Dead Souls

by Sam Riviere

Genres: Literary Fiction; Magical Realism; Visionary & Metaphysical

Synopsis

'Mordant, torrential, incantatory, Bolano-esque, Perec-ian, and just so explosively written that I had to stop and shake the language-shrapnel from my hair and wipe it off my eyeglasses so I could keep reading' Jonathan Lethem

'Full of clever postmodern flourishes, self-referential winks and riotous set pieces. It's funny, smart and beautifully written' Alex Preston, The Guardian


'I absolutely adored Dead Souls. Reading it felt like overhearing the most exhilarating, funny, mean conversation imaginable--which is to say it made me extremely happy and I dreaded it ending' Megan Nolan, author of Acts of Desperation

'I first heard about Solomon Wiese on a bright, blustery day on the South Bank...'

Later that evening, at the bar of the Travelodge near Waterloo Bridge, our unnamed narrator will encounter that very same Solomon Wiese.

In a conversation that lasts until morning, he will hear Solomon Wiese's story of his spectacular fall from grace.

A story about a scandal that has shaken the literary world and an accusation of serial plagiarism.

A story about childhood encounters with nothingness and a friend's descent into psychosis; about conspiracies and poetry cults; about a love affair with a woman carrying a signpost and the death of an old poet.

A story about a retreat to the East Anglian countryside and plans for a triumphant return to the capital, through the theft of poems, illegal war profits and faked social media accounts - plans in which our unnamed narrator discovers he is obscurely implicated...

A story that will take the entire night - and the remainder of the novel - to tell.

'Reading Dead Souls feels like discovering the British Bolaño, and not just for the gleeful dismantling of the cultural ego: the restless, searching sensibility; the precise tuning-in to contradictory voices. I haven't been so excited by a debut novel in a long time' Luke Kennard, author of The Transition


'Elegant, ambitious, very serious and very funny' Katharine Kilalea, author of OK, Mr. Field


'Sublime, legendary, delightfully unhinged. A rare and brilliant pleasure' Nicolette Polek, author of Imaginary Museums

