{"id":90,"date":"2008-09-01T22:26:11","date_gmt":"2008-09-02T03:26:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/reviews.editormum.com\/?p=90"},"modified":"2010-05-28T22:28:45","modified_gmt":"2010-05-29T03:28:45","slug":"the-debt-to-pleasure-a-novel-by-john-lanchester","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reviews.editormum.com\/?p=90","title":{"rendered":"The Debt to Pleasure: A Novel, by John Lanchester"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had in mind a project for a novel which would begin in the usual manner … except that gradually the characters’ identities would begin to slip and to blur, and so would the geographical surroundings. …Only the style of the book would remain consistent …. gradually … the work would become more troubling … until the appalled readers, unable to understand what was happening … and also unable to stop reading, would watch the wholesale metastasization … the collapse … so that when they finally put the book down they are aware only of having been protagonists in a deep and violent dream whose sole purpose is their incurable unease. (pages 226-228)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is not often that an author postpones his statement of purpose to the closing pages of his work, burying it within the work itself, rather than in a preface, foreword, or note from the author. But that is precisely what John Lanchester has done in this novel.<\/p>\n

Habitual preface-skippers will miss out on essential information, as the “preface” is a note from the protagonist, not from the author. And it sets the stage for the tone of the rest of the book.<\/p>\n

Tarquin Winot is the anti-heroic protagonist of this book — he is, in fact, so anti-heroic that he serves as both protagonist and antagonist. Winot is verbose, opinionated, patronizing, self-aggrandizing, and entirely too fond of himself. He is also faintly sinister, but the faintness of that impression steadily diminishes throughout the narrative.<\/p>\n

(If you can call it that. If James Joyce or TS Eliot were to write a murder-mystery, this book is a good example of what would result. It’s a stream-of-consciousness, flashback-ridden nightmare of a story.)<\/p>\n

Winot is presented as a gourmet and connoisseur — but not in a sympathetic way. He is a dark and worrying figure, and the disjointed stories of his earlier life increase the darkness and worry. What begins to emerge is a person whose life has been strangely surrounded by bizarre and inexplicable tragedies. And a person who seems to have both a morbid fascination with death and a suspicious knowledge of the intimate details of the tragedies that touch his life.<\/p>\n

This is a hard book to read, and it was only sheer, teeth-gritting determination that got me through the first two chapters. And then I couldn’t stop reading, even though I wanted to. I needed to understand what was being hinted at. I needed to know the end, even though it was all-too-baldly foreshadowed. If you can work your way through the page-long periodic sentences with their frequent interruptions and asides, you will, as the author suggests, find yourself waking from “a deep and violent dream,” afflicted by “incurable unease.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had in mind a project for a novel which would begin in the usual manner … except that gradually the characters’ identities would begin to slip and to blur, and so would the geographical surroundings. …Only the style of the book would remain consistent …. gradually … the work would become more troubling …… Continue reading The Debt to Pleasure: A Novel, by John Lanchester<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[4,32],"class_list":["post-90","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-fiction","tag-books","tag-mystery","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reviews.editormum.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reviews.editormum.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reviews.editormum.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reviews.editormum.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reviews.editormum.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=90"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/reviews.editormum.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reviews.editormum.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=90"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reviews.editormum.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=90"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reviews.editormum.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=90"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}