In Isabel Waidner’s previous novel, 2023’s Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, a working-class writer wins a literary prize. As the trophy takes the form of an elusive UFO, Corey Fah – an outsider unfamiliar with the baffling inner workings of the system – is unable to collect or even confirm the award. Waidner has said that the novel was partly inspired by the experience of winning the Goldsmiths prize for their previous work Sterling Karat Gold, and by the ephemeral nature of success, with its “unfamiliar contexts of social power and opportunity”.
In Waidner-world the surreal is always lurking, gleefully waiting to trip the reader up. As If uses the acting profession and its inherent themes of performance and doubleness to explore the precarity of work. A Waiting for Godot transported to the housing estates and grotty sublets of Clerkenwell, London, the book opens with a gnomic Vladimir/Estragon-type exchange between two startlingly similar strangers in a flat. They are both in their late 40s, very tall, dark-haired, a mirror image of each other – “my unremarkable eyes, they were looking back at me”, Aubrey Lewis, who is subletting the flat, notices with some alarm. “Were we ever to be seen together, I thought, we would reflect badly on each other.” The other man, dressed in “a novelty T-shirt, the less said of it the better, and pyjama bottoms”, had “walked in through the door as if he owned the place”. He introduces himself as Lindsey Korine and announces he is cold. Rifling, with Pinteresque fuss and deliberation, among the “historic arrangement” of heavy coats left by the previous subtenant, he assumes a new guise for his next role in the narrative.
Lewis and Korine have uncannily similar backstories as well as appearances. Lewis, a former actor now down on his luck, has lived in the flat for two years, since his curator wife Laurie died of cancer. Korine, it transpires, also has a wife called Laurie, who has survived cancer, plus a small child. A self-professed “house husband” who has worked countless unsatisfactory short-term jobs, he has abruptly abandoned this family unit, or been kicked out. Despite his lack of formal training, Lewis had catapulted to fame after a Barbican run of Waiting for Godot, but became unstuck when he succumbed to stage fright. There followed 17 seasons in a suddenly cancelled TV show in which most of his acting was accomplished by a prosthetic nose: its premise, in which one figure follows another, in turn stalked by a third, eerily echoes Waidner’s plot.
Korine and Lewis narrate successive chapters as they pursue a cat-and-mouse game across the urban morass of the inner city. Lewis ends up a surrogate husband and father to the other family, while Korine moves into the sublet and impersonates Lewis at an excruciating audition. A shadowy third floats in and out of the story, in the form of Lucien Jelley, a sinister understudy who also closely resembles both men. There is always, it is implied, someone waiting in the wings to snatch away your joy. Waidner’s tactic of switching selves – for are not Lewis, Korine and to a lesser extent Jelley aspects of one and the same person? – is wrenchingly funny and not a little poignant, especially in Lewis’s scenes with Korine’s child, who alternates between sunny and sullen.
Both men claim to have attended the same school in south London as Gary Oldman, and there is an element of Oldman’s latest incarnation as Slow Horses’ Jackson Lamb as they meander across the locales in which that series is set, all greasy spoons and abandoned alleyways. The city is more than just backdrop: a starring role is given to the Barbican underpass, which represents dubious shelter. Lewis had been galvanised to take up acting by Oldman’s role as playwright Joe Orton in the 1987 film Prick Up Your Ears; Waidner also possesses something of Orton’s macabre relish at kicking back at authority. “Consistency is the death of good acting,” Lewis remarks early on, and Waidner’s brand of anarchic dissonance and absurdist comic jolts buoy the novel along, even if the whole enterprise seems merely laughter in the dark.
• As If by Isabel Waidner is published by Hamish Hamilton (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
