At 10:35 on an early summer's morning, John Lanchester sat down at his study desk, switched on his new Dell computer, opened up the word processing programme that the computer had come with and began

Monday

lol

I realised things had gone wrong as soon as I arrived at my hotel. The receptionist spoke no English. Only when I showed them my passport did they seem to accept, with reluctance, that I had a booking. I was given a key and took my own bag upstairs. the room was a cramped, over furnished space with thin brown walls. On the desk was an envelope of conference materials including a laminated pass on a lanyard and a printed programme.

now i have to confess that my flatmate and friend, aware of the strong feelings lanchester provokes in me, had already read me this paragraph out loud before I had to ask him to stop. but we both noted that, although we both use hotels in our separate work very frequently, we have never ever encountered a receptionist who didn't speak English.

I do remember a place in Italy about twenty years ago, which was more of a boarding house, where the late night receptionist didn't speak any English, and where there was a gunshot in the middle of the night and loud shouting. But it wasn't the sort of place that would host a conference.

I note warily the Lanchester signature of non-specific descriptions of material contents, 'Laminated pass on a lanyard.'

i mean basically it already feels like one of those stories that once memorably caused a friend of mine to say to someone after they'd finished, 'I'm sorry I don't believe a word of it.' (Again, as I think I said upthread, he has a habit of making you exclaim 'No, they didn't, no you weren't, no it *wasn't*.')

Ok, he's at a conference that he feels he's been misled into attending.

The first talk on the first morning was titled 'What String Theorists Can Learn from Vlad the Impaler: Narrative, Belief and the Immanence of the Imperceptible'. The other events were given similar names and had the same preposterous emphasis on the idea of an engagement or 'conversation' between areas that are manifestly questions of proof and fact, on the one hand, and, on the other side, a degenerate mass of of whiffle and nonsense.

It brings to mind a line in the address on the liner notes of The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall: 'Forcedcomedy, Lancs.'

oh god he's a Sokal guy, of course he is

In short, I find I have been brought to this godforsaken country in Central Europe – I say godforsaken purely as a figure of speech – to attend a conference on the 'dialogue' (emetic term) between science and mythology under entirely false pretences. My views on this subject are well known.

ok, unreliable narrator. we must tread carefully. any pomposities or imbecilities of statement may not be the author's own. I do note the not all covert hostility, as in lol how funny this sort of thing is, to the notion of theory - let's make it look silly or small. This isn't a narratorial thing I think.

I get the feeling his dismissiveness may be intended to be of the same category as MR James' academics, and that there will be some supernatural happenings.

yes! of course. xpost.

Bah! I have to go out now.

and regardless of it being a signal of the unreliable narrator, i don't think how godforsaken is used there is at all good. either in it being used in the first place, or how it is then reversed into irony.

taking it literally i suppose this is more indication that this will be a supernatural story.

it will be here when you get back, tom.

oh yeah, i have just remembered what "Coffin Liquor" means

Tom trudged out into the overcast late-afternoon pallor of a London New Year's Eve

he phones the organiser.

'I have been lured here under a pretext,' I said. 'My understanding was that this event would be an opportunity to explain my ideas and to point out the ways in which other people's beliefs are wrong. I now find this is not the case.

Swift or Myles this is not.

ok so it's a very heavy-handed satire of a Sokal guy, i'll let you off for now M. Lanchester

fiver says the narrator turns out to be called Dichard Rawkins

ok, so we know now this will be supernatural and the narrator is intended to be unreliable and pompous. so this sort of thing is probably fine?

I slept poorly. The atmosphere of this room is oppressive. The furniture is heavy but the walls are thin. The building creaks as it settles. The heating is set high and cannot be turned down...

this bit is very capital tho:

Breakfast was dark bread and black jam. Not bad.

"Prof. Pritchard Hawkins to rezeption."

little bits of the lanchester gps approach to scene-setting appear:

The conference centre is a short walk away from the hotel, about four hundred metres.

bit of tense oddity that i'm not feeling in the previous bit - "slept...is...are...creaks"

it is p tense amirite!

He was succeeded by a female Eastern European sociologist in early middle age who had hair with a coloured streak in it and purple glasses. Also bangles

...

