Denys Arcand’s 2003 film The Barbarian Invasions presented an unashamedly concupiscent professor who seeks distraction from the cancer that is slowly killing him by reviewing his numerous sexual conquests and failures. Like a large segment of his generation and profession, Rémy—who taught a radical view of history at the Université de Montréal—embraced left-wing ideology as eagerly as promiscuity. He recalls how he mixed the two pursuits during a trip to China in the 1970s:

Paper Tiger, by Olivier Rolin (Translated by William Cloonan)

Praising the “Great Helmsman” and the admirable work of the Cultural Revolution, Rémy attempted to impress an attractive young cultural liaison officer assigned to him. It is only years later, with death breathing down his neck, that Rémy belatedly realizes that one likely reason why he failed to seduce the young woman was that she probably hated Mao for the terror he had unleashed and loathed callow Westerners who failed to see what a monster the dictator truly was.

Not the least of Olivier Rolin’s achievements in Paper Tiger (Tigre en papier) is to make what is perhaps one of history’s most absurd ideologies—European Maoism—plausible as  a motivating force for a fictional group of characters. Rolin pulls off his levitating act partly through the novel’s involuted structure. Rather than presenting the actions of a Maoist groupuscule in the cold light of the present tense, the narrative filters them through the indulgent nostalgia of a protagonist who is trying to make sense of past actions for an audience and for himself.

The opening of the book, an account of the lights and sights visible from a car circling the Périphérique—Paris’s ring road—sounds like an incantation, a call to be transported into a liminal state: “Emerald green against the blue night. INTERIOR BELTWAY CLEAR EXTERIOR BELTWAY CLEAR.”  

Beside Martin, in the passenger-seat of the low-slung Citroën DS, is Marie, the daughter of “Thirteen” (this gnomic nickname is explained in the course of the book) a former “comrade” who died when she was only a child. Marie’s voice is never heard during the book’s journey—we hear only Martin’s world-weary reactions to what must be her sceptical and occasionally uncomprehending reception of his tales of daring-do in the name of “the Cause”: “ …there must be a relation between your naive cult of individual happiness, I mean you, the ultramoderns, and your fucking ignorance of history.”   

During their night-long revolution of the French capital, Martin’s tutorial on history appropriately brings to mind Marx’s shop-worn dictum about it repeating itself first as tragedy, then as farce. In regards the farcical repetition, in truth the exploits of Martin and Thirteen’s band amount to very little. Their crudely printed tracts attacking American imperialism are ignored by the workers; the kidnapping of a “fascist” capitalist goes disastrously wrong; and the few members of the proletariat who are willing to join up usually turn out to be either envious idiots or violent buffoons.

But beneath this romantic playacting passing as revolution lies a substratum of a genuine tragedy, both private and national, that immensely complicates Martin’s involvement in the Cause and its goal (laughably ambitious) of “freeing” Vietnam. For his father, only known as “the Lieutenant,” a devil-may-care hero of the French Resistance, was killed by insurgents while serving with the colonial forces in what was then known as French Indochina. Martin never knew him.

By giving his narrator a father who is both a hero and on the “wrong side of history,” Rolin opens up his story to a wider meditation about whether it’s possible to develop individual values when the family and patrimony that is supposed to supply a template is so compromised. It is in this context, against a backdrop of shame over national humiliation and culpability, that the wild leap into a cult like Maoism makes some sense. Or, as Martin succinctly opines, “You know, to be born just after Vichy, that really creates the need for an epic…”

Rolin’s approach—dense, allusive, replete with repeated motifs (for instance, the image of Rosa Luxemberg’s body, Ophelia-like, in the Landwehr canal is invoked several times)—braids the various strands fluttering in Martin’s memory with imperceptible skill. For example, towards the end of the book, in a dazzling segue, the neon and illuminated logos of the Parisian suburbs blend with those of the city of his father’s death, Saigon.

Coming in at only 203 pages, this novel has the heft of a dug-up paving stone.

Anyone who has read even a few pages of John Cheever’s self-excoriating journals will be aware that the author’s apparently placid WASP persona was a facade that hid a private life that was little short of chaotic. The dying embers of interest in Cheever’s works and life have received a shot of oxygen with the publication of Blake Bailey’s substantial new biography.
And a recent review in the New York Times offers an insight into the bizarre code of snobbery that Cheever—ashamed his family’s supposed patrician origins were besmirched by his mother’s opening of a gift shop during the Depression—inherited from his father:

On those frigid Boston evenings when he drank with the homeless, he rarely wore an overcoat, because his father had convinced him that such garments made one look Irish.

Someone said Evelyn Waugh died of snobbery. I doubt it did Cheever much good either.

Earlier this week, the Irish Times’s letter page published a fine letter by Michael Carr in which the correspondent argued that even in the age of text-checking software, competent sub-editors and proofreaders are still required. Typically, computers are poor at distinguishing homophones—two or more words having the same or very similar pronunciation but with different meanings and spellings. Homophones are tricky because we are usually oblivious of the differentiation when speaking—it is only in print that care is required to choose the correct word. To illustrate the pitfalls, Carr points out a howler that marred an otherwise solid obituary:

I did not know Michael Adams, a publisher of academic works, but the obituarist’s stylish piece revealed a lovable man dedicated to his authors, a man of rare integrity in his private and professional life.

