Book review: Eureka, Anthony Quinn (2017)

This stunning ensemble piece is a roman a clef that has on its cover the photo of a young woman using a hula hoop. The trope registers immediately to place the book in the 1960s, when it is set, as the headline of a news story might be written to hook the reader’s attention and get him or her to invest the time needed to complete the associated story. But this novel is much more than a facile snapshot of an era characterised by incipient postmodernity, it is many other things besides: a gritty thriller, a literary detective story, and a deeply humane portrait of a fascinating time in history.

There are three main characters, who are used to focalise the narrative in different parts of the book, which is set in London. The first of these is Nathaniel Fane, a scriptwriter who has got the commission to write the script for a movie based on a short story by Henry James, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ (1896), which is about a novelist named Hugh Vereker who lets slip to a book critic named Charles Pallingham that there is a secret in his books that influences every line and that links all his works together thematically. Chas mentions this fact to a friend he works for at a newspaper, George Corvick, who tells his fiancée Gwen, a writer.

Meanwhile, Vereker has instructed Chas not to tell anyone else, but it is too late. George is sent by his paper to Italy as a correspondent and there he unearths the secret. He meets with the famous author and tells Chas that he has been successful, but he won’t tell him the secret. In the meantime, Gwen and Chas have had an affair. George’s marriage to Gwen had been put off indefinitely due to an illness of Gwen’s elderly mother, but now it is to finally go ahead. But one day while tripping on LSD, Chas lets something else slip that he should have kept secret.

I hesitate to go into too much detail about the script here because it is let out in instalments between chapters of action that chronicle the making of the film. The “secret” behind the novelist’s oeuvre is part of the lure that keeps you turning the pages. There are other secrets too in this fascinating work of fiction that relies heavily on its characters for its forward movement.

The other two central characters are Freya Wyley, a journalist and an old friend of Nat’s, and Billie Cantrip, a young actress Nat meets one day when he is dawdling at a hotel in a tony part of the city. Billie is waitressing there and filches 100 pounds from his wallet when he is away from his table; carelessly he had left the thing there in his absence. He confronts her with an accusation and gets his money back, in the process discovering that she has studied at RADA. He later meets with her at the office of his agent, and further on in the book he uses his good offices to help her get the role of Jane, Chas’s love interest and Vereker’s friend, in the film.

Billie lives with her artist boyfriend, Jeff, in Kings cross, a hardscrabble part of the city. Jeff is an artist (like Billie’s mum, Nell) but he’s a morose and pessimistic man who privileges his own feelings in preference to any that his girlfriend might have. She tries to sustain the relationship but it’s hard going and her success with the film role only ends up making him jealous. The threat of physical danger that appears later in the book first creeps in in Nat’s predilection for sadomasochistic gameplaying, but reaches a new high in the form of Jeff. There’s much worse to come.

The threat of violence that lies at the centre of this book is of a kind that appeared many decades ago, in 1989’s ‘The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover’ by British film director Peter Greenaway. In that movie, Michael Gambon plays a very vicious and volatile Albert Spica, a gangster who takes over the management of a high-class London restaurant, Le Hollandais. In Quinn’s novel, the undercurrent of violence is embodied mainly in the figure of Harry Pulver, who invests in the movie as a co-producer.

There’s a thread of violent intent also inherent in the figure of Rainer Werther Kloss, the director of Pulver’s movie, who is based on the real-life historical figure of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a genius who died very young after producing an astonishing number of brilliant films. In Quinn’s books, Kloss is implicated, through research Freya conducts in the course of her work, in a series of cases of arson. I won’t spoil the fun, but the foreshadowing of Kloss’s predilection for fire goes back to the first time that Nat meets with the young German director at a lunch organised by one of the producers.

Quinn worked for many years as a film critic, so he is full of pop culture lore. There’s a knowing reference at the beginning of the book to Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film ‘Blow-Up’, in which a photographer (who drives a Rolls Royce, like Nat does) discovers that a murder has been committed in a park. In that film, the photographer develops prints from a roll he had used in the park but his studio is burgled and the prints are all stolen with the exception of one which had slipped down behind a sofa. Nothing concrete can be ascertained from the grainy print however, which is compared by one character in the movie to the canvases painted by an artist the photographer knows.

Artists don’t get a good run in Quinn’s novel. In addition to the nasty Jeff and the complacent Nell there’s Freya’s tweedy father who also paints, and one day in the street Nat runs into an artist he knows, Ossian Blackler, who invites him to a show being held to celebrate the success of his work. Freya goes to the show with Sonja Zertz, a famous actress (based on the real-life stress Hannah Schygulla) who has also been cast in Kloss’s film. Freya is confronted at the show by a portrait of herself that shows a naked pregnant woman. Blackler is based on the figure out of history of Lucian Freud, whose expressive portraits are considered to be emblematic of something profound about the era in which they were created. Blackler is a womaniser and, like Nat, a person who uses those he meets for his artistic purposes.

The other thing that gets a bit of a shredding in the novel is the movie business itself, especially its intimacy. Everyone knows everyone else. In the beginning, Nat gets the job of writing the film script because he’s a friend of Vere Summerhill, an ageing actor who was famous in the past but who had been convicted of indecency and jailed because of his homosexuality. In the event, Nat was one of the only people who stood by Vere at the time, and Vere has never forgotten the favour. Kloss, who is gay, wants Vere for the film, so getting Nat on-board is part of his scheme to assemble an all-star cast.

The novel is full of quotation, and the use of Kloss as a vector to progress the plot is typical of Quinn’s knowing style. He keeps you turning the pages, but the tension created by the suspense is modulated by the fundamentally human language that characterises the work especially through the way people like Nat, Freya, Billie and Vere, who are all flawed in different ways but who are predominantly decent people, deal with one another and with other characters in the novel. The crunch when it comes is satisfying and neatly handled, and it transpires with a sly nod to the genre of crime fiction that has become so popular, now, in the age of rap and funk.

Quinn has fun with the Beatles too, using them as levers to get his characters to reveal things about themselves that contribute to the development of the plot. It’s all very brilliant and witty and so very English.

Amid all this cleverness it is however tonic to remember that this was the period when the political achievements that came after WWII resulted in the creation of the consumer class that would go on to form the foundation for the optimistic and altruistic generations that still people the west despite the best efforts of right-wing ideologues to destroy the compact achieved in those years of hope. We do well to contemplate where we are going, and if we are going back, which place in history are we heading toward? Is it to the nihilistic years following the onset of the Depression in 1929, that saw totalitarianism overtake so much of the world in one form or another. Or are was going to return in some positive way to a period of economic growth where all parts of the commonwealth were able to benefit from productivity increases, and not just a narrow managerial class?

The book ends with a spoof, a review of the movie that gets made in the novel, which is a nicely postmodern way to tie things up: with a self-conscious wink in the direction of (Quinn hopes) an educated reader.