The Works of Melmont [Hardcover]

Sarah Dunant

David Storey

Simon Callow

Philip Pullman has written about the care and respect that a writer has to exercise for his materials when actualising the structure of a story. The endless ramifications of Maxwell’s hall-of-mirrors existence, his unexplained changes of religion, his real-life tergiversarial secretiveness; none of it would leave me alone. What was he hiding, behind that portentously vast exterior, that delicious, artificial stage-villain delivery? Surely the secret, the thing that drove him on, was more than the theatrical: it had to be something special. The mysterious death he underwent allows a fictive ‘truth’ about the Mighty Deceiver to emerge without restraint or writ, from the wordprocessor. At last, it can be told.

One of the characters in the book is Dominic, an idealistic youth who finds his life’s vocation when he is employed to write the great man’s rags to riches story. Dominic finds out the truth behind Melmont’s facade, and pens not the commissioned hagiography but a detailed documentary exposé; The Book of Melmont, which the great man almost succeeds in destroying, and with it the truth about himself.

Did Maxwell trade in nuclear warheads? No-one today would be surprised to discover that he had. In life, Maxwell was a past-master of the cheque-book powered writ, suppressing all criticism. Now the man who came on as Falstaff crossed with Billy Bunter and Hermann Goering is gone, leaving pensioners burgled and his companies gutted. Can he ever be forgiven for leading the world such a dangerous dance?

I love the fat villain for his very excesses, and for the fact that his path had mystery at its end and its beginning. I love the way Melmont arrives in a war-torn, scruffy, exhausted England, the distant one I grew up in. This vanished England seemed always on the cusp of annihilation in the cold war, so its survival and present prosperity is a kind of miracle which has inspired me, as remembrancer, to paint where we stood and stand; on a precious, fragile and fortunate island of the mind.

With Melmont’s arrival the country’s preoccupations and beliefs change radically. Its wealth grows with his girth. And then, as the century expires, the last big lie cannot sustain, the bubble bursts, and the big man falls off his yacht.Our age with its technological marvels is witness to the rebirth of the absurd desire for some kind of human omnipotence. But our humanity is sadly the same as the one that dogged the excesses of the Roman Emperors. Melmont's excesses are the same human ones, no better or worse than the ones that made an end of Nero, or Caligula. How advanced are we, morally, from those times? I don't know the answer but in a world which now apparently has the capacity to destroy itself a thousand times over, it seems a fair question.

Melmont Ate My World
Everybody thinks they know how it began.

No less than two body hoists had to be belayed together by the rescuers, whose task it was to retrieve the vast corpse from the ocean. The burly Spanish coastguards chuckled incredulously, as they improvised the net which would span the epic circumference of their corpse. Then they dropped their cigarallo stubs into the water, spat on their hands and set to hauling, almost capsizing the boat.

Later, in interview, both thick-fingered fishers of men excitedly used the same name for their oversize catch of the day as the one used for the unimaginably vast Spanish state lottery;

—El Gordo!

The part-time coastguards were paid little enough for the interview. They were people whose moment came and went, as the spotlight of history passed. But the fulcrum of the earth had tilted, far more drastically than anyone could imagine.

As the the body was apparently raised from the water, the world had in fact entered a new and different state, having been entirely swallowed whole by the drowned man, Earnest Melmont, MC.
It is true that history appeared to continue. There was news of the Big One’s death, which resounded from his rival’s satellites round the world.

Then, hard on the heels of the announcement, came rumours of a titanic misappropriation of funds, sums of the fifteenth magnitude, telephone-numbers-to-distant-galaxies, almost beyond counting, which had also disappeared. Earnest Melmont had taken a lot of money with him, apparently.

What had happened was that a very great deal of matter followed the money into Not-ness. Indeed, more than a very great deal of matter was involved. Everything; not just the world, but the whole universe––with the possible exception of Earth’s moon.

This fact is so shocking, so peculiar that it is still routinely denied, mocked or ignored––not least in the press which Melmont used to dominate. Mark my words, if it is published, this depiction of Melmont the Oesophagian will have to be disguised, tucked away in the occult section, or as some kind of ‘zany’ science fiction.

Of course, there may be those who can read between the lines and see it for what it is. Are you that rare discerning soul, the Discriminating Reader, to whom I must speak of terrible things?

Compared with Melmont’s sudden depradation, the most treacherous biological weapons on Earth are pinpricks. The atom bomb is entirely harmless, beside what He has done. The hydrogen and neutron bombs, (which Melmont earlier traded all around the world before gulping the everything down), are mere penny party-poppers. This may seem incredible, at first. But hear me out.

No one denies that space, mass and time are the same ‘thing’, like a mountain with three names, seen from three different countries. In Melmont’s final Act, all earthly mountains were swallowed with insolent ease, along with everything else.

Everest, at a single gulp, followed by Ararat, the Cascades, the Atlas ranges, Table Mountain, the Andes and, at one fell slurp, the blue oceans, Mother Earth’s lycra exercise garment that stretches cool and deliciously curved over the self-heating radioactive core.

The core itself, in the ultimate hostile takeover, unconsulted, engulfed.

The Cotswolds, the Cheviots, Brazil’s renowned Mato Grosso, France’s Massif Central; any number of luxury hotels, and their golf courses.

In the solar system, it is likely only the moon escaped, bumping away like a bobbed apple from His lips. I believe a substitute flattened hemisphere was placed in position immediately, and the true moon wanders by itself forever, in a Melmontless void.

So, where are we now, exactly? Nowhere, more or less.

Before He engulfed it, the earth like most planets was round, and in a decent, oldfashioned Newtonian orbit. Right now, we have been filletted of all our previous dimensions. Things exist in speculation, true, and that is all.

The present shape and weight of the entire universe now is akin to an inside-out old games sock, or Melmont’s longer intestine. The ‘end of history’ is no longer an empty phrase, my friend!

How did this happen?

At the point of drowning, Melmont somehow converted financial black holes into physical ones, transforming himself into a dark, omnivorious sucking Force, a living gravitational field, pure Hunger which first engulfed his creditors, sucking them wholesale inside Him like a dark star asset-stripping a solar system that strays too close.

And then, having swallowed his creditors, he did not stop there. He could have, but He went on. He swallowed everything. The ground beneath and the air we breathe. You, them, us and so on.

To rationalists, for a mere businessman to perform this kind of high-velocity negative entropy is of course, absurd. But physicists daily discover the universe is not only strange, it is stranger than anyone previously thought. The science writing of the last seventyfive years, from Doctor Alan Turing’s ‘Computable Numbers’ to the latest book on chaos theory, describe far more bizarre existences than the one into which the world is now trapped. Those who regularly watch space-operas on television should realise they are in one.
In a nutshell: Melmont, having fallen into a state of plasmic convertability, coaxed open the world-oyster, and while appearing to perish in one dimension, in fact commenced a revenge-driven feast which exponentially maximised its own appetite, and concluded with engorging all of creation.

The sun rose and a body was found.

The putt-putting of boat engines ceased and voices announcing the discovery called over the blue to each other, in the stillness under the suddenly empty sky. Horny hands plied salt-stiffened sisal ropes. Hoists creaked and groaned, and the prow of the little rescue cutter reared uneasily, as if it alone sensed there was something amiss.

In death, Melmont had successfully mimicked a fat man who stumbled over the stern rail during a heart attack, his tears dispersing in the sea as the softly thudding marine diesels bore his boat, named for his favourite daughter, away.