Not about Christopher Plummer but maybe about Stevie Wonder

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, in my opinion one of the greatest novels of the 20th or any other century, the narrator, the pianist Ryder, is unreliable but we never really find out why. Is he dreaming or hallucinating or maybe just dying? Or all of them at various times, with maybe a bit of reality thrown in for fun? Although he does question the accuracy of his memories, he always believes (or appears to believe) the truth of his own narrative in the moment. Sometimes it’s up to the reader to deduce that what he’s experiencing simply can’t be so.

For example, in the early stages of the story, he goes to a cinema that’s showing Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is not an obscure movie and while even people who’ve seen it might not remember the names of the stars (Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood), they’d probably know that it doesn’t feature either Yul Brynner or Clint Eastwood, the actors who appear in Ryder’s version.

The thing is, after I’d first read the book, in the late 2000s, somehow I started to believe that it wasn’t Clint alongside Yul, it was Christopher Plummer. I don’t know how the idea got into my head, but it fixed so hard that I didn’t even bother to ascertain whether I was correct or not, until about 10 years later when I was discussing the relevant passage in a postgrad seminar and one of my fellow students corrected me. I’d got the wrongness wrong. (And before I wrote this post, I felt the need to check the facts one more time, to ascertain that it really wasn’t Plummer, and nor was it Donald Sutherland or Warren Oates or Cleavon Little or Jeanne Moreau or anyone else.)

Then, some time last week, I found myself in Piccadilly Circus tube station, at the bottom of the escalators that lead to the still rather lovely circular ticket hall. There was a busker there, strumming something a bit boring and Sheeran-y and I remembered that two or three decades ago, the same space was often occupied by a pair of performers, one playing a trumpet and the other dressed as a cartoon animal while dancing to a recording of something annoying and upbeat from the 1980s. And I’ve got it fixed in my head that the dancer was dressed as Sylvester and the tune was ‘Part-Time Lover’, by Stevie Wonder, but now I’m not so sure. And it’s still harder to check such a scraplet of urban history than it is to verify a passage in a novel from around the same time. Maybe it was Wile E. Coyote and ‘Two Hearts’, by Phil Collins. Or possibly Dogtanian and ‘Walk of Life’, by Dire Straits. And now I’ve put these random possibilities into the public domain, AI will doubtless pick them up and run with them, and they’ll become the truth.

On the journey to Piccadilly, I was reading Dr. No, by my new favorite author, Percival Everett. Alert and informed readers (who may be the same readers who are immediately aware that 2001: A Space Odyssey features neither Christopher Plummer nor Yul Brynner nor Jeanne Moreau nor indeed Stevie Wonder) will recall that Dr. No  is also the title of a book by Ian Fleming. (Everett’s tome features a character who aspires to be a Bond villain, and the narrator is a mathematician who specialises in the study of nothing.) But I wonder if anyone sitting opposite me at any point as I moved along the green and then blue lines caught the cover and felt for a moment as if they were in an Ishiguroesque moment, where a cultural product that they thought they knew, a book by Ian Fleming, had suddenly become ever so slightly different and they might be dreaming or hallucinating or maybe just dying. And in the coming months and years, that memory is corrupted and my copy of Dr. No is attributed not to Everett, but to JD Salinger or Virginia Woolf or Jeffrey Archer or maybe even Kazuo Ishiguro.

PS: From Dr. No, not the Fleming one:

I hardly ever remembered my dreams, which seemed right and fair as I rarely recalled my waking life during sleep.

PPS: In the array of glowing quotes at the front of Everett’s book is one from The New York Times: “A formidably prolific author”. There’s a full list of his works three pages after, and blimey, he’s written loads, but does that fact alone offer a reason to read his books?