This is it, by Joseph Connolly Faber & Faber, 310pp, £8.99 in UK "GOD - I don't know what the bloody book's about," Pizer, the anti-hero of Joseph Connolly's boisterous second novel, confesses to the favourite: tenant of his inherited large house.
Gloria, "too nice in every way", is a prostitute.
"What are novels about?" Eric asks her and himself (and this, reviewer). "Men, women, love, hate, life, death." Slipping, as he often does, into irritable interior monologue, Eric adds: "I always sound so pompous when I talk about this so-called novel, and I've only written two lines of the fucking thing." "And is it a Hampstead novel?" Gloria persists. At first, he dismisses that idea, which he associates with "something on the lines of [Margaret] Drabble".
But then, when she asks him whether he has got a title, he says: "Well, actually, I think you've just given me the title - The Hampstead Novel, how about that? I'll put you in the thing, acknowledgements." Joseph Connolly ran a book-shop in Hampstead for many years and his new novel is indeed set in Hampstead, on the fashionable inner suburb's less fashionable southern slope. He immediately demonstrates what a dangerous place London can be. The very first sentence begins: "When the big red bus knocked him down in Fitzjohn's Avenue Connolly proceeds to write with lusty good humour about farcical infidelities and blackmail and their usual consequent anxieties.
Fiona, Eric's live-in, 36-year-old "girl-friend", who collects the rent money for him whenever she can (to spend on her clothes), visits him in hospital. Though he is lying in pain, with a broken leg and a wired jaw, she typically asks: "Are you all right? Sweet thing?" And then: "Fiona looked at him quite crossly and said, `Eric, we have to talk'." Only what he calls "red-hot sex" keeps them together. Her assessment of this aspect of their relationship is different She confides in her best woman friend, her adviser on haute couture: "About twice a week I excite him, too much for about thirty seconds flat. Jesus, aren't men utterly contemptible? They're all the same." Even so, she keeps asking him to marry her. She says she wants children while there is still time. Eric, however, is unable to oblige, `as Connolly discloses early in the story. Eric says he spends the weekends in Reading, away from London distractions, to devote himself to his work-in-progress, or work-not-in-progress. But in fact he spends the weekends in Bath, with his wife, Bunty, who has a house and money and is a good cook.
To Bunty, Eric says he spends the weekdays publishing art books. To lend verisimilitude to this cover story this hard-cover story - he regularly buys a couple of expensive coffee-table books every Friday on the way to the railway station.
Little does he know that Bunty, that model of provincial domesticity, is a secret adulterer who regularly adulterates their adulterous marriage. Meanwhile, Fiona, the supposed would-be mother of Eric's children, is also unfaithful to him, while he, in turn, is unfaithful to Fiona in London, as well as in Bath.
These complications are merely the initial twists in the plot. Enter one Slingsby, a sinister character who has somehow learned all about Gloria, Fiona and Bunty and demands a park-bench rendezvous and a large sum of money to keep quiet.
"If he didn't keep this appointment, Slingsby had assured him, the police would be apprised of the fact that he was a pimp and the keeper of a bawdy house and, prior to that, Slingsby would personally - very slowly - slice off each of Eric's ears." Eric recognises that he is in deep trouble. The rent money would not be enough for Slingsby, even if Fiona didn't spend it on Armani suits. Eric's cri de coeur gives colour (blood-red) to the novel's cryptic title.
" `Right,' said Eric out loud. `Right - OK, then. OK, fine. This is it. Jesus, yeah. This is it'." Should he ask his wife for the money? It may just as reasonably be asked whether a subsidiary, character by the name of Henry Vole will ever give up his addiction to alcoholic cough syrup, "ultra-soft pornography from the 195Os" and endless cups of tea.
Ah, Hampstead.
