The first novel

The First Time is a crucial marker.  Whether it be a first lover, first job, or first child, these first events serve to map out our chronology.  They grip and bite into our past like pitons up the face of a mountain.  Recently I achieved another first; my First Novel.  Not of course the first that I have read, or even the first that I have written; but the first written by a friend touching on matters in which I figured.

The Devil's Looking Glass: how like Simon to choose an obscure quotation from an obscure poet - Butler - that somehow has all the quaint dated contemporaneity of a Dennis Wheatley thriller.  The book is actually a PhD manqué - the thesis Rees should have written on seventeenth century scientific prose.  It even boasts a splendid collection of recondite epigrams which serve as ersatz academic footnotes.  Throughout the novel, he works in God knows how many strange-but-true facts about Aztec gods, mineralogy, Restoration eccentrics, Italian liqueurs, parapsychology and much else.  If a criticism can be made of the book, and there are several, notably that it has no heart - presumably torn out with an obsidian dagger by moonlight - it is that it wears its manifest erudition too heavily. But then Rees, while always fascinating, was never the subtlest of chaps.

But beyond all this skilful skullduggery, the book is something rather more touching, an elegy to the Varsity life.  In this respect it has much in common with The Masters, Glittering Prizes, and a host of other novels, published and unpublished, which represent the bitter fruits of an unrequited love-affair with Oxbridge.  We have the echoing pillared courts, the obligatory donnish in-fighting, the sublimely ivory-towered isolation from the outside world.  But it is not even for these elements that I find the book so moving.

It is for the way that Simon's own voice, his richly modulated unstoppable story-telling, breaks through time and again, often with words, phrases, facts and sometimes conversations which sound so familiar.

I was present at the actual birth of one draft of one chapter - I have no idea which, even assuming that first Blitzkrieg composition survived through to the printed page.  What I remember most about it was the insouciance and fecundity of Rees.  With barely an "Oh, excuse me, must do my daily chapter," he sat at his long-suffering Olympia - this was before the days of his huge, improbable and ultimately handicapping word-processor - and knocked off the requisite words.

But it was not because of that the novel hit home.  It was the way many of Simon's daily preoccupations over several years had been melded into a novel.  From the fabric of Trinity, dons and their famous foibles, to his musical knowledge and activities, and of course his half-hearted research.  I noted too the aspersions cast on Ford Escorts: I do not think it is a coincidence that Rees was no lover of my car or my driving.  On one other point I am less sure, and my feelings are more ambivalent.  I am aware of several Rees short-stories based fairly directly on events from my life at that time.  But what should I make of the fact that one of the main characters in the novel is called by the rare and half-familiar name Gwyn?

(4.2.96)

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