Release date: May 18, 2021

Publisher: Catapult

Print pages: 320

Sample

Ifirst heard about Solomon Wiese on a bright, blustery day on the South Bank. The man who told me about him, standing opposite me outside the Royal Festival Hall, within sight of the river, which could be observed heaving like horrible grey jelly, was the head of a small publishing company, and had mentioned the name Solomon Wiese in connection, I thought, with a literary scandal from earlier in the year. Before this happened I hadn’t really been listening to the head of the small publishing company, although outwardly I was nodding, saying “Mmm,” and even occasionally generating an entire sentence. There were two reasons that I hadn’t been listening to the head of the small publishing company, apart from the obvious ones—that the head of the small publishing company was not a particularly enthralling conversationalist, for example, or the atmosphere of generalised boredom that mists these kinds of encounters, especially when they take place among a long series, as this one did, that closely resemble each other in tone and subject matter. The first reason was the presence, next to him, on my left, of his wife, who I remembered was a dentist, or in training to be a dentist, and like me had remained largely silent during the head of the small publishing company’s discourse. As he spoke I had become increasingly aware of her, and her position relative to me in the small triangle we formed, standing on the biscuity concrete—I had been reminded of her name moments before but hadn’t succeeded in retaining it. And although she had refrained from speaking almost entirely, and although I was able to prevent myself from sliding my eyes leftwards to look at her, the fact of her presence began to weigh on me more and more heavily, accompanied by a growing certainty that for seconds at a time she was staring at me, specifically at an area around my left shoulder, quite close to my neck. I was facing away from the water and it was possible, even quite likely, that the head of the small publishing company’s wife was simply taking glances beyond me towards its surface, I thought, as the mouth of the head of the small publishing company continued to move. Without turning my head I could see the water, too, in the far reaches of my vision, registering as little more than a restless effect of the light—it was possible it was to this area behind me, where the river continued its dissatisfied heaving motions, that her eyes were drawn. It was possible, but it wasn’t my feeling. That the head of the small publishing company’s wife was uninterested in the conversation and seeking distraction in the view wouldn’t have been difficult to explain, I thought, but I had met her two or three times before at similar gatherings, and if she had refrained from speaking more than absolutely necessary, she had at least always managed to give the impression that she was participating: her devices remained pocketed, and she faced the spectacle of literary society with an expression that wasn’t bored or impatient, but carefully interested. If you looked at her during the conversation she would be smiling at a moment of mock obtuseness, or nodding minutely during one of the flat stretches. She had been to enough of these events, I reasoned, while the head of the small publishing company continued to speak, to have got far beyond wondering what she was doing at them; she no longer questioned their purpose, if she ever had, the literary events of her husband’s professional world, with their warm hubbub, the haze of alcohol that clung to your clothes, the tired charades and the endless gossip—yet to look at her you felt that she hadquestioned them, in the past, perhaps in acid tones. That was all behind her now. She had become fully, numbly accepting of them, she attended unquestioningly, as a matter of principle, in support of her husband, who no doubt attended in a symmetrical way, I imagined, the social events around dentistry that surely took place from time to time, possibly in parts of the city very near this location, on the South Bank, the so-called cultural hub of the capital, and which she was obliged to mark in their calendar months in advance, so as not to spring one of these occasions on him without allowing him adequate time to psychologically prepare himself. It must be the same for her, too. Could it be, I wondered, that the wife of the head of the small publishing company had, during this conversation, reached a new plateau of boredom, so that she was on the brink of embarking on a course of action beyond her usual range? Or that she had become, despite everything, interested? I was forced to hold this thought at bay, as the head of the small publishing company’s face indicated he required a response—he still had not mentioned the name Solomon Wiese—and I provided a statement neither so specific as to betray my inattention, nor so broad as to seem evasive, and in the opening that followed I took my opportunity and glanced at the head of the small publishing company’s wife. It was as I suspected. Her gaze was not cast towards the grey surface of the river, or at the distant attractions arrayed on its far bank, but hovered instead in the region of my left shoulder, possibly around the collar of my shirt. All of this would have been enough to ensure that my attention to the head of the small publishing company, and the drift of his argument, as I understood it, on the noticeable lapse in quality of literary production over the past half decade, was thoroughly dispersed, but there was a further prelude to come, before his announcement of the name Solomon Wiese in connection with a recent publishing scandal. As the wife of the head of the small publishing company met my gaze with a frank expression, which seemed to herald a remark, the details of which I wouldn’t discover, there was a movement to my right that drew my attention away from her and her husband. Who knows how it is that we can identify, in a large and fairly complex field of activity, the small events that pertain to us—the stare of a rival, or the movements surrounding a friend’s departure. All I was really aware of at first was a faint, streamlined motion, and, dragging my eyes away from the head of the small publishing company, I was able to pick out the head of my ex-girlfriend, Genia Friend, in the company of her new partner, a burly, reticent South African named Piet Durcan. The angle was such that I could only see their heads gliding above a bar of speckled granite as they paced along a pedestrian ramp on the outside of the Royal Festival Hall, but I could guess from their trajectory that they, or perhaps Genia Friend alone, had already spotted me where I was standing in the relative calm of the riverside seating area, and without mentioning it had adjusted their passage through the crowd so as to avoid a meeting. Somehow I knew it was the last time I would see either of them. It was at this moment that the head of the small publishing company uttered the name Solomon Wiese. Something about the name, its melodiousness, its minor alterity, brought me back to the conversation, and, the heads of my ex-girlfriend and her companion having scudded from view, I indicated with an expectant expression and slight shake of my head that I was unfamiliar with the name, or the story he was referring to, or both. At least that was the impression that I gave to the head of the small publishing company—but in fact the name Solomon Wiese was familiar to me. As an editor at a mid-circulation literary magazine I made it my business—I was professionally compelled to make it my business—to stay abreast of all important and seemingly unimportant developments in the literary sphere: the prizes and grants, but also any deficit of prizes and grants, the reviews and mentions, but also the lack of reviews and mentions, the names that appeared in journals and magazines, and also their casual or calculated omission, the recipients of bursaries and residencies, as well as those who had been passed over, in other words all the appointments and expulsions, feuds and alliances, coronations, cancellations, deaths, debuts, all those who had been overlooked and all those who had been over-rewarded, not to mention the force and temperature