It is six years since Hanif Kureishi’s last novel Something to Tell You, a kaleidoscopic meditation on life and death seen through the eyes of a Freudian analyst striving to make sense of middle age. It was regarded as a return to the highs of The Buddha of Suburbia, Kureishi’s first and still best-loved novel, populated by irresistible characters who ploughed through life with a feckless sexual voracity. The Last Word displays a similar chutzpah, although things are hampered by an unlikely story which over-sexualises every character in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a shabby country house.
The plot, which has Harry, an indolent young biographer, enter the West Country purdah of Mamoon, an eminent Indian-born writer, comes burdened by whispers that this is a fictional account of Patrick French’s commission to write the authorised biography of V.S. Naipaul. Indeed it is hard to think of the novel on its own terms as Harry unearths various accounts of a priapic sage whose relationships with women teeter on the edge of sexual sadism. Mamoon is capricious, arrogant and insecure, answering Harry’s questions with trite pronouncements: ‘An artist, you must remember, is at his best in his art.’ The problem is that although this is Mamoon’s attempt to deflect Harry from the truth, the reader is never allowed to see the full extent of his brilliance. There are no intellectual set pieces, no real hint at the razzle-dazzle which has earned Mamoon a place on the world’s literary stage.
It’s much more fun when we see him being scurrilous about E.M. Forster (‘He spent 30 years staring out of the window when he wasn’t mooning over bus conductors and other Pakis’) or Jean Rhys (‘the only female writer in English you’d want to sleep with’).
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