‘Afternoon of a Faun’ by James Lasdun   (2019) – 164 pages

Here is a novel with a story ripped from today’s headlines, and I actually liked it.

A woman accuses a man of raping her while they slept together in the 1970s, and she is going to get her story published in a magazine. By this time, both man and woman are in their sixties. The man realizes that soon his life may be ruined for all intents and purposes by “the ritual of public denunciation”.

Yes, this story focuses on the assault and harassment scandals that seem to be breaking every week in the news. It is also a firsthand account of the sexual mores of the 1970s.

“The gist of it was that men were more overtly sexist then; more condescending, imperious, entitled, aggressive and preeningly lustful.”

It was an era of “errant masculinity”. All kinds of behavior we question now were considered perfectly acceptable in those days. One-night stands , the sexual revolution, the birth control pill, “The Joy of Sex”.

If you think James Lasdun vehemently takes either the man’s side or the woman’s side, you do not know James Lasdun. The narrator of ‘Afternoon of a Faun’ sees himself as “an appraiser of the truth” who is only interested in finding out what actually happened. He meets with the woman who is an old family friend of his deceased mother who was a confidant to her.

“There was no such thing as rape in those days, once you’d gotten in bed with a man. I didn’t even think of it as rape myself, at the time. The word didn’t enter my head.”

The narrator decides she is telling the truth. The narrator is also a friend of the man accused.

“On one occasion he said he was surprised I hadn’t already written a book about a predicament exactly like his. I’d explained the difficulty: that in a made-up story you’d have to clarify in your mind who was lying, the man or the woman, and that this would inevitably read as a larger statement about the relative truthfulness of men and women in general, which would in turn reduce the story to polemic or propaganda.”

I have read all of the novels and stories James Lasdun has written including his first wonderful collection of stories, ‘Delirium Eclipse’. Lasdun also writes poetry, some of which I have read. I have found all of his work reliably well-written and fascinating, and ‘Afternoon of the Faun’ is no exception.

Grade:    A

‘The Fall Guy’ by James Lasdun    (2016)  –  244 pages

About thirty years ago, I read a new collection of short stories called ‘Delirium Eclipse’ which greatly impressed me.  Here was a writer who could vividly and eloquently capture what it was like to be alive in our modern world. That book of short stories was the first fiction by James Lasdun. I thought for sure that Lasdun would soon join the ranks of young English literary stars like Ian McEwan and William Boyd whose acclaim was rising rapidly.

But widespread fame was not to be for James Lasdun.  His next literary work was ‘A Jump Start’, a book of poetry.  I bought that book and it contains some very fine poems, but we all know how poetry sells.  Throughout his career Lasdun has devoted at least as much energy to his poetry as to his fiction.  His next book of fiction was another collection of short stories called ‘Three Evenings’.  But short story writers just do not generally receive the plaudits that novelists do.  Lasdun did not write a novel until ‘The Horned Man’ in 2002   He has only written three novels including his latest ‘The Fall Guy’ in his entire thirty year career    His novels have received uniformly strong reviews, but Lasdun has never captured the public recognition of many other writers.  He has also written a lot of literary criticism and book reviews.

‘The Fall Guy’ takes place in New York which is where Lasdun relocated.  It is told from the point of view of a guy in his thirties named Matthew who has bounced around in the cooking and chef trade but has never been all that successful.  He is staying at an upscale vacation house outside New York with his rich half-brother banker Charlie who is married to the beautiful Chloe.  Matthew does the gourmet cooking for the couple during his stay.

There are a lot of bad deeds in this novel of which I will not go into detail, but all that misbehavior surely does spice up the plot.  One thing about the writer Lasdun, he has no qualms about his characters being wicked in our current times.

Along the way we get some insights into gourmet cooking and into banking.  There is a subplot regarding the Occupy movement which is probably Lasdun’s only misstep in that the movement has already been nearly forgotten today.  Matthew does criticize his banker brother Charlie:

“You’re not only allowed to rob people of their life’s savings and steal their houses.  In fact, the more you rob people of their life’s savings and steal their houses, the bigger your year-end bonus, right? And of course if it all goes pear-shaped, you and your chums in your six-thousand-dollar power suits can just get together with your other chums at the Treasury Department in their six-thousand dollar suits and arrange for an eighty-billion-dollar bailout, paid for of course by the very people you’ve spent the last decade robbing and stealing from.  Right, Charlie?” 

The quality that stood out the most for me in ‘The Fall Guy’ is that Lasdun’s writing at the sentence level is lively and adept.  I found the prose here energetic and nearly addictive, so I burned through this novel much faster than I normally do.  The suspense of the plot propels this scandalous story forward at a breakneck pace.  This shocking novel is not what you would expect from a poet

Grade:   A