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EGOR FALASTROM – Dark Dreams of a Delirious Dog-Catcher

Upon first looking into Egor Falastrom’s Dark Dreams of a Delirious Dog-Catcher, I felt as though the sweet hands of love were slapping me tenderly in the face. The soft light of the setting sun crawled through a gap in my bedroom curtains and bestowed upon my grasping fingers a luminous glow. It was as if sticks of gold had grown from my hand. The moment was rich, ripe and eminently filmable. Never mind why the curtains were closed at such an hour. Do not worry your small head over these piddling details. Do I always wear make-up when I read Scandinavian literature? It matters not. Do we really need the soundtrack of sweeping violins? Possibly not – but let them stay. Am I busily restaging reality? Again: never mind. I was looking beautiful – and I was reading a beautiful book; with whose hero I was, in truth, in love. What more do you need to know?

    I have read much of many men, travelling through kingdoms and states, strutting the proverbial stuff like peacocks, doing oh-so-heroic deeds. Yet, boy oh boy, I can honestly say that I have never come across any man who is the equal of Egor. The wild, bold, brooding Egor knocks all others off the peak and screaming into the sea. Oh Egor, Egor! What a prodigious first-rate fellow. Can I compare thee to a summer’s day? Not if I ever want to enjoy July again. The wondrous, captivating Egor would overshadow anything. Never has a character in a novel combined so many attractive qualities, without a hint (no, not even a hint) of smugness.

    I stress the word ‘character’. For the Egor of which I speak is the of hero the novel, not the author. Though they share the same first name, the fictional Egor bears the surname ‘Poeur’. This is, in some ways, an academic shift – for as the first name proves, there is an obvious relationship between author and character. This is almost autobiography. Indeed, if we accept that all forms of autobiography are inherently flawed and that the genre represents an impossible (if not implausible) goal, it might be argued that this is autobiography. In the meantime, we might prefer to go with Falastrom’s nicely worded subtitle: Portrait Of The Artist As The Man He’d Like To Be.

    This, in a nutshell, is just about the perfect review of Dark Dreams of a Delirious Dog-Catcher. It’s a version of the author’s life; not as it happens, but as he would have liked it to happen. In most cases, there would be a sizeable gulf between these two accounts. In Falastrom’s case, there are a million miles - and counting.

    I fell in love with Egor Poeur. How could I not? Delirious dreamer he may be – and heavy-drinking part-time drug-addict into the bargain - but rest assured a more delightful dog-catcher has never walked upon this earth. Egor Poeur has it all; sensitivity, sexuality, wit, wisdom, and an amazing ability to tame wild dogs. Throw a sharp toothed drooling man-killer into his path and he’ll have it whinnying in submission within minutes. Not that he’d brag about it, mind you, nor treat himself to an overlarge helping of humility. No, Egor always manages to do everything to just the right level. He’s perfectly short of being absolutely (insufferably) perfect .

    And yet, Egor Poeur is a fictional character. How to get closer to him? Well, I could always arrange a meeting with his creator, his ‘alter-ego’ Egor Falastrom. But, as my friends were quick to remind me, Falastrom is a long way from Poeur – a famously long way. Poeur has perfected everything that Falastrom has failed at. The author isn’t merely a second-rate version of his hero: he’s a fifth rate form, if not worse. To meet with Falastrom would be madness. According to one female writer, well-known for her generous criticism: ‘he isn’t even sweetly infallible. He’s just pathetic. Horribly, horribly pathetic. Oh, and whoever said that all Scandinavian people were good-looking was well off the mark. Falastrom brings the average down. Far down’.

    It was with this charitable endorsement that I set about arranging my meeting. For as Georgy Riecke has always preached, there is no good in taking the advice of the many. The clinical critic is the one that, in Georgy’s words: ‘rejects the well-trodden path and rushs off into the prickly undergrowth’. And, by meeting Falastrom, this was exactly what I was doing. Unpleasant he may be; a dirty stain on the beautifully pure frame of his fiction counterpart, perhaps, but sometimes one must – for the sake of literature, dear literature – take a risk. For, as I shall now relate, there is can in fact be much gain to be had from dipping one’s toe in the stagnant pond of unpleasant experience.

 *******

    I had been washing my hands all morning, but still they resembled those of a Hollywood leper. Never mind. Who was I out to impress? All the received reports were firmly on the ball. Egor Falastrom was everything and more. The misanthropic Pyetr Turgidovky – of whom Heidi Kohlenberg wrote ‘on a good day… [he] might resemble Rasputin’ -  could be termed angelic in comparison to Falastrom. His face appears to have been boxed into shape, badly wrapped up, sent via fourth-class post across the world, kicked across streets like a football, lost for several weeks, been mistakenly dropped into the ocean and recovered, after a significant period of time, by a team of naturalists, who wrongly supposed they had discovered a ‘strange creature of the deep’.

