
Blake Morrison’s new book is a novel about the piecing together of a poetry collection, which is then printed in full at the end. Reading it was, I confess, a perplexing experience: something like watching Lewis Hamilton ride a bicycle round Silverstone for innumerable reconnaissance laps just so as to be prepared when he finally climbs into his race car and risks his life at 200mph on the edges of adhesion and daring. It tells the story of a vexed acolyte-mentor friendship between Matt Holmes, a literary journalist, and Robert Pope, a famous poet. Rob makes Matt his literary executor, then dies. Matt journeys to Rob’s house and starts going through drawers looking for unpublished works. He finds three hidden batches – variously presented in the text – and then the “final” collection: “Love’s Alphabet by Robert Pope”. Matt then invites us towards the end of his narrative to think of the whole novel as his introduction to this work.
In a formal sense, The Executor is adept, attentive and occasionally beautiful; and yet, for all its well-cadenced phrasing and precise word selection, Morrison’s prose seems too often deployed to peddle humdrum material. So much so, that I began to wonder if there was a meta joke that I wasn’t getting. “My socks had coloured stripes with days of the week on them, but I couldn’t find a matching pair,” Matt tells us. “I remember going to the supermarket – Waitrose for once, not Lidl – and buying fresh pesto.” A claustrophobically tedious trip to visit Matt’s mum – “I loved my mum but to be honest these trips bored me silly” – winds up in the dismal back room of a pub with a crack in the seat of a chair. This is thin gruel.
But when the poetry starts to break through, the book comes alive – reverberatingly, ravishingly so. Everything is illuminated. Gone are all the meekness, quotidian and connubial plod; enter the revivifying excitements of adultery, incest, euthanasia; sex and lust and love; dreams, mortality and death. And thank heavens for that. The poem “Love and War”, for example, declares: “I was set to write an epic of the twenty-first century … Homs, I typed, to spite you, Saddam, Assad, Arab spring. / But the keyboard had a mind of its own; put Putin / and it morphed into Cupid … ”
It’s a wonderful poem: exquisitely metered, intimate and yet profound, glimmeringly intelligent, slyly sensual. In this playful, urgent piece, a poet is trying (but not really trying) to address the high seriousness of the world while his lover loops her arms around his neck and urges him to “Write about love. About sex. About us.” It’s a poem that’s also about poetry itself.
We are in the arena, then, of such great books as Nabokov’s Pale Fire or AS Byatt’s Possession – or at least we should be. Morrison is a well versed, intelligent and technically astute writer, so I found it hard to fathom why he had elected to deliver this poetry (and thoughts about poetry) from so drear a vantage point as the character of Matt – “Matt the Scruple”, as he calls himself. In contrast to the shimmering brilliance of Nabokov’s Kinbote and Shade, or the intricate filigree pleasures of Byatt’s parallel love stories, Morrison’s encasing novel detracts from the work rather than enhancing it.
So let’s get back to that poetry. It turns out that Robert Pope had written his final sequence after Ovid’s Amores. This prompts a meditation on the nature of Ovid’s wild, rapacious sexuality, as presented in the verse: was Ovid (and thus Pope) busy “stealing wives from husbands”, or was he making it all up? Was there one lover or an unholy legion? What is the connection between reality and fiction, the work and the life?
These questions are interesting but not new. And I just loved many of the actual poems – their dramatic kinesis and the way they engaged simultaneously with both the canon and life’s quiddity. Here’s Pope/Morrison’s aubade, “Dawn”: “Rosy fingers, lark ascending, gold disc cresting the skyline … / Give it a rest. Why do you think the curtains are drawn?” Two lines in, Pope/Morrison has gathered up Homer’s “rosy-fingered dawn”, Ovid’s ironical take on the same trope, George Meredith and John Donne. And the next 10 lines track and shadow these forebears – particularly Donne’s “The Sun Rising” – with such dexterity and ingenuity that by the end an ancient form is written anew.
This seems such a worthwhile, interesting and impressive achievement that I was left wondering how so sophisticated a poetic self (Pope) could co-exist with so insipid a prose self (Matt). Perhaps this is Morrison’s meta point: that we live in tedious prose and we love in radiant poetry? OK, maybe, but we read for pleasure in the narrator’s company. And Matt was almost too high a price to pay.
Edward Docx’s latest novel is Let Go My Hand (Picador). To buy The Executor for £14.44 go to guardianbookshop.com.