As I made my way out of the room I found myself standing in front of the female sociologist. Under the circumstances, I felt it incumbent on me to say something about her talk. In a professional context, as a point of principle, I do not permit myself to dissemble my views. At the same time I am always scrupulously polite.

'You are stupid,' I said.

Irony is a delicate business, and stating the bleeding obvious, that last excerpt is really ill-judged. it's not at all funny, and its rudeness and stupidity bleeds through to the reader imo. also irony is obv a two-edged sword, and the targets of the unreliable narrator here are no less targets of the text. so that 'sociologist with bangles' really isn't very astute or amusing. it's very unfair to lanchester to compare him to swift - it would be unfair on anyone really - but the language of irony and satire needs to be language on a hair-trigger. you should feel the tension of wit. this is slack and does violence to the intelligence of the reader.

it's also not something i would expect a human being to say to a stranger even in the context of academia, think he's been on Twitter too long

good point about the tenses, it was nagging at me as well.

The heating is set high and cannot be turned down, and when I opened a window I was greeted by intermittent carousing from the street outside. An uncomfortable night. Breakfast was dark bread and black jam. Not bad. A number of other guests were eating the meal on their own; I surmise that they too are conference attendees.

it's a mixture of past simple and present simple, which I think is ok for diary observations, which is how this is structured? 'surmise' is a bit wobbly there, as present simple is something either factual or that he is thinking while writing the diary. it should be 'surmised' or 'I think', but it's just about allowable as a piece of narratorial pomposity.

i mean this whole piece is pretty hoary tbh. cat person it is not.

The closest was a famous church and graveyard of both architectural and historical consequence.

i mean i don't really want to read these words even as parody.

the tenses might be pointing towards our narrator turning out to be in some kind of limbo state, it feels too calculated to be simply accidental. we shall see!

his agent or somebody should really tell him to cut it out with this shit tho

ha ha, something's gone a bit wobbly here again:

I decided to take the opportunity for a little sightseeing. I had brought the guidebook and there was a selection of places of interest within convenient walking distance of the hotel. The closest was a famous church and graveyard of both architectural and historical consequence. I took some refreshment at a café in a side street and wandered through the paved lanes towards my intended destination. This is the medieval part of town. The buildings were close on either side; many of them had arcades for, according to the guidebook, the dual purpose of keeping off summer sun and winter rain.

That should be 'the buildings are close on either side'. also, 'my intended destination' and very much 'the dual purpose' are superfluous, and really cumbersome. this is pure lanchester. so laboured and cack-handed.

one of those passages where you feel a good editor would have edited it down to 0.

i'm going to get a an oatmeal cracker and some cheese. brb.

i've been rereading M.R. James over the last couple of weeks and i think i can hear him spinning from here

A decrepit stone arch ... opened onto an oblong patch of crammed, stacked graves. They were so densely pressed together that they seemed to be squeezing against one another, as only living things can. Some of them protruded sideways and upwards at erratic angles, like a mouthful of unstraightened teeth.

ok this is bad. 'as only living things can' is absurd, he means 'like living things', I think, if he means anything at all. taken as it is it implies graves are generically living things. the fact that he's trying to suggest malevolence, that these graves *are* living (when normally they are not) has as a consequence been confused.

that 'unstraightened teeth' is a balls up as well. for a start it's a f'ing cliche (but well, here we are). but also, 'unstraightened' is wrong. it should be 'crooked'. 'unstraightened' is very lol middle-class father perspective of dentristy. 'all crookedness is as yet unstraightened godliness.'

this incompetence with metaphor is also pure lanchester. he just simply doesn't understand how it works, frankly. it's incredible that he lacks a basic skill of imaginative writing.

of course these graves in this churchyard also show a fundamental lack of imagination, so we have a few problems here obv.

i mean i feel a bit bad, this is clearly meant to be a harmless festive bagatelle. but it's irritating.

an old woman in a shawl sat on a chair by the entrance to the graveyard.

-_-

i'm a little confused about the graves' stackedness? coffins, sure, but graves?

you're right, this is blasting away at fish in a little sandcastle bucket but he's getting paid and there are loads of writers who are good at this who he could copy from.