Recalling his dedication, the following line appears: “which led him personally to spend hundreds of hours pouring over authors’ proofs to ensure deadlines were met and books saw the light of day.” Well, whether it was tea, water, alcohol or whatever liquid happened to be conveniently nearby, a comical cartoon emerges of a deranged proofreader. And in this context it’s a regrettable error. “Pore” is the word, of course.

A less egregious example of mixing up homophones appeared in today’s Irish Times. This piece also concerns the passing of an individual, although it seems unlikely that this man pored over many texts, including, one assumes, the manual for a Glock 9mm pistol. The article explains how Limerick “criminal mastermind” Philip Collopy lost his life: 

Gardaí believe the father of two was showing others how to use the gun and took the magazine out, but forgot to remove the live round from the breach when he shot himself in the head.

But the rear of a gun barrel into which a bullet is loaded is called the “breech.” And, incidentally, on the other end of the continuum it’s a “breech birth” not a “breach birth.”

Commenting on the déclassé status of the modern hero in fiction, Martin Amis argued “Nowadays, our protagonists are a good deal lower down the human scale than their creators: they are anti-heroes, non-heroes, sub-heroes.” One hopes that this dictum holds true for David Milnes, author of The Ghost of Neil Diamond. For Milnes’s protagonist, bearing the blandly English name of Neil Atherton, is a lost man on the edge of the abyss.

Atherton has washed up in Hong Kong, dragged into the territory on the coat-tails of his wife, Angel. Back in England, back in the distant past, he had known modest success as a musician on the folk scene, touring the working men’s club circuit. But now he’s 48, these meagre stage triumphs are a fading memory and Atherton appears increasing redundant to his younger wife, who has carved out a niche for herself in the city’s corporate hierarchy.

The Ghost of Neil Diamond

Eventually, an exasperated Angel washes her hands of her husband, handing him enough Hong Kong dollars for a flight back to the UK with some to spare. But Atherton refuses to retreat with his tail between his legs. Like a drowning man who clambers into a sinking lifeboat, he falls into the ambit of Elbert Chan, a diminutive Cantonese businessman operating from a seedy backstreet office. Chan handed his business card to the Englishman after a rousing rendition of “Song Song Blue” and now dangles before the destitute Atherton the potentially lucrative prospect of being part of a celebrity tribute act.  Neil’s preparation for taking his place in a bizarre roll-call of the fake famous is not just to learn how to sing like Neil Diamond but, in some Zen-like way, to become the American superstar. 

While waiting for Chan’s purported connections with the entertainment managers of Hong Kong’s hotels to open doors, Atherton spends his nights on the floor of a language school’s classroom and purgatorial days wandering the humid streets of an alien city. There are echoes here of Poe’s short story, “The Man of the Crowd,” as the narrative tracks aimless, time-killing trudges among uncaring crowds.  

Ostensibly rooted in the superficial world of tribute singers and their milieu of corporate entertainment, this is a book that subtly plays with the tropes associated with its subject matter to raise some interesting questions about what represents the real, and what constitutes the fake. Crossing the spectacular Tsing Ma Bridge, for example, Atherton reflects on the engineers and builders who made this feat of engineering possible and compares their achievement with his own contribution to this world:

His sort need not be taken at all. There was, self-evidently, a need of some kind for people such as Neil Diamond, though surely even they must find it hard to live with themselves after a while. But whatever case could be made for the pedlar of trash and illusion, there was surely no case at all to defend one who only followed, the counterfeit and impostor running along behind. Surely there was no room on the ark for such a stowaway. 

This angst over how the professional impostor can maintain his self-worth reaches a crescendo in the novel’s second half, when Atherton’s attempt to usurp another Neil Diamond impersonator—a photocopy of a photocopy as it were—threatens to annihilate his personality.

This book has its comic aspects, but it’s a dark comedy, stemming from the howling despair of a man who is out of his element in every way. Although the story is filtered through the “shifting sand” of Atherton’s personality, the environment through which the main actor moves like a ghost is deftly evoked with economic flourishes. The notorious jams are captured with an unusual but apposite verb: “Down to his right, on his side of the water, was the Eastern corridor, built on stilts in the sea. It was flushed with traffic queuing for the crossing.”  The ambiance of the subterranean hotel bars that host acts such as Atherton’s is conjured with a reference to mirror balls that “shed loose change all over the dance floor.” And one of Hong Kong’s icons, the Star Ferry that shuttles between Kowloon and the island, is revivified with a simile that is both resonant and culturally attuned: “Children scrambled ahead and flipped over the back-rests, making a wonderful clattering sound across the teak decks, like the fall of mah-jong tiles.”

Above all, and appropriately for a locale known for its glittering facades, this book meditates on how the city can be framed in radically different ways: how it appears in the floor-to-ceiling panes of an exclusive hotel’s breakfast bar as opposed to the prospect offered by the windows of a McDonald’s (where Neil is at one stage reduced to eating in every day).

Despite some ragged edges—Chan’s transformation from failed wheeler-dealer to make-or-break impresario seems implausible, for example—this is a work of unexpected substance.