Above the Fat
‘Bill Mathers’, meanwhile, satirises the figure of the curmudgeonly ageing novelist, presented by an amanuensis, a young man who responded to a classified ad: ‘Old man, blinding writer. Seeks reader for short walks and zero conversation’. His pearls of wisdom are a mixture of boastfulness, pub bore wisdom, fishing chat, ignorance, gossip and name-dropping. Ted Hughes: ‘shit at fishing’. Walter Benjamin: ‘people go round quoting him like he’s a pal. They miss the point: you’re not meant to think he’s your pal’. Zadie Smith: ‘she farted once at the Booker ceremony. Cleared the room. Still didn’t win though’. The smug satisfaction and complacency displayed by Mathers is the same energy behind a thousand opinion pieces bemoaning the death of the novel, or the popularity of Sally Rooney.
Thom Cuell reviews Thomas Chadwick‘s Above the Fat – the Republic of Consciousness Book of the Month.
Red Sky at Night
Paul arrives in Patras and lights a cigarette. It is four pm and hot. Sweltering in fact. It has been all summer and even though it is now September the heat shows no sign of letting up. From the coach across southern Greece, Paul had seen trees blackened by forest fires and white walls stained with smoke. He crossed rivers that had become beige dried-up banks and he watched a dog limp across a road to beg an old man for water. Everywhere you look there are signs of the damage being done to the land by the heat, but here in Patras no-one seems to care.
An extract from Thomas Chadwick‘s Above the Fat – this month’s Republic of Consciousness Book of the Month.