We are what we aren’t: Lives of guile and deception

Delineating lives steeped in lies, guile and deception has always made for fascinating reading. Patricia Highsmith's Ripley stands out as one sterling example. The battle of wits, the slow descent to life of sham and the motivation to create it, the disastrous or absurd results, and our status as readers allowing us to revel in knowledge the characters in the book may not possess – all this adds to the reading pleasure (guilty or otherwise). Two recent novels that play on this theme hit the mark in very different ways.

Seven Lies
By James Lasdun
Jonathan Cape, 199 pages
Available at Fully Booked

James Lasdun has carved a reputation as poet, and as a short story and screenplay writer. His short story "The Siege" was adapted into film by Bernardo Bertolucci, and James' own screenplay, Sunday, was adjudged Best Feature and Best Screenplay at the 1997 Sundance Festival. His new novel, Seven Lies, is a manifestation of these honed sensibilities. Lyrical, poetic images abound, interspersed by crisp, sharp, dialogue. The plot evolves like a screenplay with an opening image of a resounding slap to the face of our protagonist Stefan Vogel. This slap occurs when he's introduced to a woman at a chic Manhattan cocktail party. From there, the novel progresses through a series of flashbacks, vignettes of various stages in the life of Stefan, an émigré from communist Berlin.

The son of an East German diplomat who negotiates treaties and trade agreements, and a mother with pretensions of minor European royalty which have no place in then East Germany; Stefan is exposed and seduced by the materialism and decadence of the West. Gifts from New York City brought back to their Berlin home by Stefan's father become symbols of his yearning, his dream to one day escape to the West – and not just to West Germany – and reach New York.

How this was achieved forms the core of the novel's plot. A life of deceit and lies is stumbled upon, and what's impressive is the exposition of how simple and harmless these lies can be at the start, then they harness a life of their own as they have to be sustained and nurtured. At 13, Stefan is referred to by his deluded and ambitious mother as the intellectual poet of the family. After having "stolen" a poem from an old family book that's kept in storage in the basement of their apartment building, Stefan is asked to declaim in front of the coterie of artists that regularly meet at the Vogel apartment with Mother as resident patroness, "I had never addressed an audience before...The rows of people before me resembled nothing so much as the teeth of a gaping shark, ready to tear me apart. I wanted to flee from it, but it seems I also wanted to put my head in its mouth."

And as his reading enjoys success, Stefan is only too aware that while some present may have recognized the poem for what it is – stolen, their silence is vouchsafed by the desire to maintain their invitations to these parties, "It seems to me that at the age of thirteen, I had already developed the cynicism of a seventy-year-old dictator."

Sexual favors granted to the wizened lecherous building superintendent, in order to continue gaining access to the basement storage rooms, his meeting a stage actress named Inge and the new set of deceptions embarked upon to "win" Inge and eventually bring her to New York – these become part of the accumulation of betrayals and lies that Stefan begins to wear as comfortably as the fingers on his hand. As a grown man, Stefan ruefully accepts, "The brightest of dreams often lie beside the darkest of nightmares."

I mentioned Lasdun as a poet and his lyrical imagery. When Stefan arrives in New York in the mid-1990s "...the buildings themselves, the skyscrapers, my childhood fetishes... the Empire State like a great syringe with some fiery elixir of the city vatted inside it, the Helmsley in its gold tiara, the Twin Towers reading each other's paragraphs of light..." It's this kind of writing that gives Seven Lies its special quality; how it rises to be a more psychological portrait than mere contemporary cloak-and-dagger.

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Ludmila’s Broken English

By DBC Pierre

Faber & Faber Limited, 318 pages

Available at Fully Booked

DBC Pierre wrote Vernon God Little, a rabid, brilliant satire on the Columbine tragedy that won the Man Booker Prize a few years ago. Ludmila's Broken English is his latest novel and while it certainly shows that Pierre can write like an angel (or devil), I wonder how accessible the novel's theme of the globally marginalized taking center stage will be to the reading public. There's a strong surreal element to the book, a veneer of ridicule and spite that permeates. The novel reminded me of a 2006 version of early Martin Amis – a smugness that one accepts because of the sheer writing skills.

The novel centers on two sets of protagonists; one strand features Ludmila and rural Russia, with Gnez troops attacking her village – a Caucasus village in the middle of no man's land. The other strand takes place in England and features two conjoined twins, Blair and Bunny Heath, who have been recently surgically separated, and possess no capabilities for living apart, much less interacting with the world. Into these two strands we achieve fusion with the introduction of Internet dating sites with shades of white slavery. It's absurd, it's crazy and potently mixed-up, and the scariest part is that it's still so real and plausible.

The Martin Amis quality is evident as we read of Bunny faking a heart attack in order to gain some advantage over Blair, who has a stronger physical disposition, "Each lonely musing brought a thrust of plasma, and each thrust of plasma spurted words into Bunny's mind. Syllables clotted into scornful pearls like 'Myocardial Infarction' and 'Cardiac Arrest'. Purulent whores like 'Superior Vena Cava' skewed and tore like puff-pastry petals before his mind's eye."

Ludmila is a wonderful creation of Pierre's. She is the quintessential third-world heroine. Forced to leave her mountain village and attempt to escape to the West, "She squinted ahead to the shadows where her future lived, and adopted the shell of the internal traveler she was, taster of inner breezes, weigher of imperceptible colors, gatherer of emotional intelligence for which no word or expression existed; the shell nobody could fathom, which was put down to aloofness."

Ludmila's Broken English may not be everyone's cup of tea, but for those who appreciate the absurdity of modern life and globalization, DBC Pierre's novel will certainly be a great read.