Writer of wrongs

27 May 2014 - 01:59 By Fiona Snyckers
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CREATING LIFE: Critics had no trouble in identifying VS Naipaul as Kureishi's inspiration
CREATING LIFE: Critics had no trouble in identifying VS Naipaul as Kureishi's inspiration
Image: GETTY IMAGES

Hanif Kureishi's latest book is more than the clever roman à clef some critics have hailed it as. But it is less than it could have been, considering the subject matter he had to work with.

Harry Johnson is a young writer who has committed himself to producing a biography of the acclaimed Indian-born writer Mamoon Azam. The project is the brainchild of Harry's publisher Rob, a flamboyant drunk with a flair for tapping into the zeitgeist.

Mamoon and his camp are in favour of the biography because they see it as a chance to revitalise his literary career and an excuse to sell new editions of his books. The fact that Mamoon has taken on an expensive new wife has made this need all the more urgent.

Critics had no trouble in identifying VS Naipaul as the inspiration for Mamoon, and indeed many details are similar. The abused and suicidal first wife, the long-suffering mistress, the intensely loyal second wife, the love of cricket and impressive knowledge of its minutiae are all elements critics have pointed to.

Through the character of Mamoon, Kureishi has the opportunity to interrogate many of the stereotypes surrounding the ''great man of letters".

Indeed, he is in danger of turning into a ''great man of letters" himself. He recently sold his personal archive to the British Library, an institution not in the habit of paying £100 000 (more than R1.7-million) to acquire the papers of literary lightweights.

The foibles and extravagances of the ''great writer" are turned into comic fodder in Kureishi's hands. Mamoon's egotism, charlatanism and deceitful tendencies are skewered on the page, but we are left in no doubt that he remains a very great man.

His young biographer is also a talented writer, and the two of them collaborate to create a new narrative that will be Mamoon's official biography. Each brings his own agenda to the table. Harry is trying to launch a serious writing career on the back of this project, while Mamoon wants to use it to administer CPR to his.

Something else the two men share is sexual incontinence. Harry starts off as a fresh-faced wunderkind with a fiancée waiting for him back in London, but becomes progressively less wholesome as time goes by. Soon he is indulging in sexual adventures worthy of his mentor Mamoon.

While the sexual buccaneering of his male characters is also used to comic effect, Kureishi fails to question the stereotype that male creative brilliance must necessarily go hand in hand with an unquenchable sexual appetite. Indeed, he reinforces it.

Harry asks Mamoon for a way to contain his desire and is told: ''But appetite is all we have and we cannot or should not be cured of it."

In the end, Mamoon is so consumed by illness as to have lost all his appetites. He is scarcely in a position to know whether the biography he and Harry negotiated over for so long is to his liking or not.

The process of writing someone's life, of turning it into narrative, remains a hotly contested space between biographer and subject. As the survivor, Harry is the one who has the last word.

  • 'The Last Word' is published by Faber and Faber, R263
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