Enjoying deserved success at the box office at the moment with LE WEEKEND , the screenwriter Hanif Kureishi also has a splendid new novel out called THE LAST WORD published by Faber & Faber.
Mamoon Azam is an amazing writer who has an amazing career. Lifetime Achievement Awards are piling up and so a prudent publisher despatches a young writer, Harry, to write the definitive biography of the great scribe.
The commission is in collusion with the wordsmith’s spouse to bolster his book sales and subsequently his dwindling bank balance.
Mamoon’s Mrs., Liana, was proving to be extravagant, expensive and explosive “it was as if Gandhi had married Shirley Bassey.”
Harry discovers his subjects’s foresight, fortitude and fearlessness.Mamoon was the first to track, in the dark cities of northern Britain, the change in the Muslim community from socialist anti racism to a radicalism built around a new worldwide form, a reactionary idea of Islam. He followed the trajectory of Islam from a form of liberation theology to a death cult demanding sacrifice.
Mamoon’s wisdom and insights pepper the pages of this provocative novel:-
“’People admired Britain only because of its literature; the pretty little sinking island was a storehouse of genius, where the best words were kept, made and remade”
“Domination, particularly by the educated, informed and intelligent was preferable to universal stupidity, or even democracy.”
In THE LAST WORD, Kureishi wrestles with the dilemma of the literary biographer- “someone who sought the truth of another and wished to remake them in their own words”. This is of course similar terrain to being a reviewer, treading on the coat tails of creators, and sending them to the cleaners.
There is also a lot of fine babble about the artistic temperament – “Harry had loved the arts long enough to know that artists had to be excused failings which would condemn the general population. The artist was the proxy, the brave one, the one who spoke, was thanked, and who paid the price……Literature was a killing field; no decent person had ever picked up a pen.”
And what of Harry’s decency, sifting through the soiled laundry of the lauded, his fallible phallus unfailingly unfettered for any fuck or fondle.
THE LAST WORD is a fascinating, funny and sometimes confounding novel which clearly illustrates that “The past is a river, not a statue.”
In the end, both biographer and subject are tarred by the same brush, self absorbed but too anxious and insecure to be self admiring.