The Bone Clocks

MAEVE MUNRO, SALTY captain of BBC2’s flagship arts show, gives a let’s-roll nod to the stage manager. I’m waiting in the wings, miked up. Publicity Girl scrolls through her messages. Stage Manager asks me to check that my mobile is switched off. I check, and find two new messages: one from Qantas air miles and one about garbage collection. In our marital halcyon days, Mrs. Zoл Legrange-Hershey would send Knock ’em dead, Genius–type texts before my gigs, but these days she doesn’t even ask what country I’m going to. Nothing from the girls, even. Juno will be playing remotely with her schoolfriends—or perverts pretending to be schoolfriends—on Tunnel Town or whatever the latest app is, while Anaпs will be reading a Michael Morpurgo book. Why don’t Iwrite kids’ books about lonely children forging bonds with animals? Because I’ve spent two decades being the Wild Child of British literature, that’s sodding why. In publishing it’s easier to change your body than it is to switch genre.

House lights dim, stage lights brighten, and the audience falls silent. Maeve Munro’s telegenic face shines and her trademark Orcadian lilt fills the tent. “Good evening, I’m Maeve Munro, broadcasting live from the Hay Festival, 2015. Ever since his debut novel Wanda in Oils, published while its author was still an undergraduate, Crispin Hershey has earned his stripes as a master stylist and a laser-sharp chronicler of our times. Our most lusted-after gong, the Brittan Prize, has—scandalously—eluded his grasp so far, but many believe that 2015 could finally be his year. With no further ado, reading from Echo Must Die, his first novel in five years, please join me and our very proud sponsors FutureNow Bank in welcoming—Crispin Hershey!”

Solid applause. I approach the lectern. A full house. Sodding well ought to be—they already moved me from the six-hundred seater PowerGen Venue to this “more intimate setting.” Editor Oliver sits in the front row with Hyena Hal and his newest client and the Next Hot Young American Thing, Nick Greek. Let silence fall. Rain drums on the marquee roof. Most writers would now thank the audience for coming out on such a bad night, but Hershey treats ’em mean to keep ’em keen and opens Echo Must Dieat page one.

I clear my throat. “I’ll jump straight in …”

… my last line dispatched, I return to my chair. Swing high, sweet clap-o-meter; not bad for a contingent of securely pensioned metropolitans stuffed with artisanal fudge and organic cider. They guffawed as my protagonist Trevor Upward got duct-taped to the roof of the Eurostar; squirmed when Titus Hurt found a human finger in his Cornish pastie; and thrummed at my dйnouement in the Cambridge pub, which flowers into Audenesque rhyme when spoken aloud at festivals. Maeve Munro gives me a cheerful that-went-well face; I give her a why-wouldn’t-it? face back. Hershey spent his boyhood among thesps, and Dad’s habit of ridiculing my brother and me for garbled diction has borne plump fruit. Dad’s last words, as my memoir recounts, were “It’s ‘whom,’ you baboon, not ‘who’ …”

“To kick off the Q and A,” Maeve Munro addresses the tent, “I have some questions of my own. Then we’ll turn it over to our roving mikes. So, Crispin, on last Friday’s Newsnight Review, eminent critic Aphra Booth described Echo Must Dieas ‘a classic male midlife crisis novel.’ Any response?”

“Oh, I’d say she’s hit the nail on the head,” I take a slow sip of water, “ if, like Aphra Booth, your notion of ‘reading’ is to skim the back jacket in the green-room loo a minute before going on air.”

My quip earns a fake smile from Maeve Munro, who is often seen wining and whining with Aphra Booth at the Mistletoe Club. “Right … And as for Richard Cheeseman’s rather lackluster review—”

“What christening is complete without a jealous fairy’s curse?”

Laughter; gasps; Twitterstorm ahoy. The Telegraphwill report the line on page one of their arts section; Richard Cheeseman will get his gay-rights group to give me the Bigot of the Year Award; Hyena Hal will be thinking Publi$ity, while Nick Greek, bless, looks puzzled. American writers are so sodding niceto each other, hanging out in their Brooklyn lofts and writing each other’s references for professorial chairs. “Let’s move on,” says Maeve Munro, her fluty trill flattening, “while we’re ahead.”

“What makes you think you’re ‘ahead,’ Maeve?”

Little smile: “ Echo Must Die’s protagonist is, like yourself, a novelist, yet in your memoir To Be Continuedyou dub novels about novelists ‘incestuous.’ Is Trevor Upward a U-turn, or is incest now a more attractive proposition?”