Loving Monsters

James Hamilton-Paterson

Editions

Review

An aged English bachelor called Jayjay buttonholes the narrator/author in the supermarket they both use near their respective homes in Tuscany and informs him that he is ‘probably going to write my life’.  Curiosity makes H-P visit Jayjay for an initial talk, at which he is hooked by the man’s charm and his description of himself as an impostor.  Born in 1918 in Eltham in South East London, Jayjay attended the local school and then left for Suez.  Within a year he left his clerical job and started dealing in pornography, which he continued to do in Alexandria, and then in Cairo during the war.  The narrative moves with aplomb from the coal and laburnums of suburbia to a Suez flophouse and the backstreets of Cairo, where the pickled turnips are ‘mauvy-pinkish lumps fished dripping from earthenware jars’.  But though Jayjay’s story is always vivid, H-P cannot help wondering why he is telling it.  ‘Mean old faggot, if that is what he is.  What is he? Why did I agree to this?’  Something is missing.  ‘Like most people he thinks unconstrued events are enough in themselves.’  The ‘narrative stands in urgent need of complication,’ H-P observes.

While he is always entertaining and persuasive, it is James Hamilton-Paterson’s thematic consistency that distinguishes him.  His new book reverts most evidently to the mental and moral territory of his 1989 masterpiece Gerontius pbk £6.99, a novel about the elderly Elgar going up the Amazon.  But the central concern of Playing With Water pbk £6.99, Hamilton-Paterson’s extraordinary autobiographical book about living on a deserted Philippine island, is also with learning how to live.  His remark there that the English culture is ‘obsessed with loss’ is amplified in Gerontius, towards the end of which Elgar writes in his journal, ‘whatever it really was is cut off & we’re left with pieces of tune wriggling in the foreground like shed lizard tails.  We work from haunted memories of nothing (but O! such nothings!).’  In this novel, characters again address their past and the coherence of their lives with the imaginative vigour and moral urgency that make James Hamilton-Paterson an important writer.  If it is the case that Jayjay was a real person (as the book states plainly that he was), then it is thematically appropriate that his life should be presented as a work of art.  It is a proof of the success of the book, however, that the question seems utterly irrelevant. - review by Johnny de Falbe