06 Jul 2013 02:36:24
The progress of A Bright Moon for Fools is picaresque. It proceeds via a series of absurd coincidences, reversals and rescues. Christmas – Ignatius J Reilly by way of Tunbridge Wells; Falstaff with a tincture (perhaps it's just the setting) of Malcolm Lowry's drunken consul – barges through its pages living on his wits, but is incessantly prone to witlessness, insulting strangers with panache and railing against the vulgar inanities of modern life. "The Rot", as he calls it – characterised by officious flight attendants rationing the Scotch – has destroyed all he loved about England.
His passage through Gatwick airport finds him in typical form: "There was a school sports team idling in front of the check-in desks. 'Out of the way, you little shitters,' he muttered, picking his way through the haircuts. Their extremely tall teacher said something to him in French – one of Christmas's favourite reasons to ignore someone – and he proffered his passport to the easyJet representative. With his mouth hung open in a smile and his mind fixed on a drink, he watched with satisfaction as she looked several times between photograph and subject. Yes, the new moustache made all the difference."
Christmas's rage against The Rot – an abstract quality in the world outside himself – is a clue to something deeper. As things go on, it emerges that his rage is in fact grief. His spite is not just lack of consideration for others, but a sort of childish vengeance. He is still mourning his dead wife, Emily, in a rebarbative but loving relationship with whom he found the best in himself. The reason he's going to Caracas is that that is where she grew up – and he wants to honour her memory by reading poems from her favourite book on a beach they dreamed of visiting together. In practice, of course, he dishonours her memory by continuing to behave just as appallingly there as he did in London. And just as it looks as if he might be on the point of – well, redemption is probably the word … everything gets very ugly indeed.
Whether in ignorance or defiance of the sorts of things creative writing students are told to avoid, Gibson – whose first novel this is – makes some amateurish moves. Within the first couple of pages we've had the protagonist size himself up in a mirror, the better to let the author describe him; and far, far too much time is spent describing the characters' dreams.
There are shortcomings of construction, patches of over-writing and some serious lurches of tone. The cynical Christmas – survivor, betrayer, insulter, misanthrope – and the mawkish Christmas whose only wish amid the wreckage of his life is to read poetry to his dead wife on a beach seemed to me to be two identities in superposition rather than two facets of a single man. And it may be my personal squeamishness, but dropping a couple of savage rapes into a narrative whose essential dynamics are comic seemed jarring.
But to focus on what's wrong with the book is to ignore what's right with it. A Bright Moon for Fools is often very funny indeed. And whatever its failings, it has a sort of horrible life to it – the vigour of its central character propelling it constantly forward, its jokes and riffs crackling and sparking. A Christmas to remember.
