In this book, Alexander Masters, the unusual biographer, is living in Cambridge, having written Stuart: A Life Backwards, the story of a homeless man with a disordered mind. Masters lives on the ground floor of a house on Jesus Green; below him, in the basement flat, is Simon Norton, who owns the building. Norton’s flat is so incredibly untidy, so absolutely revoltingly messy, that I can’t go into it now; I’ll spend a couple of paragraphs on it in due course. More importantly, Norton is one of the cleverest mathematicians in the world. Possibly the cleverest. So Masters decides to write his biography.
Stuart, who lived his life backwards, had a messy mind; Simon Norton has a messy flat. This flat, as Masters tells it, looks like a total disaster. Trying to get into it is difficult enough, because there are holes in the stairs, and no light switch to hand. The lavatory has somehow broken through the floor, and sunk, even though it is still, at the start of the book, semi-functional. When Norton needs to use it, he ‘teeters his toes to the edge of the broken woodwork — and waters the blackness’.
Mostly, the basement seems to be a container for layer upon layer of stuff in plastic bags — documents, bits of paper, and lots of bus tickets. Masters calls it ‘the excavation.’ He says: ‘It’s easier in here to describe where the paper, plastic bags and books are not than where they are: they’re not on the ceiling.’ Next, there’s the kitchen. Norton eats only a few things — takeaway chicken biryani or chicken in black bean sauce, and a dish he cooks himself, using tinned mackerel and some kind of rice that, Masters keeps saying, stinks.
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