    What’s more, though I am no fan of physiognomy, the face fits the personality. Everything that Egor Poeur is, Egor Falastrom is not. We met in a bar. Upon noticing that our table was sloping slightly, he suggested he should sit at the end to which the slope leaned. If he sat at the other end, he said, the sweat that poured from his brow would slip down the table and onto my lap. Polite of him to point this out, you might say. Yes, perhaps, though as it turned out he got the angle of the slope all wrong – and when the flood gates opened, the rivulets sped towards me after all. I sound as though I am exaggerating for effect. I am not. Though I am perhaps being a little unfair. Falastrom is, after all, a perfectly well-meaning man. He had the good grace to turn up, to answer all of my queries and, at least until after his second drink, refrain from inspecting my figure in an overly voyeuristic manner. No, he isn’t horrible, so to speak. Just ridiculous.

    At one point in the evening (it must have been relatively early on, for I recall that he wasn’t yet slurring his speech) Falastrom leaned across the table, allowing me both a front-row seat from which to explore his valiantly hideous nose and the opportunity to hear the following story:

    ‘I was’ (said he) ‘sitting in a bar in Mexico’. This, I know, was a lie – but then I did say it was a story. He went on with a few more lies (‘I was wearing a suit of inestimable elegance’, ‘I had just exchanged a silver-tipped machete for a selection of early twentieth-century Irish fiction’) before serving up the truthful meat of the tale. ‘I took up one of the books. It was Flann O’Brien’s At-Swim-Two-Birds. In it I found a passage that perplexed me’. Go on, said I. He went on: ‘There is an instance in which the narrator of the novel constructs a clever pun, but delivers it badly, so that it falls on deaf ears’. I nod. Meaning of gesture: to disclose the fact that I am vaguely aware of the passage to which he refers. He continues: ‘Later on the narrator repeats the pun to a more forgiving audience. He is rewarded by laughter’. I repeat my nod, introducing into the mix a question: ‘What is it about these two passages that perplexed you?’ He frowned. Nature of frown: patronising, excessive, needless. His answer followed: ‘Why does the first passage even exist? As far as I am concerned, the point of fiction is to iron out the creases of life. O’Brien has left the crease in – and it works!’ He shook his head furiously, as if presented with a conundrum of ineffable curiousness.

    After a pause, I posit another question. ‘Perhaps you are attracted to the quality of honesty in O’Brien’s prose?’ ‘Oh, undoubtedly,’ says he. ‘Honesty is a great quality, no doubt about it.’ He thinks about this for a moment, before continuing: ‘But it’s not for me. No, it takes real skill to pull honesty off. And if you fail, all you’ve got is an indulgence of self-pity. And you don’t want that. That’s the worst thing of all, that is. No, I don’t want to fall in love with my own faults. That’s sickening. Sickening.’ As he repeats this word another stream of sweat silently trickles down the table, like drops of rain on the windscreen of a car. As it reaches the edge, he reaches his conclusion: ‘Best steer clear of honesty altogether’. I nod again, unconsciously. Meaning of gesture: purely ornamental.

    This, of course, is very much what Falastrom has always done. There are none of life’s ‘creases’ in his fiction – at least, not in his hero, the incredibly well-ironed Egor Poeur. If there was, he wouldn’t be half as nice. Nor would the story flow so well. As Falastrom went on to say: ‘You want the truth? Dear me, you don’t want the truth. For I’ve seen it – and hell is it boring. Oh dear me – the most unstructured turgid mess you ever saw’. And yet didn’t O’Brien make something of the truth? Indeed he did, admitted Falastrom. But that doesn’t mean other writers should follow in his wake. Just because a clever writer has proved it is possible, it is by no means a viable option. For the majority of the world’s incessant scribblers, the ability to represent the truth in an attractive mode remains securely out of reach. And, god bless all ten of his ugly fat toes, Falastrom has the sense (unlike so many) not to try and scale the impossible peak. There’s honesty, of course, to Falastrom’s seeming shirking of honesty. Realism and fantasy can share the same bed – we must not forget that. But one also has to admire his simplicity; the appealing candour of his approach. Here is a writer who has no lofty ambitions. In one sense, he is writing merely to please himself; to act out his fantasies. An audience is a bonus. As he puts it  ‘I am but sculpting the life I could have had were I not a little bit nervous – and somewhat on the ugly side. Dark Dreams is nothing but a diary of my dreams: a projection of my delirious desires’. As usual, he sums the subject up with a triumphant but telling cliché: ‘What is fiction? The opportunity to live again, but properly this time’. When I suggest that ‘failed’ living may be more interesting, or more instructive, than ‘proper’ living, he simply laughs. ‘Self-indulgence’, he says. ‘Failure is only interesting in the minds of the ignorant. Ultimately, failure is pathetic’.