of the various currents of favour and fatigue, and although I couldn’t place the name Solomon Wiese precisely, as I waited for the head of the small publishing company to resume his explanation and reveal to me the pertinence of it, I was reasonably certain I had seen it featured on the tables of contents of several journals over the past eight or nine months. The aura of the name was that of a new talent, I felt sure, and which on a second or third sighting I had informally flagged, although not in a way I would describe as completely conscious. In any case, I wasn’t familiar with Solomon Wiese’s actual output, if indeed he was a writer worth investigating—the name had not gained sufficient shine for that—or of the difficult situation he was involved in, which the head of the small publishing company had just alluded to. The impression I gave to the head of the small publishing company, that the name and circumstances of Solomon Wiese were entirely unknown to me, was, then, only partly inaccurate, but the fact that I had volunteered my lack of knowledge so automatically gives some sense of my professional reflexes, and their essentially defensive or strategic function—if in doubt, at these kinds of events, I always claimed that I knew nothing, I shrugged, I waved my head, unless I forgot for a moment that despite the friendly, if unemphatic, tone of my conversation with the head of the small publishing company, we were representatives of rival organisations, meeting on the field of action with the purpose of exchanging tactical information. In other words, a game of incredibly low stakes was taking place, but in this case the lowness of the stakes only made the players keener and more ruthless in their conduct—this ruthlessness was a given, we both understood, a principle of the industry, and the centre that we vied around. It was wise of me not to betray any excessive curiosity about Solomon Wiese to the head of the small publishing company—my editor’s autopilot was working correctly in that respect—unless he became aware, mistakenly or otherwise, of the value of the particular chip he was handling, and took it into his head to demand a higher price for its transfer. Either that, or he may simply have enjoyed toying with it in front of me, weighing it, withholding it—and if there was one thing I wanted to avoid during the course of my encounter with the head of the small publishing company, and which my slightly studied uninterest was calculated to circumvent, it was giving him the opportunity of extracting any more pleasure from the exchange than the bare minimum I could allow him. I had him where I wanted him, more or less—I had had him there for several years, and I wasn’t interested in relinquishing a millimetre of my advantage. He had been the one to approach me, in the outdoor seating area on the South Bank beside the Royal Festival Hall, he had addressed me, he had done the talking, and I had listened, or feigned to listen, and I didn’t plan on giving him anything more than he had come to expect. My indifference had to be more or less perfect. So I was careful how I treated his mention of the name Solomon Wiese, and while waiting for him to furnish me with the relevant facts, I tried to shore up my position by reminding myself what the head of the small publishing company had been saying while I had been preoccupied, firstly with his wife’s behaviour, then the arrival and departure of Genia Friend and her companion, the taciturn South African, Piet Durcan, who I now remembered ran an artisanal business, roasting ethically sourced coffee beans. I should make it clear that we were gathered on the South Bank, next to the Royal Festival Hall, myself, the head of the small publishing company, his wife, and several thousand other participants in the arts, to celebrate the biennial Festival of Culture. Our formation of three was positioned close to the heart of the Literature Zone, adjacent to both the Theatre and Performance Zone, centred around the King George Hall, a hundred metres or so to the east, and the Visual Arts Zone using as its base of operations the Hayward Gallery, which stood within eyeshot, through a crush of stairways and mezzanines set back from the river—it was in that direction that Genia Friend and her companion, the South African roaster, had disappeared. Hordes of people of all ages, enthusiasts and producers of culture both, moved through this scene at a dazed pace, taking their positions at pastel-coloured tables and chairs, where they drank coffees, teas, beers, juices and shakes, or ate tacos, hotdogs, soufflé pancakes, banh mi and bento from biodegradable packaging. Festival of Culture was here. A blimp turned faithfully overhead, with the new logo on it. There was some truth, I reflected, in the head of the small publishing company’s earlier statement, that a crisis of confidence had emerged, here in the heart of the Literature Zone, so to speak, over the past couple of years: that a fever, felt only at the fringes to begin with, had swept in from those marginal, outlying territories of the art form, populated by antagonists and outcasts whose theories occasionally gained low-level support before being pitilessly extinguished by the rational majority—but in this instance the idea, or feeling, had taken hold, and gone on to infect the industry at large with a widespread, debilitating anxiety. This nervous mood had simmered away for months, increasing in potency, until it was reborn as a discreet but total state of alarm. Barely acknowledged within the sector’s working environments, it nonetheless had begun to exert a powerful, unseen influence on the day-today choices of its operatives. This heightened atmosphere was one of uncommunicated insecurity, even paranoia, meaning that beginning from the bottom, with the junior editors, slush pile readers, publisher’s assistants and reviewers for mid-circulation journals, belief in the established standards and practices of the industry had begun rapidly to wane—many literary agents and editors ceased, almost overnight in some cases, to vouch for their own judgements, and when these key negotiators turned for support to their colleagues and associates, or to such benchmarks as provided by their previous deals, or other trade success stories, which usually could be counted on to have a steadying effect, those cornerstones, rather than meeting them with reassurance and solidity, turned out to be entirely insubstantial, their elbows passed straight through, and down they went. Of course, these individuals, the assistant editors and up-and-coming junior agents, the interns and first readers, were confident young men and women, employed to an extent on the basis of their capacity for certainty, and products in many cases of elite educational institutions—if they trusted in anything at all it was in their own faculties and their ability to make judgements. They had always known what they were looking for, or they had known it when they saw it. But now a fissure of doubt had opened, and they were no longer certain they knew what they were looking for, whether they would recognise it when they saw it, or if they had missed it, and it had already passed them by. They began making tentative enquiries to their colleagues and associates, and were relieved to discover, having endured a certain amount of pretence, that their colleagues and associates found themselves in a similar predicament. It was simply not believable, they felt, that their gifts could have deserted them—the fault must lie, they felt, when they met to talk about this, as they began to, on high stools at city pubs after work, sliding their microbrews and almost spherical glasses of wine agitatedly on the table tops, with the material itself. The problem had to be with the material they were handling, they decided—something had changed, something fundamental—and so they passed it on: they passed it up, in other words, to higher stations, to the floors above, the inboxes of senior editors, to offices with tall windows and views of the grey and green squares of the city, to persons whose names were debossed on paperwork and on metallic signs above the brown brick doorways. They knew that the owners and senior actors of these companies were not as assured as was widely believed—they appeared