The Horned Man [Paperback]

James Lasdun's debut novel in 2002, The Horned Man, followed several successful collections of poems and short stories, one of the latter being adapted by Bertolucci for the cinema. The Horned Man attracted good reviews but it wasn't until Lasdun's Booker listed follow up Seven Lies that he became well known in literary circles.
The Horned Man is easily as compelling and brilliant as Seven Lies. It opens with echos of the stark, persecutory shock of Kafka's The Trial - the reader learns immediately that something is amiss. Laurence Miller, an English expatriate in New York, teaches Gender Studies at a college near Manhattan. He is separated from his wife Carol and desperately wants her back. He sits on the Sexual Harrassment Committee of the college at which he teaches, and this involves pointing the finger at a fellow English expatriate teacher, Bruno Jackson, who has been having an affair with a student.
But things are not right in Miller's world. He has the distinct impression that someone else is using his office. He finds out that the previous occupant met an undesirable fate. Furthermore, an erratic, irascible Bulgarian professor left in heated circumstances. Miller's gnawing desire to discover why the Bulgarian seems to have a grudge against him leads to a maze of dead ends and disparate clues, and his growing paranoia seems justified in the acts of violence that are perpetrated around him, incriminating him in the shadowy world of his pursuers.
Lasdun writes with a taut, finely honed discipline that combines flashes of poetic resonance with a plot that is compelling and hypnotic. As we learn snippets about Miller's life - his head-splitting migraines, latent since childhood but reappearing with a vengeance in this time of stress; the circumstances leading up to his wife's departure - our picture of Miller shifts and changes, slabs of jigsaw illuminating the image in unexpected ways. More mysteries leap up - why is Elaine Jordan, the lawyer at work, under the impression that she and Miller have a secret tryst? Who wrote to her impersonating Miller to give her this idea? Why does Miller respond the way he does? All these new twists and turns add to the intrigue, and Lasdun's wonderful prose keeps the reader engrossed. He has a talent not only for mesmerising story telling, but also an acute eye for humour - Miller's encounter with his upstairs neighbour is wickedly, blackly hilarious, as are details of Jordan stealing into his office and trying to create there an intoxicating mist reminescent of herself. Miller lands himself in bizarre positins which the reader can understand, having followed his thought processes and motivations, but which lead to a delicious thrill of anticipation since their appearance to other characters would appear so inexplicably weird if discovered. As Basil Fawlty and numerous Boyd heros have shown, the neurotic and their foibles are so endearing and entertaining when set in the yawning normality of the real world.
And towards the end, revelations light up the whole mystery, and the strangeness and ugliness of the situation become apparent.

This is a great book. My only whisper of a reservation is for pedantic reasons. (READ NO FURTHER if you haven't read the book - don't be tempted to peek at the spoiler, you MUST read the book - and the spoiler will ruin it.) SPOILER - READ ONLY IF ALREADY FINISHED BOOK: Lasdun's intention at the end is that the reader finds out that Miller is not as he seems. The queasy knowledge is planted that Miller himself - and not the temperamental Bulgarian - is responsible for the crimes around him: violence towards his ex-wife in a club, the presumed murder of a woman in Central Park and even of Elaine Jordan, the impersonation of Jordan's brother in a phone call to the college, possibly even her rape before her murder. This chilling realisation is powerful but the pedant in me cries that it's impossible psychologically speaking for a psychopath to have amnesia for his acts of violence. Certainly amnesia is possible after a trauma, most commonly a head injury, but not repeated amnesia interspersed with lucidity. The only other plausible explanation is that Miller writes the story at the end and is lying in an attempt to prove his innocence - which makes him a frightening, plotting, icily cold-hearted psychopath capable of plotting his actions - an insightful psychopath. This is the explanation I chose, because the one of a man who is prone to fits of psychotic violence for which he then loses all memory is unfeasible in psychiatric terms - psychotics would believe their violence was justified (due to paranoia about persecution for example), but would not forget about the acts. END OF SPOILER.

So, a stunning debut. 1/2. Not to be missed.

A remarkable piece of writing. The manner in which the sinister bleeds like a stain into the everyday is worthy of Hitchcock, and the book’s cinematic properties mean that it is probably best read in a single sitting. The protagonist moves towards his fate in the same anxious spirit of defiance and foreboding as Oedipus on the road to Thebes. Surely worth the full, five-star rating for the sheer quality of the prose and the masterful sense of inevitability as the plot follows the labyrinth through to its disturbing conclusion.

There's nothing I like more than an unreliable narrator (if you can believe that), and as far as concerns first-person protagonists who are somewhat detached from reality, James Lasdun's Lawrence Miller in "The Horned Man" knocks previous record-breaking barmpots like Patrick McGrath's Edward Haggard and Nabokov's Charles Kinbote into a cocked beret.

The blurb is reprinted above so I won't go into the plot, but please let me assure you that it will not spoil your enjoyment to know now that Miller is as mad as a cake. It's pretty obvious from page one, where he discovers the placemarker has been mysteriously moved in one of the books in his office. But the delight of "The Horned Man," which brings it more in line with "Pale Fire" than "Dr. Haggard's Disease," is that although we have a fair idea of what's not real, we are never explicitly told what is actually happening. Even at the end (which, in another fine touch, neatly has us turning back to the beginning) Miller's meticulously consistent delusions will not let go. The normal way for an author to let the light in on dusty attic of a barmy narrator's mind is to interject remarks from real people, which Lasdun resorts to only once. Here you're pretty much on your own.

Of course it is a feature of such a turbulent and twisted narrative that you can't really tell too much about what happens without spoiling it, but I can safely reveal that Miller's odyssey takes in cross-dressing, unicorns, swingers, bloody murder, excrement on desks, and representations of female masturbation in "Mansfield Park". So don't say there isn't something there for you. The other joy is the prose, which is surprisingly lively and fast-moving for a poet but with all the careful beauty you would hope for:

"Night had fallen by the time I reached my block down between B and C. It had been a crack block when Carol and I had moved there a few years ago - vials all over the sidewalk like mutant hailstones; stocky, stud-collared dealers in the doorways with canine versions of themselves grimacing on leather-and-chain leashes; a false bodega with an unchanging display of soap powders gathering dust in the window and a steady stream of human wreckage staggering in and out through the door..."

"The Horned Man" will either become a modern classic or fade into obscurity within a few years. In which case I'm delighted to have (a) got in on the ground floor for once, or (b) caught it while it's still in print [Delete as applicable]. You should too.