THE BOOK OF PLEASURE SERIES

True, he employs that fancy prose style of his to blur the background, littered as it is with corpses вЂ“ one is hardly giving the game away by mentioning that Tarquin/Rodney is a mass murderer вЂ“ and there are many instances of his willed blindness to actuality. In fact, Tarquin is blithely, if at times coyly, open about himself and his deeds and вЂ“ more to the point вЂ“ his misdeeds. The epigraph that Lanchester does choose, an amusing remark by Bertrand Russell about WittgensteinвЂ™s philosophical obtuseness, is no doubt intended to alert us to the fact that we are in for an extended dose of undependable narration. Equally, he might have echoed the Underground Man: вЂњThough we may be capable of sitting underground for 40 years without saying a word, if we do come out into the world and burst out, we will talk and talk and talk вЂ¦вЂќ Indeed, Lanchester could have taken as his epigraph Humbert HumbertвЂ™s wry observation that вЂњYou can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose styleвЂќ.

THE BOOK OF PLEASURE SERIES

The book is one in a long, dark series that includes DiderotвЂ™s masterpiece RameauвЂ™s Nephew, DostoevskyвЂ™s Notes from Underground, De QuinceyвЂ™s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, GogolвЂ™s Diary of a Madman and any number of Vladimir NabokovвЂ™s novels, from The Eye through Despair to, of course, Lolita. As he says himself, the real point about the conjunction of art and evil вЂњis not that the megalomaniac is a failed artist but that the artist is a timid megalomaniacвЂќ. He is a middle-aged gourmand, scholar and monstre damnГ© he is also a kind of artist, with an artistвЂ™s ambition, ruthlessness and greed for recognition. The narrator, Tarquin вЂ“ real name Rodney вЂ“ Winot, is a wonderful invention, at once appalling and appealing, if only for the pathos of his self-delusions, and lucidly, utterly mad. Polished, assured, intricately plotted and immaculately written, it is a work any longestablished novelist would be proud to claim. Hard to believe that, when it came out in 1996, it really was John LanchesterвЂ™s first book. The Debt to Pleasure is, among many other things, one of the most remarkable debut novels of recent decades.

The book of pleasure