The Murdstone Trilogy

The sun sinks, leaving tatty furbelows of crimson cloud in the Dartmoor sky. From somewhere in the bracken, tough invisible ponies huff and snicker. Final calls: rooks croaking homeward, a robin hoping for a last territorial dispute before bedtime. Voles scuttle to holes, their backs abristle with fear of Owl. It is early spring. Lambs plead for mothers. Below ground, badgers, ripe and rank with oestrus, prepare themselves for the night’s business. A fox flames its ears and clears its throat.

Darkness takes possession of the earth, then the sky. Now the only light is small and square. It comes from the window of an isolated cottage. To be exact, it comes from a Habitat anglepoise lamp hunched upon a small folding table inside and below the window. The lamp shares the table with a plate upon which tomato sauce has congealed, a bunch of keys and a somewhat out-of-date London A to Z.

These things, and the cottage, belong to Philip Murdstone, who sits, still wearing his overcoat, gazing
into the illusory heat of his coal-effect electric fire. He is holding, and sometimes remembers to drink from, a pint glass containing cloudy cider from the two-gallon plastic container on the floor next to his chair. The false fire sits on the hearth of a gaping fireplace formed from large, irregular blocks of granite.

On the mantelpiece a small number of trophies gleam faintly. One is a slab of glass, or more probably Perspex, the accolade buried within it only readable from an oblique angle. Another is a rather kitsch statuette of a child sitting cross-legged intent upon a book. There are three others, and all five are in need of dusting.

For some time now, since well before sunset, Philip Murdstone has been reciting a brutal phrase as if it were a mantra that might console him.

It is:
I’m fucked.

It has failed to console him.

Usually, in his life as well as his fiction, Philip tends to leave the weightier questions unanswered; now, in self-lacerating mode, he addresses them. Or, rather, it. His bitter self-interrogation has resolved itself into a single query: why has he agreed to sell his soul?

Answer: because he is broke. Skint.
Poor
. He is a poor man. Famous – OK, well-known – but a pauper. This ugly truth frequently visits him in the dark marches of the night. He tries to deflect it by turning on his bedside radio and losing himself in BBC World Service programmes about leech farming in Cambodia or the latest dance craze in Saudi Arabia, but it doesn’t always work.

His penury had not always dismayed him; there was after all, an honourable tradition of writers living in poverty. Russian ones, especially. Dying in poverty, however, had less appeal. Dying
of
poverty had none at all.

Philip knows why the sales of his books are in drastic decline. It has nothing at all to do with their quality. He buys the
Guardian
every Saturday, Brian at the corner shop handing it, in its plastic sheath, over the counter as if it were a pornographic version of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He also subscribes to
The Author.
So he knows what’s going on. Oh yes. Writers no longer work in solitude, crafting meaningful and elegant prose. No. They have to spend most of their time selling themselves on the fucking internet.
Blogging
and
tweeting
and
updating
their bloody Facebook pages and their wretched narcissistic
websites
.

Minerva has mentioned his failure to do likewise on several occasions.

‘But it has nothing to do with real
work
, Minerva. Surely you can see that.’

‘I do see that, Philip. I’m not actually a fool, you know, even though I am your agent. But it has a very great deal to do with
money
. Gone are the days when you simply write a jolly good book and wait for the queues to form. Readers need to be
friended
, darling. They need to be
subscribers
. They need to be
followers
. You can’t just sit in splendid isolation. Not that your isolation is particularly splendid, is it?’

But he’d refused to do any of it. Not that he was a
Luddite, by any means. Not at all. He regularly caught the monthly bus to Tavistock with his handwritten list of Things To Find Out About and spent a good hour, sometimes more, at one of the library’s computers. He considered himself a bit of a dab hand at Googling. That was work. That was useful. The rest of it, though, the incessant, vacuous web-witter … No.
No!