The church had strong historic associations with a monstrous feudal overlord of the town. The count had been a famous torturer, whose favourite practice was to exlinguate his victims (this being the leaflet's term for cutting out tongues, a neologism, I suspect)...

i feel like i'm on a long and arduous walk.

Count Magnus this is not.

and yes, he's manipulating cliches so his imagery is fucked. he hasn't actually tried to visualise what he's saying.

i mean it is remarkable how a little bit of picking apart destabilises the meaning of any of the words. it's a lanchester speciality.

we've given up on the comedy scientism now i take it

there's a stretch of very dull scientism, neither comedy nor parody, but just reiteration of a fairly standard rubric. I was going to pass over it, but since you asked:

He and a large number of his victims were buried in the graveyard outside. His activities supposedly continued after his death.

It goes without saying I was sceptical. I am familiar with the scientific explanation of this and similar narratives. A rash of deaths – their real cause inevitably viral or bacteriological – affects a place. Explanations are sought, and found in the arenas of legend and superstition and dream. A panic begins. Since the living are victims, the perpetrators must be found among the dead. Exhumations take place. Some bodies are found to have characteristics indicating postmortem existence – for instance, hair and fingernails that appear to have grown. In other cases the liquefaction of improperly preserved corpses leads to the creation of the substance known as 'coffin liquor'. As a result, in some crypts, coffins appear to have moved or burst. Supernatural phenomena are credited as the cause. Fear and superstition triumph over science, and myths are born.

lol

I went back out into the graveyard. The sky had clouded over, and full dark was imminent.

what the fucking fuck.

yeah you had to quote the bit with the title in it

I went to the place where the count had been tortured, partially dismembered, had his tongue cut out and then been thrown into a pit

bzzzzt! repetition.

also struggling with 'partially dismembered' - can't tell whether it's ok or not due to the temporary aneurysm reading lanchester gives you.

i did xpost. you suspect he read about coffin liquor and then a very dim wattage light bulb came on over his head.

The story was graphically, too graphically, told on the leaflet, which interspersed genuine information with fantasy about the count's supposed supernatural manifestations. Without the leaflet one would have known nothing of this.

a) can i read the leaflet plz
b) that last sentence - well no, i mean, what? it reminds me of trying to read quite simple things when hungover. you find yourself thinking 'hang on, does that make sense or not?'

ok i suppose this bit is important, grinding as it is:

It was this thought that gave me my brilliant idea. I could choose not to be in the conference by not being there, but perhaps i could also choose not to be at the conference even while i was there. I could go into a form of internal exile. The medium for doing so was simple: the translator's earpiece. One was supposed to plug these into a small radio, not much larger than a box of matches, and listen to the approved feed of the conference. But there was nothing to stop one from plugging the earpiece into a different device, a smartphone, say, and, instead of listening to sociological flummery about canon formation and the structure of myth, hear something interesting and intelligent.

i mean he's basically talking about plugging headphones in here isn't he? also he doesn't mean 'translator's earpiece', a confusing perhaps semi-legitimate piece of compression. i'm ignoring the last bit. even as a piece of narratorial colour, it's tiring and shit. your unreliable narrator is still a character ffs, and this is dire, very in the mould of Capital characters.

An excellent plan. I took out my mobile and opened the Audible app.

Yes! Back of the net.

A number of audiobooks were on offer at a special price

Aaah, it's like relaxing into a warm bath.

lol

what if his intentions were tier-2 satire all along

what if john lanchester has always been a shitposter

well in a sense he's coming home - The Debt to Pleasure was all about the unreliable narrator. I mean i thought it was ok when I read it, but i was also 16 or so, and given the conspicuous shitness of this, i'm wondering if wasn't very good after all.

again, i worry i'm loading too much on it - if i just read through it in a spare moment it would be relatively unobjectionable. but there are so many questions you find yourself asking that your entire notion of what fiction is, what it consists of, starts coming undone.

i'm going to get a beer, and do a bit more, but i think this is going to need to extend into two sessions tbh. liveblogging reading lanchester turns out to be more time consuming than anticipated.

why the fuck am i doing this.