that way when they were glimpsed in the windows of a restaurant, having one of their famous lunches, or lifting a pen behind an antique desk, but in reality much was projection, much was illusion. The circumstances of these appointments were labyrinthine, concerning many disparate, interested and invested parties, the result of delicate, shadowy calibrations, and frequently passage to those high-ceilinged offices did not lead through broad daylight. Once their junior staff, tier by tier, had begun to furtively evade responsibility in the decision-making process, which often required only a touch of finessing at the final stage, once deprived of those systems of consensus, whose key posts they started to find unresponsive at the moment they appealed to first heard about Solomon Wiese on a bright, blustery day on the South Bank. The man who told me about him, standing opposite me outside the Royal Festival Hall, within sight of the river, which could be observed heaving like horrible grey jelly, was the head of a small publishing company, and had mentioned the name Solomon Wiese in connection, I thought, with a literary scandal from earlier in the year. Before this happened I hadn’t really been listening to the head of the small publishing company, although outwardly I was nodding, saying “Mmm,” and even occasionally generating an entire sentence. There were two reasons that I hadn’t been listening to the head of the small publishing company, apart from the obvious ones—that the head of the small publishing company was not a particularly enthralling conversationalist, for example, or the atmosphere of generalised boredom that mists these kinds of encounters, especially when they take place among a long series, as this one did, that closely resemble each other in tone and subject matter. The first reason was the presence, next to him, on my left, of his wife, who I remembered was a dentist, or in training to be a dentist, and like me had remained largely silent during the head of the small publishing company’s discourse. As he spoke I had become increasingly aware of her, and her position relative to me in the small triangle we formed, standing on the biscuity concrete—I had been reminded of her name moments before but hadn’t succeeded in retaining it. And although she had refrained from speaking almost entirely, and although I was able to prevent myself from sliding my eyes leftwards to look at her, the fact of her presence began to weigh on me more and more heavily, accompanied by a growing certainty that for seconds at a time she was staring at me, specifically at an area around my left shoulder, quite close to my neck. I was facing away from the water and it was possible, even quite likely, that the head of the small publishing company’s wife was simply taking glances beyond me towards its surface, I thought, as the mouth of the head of the small publishing company continued to move. Without turning my head I could see the water, too, in the far reaches of my vision, registering as little more than a restless effect of the light—it was possible it was to this area behind me, where the river continued its dissatisfied heaving motions, that her eyes were drawn. It was possible, but it wasn’t my feeling. That the head of the small publishing company’s wife was uninterested in the conversation and seeking distraction in the view wouldn’t have been difficult to explain, I thought, but I had met her two or three times before at similar gatherings, and if she had refrained from speaking more than absolutely necessary, she had at least always managed to give the impression that she was participating: her devices remained pocketed, and she faced the spectacle of literary society with an expression that wasn’t bored or impatient, but carefully interested. If you looked at her during the conversation she would be smiling at a moment of mock obtuseness, or nodding minutely during one of the flat stretches. She had been to enough of these events, I reasoned, while the head of the small publishing company continued to speak, to have got far beyond wondering what she was doing at them; she no longer questioned their purpose, if she ever had, the literary events of her husband’s professional world, with their warm hubbub, the haze of alcohol that clung to your clothes, the tired charades and the endless gossip—yet to look at her you felt that she hadquestioned them, in the past, perhaps in acid tones. That was all behind her now. She had become fully, numbly accepting of them, she attended unquestioningly, as a matter of principle, in support of her husband, who no doubt attended in a symmetrical way, I imagined, the social events around dentistry that surely took place from time to time, possibly in parts of the city very near this location, on the South Bank, the so-called cultural hub of the capital, and which she was obliged to mark in their calendar months in advance, so as not to spring one of these occasions on him without allowing him adequate time to psychologically prepare himself. It must be the same for her, too. Could it be, I wondered, that the wife of the head of the small publishing company had, during this conversation, reached a new plateau of boredom, so that she was on the brink of embarking on a course of action beyond her usual range? Or that she had become, despite everything, interested? I was forced to hold this thought at bay, as the head of the small publishing company’s face indicated he required a response—he still had not mentioned the name Solomon Wiese—and I provided a statement neither so specific as to betray my inattention, nor so broad as to seem evasive, and in the opening that followed I took my opportunity and glanced at the head of the small publishing company’s wife. It was as I suspected. Her gaze was not cast towards the grey surface of the river, or at the distant attractions arrayed on its far bank, but hovered instead in the region of my left shoulder, possibly around the collar of my shirt. All of this would have been enough to ensure that my attention to the head of the small publishing company, and the drift of his argument, as I understood it, on the noticeable lapse in quality of literary production over the past half decade, was thoroughly dispersed, but there was a further prelude to come, before his announcement of the name Solomon Wiese in connection with a recent publishing scandal. As the wife of the head of the small publishing company met my gaze with a frank expression, which seemed to herald a remark, the details of which I wouldn’t discover, there was a movement to my right that drew my attention away from her and her husband. Who knows how it is that we can identify, in a large and fairly complex field of activity, the small events that pertain to us—the stare of a rival, or the movements surrounding a friend’s departure. All I was really aware of at first was a faint, streamlined motion, and, dragging my eyes away from the head of the small publishing company, I was able to pick out the head of my ex-girlfriend, Genia Friend, in the company of her new partner, a burly, reticent South African named Piet Durcan. The angle was such that I could only see their heads gliding above a bar of speckled granite as they paced along a pedestrian ramp on the outside of the Royal Festival Hall, but I could guess from their trajectory that they, or perhaps Genia Friend alone, had already spotted me where I was standing in the relative calm of the riverside seating area, and without mentioning it had adjusted their passage through the crowd so as to avoid a meeting. Somehow I knew it was the last time I would see either of them. It was at this moment that the head of the small publishing company uttered the name Solomon Wiese. Something about the name, its melodiousness, its minor alterity, brought me back to the conversation, and, the heads of my ex-girlfriend and her companion having scudded from view, I indicated with an expectant expression and slight shake of my head that I was unfamiliar with the name, or the story he was referring to, or both. At least that was the impression that I gave to the head of the small publishing company—but in fact the name Solomon Wiese was familiar to me. As an editor at a mid-circulation literary magazine I made it my business—I was professionally