    There is little to what Falastrom has to say that we don’t already know. However, as I have stated, his attitude (though not, sadly, his personality) is nonetheless an attractive one. I warm to his over-simple concept of fiction as a repository for the writer’s fantasies; as a stage for all that ‘might have been’ presenting the eternal possibility of another, better life. And who am I not to grant Falastrom that privilege? He needs it, after all. Egor Falastrom is a sad figure, incapable of attracting anyone’s attentions. Egor Poeur, yet, is a model man; a creation of unsurpassable beauty. To return to yet another of the former’s ingenuous clichés: ‘fiction is the ultimate makeover’.

    The only problem: Egor Poeur is fictional. How can I discard the real man in favour of someone who is no more than a figment of his imagination? Egor Falastrom may not be outwardly as great as Egor Poeur, but the latter was produced by him – and might be said, therefore, to be lurking somewhere within him, somewhere below that fearsomely repellent and rough exterior. All he needs is to be extracted.

    But hasn't this already happened? Dark Dreams of a Delirious Dog-Catcher is, surely, the result. For the bottom line is this: extracting Poeur from Falastrom needn’t involve the physical. Let’s keep things fictional. It’s more exciting, more sensual even, than you can possibly imagine. As I have discovered….

    Though Falastrom proved to be an intriguing subject, if I was to sum up my meeting with him in one word, it would still be something along the lines of ‘obnoxious’. As in every man’s dreams, drink makes Egor Poeur charmingly confident. What it does to Falastrom is a little less tasteful. But never mind. For though the core of the experience was unhappy, in retrospect the meeting more than made up for itself. After all, does not the cruel mess of reality find a happy home elsewhere, in the comforting arms of fiction? It certainly does, as I was soon to find out.

    Most readers will know that Dark Dreams of a Delirious Dog-Catcher is only the first volume of Falastrom’s adventures in fiction. It was followed, after a refreshingly short interval, by Further Dreams of a Delirious Dog-Catcher and, a few weeks ago, Still More Dreams of a Delirious Dog-Catcher. Those who have already got their paws on a copy of the latest volume will know that an early chapter contains a scene set in a bar, in which Egor Poeur means a good-looking female critic – with, and I quote, ‘hands as soft as the sweetest pillow’.

    That’s right. My meeting with Egor Falastrom found its way into his fiction, in a very much (and dare I say it) thankfully modified form. This time round, Egor was not sweating oceans, nor making clumsy attempts at flirtation. Flirtation was involved, but (boy oh boy) it was far from clumsy. Indeed, to say that our fictive meeting goes swimmingly would be a severe understatement. Me and Egor Poeur really hit it off. Somehow, where our real-live meeting was full of misunderstandings, awkward conversation and, on my part, physical repulsion to my companion, our dalliance within the pages of Falastrom’s third novel is much, much more successful. It’s the perfect evening. It doesn’t end with my having cheap beer spilt down my sweat-stained dress and being fondled in all the wrong places by a fish-faced Scandinavian novelist, but by being enchanted (and eventually fondled, but in all the right places) by a handsome, humorous Swedish writer of pleasant odour. And, whereas in real life I have never met Egor Falastrom again, I am embarrassingly proud to say that in the made-over world of fiction, I meet up with Egor Poeur, regularly.

    I say ‘embarrassingly’. After all, as friends of mine have been quick to point out, my appearance in Still More Dreams… might be said to represent ‘a starring role in the fantasy world of a pathetic and perverted man’. Perverted (though maybe correct in its true etymological sense) is, I think, a little too harsh. To give Falastrom credit, Egor Poeur is a gentleman. These dreams of his are not, contrary to the title, all that dark. As for the ‘pathetic’, well I find that I am leaning that way myself, and leaning with such pleasure that I can hardly be bothered to defend myself. How does it feel to be fantasized over in print? Well, put it this way. I get to sleep with Egor Poeur. And though he may not be real, he is rather wonderful. As am I, in fact (fictively speaking) And as for the truth… Watch me whilst I fail to suppress a yawn. Nature of gesture: instructive, conclusive, and oh-so-very telling.

Joy de Vejean

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