Few readers who enjoyed Freya, Anthony Quinn’s last novel, will be surprised to discover that Nat Fane is back. In a tale of female friendship and identity in the bohemian 1950s, Freya’s louche friend Nat nearly stole the show, bursting the confines of his supporting role with his waspish epigrams and his penchant for silk suits and spanking.
Eureka is the third in Quinn’s 20th-century trilogy (the first, Curtain Call, was a thriller set in 1930s theatreland) and, though Freya returns, it is Nat’s turn this time to take centre stage. In London in the steamy, seamy summer of 1967 the playwright turned screenwriter is struggling. At not quite 40, his star is on the wane: it is eight years since his first film brought him fame and an academy award, and the flops are mounting fast enough for the Evening Standard to disdain him as “British theatre’s youngest living has-been”. Everything hangs on his latest project, “Eureka”, a modern-day adaptation of a Henry James story for the hotshot German auteur Rainer Werther Kloss, scheduled to begin shooting in six weeks. Unfortunately Nat is still to write a single word.
Quinn builds his historical novels from the ground up, plundering the contemporary records for real-life characters from which to draw his fictions. Nat owes a great deal to the notorious dandy and sexual hedonist Kenneth Tynan, while his wunderkind director is a mash-up of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog. Throw in Billie Cantrip, a violet-eyed neophyte actor “almost cartoonish in her prettiness”, and a Jack-the-Lad East End actor fresh from a triumphant turn as an officer in the imperial epic Mafeking (no prizes for guessing that one), along with unholy amounts of drugs and alcohol and a Beatles soundtrack, and the scene is set for a caper straight out of Ealing Studios. Quinn takes us on a gleeful tour of the 60s sights, from Silver Cloud Rolls-Royces and extravagant fashion (Nat in a patterned shirt glumly acknowledges being “mutton dressed as leopard”) to discs on the Dansette.
Even when the plot darkens into underworld menace it does so Ladykillers-style, tongue firmly in cheek: the teasingly named Harry Pulver might be a gangster and racketeer with a reputation for brutal violence, but he is also excessively sensitive about his toupée.
Powered by a satisfactorily pacy plot and oiled by Quinn’s effortless prose, this is a book that slips down as easily as a gin-and-it, but larger questions lurk beneath its polished surface. As Nat slowly, painfully produces his screenplay, his pages find their way into the novel. As the story of the making of the film unfolds so too does the story of the film itself, a 60s take on “The Figure in the Carpet”, James’s oblique tale of literary provocation in which a famous writer confides to the story’s narrator, an ambitious critic, about a unifying element to all his work, “the string the pearls were strung on”, that brings together the oeuvre and that no critic has ever succeeded in identifying. Piqued, the narrator embarks on an increasingly obsessive, and ultimately unsuccessful quest to uncover the mystery.
Must a work of art be understood to be appreciated, Quinn asks, or does its power lie in its ambiguities and secrets? Explaining his film to Pulver’s fixer, Joey, Nat declares that it is “‘about’ all manner of things: ambition, envy, competitiveness, altered states, enlightenment, despair, death. It’s about secrets and the value of keeping secrets. And it is about the mysterious power of art – is the meaning of a work of art as important as its overall effect?” Though Nat’s trippy rendering of James’s complex story falls rather short of this grand description, it is a question the novel circles round to again and again.
As for answers, Quinn leaves that up to us. While he mocks Nat’s dilatoriness and reserves the novel’s tenderest moments for those who work with integrity, it is the artists like Billie’s self-involved boyfriend Jeff who take themselves and their work too seriously who draw his strongest fire.
His own position is perhaps best intuited from the sheer verve of this novel, the delight it takes in its capacity to entertain. Joey, having listened to Nat’s explanation, curls his lip in disgust. “You’re sure,” he asks, “this film isn’t in black and white?” Eureka, on the other hand, is in glorious Technicolor.
• Eureka is published by Jonathan Cape. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