compelled to make it my business—to stay abreast of all important and seemingly unimportant developments in the literary sphere: the prizes and grants, but also any deficit of prizes and grants, the reviews and mentions, but also the lack of reviews and mentions, the names that appeared in journals and magazines, and also their casual or calculated omission, the recipients of bursaries and residencies, as well as those who had been passed over, in other words all the appointments and expulsions, feuds and alliances, coronations, cancellations, deaths, debuts, all those who had been overlooked and all those who had been over-rewarded, not to mention the force and temperature of the various currents of favour and fatigue, and although I couldn’t place the name Solomon Wiese precisely, as I waited for the head of the small publishing company to resume his explanation and reveal to me the pertinence of it, I was reasonably certain I had seen it featured on the tables of contents of several journals over the past eight or nine months. The aura of the name was that of a new talent, I felt sure, and which on a second or third sighting I had informally flagged, although not in a way I would describe as completely conscious. In any case, I wasn’t familiar with Solomon Wiese’s actual output, if indeed he was a writer worth investigating—the name had not gained sufficient shine for that—or of the difficult situation he was involved in, which the head of the small publishing company had just alluded to. The impression I gave to the head of the small publishing company, that the name and circumstances of Solomon Wiese were entirely unknown to me, was, then, only partly inaccurate, but the fact that I had volunteered my lack of knowledge so automatically gives some sense of my professional reflexes, and their essentially defensive or strategic function—if in doubt, at these kinds of events, I always claimed that I knew nothing, I shrugged, I waved my head, unless I forgot for a moment that despite the friendly, if unemphatic, tone of my conversation with the head of the small publishing company, we were representatives of rival organisations, meeting on the field of action with the purpose of exchanging tactical information. In other words, a game of incredibly low stakes was taking place, but in this case the lowness of the stakes only made the players keener and more ruthless in their conduct—this ruthlessness was a given, we both understood, a principle of the industry, and the centre that we vied around. It was wise of me not to betray any excessive curiosity about Solomon Wiese to the head of the small publishing company—my editor’s autopilot was working correctly in that respect—unless he became aware, mistakenly or otherwise, of the value of the particular chip he was handling, and took it into his head to demand a higher price for its transfer. Either that, or he may simply have enjoyed toying with it in front of me, weighing it, withholding it—and if there was one thing I wanted to avoid during the course of my encounter with the head of the small publishing company, and which my slightly studied uninterest was calculated to circumvent, it was giving him the opportunity of extracting any more pleasure from the exchange than the bare minimum I could allow him. I had him where I wanted him, more or less—I had had him there for several years, and I wasn’t interested in relinquishing a millimetre of my advantage. He had been the one to approach me, in the outdoor seating area on the South Bank beside the Royal Festival Hall, he had addressed me, he had done the talking, and I had listened, or feigned to listen, and I didn’t plan on giving him anything more than he had come to expect. My indifference had to be more or less perfect. So I was careful how I treated his mention of the name Solomon Wiese, and while waiting for him to furnish me with the relevant facts, I tried to shore up my position by reminding myself what the head of the small publishing company had been saying while I had been preoccupied, firstly with his wife’s behaviour, then the arrival and departure of Genia Friend and her companion, the taciturn South African, Piet Durcan, who I now remembered ran an artisanal business, roasting ethically sourced coffee beans. I should make it clear that we were gathered on the South Bank, next to the Royal Festival Hall, myself, the head of the small publishing company, his wife, and several thousand other participants in the arts, to celebrate the biennial Festival of Culture. Our formation of three was positioned close to the heart of the Literature Zone, adjacent to both the Theatre and Performance Zone, centred around the King George Hall, a hundred metres or so to the east, and the Visual Arts Zone, using as its base of operations the Hayward Gallery, which stood within eyeshot, through a crush of stairways and mezzanines set back from the river—it was in that direction that Genia Friend and her companion, the South African roaster, had disappeared. Hordes of people of all ages, enthusiasts and producers of culture both, moved through this scene at a dazed pace, taking their positions at pastel-coloured tables and chairs, where they drank coffees, teas, beers, juices and shakes, or ate tacos, hotdogs, soufflé pancakes, banh mi and bento from biodegradable packaging. Festival of Culture was here. A blimp turned faithfully overhead, with the new logo on it. There was some truth, I reflected, in the head of the small publishing company’s earlier statement, that a crisis of confidence had emerged, here in the heart of the Literature Zone, so to speak, over the past couple of years: that a fever, felt only at the fringes to begin with, had swept in from those marginal, outlying territories of the art form, populated by antagonists and outcasts whose theories occasionally gained low-level support before being pitilessly extinguished by the rational majority—but in this instance the idea, or feeling, had taken hold, and gone on to infect the industry at large with a widespread, debilitating anxiety. This nervous mood had simmered away for months, increasing in potency, until it was reborn as a discreet but total state of alarm. Barely acknowledged within the sector’s working environments, it nonetheless had begun to exert a powerful, unseen influence on the day-today choices of its operatives. This heightened atmosphere was one of uncommunicated insecurity, even paranoia, meaning that beginning from the bottom, with the junior editors, slush pile readers, publisher’s assistants and reviewers for mid-circulation journals, belief in the established standards and practices of the industry had begun rapidly to wane—many literary agents and editors ceased, almost overnight in some cases, to vouch for their own judgements, and when these key negotiators turned for support to their colleagues and associates, or to such benchmarks as provided by their previous deals, or other trade success stories, which usually could be counted on to have a steadying effect, those cornerstones, rather than meeting them with reassurance and solidity, turned out to be entirely insubstantial, their elbows passed straight through, and down they went. Of course, these individuals, the assistant editors and up-and-coming junior agents, the interns and first readers, were confident young men and women, employed to an extent on the basis of their capacity for certainty, and products in many cases of elite educational institutions—if they trusted in anything at all it was in their own faculties and their ability to make judgements. They had always known what they were looking for, or they had known it when they saw it. But now a fissure of doubt had opened, and they were no longer certain they knew what they were looking for, whether they would recognise it when they saw it, or if they had missed it, and it had already passed them by. They began making tentative enquiries to their colleagues and associates, and were relieved to discover, having endured a certain amount of pretence, that their colleagues and associates found themselves in a similar predicament. It was simply not believable, they felt, that their gifts could have deserted them—the fault must lie, they felt, when they met to talk about this, as they began to, on high stools at city pubs