If there’s anything full-time novelists hate more than a celebrity muscling in on their turf, it’s the celebrity doing such a good job that it seems as if anybody could write fiction. Happily for the pros, this isn’t a problem with Briefs Encountered. Not only is the book full of obvious flaws, but it also makes the whole business of novel-writing look unbelievably difficult. There is, it turns out, so much to do — what with plot, characters, dialogue and tone all to be created and, worse still, made coherent. And then there’s all those pesky sentences you have to string together…
In fact, Clary’s set-up is quite promising. Richard Stent, a middle-aged actor, his once-stellar career in gentle decline, moves with his boyfriend to Goldenhurst, a house in Kent that he buys from a dissolute comedian called Julian Clary. More significantly, between 1926 and 1956, Goldenhurst was the home of Noël Coward. (In real life, Clary still lives there.) From there, the novel alternates between Richard’s first-person narrative and a diligently researched account of Coward in his pomp.
At first, then, it looks as if we might be in for a Hollinghurst-style meditation on gay life across the generations; but that fails to materialise. Instead, what we get is … well, it’s not easy to say. As the title suggests, there are elements of light sex comedy, complete with double entendres. Yet, these are so sporadic that they seem to be there only as a sop to Clary’s fans — or from sheer force of habit. Elsewhere, he throws in a period whodunit, showbiz satire, some heartfelt romance, an old-fashioned ghost story, a fair bit about interior design and a climax straight out of Stephen King.
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