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From the Author
IT CAN'T GO ON is my sixth novel, the title - in common with the second, THIS IS IT - comprising a phrase used very often and meaning all sorts of different things depending upon not just the nature of the speaker, but also on the subtleties of inflection. IT CAN'T GO ON is an ironic title, at base - the 'point' of the book being, I suppose, that whether we like it or not everything in the grander sense will go on in our absence and even up to and beyond the point of our deaths.
The novel opens with Jeremy at yet another drinks party - and this one he oh-so-nearly didn't bother going to. But he meets there Phoebe (or, at least, that's the name he is sure she has told him - but according to her a short while later she's actually called Maria …and sometimes Marsha: she is both bewildering and utterly captivating). Jeremy is steamrollered by her (literally) devastating allure and succumbs to just anything she wants (but why? he persistently asks himself: it's not as if she's even very nice…).
From here, the 'domino effect' takes over - except that the relentless progression of the plot, like life, is rather less ordered and predictable than a meandering line of preset blocks, duly falling over in strict rotation. The 'pinball effect' is better - the random tangents taken by the ball at speed as it ricochets away from each clanking cushion, to end up God knows where, or when. Jeremy's wife, Anne, orders him out of the house - not because of Phoebe (Maria…Marsha) but on account of her unshakeable belief (is she right? Is she wrong?) that he has been conducting an affair with the nanny of their two children, Adrian and Donna. Soon after, the nanny finds herself out of a job, for the self-same reason, and is therefore flat-hunting - her life turned upside down. In the shared flat she eventually ends up in, she meets people, new people. More lives are affected by the governing yet random pinball machine, and the ripples are spreading ever wider. Seemingly inconsequential characters - a taxi driver and a cashier in a building society, among many others - I follow and explore as a result of their having come into accidental collision with the driving forces of the moment: yet more lives are bruised, enriched, warped or madly altered. The plot is brought around to a satisfying conclusion - but not, of course, an end: because none of us ends just because we have dropped away from sight - and nor do people we have ceased to know or love or even remember simply therefore cease. Anyone we know, we know purely because we met them (husbands, wives, milkmen, head waiters) and everyone else…we simply didn't. The ramifications of this apparently simplistic truism are, of course, totally without limit.
Much absurdity and rich humour arise as a direct result of these glancing blows between humans on their way wherever - as well as, inevitably, sex, pain and puzzlement. Cause results in unguessable effect; at moments of deepest misery or utter elation we are convinced that such states simply can't go on - either because we simply cannot bear them to, or else because it has been dinned into us that all good things must come to an end. And they do. And pain is blunted. But life goes on: it has to.
Fiction Poor Souls, This Is It, Stuff, Summer Things, Winter Breaks, It Can't Go On (Faber and Faber)
Non-Fiction Beside the Seaside ( Mitchell Beazley), All Shook Up: A Flash of the Fifties (Cassell, October 2000)
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Customer Reviews
The general theme is that of infidelity. The women are either sexual predators or embittered housewives; the men are unthinking adulterers or failing professionals. The are moments of sublime horror and embarrassment and some touches of lyrical mastery, albeit couched in the ignoble inner rhetoric of whichever character happens to be holding forth at the time.
There's no plot as such - more a chain of events. A man is seduced by a woman at a party and subsequently thrown out of the house by his wife, an action which sets off a chain of events that shatters the lives of a spinster, a taxi driver, two bank workers and a work-shy American before returning to the rather colourless married couple who started it .
I won't say any more - I don't want to ruin it for you!
The story, however, was brilliant. I find myself thinking back to this book weeks after finishing it. At times I even quote from it. I feel as though I got to know and dislike all of the characters on a personal basis. They were all essentially slime.
But this book also reflect human nature at its worst and goes to show how our actions can result in a chain reaction that eventually may lead back to ourselves.
Does this mean that we are all slime?
I don't think so. But it does leave one wondering if this book is meant to have a moral and if so, then we should be saddened by the dismal view of humankind with which we are left at the end.
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