after work, sliding their microbrews and almost spherical glasses of wine agitatedly on the table tops, with the material itself. The problem had to be with the material they were handling, they decided—something had changed, something fundamental—and so they passed it on: they passed it up, in other words, to higher stations, to the floors above, the inboxes of senior editors, to offices with tall windows and views of the grey and green squares of the city, to persons whose names were debossed on paperwork and on metallic signs above the brown brick doorways. They knew that the owners and senior actors of these companies were not as assured as was widely believed—they appeared that way when they were glimpsed in the windows of a restaurant, having one of their famous lunches, or lifting a pen behind an antique desk, but in reality much was projection, much was illusion. The circumstances of these appointments were labyrinthine, concerning many disparate, interested and invested parties, the result of delicate, shadowy calibrations, and frequently passage to those high-ceilinged offices did not lead through broad daylight. Once their junior staff, tier by tier, had begun to furtively evade responsibility in the decision-making process, which often required only a touch of finessing at the final stage, once deprived of those systems of consensus, whose key posts they started to find unresponsive at the moment they appealed to them, many of those at the pinnacles of these companies panicked. A flurry of rash decisions followed—some stalled, entering a state of paralysis from which they didn’t emerge, even as the floors below them descended into chaos; others attempted to deflect the blame, and became ensnared before long by their own duplicity; still others embarked on strategies to protect the public face of their interests, and insisted in all dealings on presenting the semblance of control. It was this last tactic that led to the worst disasters, in the form of a series of discoveries, staggered over two or three weeks in the spring, during which the story dominated all platforms as it entered an annihilating spiral that was willed to completion by various orders of the commentariat, that two of the main commercial houses had been proven to have released several fixed books, that is, to have sold, as new, publications that were revealed to be reprints of earlier publications, with minimal changes implemented to disguise this fact. Typically locations and names were switched, titles and authors were of course replaced, while the rest of the content and structure remained intact. The supposedly culpable parties, when they were unearthed in their buildings, admitted before the banks of media that they had undertaken this admittedly extreme and reckless course of action only to tide things over while the market endured its most troubled and unpredictable period in recent history. These hastily summoned apologists, with their calm willingness to shoulder the blame, were regarded as unconvincing and inadequate sacrificial offerings by most onlookers, and so, on an unforeseen scale, every aspect of the industry’s architecture came under intense scrutiny; every major player in the field received challenges to redress and redesign, as shockwaves moved up and down the once proud edifices of publishing, shaking loose careers and reputations. Heads, like they say, began to roll—the heads of the highest-paid agents, for example, and the heads of company heads—heads fell from the windows of the Big Four—from the top of the tree, for weeks, it rained heads. Finally, those that were left in the emptied towers of the once great houses began to regroup, to organise themselves. They met after dark in curtained rooms, for hour after hour, and eventually they mounted their response. The reading public—they wrote in a collection of statements, echoing each other, and released simultaneously by representatives of all the implicated bodies—the reading public was first heard about Solomon Wiese on a bright, blustery day on the South Bank. The man who told me about him, standing opposite me outside the Royal Festival Hall, within sight of the river, which could be observed heaving like horrible grey jelly, was the head of a small publishing company, and had mentioned the name Solomon Wiese in connection, I thought, with a literary scandal from earlier in the year. Before this happened I hadn’t really been listening to the head of the small publishing company, although outwardly I was nodding, saying “Mmm,” and even occasionally generating an entire sentence. There were two reasons that I hadn’t been listening to the head of the small publishing company, apart from the obvious ones—that the head of the small publishing company was not a particularly enthralling conversationalist, for example, or the atmosphere of generalised boredom that mists these kinds of encounters, especially when they take place among a long series, as this one did, that closely resemble each other in tone and subject matter. The first reason was the presence, next to him, on my left, of his wife, who I remembered was a dentist, or in training to be a dentist, and like me had remained largely silent during the head of the small publishing company’s discourse. As he spoke I had become increasingly aware of her, and her position relative to me in the small triangle we formed, standing on the biscuity concrete—I had been reminded of her name moments before but hadn’t succeeded in retaining it. And although she had refrained from speaking almost entirely, and although I was able to prevent myself from sliding my eyes leftwards to look at her, the fact of her presence began to weigh on me more and more heavily, accompanied by a growing certainty that for seconds at a time she was staring at me, specifically at an area around my left shoulder, quite close to my neck. I was facing away from the water and it was possible, even quite likely, that the head of the small publishing company’s wife was simply taking glances beyond me towards its surface, I thought, as the mouth of the head of the small publishing company continued to move. Without turning my head I could see the water, too, in the far reaches of my vision, registering as little more than a restless effect of the light—it was possible it was to this area behind me, where the river continued its dissatisfied heaving motions, that her eyes were drawn. It was possible, but it wasn’t my feeling. That the head of the small publishing company’s wife was uninterested in the conversation and seeking distraction in the view wouldn’t have been difficult to explain, I thought, but I had met her two or three times before at similar gatherings, and if she had refrained from speaking more than absolutely necessary, she had at least always managed to give the impression that she was participating: her devices remained pocketed, and she faced the spectacle of literary society with an expression that wasn’t bored or impatient, but carefully interested. If you looked at her during the conversation she would be smiling at a moment of mock obtuseness, or nodding minutely during one of the flat stretches. She had been to enough of these events, I reasoned, while the head of the small publishing company continued to speak, to have got far beyond wondering what she was doing at them; she no longer questioned their purpose, if she ever had, the literary events of her husband’s professional world, with their warm hubbub, the haze of alcohol that clung to your clothes, the tired charades and the endless gossip—yet to look at her you felt that she hadquestioned them, in the past, perhaps in acid tones. That was all behind her now. She had become fully, numbly accepting of them, she attended unquestioningly, as a matter of principle, in support of her husband, who no doubt attended in a symmetrical way, I imagined, the social events around dentistry that surely took place from time to time, possibly in parts of the city very near this location, on the South Bank, the so-called cultural hub of the capital, and which she was obliged to mark in their calendar months in advance, so as not to spring one of these occasions on him without allowing him adequate time to psychologically prepare himself. It must be the same for her, too. Could it be, I