FICTION: JOHN SELFreviews
Jude in LondonBy Julian Gough Old St Publishing, 366pp. £12.99
JULIAN GOUGH'S last novel, Jude: Level 1, was a barnstorming satire of boom-time Ireland, where realism didn't get a look-in but reality was ever present. This sequel picks up where the first book left off, with a handy summary of volume one for the uninitiated. Following the story is not exactly the point here anyway.
Jude, our innocent orphan, alights on land after an eventful swim across the Irish Sea (“So this was England! Or perhaps Wales”). He has come to find his two desires: the secret of his origins, and his true love, Angela. No matter that she has expressed little reciprocal affection: like most quests, the destination is incidental, and the real point is the journey itself.
The picaresque plot is a structure around which Gough can do what he does best: knock seven bells out of aspects of contemporary society in a charming yarn of comic brilliance. The storyline is a sequence of set pieces, simultaneously funny and serious, where Jude encounters various satirical figures of fun. Gough is at his best on the subject of financial folly. He gives us former property speculators who try to build a wall using just one brick and stock-market jiggery-pokery, and a beautifully absurd analogy for the property crash rewritten as the Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble. In these pieces, Gough pursues flights of fancy with ruthless logic. He achieves a symbiosis that makes the comedy a vehicle for the ideas just as the ideas are a vehicle for the comedy.
However, some of Gough’s targets – property developers, bankers, Young British Artists – have been softened up pretty well already. Bolder is his tackling of the Irish literary establishment, though here the satire seems misdirected. (“You can tell that we are Good Irish Writers, because the English give us prizes.”) Yet the authors he specifies, huge talents all, seem among the least culpable for what Gough considers an excessive devotion to lyrical realism in the Irish novel. When he calls for more ideas and less melancholy in our literature, there’s a sense that Gough is making a virtue out of a necessity, proclaiming those to be the desired qualities because that’s the way he happens to write.
Indeed, Gough’s energy makes the book both exhausting and invigorating. It has so many cultural references that reading it is like trying to keep track of the film homages in Shrek. It is a primer in economics, quantum mechanics, even skincare (“A biro’s inner, ink-filled plastic tube is your only man for removing a blackhead”). It has a surfeit of what JB Priestly called Komic Kapitals and endless very silly jokes. Sometimes, what seemed like a nice throwaway conceit in the last book (such as Jude having surgery to look like Leonardo DiCaprio) now seems like a millstone that Gough must forever keep his eye on; but, then again, it can spur him into greater inspirations of creativity. Far from killing his darlings, Gough has filled the book with them.
His antic style tests the reader: a little silliness goes a long way, but Gough explores what happens if you carry on regardless, and often makes it out the other side. For some, the book will be read in a condition of perpetual frustration at its seeming aimlessness and chaos. But the chaos of real life replicated on the page might after all be a welcome change from the artificial order of much contemporary literature.
And, occasionally, Gough shows that his reach extends beyond the comic. One otherwise predictable scene where Jude, at a Turner Prize exhibition, innocently "tidies up" a series of famous artworks (and, more predictably still, earns the approbation of art critics in doing so), ends with a two-page passage in which Jude contemplates Damien Hirst's installation A Thousand Yearswith a straight face. It's affecting and impressive and one of the only moments when the book becomes serious at the level of character as well as ideas. In a blizzard of serious points made in silly ways, a serious point made in a serious way comes like a punch in the gut to the reader.
Jude in Londonis a success on its own inimitable terms. It creates a vision and runs with it, which might be all we can ask from a novel. Jude seems to agree, as he recalls reading from the banned-books section in his childhood orphanage: "I brought the living book closer to my eyes so that it replaced the world entirely."
