One of Joseph Conrad’s characters in Lord Jim — I forget who it was — remarks: “Man is amazing, but he is not a masterpiece.” The picaresque hero goes from one shady incident or daring exploit to another, as if striving to become exactly that — a masterpiece in the art of living, a complete depiction of glorious life itself, which almost from birth he had half-consciously believed himself able to attain.
If he doesn’t finally appear to be anywhere near that masterpiece of the art of living then only the writer can be held responsible, because he being all-powerful created the picaro as much as the picaro created himself. The picaresque hero was the template on which the art of the writer was practised — or attempted.
The writer himself couldn’t, of course, be the masterpiece Conrad was alluding to. That would be an impossibility, because anyone who becomes a writer is flawed from the beginning — though he may at least endeavour to make one out of his hero. Whether or not he fails is only for the reader to say.
The writer and picaro are different, but they are bound up together in society, though both may well dislike the fact. I confess that two very different careers were open to me in my youth. One was to become a criminal, and the other was to be a writer. How much luckier mankind is that I became a writer is not for me to say, but having viewed the alternative around me in childhood gave some insight into the workings of the picaresque mind — the mind of the picaro, that is.
The fact that both picaro and writer are so firmly embedded in society makes the symbiosis complete. A writer, by creating his own idiosyncratic picaro, proves that all picaros are unique. It is the world that is the same, both picaro and writer united by its social framework.
During his Herculean endeavours the writer portrays himself as his own picaresque hero, but because he writes instead of lives, he suffers no perils by his temerity. He uses his imagination, he observes, he remembers. The landscape is his, as are the people in it, and his occupation is to write about them rather than harm them. If he does harm them, in the way of morals, it is only on paper, which they can take or leave as they wish. Nevertheless, he does not forget that he is the god who controls, who amuses himself by fabricating adventures, and thereby instructing and entertaining his readers.
Society and the picaresque hero are bound together, then, and the writer tells the story that is essentially for both. Writing about the picaro may cause less harm to society than the immoral exploitations of the picaro himself but, all the same, it would be a pity of cosmic proportions if the picaresque hero ever faded from literature.
And if the same fate overtook writers, who breathe life and fire into his image, why, that would be even worse.
Certain facts the reader might care to know before the novel begins
I, Michael Cullen, have been a bastard most of my life, except for a break of legitimacy when my father the novelist Gilbert Blaskin met my mother again and married her. I was a grown man by then, so will never know why he did, for they parted two years later, and I reverted to my status as a bastard. Not that I had stopped being one, in any case.
I was born in Nottingham — where else for such as me? — but left at eighteen. At the time I was working, if you can call it that, in an estate agents’ office, till a way came of making a bit of ready on the sly. The scam paid off, but the manager rumbled me so I had to leave. Luckily, always with an eye to the future, I made enough to buy a car and set off for London.
I would have done better had my belongings been wrapped in a handkerchief and balanced from a stick on my shoulder, with a mangy cat mewing behind, because the car, which was not only British made but secondhand, dropped to pieces bit by bit on my progress down the Great North Road. After the engine’s massive cardiac arrest at Hendon Station I finished the journey by Underground.
On my way to London I had picked up a hitchhiker fresh out of jail, a sponger from Worksop called Bill Straw, and through him became employed for a while by Claud Moggerhanger, a racketeer who made Rachman seem like a charity worker from Oxfam.
I worked as a bouncer at one of Moggerhanger’s Soho clubs until, ever greedy for cash, I saw more to be made smuggling gold out of the country for an organisation run by Jack Leningrad, who conducted his operations from the inside of an iron lung. This business ended by my being banged up for eighteen months, though not before I had put by sufficient to buy a Beeching axed railway station at Upper Mayhem in the Fen country. Moggerhanger sent me to jail, because he was Leningrad’s rival in the gold trade of that time, but he also put me there on discovering I had been giving too much mutton dagger to his depraved daughter Polly.
When I came out of prison I married an ex-au pair from Holland called Bridget Appledore, and retired to Upper Mayhem, but after ten years of what I considered bliss at my railway station, she left me, and took the children to Holland.
In my despair I lit off for London, and worked for Moggerhanger again, who often took on those he had injured, in the knowledge that they knew the consequences should they be so daft as to do anything against him again.
He judged me wrong, my object being to find sufficient evidence to put him where he had so callously sent me. But he had meanwhile been ennobled into Lord Moggerhanger, and was even more cunning than he was rich. Suspecting my intention of contacting Interpol, he put Bill Straw to follow me onto the ferry at Harwich. Straw found his way to throw the briefcase, of carefully collected incriminations of Moggerhanger’s drug running empire, into the sea.
A few weeks before, I had met Frances Malham, a medical student. She was besotted by Ronald Delphick, England’s foremost performance poet, but I rescued her from him by marrying her, and we lived happily ever after, which is to say, for the last three years.
By that quick thinking, which a picaresque hero such as myself is born with, I had helped her Uncle Geoffrey out of trouble, because he’d fucked the Portuguese maid and made her pregnant. My untruths put him in the clear with his wife, and in recompense he gave me a job at his advertising agency, where he assumed my talent for telling lies would be useful.
Now read on.
Chapter One
The funny-money City of London, on a clear spring day, put me into a philosophical mood. I’d heard that you became wiser as you get older, no matter how dodgy the start. Not me. Where’s the liberty in going along with that? Liberty, like the wine of a good year, doesn’t come cheap. It’s enough to keep on keeping on, and let wisdom take care of itself, which generally happens. All I had learned for sure was that fight against Fate and you’re done for, dropped by parachute — if you have one — into the middle of Dreckland.
The blue-skied day was so fresh I seemed to be convalescing after a long illness, or living in my carefree twenties again, though I was edging towards forty. Sound in wind and limb, and as footloose and fancy free as fancy could still make me, I felt at the acme of self-satisfied overconfidence, until a cornering taxi painted my turn ups black with diesel smoke, reminding me that last night I’d had the alarming notion that if I succumbed to sleep I would never wake again. Such premonitions I could live without, but since nothing could stop slumber on its wool bound iron wheels I knew on waking this morning that the day was going to be another fateful one in my life.
How right I was. In the office a letter on my desk told me I’d got the push. In so many words it informed me that my imagination and genius for lying weren’t needed anymore. The fact was that my obvious and endless contempt for the job had got under my colleagues’ pinstripes, and they didn’t like it. What had taken them so long? All they believed in was a load of bollocks, and they knew it, and they knew I knew it, but my frequent jokes on the matter were no longer allowed.