wondered, that the wife of the head of the small publishing company had, during this conversation, reached a new plateau of boredom, so that she was on the brink of embarking on a course of action beyond her usual range? Or that she had become, despite everything, interested? I was forced to hold this thought at bay, as the head of the small publishing company’s face indicated he required a response—he still had not mentioned the name Solomon Wiese—and I provided a statement neither so specific as to betray my inattention, nor so broad as to seem evasive, and in the opening that followed I took my opportunity and glanced at the head of the small publishing company’s wife. It was as I suspected. Her gaze was not cast towards the grey surface of the river, or at the distant attractions arrayed on its far bank, but hovered instead in the region of my left shoulder, possibly around the collar of my shirt. All of this would have been enough to ensure that my attention to the head of the small publishing company, and the drift of his argument, as I understood it, on the noticeable lapse in quality of literary production over the past half decade, was thoroughly dispersed, but there was a further prelude to come, before his announcement of the name Solomon Wiese in connection with a recent publishing scandal. As the wife of the head of the small publishing company met my gaze with a frank expression, which seemed to herald a remark, the details of which I wouldn’t discover, there was a movement to my right that drew my attention away from her and her husband. Who knows how it is that we can identify, in a large and fairly complex field of activity, the small events that pertain to us—the stare of a rival, or the movements surrounding a friend’s departure. All I was really aware of at first was a faint, streamlined motion, and, dragging my eyes away from the head of the small publishing company, I was able to pick out the head of my ex-girlfriend, Genia Friend, in the company of her new partner, a burly, reticent South African named Piet Durcan. The angle was such that I could only see their heads gliding above a bar of speckled granite as they paced along a pedestrian ramp on the outside of the Royal Festival Hall, but I could guess from their trajectory that they, or perhaps Genia Friend alone, had already spotted me where I was standing in the relative calm of the riverside seating area, and without mentioning it had adjusted their passage through the crowd so as to avoid a meeting. Somehow I knew it was the last time I would see either of them. It was at this moment that the head of the small publishing company uttered the name Solomon Wiese. Something about the name, its melodiousness, its minor alterity, brought me back to the conversation, and, the heads of my ex-girlfriend and her companion having scudded from view, I indicated with an expectant expression and slight shake of my head that I was unfamiliar with the name, or the story he was referring to, or both. At least that was the impression that I gave to the head of the small publishing company—but in fact the name Solomon Wiese was familiar to me. As an editor at a mid-circulation literary magazine I made it my business—I was professionally compelled to make it my business—to stay abreast of all important and seemingly unimportant developments in the literary sphere: the prizes and grants, but also any deficit of prizes and grants, the reviews and mentions, but also the lack of reviews and mentions, the names that appeared in journals and magazines, and also their casual or calculated omission, the recipients of bursaries and residencies, as well as those who had been passed over, in other words all the appointments and expulsions, feuds and alliances, coronations, cancellations, deaths, debuts, all those who had been overlooked and all those who had been over-rewarded, not to mention the force and temperature of the various currents of favour and fatigue, and although I couldn’t place the name Solomon Wiese precisely, as I waited for the head of the small publishing company to resume his explanation and reveal to me the pertinence of it, I was reasonably certain I had seen it featured on the tables of contents of several journals over the past eight or nine months. The aura of the name was that of a new talent, I felt sure, and which on a second or third sighting I had informally flagged, although not in a way I would describe as completely conscious. In any case, I wasn’t familiar with Solomon Wiese’s actual output, if indeed he was a writer worth investigating—the name had not gained sufficient shine for that—or of the difficult situation he was involved in, which the head of the small publishing company had just alluded to. The impression I gave to the head of the small publishing company, that the name and circumstances of Solomon Wiese were entirely unknown to me, was, then, only partly inaccurate, but the fact that I had volunteered my lack of knowledge so automatically gives some sense of my professional reflexes, and their essentially defensive or strategic function—if in doubt, at these kinds of events, I always claimed that I knew nothing, I shrugged, I waved my head, unless I forgot for a moment that despite the friendly, if unemphatic, tone of my conversation with the head of the small publishing company, we were representatives of rival organisations, meeting on the field of action with the purpose of exchanging tactical information. In other words, a game of incredibly low stakes was taking place, but in this case the lowness of the stakes only made the players keener and more ruthless in their conduct—this ruthlessness was a given, we both understood, a principle of the industry, and the centre that we vied around. It was wise of me not to betray any excessive curiosity about Solomon Wiese to the head of the small publishing company—my editor’s autopilot was working correctly in that respect—unless he became aware, mistakenly or otherwise, of the value of the particular chip he was handling, and took it into his head to demand a higher price for its transfer. Either that, or he may simply have enjoyed toying with it in front of me, weighing it, withholding it—and if there was one thing I wanted to avoid during the course of my encounter with the head of the small publishing company, and which my slightly studied uninterest was calculated to circumvent, it was giving him the opportunity of extracting any more pleasure from the exchange than the bare minimum I could allow him. I had him where I wanted him, more or less—I had had him there for several years, and I wasn’t interested in relinquishing a millimetre of my advantage. He had been the one to approach me, in the outdoor seating area on the South Bank beside the Royal Festival Hall, he had addressed me, he had done the talking, and I had listened, or feigned to listen, and I didn’t plan on giving him anything more than he had come to expect. My indifference had to be more or less perfect. So I was careful how I treated his mention of the name Solomon Wiese, and while waiting for him to furnish me with the relevant facts, I tried to shore up my position by reminding myself what the head of the small publishing company had been saying while I had been preoccupied, firstly with his wife’s behaviour, then the arrival and departure of Genia Friend and her companion, the taciturn South African, Piet Durcan, who I now remembered ran an artisanal business, roasting ethically sourced coffee beans. I should make it clear that we were gathered on the South Bank, next to the Royal Festival Hall, myself, the head of the small publishing company, his wife, and several thousand other participants in the arts, to celebrate the biennial Festival of Culture. Our formation of three was positioned close to the heart of the Literature Zone, adjacent to both the Theatre and Performance Zone, centred around the King George Hall, a hundred metres or so to the east, and the Visual Arts Zone, using as its base of operations the Hayward Gallery, which stood within eyeshot, through a crush of stairways and mezzanines set back from the river—it was in that direction that Genia Friend and her companion, the South African roaster, had disappeared. Hordes of people of all ages, enthusiasts and producers of culture both, moved