Madness Is Better Than Defeat.

Ned Beauman’s fourth novel Madness is better than Defeat is a self-conscious shaggy dog story. Like all good shaggy dogs, it has a self-conscious relationship to Lawrence Stern’s 1759 Tristram Shandy, though Beauman’s effort has - along with Mayan Gods, Golden Era Hollywood, CIA backed coups in south America - a good deal more incest. Or perhaps, knowing the eighteenth century’s fixation on marriage, identity, and bloodlines, it just made the incestuous subtext text. As you might have guessed, it’s also a bit too clever for its own good. You can imagine Beauman sitting back after writing eg:

There are some houses that give you such a forceful vision of your corpse lying undiscovered for several weeks after your death that you can’t possibly walk past them without resolving to talk to your neighbours more often or at the very east to sign up with a cleaning service (237)

With a smirk and a pat on the back. That doesn’t mean it’s not funny, it just means that the references to post-modernism, literary theory, the CIA, and wanking allow the reader to feel akin to, say, retweeting something on twitter that mocks guy de bord or - the ur example - Hegel. It is this masturbatory tone, Beauman ultimately suggests, that’s the only thing saving us from defeat.

The plot is something like this: in pre-war america two teams of americans search for a recently-discovered Mayan temple. One team wants to use it as a particularly authentic set for their film ‘Hearts in Darkness’, the other to tear it down and transport it back to New York a la Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan Museum. By the time they get there and discover each other, their attempts to outbid one another for the services of the native porters - who, of course, had double booked themselves - goes wrong when the porters take everything from everyone and disappear off into the jungle. With no food, no equipment, and most of all no film with which to actually make the movie, the two camps find themselves being run - briefly - by a blackmailing tabloid editor as they struggle to make film from bushcraft materials. Back in the 50s, the CIA agent - relegated to a warehouse full of materials about the disastrous expedition that will take him longer than his alcoholism will permit him to live, attempts to navigate CIA bureaucracy and their literary innovations and defend his conduct.

You’d be right in thinking that perhaps this setting makes it closer to the postmodern novels of the 50s onwards, something like a Pynchon or Gaddis than Tristram Shandy. Much like Pynchon or Eco, Beauman is more comfortable with the idea that the plurality of worlds, narratives, and personalities leads us to an anarchic understanding of world history. If Sterne found the materiality of publishing unsettling, then Beauman understands the unheimlich of modern life is passe. If it’s not quite ‘nothing is true and everything is permitted’, then it at least portrays the CIA and the American colonialism of the 20th century in Latin America as an understandable ploy in a world where everybody is in a struggle for self-control. The author writing the world, whether Trimble the blackmailer, the Hollywood Director, or Beauman himself is always the coloniser. You just have to choose your poison. The mayan inhabitants long since fled/murdered, there’s no difference between set, stage, and ‘authentic’ place. The natives too are in no sense in that Rousseau-esque state of nature, and can play the Americans off against each other. 

There’s a reason, then, that this novel is set between the 30s and 50s, the golden age of hollywood and the shadow of Nazi occupation. We all (well, hopefully) know that the nazis were bad, and that the stability and glamour of hollywood was more of a gilded age (in its original meaning of cheap and tacky veneer). The same goes for the presence of the United Fruit Company, who - again if you’re the type to read literary fiction - you’ll be aware was responsible for some of the worst massacres of interwar latin america. These are our anchors, a sense of right and wrong in a landscape in flux. There’s a reason why the Americans, trapped in the jungle, attempt to fashion home-style food and use tree bark and silver to continue to make the film. The only certainty in history and narrative is in death and fiction.

Which brings us back to the present. Beauman’s obsession with both latin america (one of the few places where British imperialism was not primarily responsible for the ensuing mess) and the collection and categorisation of data pushes us inevitably to consider this novel as Post-Colonial. In other words, Beauman represents a young [ish] british novelist attempting to grapple with both the legacy of imperialism, and how to square insurgent narratives with enough of a national story to remain vaguely coherent and not an apologetic knot of neuroses. Honduras is a ludic space in which the anxieties of Britishness can be played out one step removed, in a way that could not happen if the Jungle lay somewhere we had directly colonised. As the mania for filming everything turns into an eschatology: we’ll be able to return home to New York when the film is completed, so too does the mad digital scramble for data promise transcendence of history. If only the map could become the territory, there would be a chance for a world history that would not descend into violence.

Of course, despite the hallucinogens which pepper the novel, Beauman is too realist to believe in the post-human. It’s for this reason that I think Beauman is too sceptical to accept the mantle of both post-modernity or post-colonialism. It’s only the madness of playing with irony, pastiche, and genre that averts the defeat of nihilism.