The Bone Clocks

… a mossy boulder, big as a troll’s head, on its side and brooding over an ancient wrong. I’m sitting on the ground with no memory of tripping, though I must have done; I’m aching all over. How the sodding hell did I get down here? A mini-stroke? Magicked by the elves of Бsbyrgi? I must have … what? Sat down for a breather, then nodded off. A breeze passes, the trees shiver, and a yellow leaf loop-the-loops, landing by a fluke of air currents on my palm. Look at that. For the second time today, I think of Mr. Chimes the conjuror. Not far away, a woman’s laughing. The campsite’s near. I get up—and notice a big cold stain down my thigh. Oh. Okay. The Wild Child of British Letters has suffered a somnambulant urethral mishap. Lucky there’s no Piccadilly Reviewdiarist around. I’m only fifty-three—surely still a bit young for incontinence pads? It’s all chilly and clammy, like it happened a couple of minutes ago. Thank God I’m so close to the parking area, clean boxers, and trousers. Back to the fork, then turn left. Let us hurry, dear reader. It’ll be night before you know it.

September 23, 2019

IT LOOKS LIKE HALLDУR LAXNESS splurged most of the Nobel dosh on Gljъfrasteinn, his white, blockist 1950s home halfway up a mist-smudged vale outside Reykjavik. From the outside it reminds me of a 1970s squash club in the Home Counties. A river tumbles by and on through the mostly treeless autumn. Parked in the drive is a cream Jag identical to the one Dad had. I buy my ticket from a friendly knitter with a cushy job and walk over to the house proper, where I put on my audio guide as directed. My digital spirit guide tells me about the paintings, the modernist lamps and clocks, the low Swedish furniture, a German piano, parquet floors, cherry-wood fittings, leather upholstery. Gljъfrasteinn is a bubble in time, as is right and proper for a writer’s museum. Climbing the stairs, I consider the prospect of a Crispin Hershey Museum. The obvious location is the old family home in Pembridge Place, where I lived both as a boy and as a father. The snag is, the dear old place was gutted by builders, the week after I handed over the keys, subdivided into six flats and sold to Russian, Chinese, and Saudi investors. Reacquisition, reunification, and restoration would be a multilingual and ruinously expensive prospect, so my current address on East Heath Lane, Hampstead, is the likeliest candidate—assuming Hyena Hal can persuade Bleecker Yard’s and Erebus’s lawyers not to whisk it away, of course. I imagine reverent visitors stroking my varnished handrails and whispering in awed tones, “My God, that’s thelaptop he wrote his triumphant Iceland novel on!” The gift shop could be squeezed into the downstairs bog: Crispin Hershey key fobs, Desiccated Embryomouse mats, and glow-in-the-dark figurines. People buy such bollocks at museums. They don’t know what else to do once they’re there.

Upstairs, the digital guide mentions in passing that Mr. and Mrs. Laxness occupied different bedrooms. So I see. Strikes a sodding chord. Laxness’s typewriter sits on his desk—or, more accurately, his wife’s typewriter, as she typed up his handwritten manuscripts. I wrote my debut novel on a typewriter, but Wanda in Oilswas composed on a secondhand Brittan PC handed down by Dad as a birthday present, and it’s been ever-lighter, ever-trustier laptops ever since. For most digital-age writers, writing isrewriting. We grope, cut, block, paste, and twitch, panning for gold onscreen by deleting bucketloads of crap. Our analog ancestors had to polish every line mentally before hammering it out mechanically. Rewrites cost them months, meters of ink ribbon, and pints of Tippex. Poor sods.

On the other hand, if digital technology is so superior a midwife of the novel, where are this century’s masterpieces? I enter a small library where Laxness seems to have kept his overflow, and bend my neck to graze upon the titles. Plenty of hardbacks in Icelandic, Danish, I guess, German, English … and sodding hell —Desiccated Embryos!

Hang on, this is the 2001 edition …

… and Laxness died in 1998. Right.

Well, a kind gesture of the Hidden Folk.