through this scene at a dazed pace, taking their positions at pastel-coloured tables and chairs, where they drank coffees, teas, beers, juices and shakes, or ate tacos, hotdogs, soufflé pancakes, banh mi and bento from biodegradable packaging. Festival of Culture was here. A blimp turned faithfully overhead, with the new logo on it. There was some truth, I reflected, in the head of the small publishing company’s earlier statement, that a crisis of confidence had emerged, here in the heart of the Literature Zone, so to speak, over the past couple of years: that a fever, felt only at the fringes to begin with, had swept in from those marginal, outlying territories of the art form, populated by antagonists and outcasts whose theories occasionally gained low-level support before being pitilessly extinguished by the rational majority—but in this instance the idea, or feeling, had taken hold, and gone on to infect the industry at large with a widespread, debilitating anxiety. This nervous mood had simmered away for months, increasing in potency, until it was reborn as a discreet but total state of alarm. Barely acknowledged within the sector’s working environments, it nonetheless had begun to exert a powerful, unseen influence on the day-today choices of its operatives. This heightened atmosphere was one of uncommunicated insecurity, even paranoia, meaning that beginning from the bottom, with the junior editors, slush pile readers, publisher’s assistants and reviewers for mid-circulation journals, belief in the established standards and practices of the industry had begun rapidly to wane—many literary agents and editors ceased, almost overnight in some cases, to vouch for their own judgements, and when these key negotiators turned for support to their colleagues and associates, or to such benchmarks as provided by their previous deals, or other trade success stories, which usually could be counted on to have a steadying effect, those cornerstones, rather than meeting them with reassurance and solidity, turned out to be entirely insubstantial, their elbows passed straight through, and down they went. Of course, these individuals, the assistant editors and up-and-coming junior agents, the interns and first readers, were confident young men and women, employed to an extent on the basis of their capacity for certainty, and products in many cases of elite educational institutions—if they trusted in anything at all it was in their own faculties and their ability to make judgements. They had always known what they were looking for, or they had known it when they saw it. But now a fissure of doubt had opened, and they were no longer certain they knew what they were looking for, whether they would recognise it when they saw it, or if they had missed it, and it had already passed them by. They began making tentative enquiries to their colleagues and associates, and were relieved to discover, having endured a certain amount of pretence, that their colleagues and associates found themselves in a similar predicament. It was simply not believable, they felt, that their gifts could have deserted them—the fault must lie, they felt, when they met to talk about this, as they began to, on high stools at city pubs after work, sliding their microbrews and almost spherical glasses of wine agitatedly on the table tops, with the material itself. The problem had to be with the material they were handling, they decided—something had changed, something fundamental—and so they passed it on: they passed it up, in other words, to higher stations, to the floors above, the inboxes of senior editors, to offices with tall windows and views of the grey and green squares of the city, to persons whose names were debossed on paperwork and on metallic signs above the brown brick doorways. They knew that the owners and senior actors of these companies were not as assured as was widely believed—they appeared that way when they were glimpsed in the windows of a restaurant, having one of their famous lunches, or lifting a pen behind an antique desk, but in reality much was projection, much was illusion. The circumstances of these appointments were labyrinthine, concerning many disparate, interested and invested parties, the result of delicate, shadowy calibrations, and frequently passage to those high-ceilinged offices did not lead through broad daylight. Once their junior staff, tier by tier, had begun to furtively evade responsibility in the decision-making process, which often required only a touch of finessing at the final stage, once deprived of those systems of consensus, whose key posts they started to find unresponsive at the moment they appealed to them, many of those at the pinnacles of these companies panicked. A flurry of rash decisions followed—some stalled, entering a state of paralysis from which they didn’t emerge, even as the floors below them descended into chaos; others attempted to deflect the blame, and became ensnared before long by their own duplicity; still others embarked on strategies to protect the public face of their interests, and insisted in all dealings on presenting the semblance of control. It was this last tactic that led to the worst disasters, in the form of a series of discoveries, staggered over two or three weeks in the spring, during which the story dominated all platforms as it entered an annihilating spiral that was willed to completion by various orders of the commentariat, that two of the main commercial houses had been proven to have released several fixed books, that is, to have sold, as new, publications that were revealed to be reprints of earlier publications, with minimal changes implemented to disguise this fact. Typically locations and names were switched, titles and authors were of course replaced, while the rest of the content and structure remained intact. The supposedly culpable parties, when they were unearthed in their buildings, admitted before the banks of media that they had undertaken this admittedly extreme and reckless course of action only to tide things over while the market endured its most troubled and unpredictable period in recent history. These hastily summoned apologists, with their calm willingness to shoulder the blame, were regarded as unconvincing and inadequate sacrificial offerings by most onlookers, and so, on an unforeseen scale, every aspect of the industry’s architecture came under intense scrutiny; every major player in the field received challenges to redress and redesign, as shockwaves moved up and down the once proud edifices of publishing, shaking loose careers and reputations. Heads, like they say, began to roll—the heads of the highest-paid agents, for example, and the heads of company heads—heads fell from the windows of the Big Four—from the top of the tree, for weeks, it rained heads. Finally, those that were left in the emptied towers of the once great houses began to regroup, to organise themselves. They met after dark in curtained rooms, for hour after hour, and eventually they mounted their response. The reading public—they wrote in a collection of statements, echoing each other, and released simultaneously by representatives of all the implicated bodies—the reading public was exhausted and frustrated by the whole affair, they were bored, in fact, by the tiresome continuation of the crisis beyond a point that was meaningful or helpful. Terrible mistakes had been made, but it was now time to draw a line under this regrettable period and to start afresh. For that to happen, in a way that would begin to rebuild the reading public’s trust, to allow them to read with confidence, certain of the industry’s integrity, measures had to be taken. What they proposed was this. They—and by “they,” they meant a panel selected by a coalition of the main publishing houses’ PR departments—had been working in collaboration with a team of software engineers on a technological solution to the crisis. The team of engineers was nearing the completion of a programme that they—the select panel—believed would have wonderful, recuperating effects on the devastated marketplace. Working from the latest developments in plagiarism detection services, the team of engineers had constructed a tool that made all previous plagiarism detection services resemble child’s play sets—that was the claim. ...