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Rules for Old Men Waiting ought to be terrible: an ageing writer (yawn) married to an artist (eyes glaze) spends a solitary bleak winter slowly dying with only his memories and self-pitying thoughts for company (chin collides with table). It seems the last resort of a plotless literary arse-gazer, desperate to write a novel. But Peter Pouncey, a retired professor of classics, has been writing about Robert MacIver for a quarter of a century and we should be grateful that he has finally published this rich, nourishing reduction. As he decays after the death of his wife, MacIver devises a set of irreproachable commandments simply so he can endure. The self-imposed obligation to write every day instils a new resilience as he carefully composes a tale set in the trenches of the first world war, a period he studied in his professional career as a historian. It required a feat of high-wire brilliance on the part of Pouncey to write a story which is competent but not outstanding, whose subtle resonances would not swamp MacIver’s memories, the surprisingly moving diary of his eating and musical habits and the growing catalogue of his ailments. It is a book of great scope that remains nuanced: the hellish fascination of war is never patly condemned. Its heart is not MacIver’s fiction but a searing ‘autobiographical’ account of his son’s involvement in Vietnam, all the more moving for its lucid and precise chronology of events, unencumbered by any narratorial mutterings.
Giles Coren’s anti-hero, Winkler, is an angry man: his residual peevishness occasionally inflates as far as eye-popping, furniture-destroying rage. He has a dead-end job, a corpulent and irascible girlfriend and lives in a house that perpetually reeks of boiled human flesh. Doubtless this partially contributes to his willingness to push a fat lady under a tube train. He reaches his tipping point when he is held by the pallid gaze of a Holocaust survivor who lives in the flat beneath him and who recounts with equanimity the horrors of his life as a partisan. Winkler abandons his grey routine for psychotropic indulgence, casual sex and cricket. Coren has a keen nose for the most underused of the senses when it comes to writing: smell. The rank urban bouquet of kebab grease, sweat, rotting vegetables and stale cigarettes is lovingly described and savoured — the paperback edition really ought to have scratch’n’sniff footnotes. The city of the novel, which bears a significant though never explicit resemblance to London, is a waste land and the arid and loveless ambience of Eliot’s poem hovers over the story. Despite the mayhem and scatology this is a novel of grand themes: truth, satisfaction and identity. Winkler’s Jewishness had been a shameful burden since childhood, but his depressing isolation is only ameliorated by accepting the companionship and help of his extended family. However, this is not so much a morality tale as an amorality one: there is an infectious glee with which Coren pillories politically correct nostra and the scabrous humour and farce make him a worthy heir of Tom Sharpe.
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