Kindle. Why else would I want to read about some sad old snob like Pabsy but to relish the vervy manner in which he compassionately grants what eluded her in life: the right kind of attention. Pathetic she may have been but Fallowell's mockery is only very faint: he observes the human constant in her, the disappointment that urged her pointless epic life.

Certainly no narcissist (to return to my question above) ever spent as much time preoccupied with how others tick as Fallowell. Beautifully packaged in art-worked hardback, How To Disappear is a beyond-fabulous wallowing in weird people in wonderful places - magical and mesmerising. Oh, and very gossipy, too.

(Review first published on Madame Arcati blog)

"How to Disappear" is a most entertaining and memorable book. The pleasure starts with its surprising format - a compact beautifully designed object which could have been born at the Bauhaus, as if someone decided to re-examine how a book should look, how it should feel, how the pages should fall open, how the type face and type size should please the eye. Ditto Press have thought through every aspect of its production and come up with something which challenges the "want to have" appeal of the Kindle. OK, it's just a single volume but one I will want to keep and revisit for the pleasure of handling the amazing cover let alone re-reading its contents.

The pleasure is compounded by the mystery of the book's nature. It feels like autobiography but only obliquely. The five sections all explore the semi-obscure lives of five very different people and Fallowell's careful, respectful and delicate probing at the mystery of their disappearance parallels the fiction writer's task of creating convincing characters out of fragments.

Fallowell's is an attractive voice, both self-confident in its authoritative worldly knowledge of people, places and literary gossip and yet subtly self-effacing. He reveals some of the wide reach of his life's trajectory in different decades, social circles and iconic or off-beat locations while hinting that it is the world travelled which is important, not the traveller. He is the humble observer of the world's wonders and finds the greatest insight when lifting the least likely stone to uncover the least expected phenomenon.

He likes to make space in his life for his fascination with other people and the more "other" they are, the more he is drawn to them. He discovers the existence of a lady called Bapsy Pavry in India when he is still a young man and then, with the attention span of the truly dedicated, returns over many years to the trail of researching and fleshing out her improbable life story. We share his delight as he gradually discovers the absurdity of Bapsy's life. But, like Fallowell, we stick with Bapsy to the end and will never forget her. In fact, his selfless diligence has rendered her immortal.

I was reading this book at the same time as "The Sense of an Ending" by Julian Barnes but I know which of the two I will remember the most and which characters will stay with me the longest and that's not those of Barnes, intriguing and masterful though his prize-winning novel might be.
How to Disappear: A Memoir for Misfits

Slip into How to Disappear as you would into a warm, scented bath -- and then luxuriate. This is something to savour, and I have read my copy ever so slowly, because pleasure is even better when it's prolonged.

It's a mystery to me why Fallowell's not better known, for his prose style is consistently elegant, piquant, and just generally exquisite. The extended essays in this book reveal his depth of understanding about human beings and their quirks, but even his tartest observations are humane.

Fallowell achieves the seemingly impossible -- he makes us curious about relative unknowns, and desperate to join him on the hunt to find out more about who they were, what they did, and whatever became of them. I will never not prick up my ears, in future, should I hear or read the names Alastair Graham, Bapsy Pavry, or Maruma.

And, of course, I shall remain on the lookout for more Fallowell titles to add to my growing collection. He is a gem, and should be treasured.