Death becomes him
Many journalists have a stab at writing a novel at some stage in their career. And many first novels often have a strongly autobiographical tang to them. So it's little surprise that fictional accounts of working life on a newspaper do roll off publishers' presses every once in a while. Although the bulk of them tend to be forgotten - typically after being hailed by hacks as being mercilessly funny and worryingly true to life - occasionally one emerges that almost threatens to topple Evelyn Waugh's classic 1938 Fleet Street novel Scoop, and Michael Frayn's Towards the End of the Morning, from their pedestals.
True to the best traditions of this minibranch of fiction, this debut from journalist Robert Chalmers is a blistering satire, although its sense of humour is of an unusually dark, uproarious hue. Half contemporary love story, half pitch-black comedy, it's not concerned so much with life on a newspaper, as with a macabre form of living death. In the opening chapters, the bumbling twentysomething central character, Daniel Linnell, meets an American girl, Laura, and moves into her flat above a bar in Crouch End. Not long afterwards, he accidentally lands a post on a national paper as a budding obituarist.
Some of the characters Daniel meets are wonderfully drawn oddballs who could have come straight out of the pages of Scoop. His boss, Alexander Whittington, is a distinctly old-fashioned type of sozzled British eccentric, whose approach to obituaries involves digging up fresh dirt about the recently departed, as well as writing about people who are still alive - and even, on occasion, people who don't exist at all. Daniel's days at work seem like a cross between Fawlty Towers, Withnail and I and Carry On Up Docklands. Life at home is made no less peculiar by his girlfriend Laura's twin addictions: infidelity and parachute jumping.
All this might sound too wacky and hysterical for its own good, but Chalmers's dust-dry wit and flair for comic invention keep the slightly overcrowded plot afloat. The action shifts to the US for several chapters, where Daniel meets Laura's family, and starts researching a book, Who's Who in Hell, which outlines in devilish detail all the lives of sinners past, from Herod to Hitler and all points between. It's quite a task. Daniel foolishly puts in a reference to one clan of living villains too - and in a Chaplinesque scene finds himself being dangled upside-down from a rope as a result, several storeys above Commercial Road.
Chalmers has such an obvious knack for caricature and morbid farce that the story loses force when, nearer the end, he tries to steer the tone towards more serious matters. There are the tentative stirrings of a unifying theme - that notions of "judgment and damnation represent our last great taboo" - but it never really resonates or comes together. More abruptly, the closing sections change register entirely in an awkward narrative lurch. Marrying comedy with calamity is a hard task indeed, one which seems just out of Chalmers's reach here. Read this for its store of genuine laughs, though, and you won't be disappointed.