He’d regarded himself as a dignified – all right,
stubborn
– refusenik. Until now. Now – what a day of ugly truths it was turning out to be! – he was forced to admit that he had deluded himself. Led himself up his own tiny garden path. The absolute bloody fact of the matter was that he had allowed himself to be left behind. He was like some ancient artificer – a clockmaker, perhaps – who looks up from his bench to discover the world has gone digital and that his days are numbered. Or a loyal and expert employee who goes to work one day to find that he has been replaced by a bit of software devised by a teenager in Bangalore.

He, Philip Murdstone, had become – the very word had a murderous thud in it –
redundant
.

He gulps scrumpy, because even that isn’t the worst of it.

Oh no.

Because, swelling and looming over the horizon of his own small tragedy, cometh the Ultimate Cataclysm. The ascendancy of the darkly glittering Californian Overlords of Cyberspace, those latter-day Genghis Khans sweeping civilization aside, burning libraries, impaling editors in
long rows, razing ancient honey-coloured colleges and glass towers alike in a venal and rapacious lust to control language, turn authors into drones servicing its throbbing Amazonian hive and children into passive dabbers at electronic tablets freeloading downloads. And soon, their philistine conquest achieved, the Overlords will stand there in their ironically democratic jeans and T-shirts, surveying the wasteland with their hands on their hips, at the head of vast phalanxes of slobbering intellectual property lawyers, sneering at the last writers still able to crawl and say, ‘You got a problem, you backward-looking ink-addicted Neanderthals? What was that? Who said “copyright”? Drag that fuckin’ nostalgia junkie up here, boys, and break his goddamn fingers.’

As Minerva had rather chirpily reminded him.

‘It’s all going to go pear-shaped when Apple rules the world, darling. So if you’re a writer the only sensible thing to do is make a ton of money before it happens. And you’re a little late off the starting block, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

There was worse yet. He is in love with her. Hopelessly – and that is the
mot
both
juste
and
triste
– in love with Minerva Cinch. And, although the gooey cliché makes him atrabilious, it had been love at first sight. On his part.

Their first meeting had been in the foyer of a Marriott hotel. He had just scooped the Blyton Prize and a Costa for
Last Past the Post,
and she’d walked in and scooped him. He’d had no idea what a literary agent might look
like. Intense and bespectacled, perhaps. Middle-aged, at least. And then this astonishing creature had swanned in, turning all heads, and exclaimed, ‘Philip Murdstone! I feel like I’ve known you for
years
! Let’s have a glass of bubbly and talk about fame.’

He had almost swooned like a callow girl in a bodice-ripper. And ever since, after their increasingly infrequent meetings, he would fantastically eroticize their brief and businesslike kisses.

He does so now, groaning into his scrumpy. Like most solitary men, he has a wide repertoire of groans.

He’d just once asked her out on a date. It had taken him a month to crank himself up to it. She’d turned him down, fairly gently, giving him to believe that it was her unnegotiable principle that professional and emotional relationships should not overlap. Actually, ‘cross-contaminate’ was the word she’d used.

He is also afraid of her. He’d been all right with this at first. Fear and attraction share chambers in the human heart, after all. But after a while fear had commandeered most of the space and furniture in that cramped accommodation. He was afraid of her not only because she was (he bitterly assumed) more experienced in the bedroom department than he was. No, it was more that she lived confidently in a world that he both despised and depended upon. She knew about the publishing business, whereas he only knew about writing.

In so far as he deigned to think of it at all, Philip pictured publishing as a vast river fed and polluted by
unmapped and unpredictable tributaries. He had no idea how its flow worked. Where its snags and shallows, its navigable channels, were. Minerva did, though. By God, she did. She stood gorgeous, masterful and unshaggable at the helm of the SS
Teen Lit
, steering it through perilous currents and gaping alligators while he, the award-winning Philip Murdstone, clutched white-knuckled at the rail.

Part of it, of course, was that
he
always went to
her
. Apart from one aborted occasion. She would send for him, and he would go. Eagerly and hopelessly, as he’d gone today. To that bloody hell hole, that stew, that
sump
, London.