The title of Welsh writer Christopher Meredith’s fourth novel, The Book of
Idiots, may remind some of the various instructional guides for mastering
everything from chess to beekeeping. In this case, the characters demonstrate how
to make a hash out of your life. They are idiots in the sense that we all are. To
paraphrase Flaubert, “Un idiot, c’est moi.” Or Walt Kelly’s
Pogo, “I have met the idiots and it is us.” Meredith’s
characters—Clive, Wil, Matt, Jeff, and others, as well as the narrator,
Dean Lloyd—all do idiotic things and cringe at their follies. When Matt
calls Dean clever, Dean responds, “Just differently idiotic.”
It’s also a novel about dying. In the opening chapter Dean recalls a kids’
game called Best Man’s Fall. The one designated On It has an imaginary gun
to shoot and kill all the others. The point was, having been shot, performing an
act of aesthetic, artistic, athletic, and authentic dying. The one chosen the best
became the next On It. But none of the kids considered that a reward. Much more
important was the chance to demonstrate the art of dying. Several of the adults,
no longer playing a game, do die in the following chapters, but while authentically
dead, haven’t made their demise a work of art. First, you idiotically fail
at living, and then you die.
While one reviewer in the UK calls the novel a “hilarious black comedy,”
I found it much more sad than funny. While the characters often make fools of themselves,
to laugh at them requires a distancing. Here, although Dean seems to maintain a
removal from some of the people he tells about, for example, avoiding a post-swim
beer with Jeff, even in his reticence he reveals a compassionate connection. As
noted, he is aware that he is just a different kind of idiot.
In fact, the novel does not disclose much about Dean’s circumstances. He has
an unspecified tedious job in a mundane office. He meets others, especially his
friend Wil, and listens to their stories, though saying almost nothing about himself
to them. He seems to want to avoid complications, in one case doing a U-turn when
a serious accident happens ahead of him on a crowded highway, in another leaving
a seriously injured man once he is assured an ambulance is on its way. Dean does
have an unnamed wife and family and goes to Crete on vacation. But at points throughout
the telling of the novel it’s revealed that he is speaking to a “you”
whom he is eager to meet and who has been in his car with him. By all implications,
this you is a lover, but not identified as explicitly as those of other men in the
novel. Marriages are inadequate. They do not make people happy, but neither do affairs.
Several stories run through the novel, mainly that of Wil, less so those of Matt,
Clive, and Jeff. Chapters about them alternate with the facts of Dean’s work
and drives, accumulating details as they fill in and surprise. By far the most compelling
is Wil’s tale of accidentally meeting a lover from his youth in a hospital
waiting room and the drama of what happens next; it runs though much of the novel,
building a suspenseful tension.
Acutely aware of life’s messiness and human inadequacies, Dean yearns for
a perfection that would achieve the vanishing of self. He reveals it when telling
of his never-realized goal in a swimming pool: “But the aim is to smooth
that [lengths of the pool] out and make it one unfaltering line at one speed....
The result should be a kind of emptiness if you were ever to achieve the perfect
line. You’d collapse into the line of your own movement and become a point.”
On the final page of the novel, above the earth in a glider and not sure where he
is, Dean is told by Peter, the plane’s pilot, “Hardest thing in the
world.... Flying in a straight line.” Much easier to act like an idiot.
For all his struggles with being, Dean observes with great precision, which is,
of course, a reflection of Meredith’s ability with description and rendering
of complexities, such as the unfaltering line. An author of four poetry collections,
he is also a master of dialogue, capturing distinctive speech patterns that reveal
the essence of the people behind them.
The Book of Idiots impresses at many levels—structure, language,
characterization, and insights. Unfortunately, released by Seren Books, an imprint
of Poetry Wales, it does not yet have an American publisher. Fortunately, the novel
is available though
Amazon.co.uk and deserves the widest possible readership.
is the co-publisher of Serving House Books and a faculty member in Fairleigh
Dickinson University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. His most recent
short story collection, The Lost Ones, was published in 2012.
Cummins has published more than 100 stories in such magazines as Kansas Quarterly,
Other Voices, Crosscurrents, Florida Review, South Carolina Review, Green Hills
Literary Lantern, Virginia Quarterly Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Arabesques,
and Confrontation, and on the Internet. He also has published memoirs,
essays, articles, and reviews.
www.waltercummins.com