The Teleportation Accident is a novel that’s hard to pin down.
It’s simultaneously highbrow, vocabulary-busting literature; sexually frustrated, debauched romance; hard-boiled crime; and ambitious science-fiction - and a lot more, besides. For the most part, though, the novel is exceptional; funny, wistful and impressively multi-faceted while losing nothing in the way of coherence. The plot does span some 17,000 years, but belief ought to be suspended when embarking upon Beauman’s second novel – thankfully, it’s worth it.
Egon Loeser is (near-eponymously) something of a loser – endlessly infatuated with the beautiful Adele Hitler in 1930s Berlin, he is sexually dilapidated, intellectually frustrated and, comically, aghast with the rise to prominence of a certain Bertolt Brecht. He flees Berlin – all the while ignorant of the simmering rise to prominence of the Nazis – pursuing the elusive Adele, meeting a colourful cast of characters on a journey that takes in Paris and Los Angeles.
The reader is also transported to seventeenth century Venice to meet Adriano Lavicini, a set designer whose teleportation device destroyed a theatre, killing many of those within, and whose shadow permeates the novel. Loeser, also a set designer, attempts to imitate him (teleportation device and all), and meets a fellow devotee, American physicist Professor Bailey, whose attempts at building the teleportation device prove much more successful – and perilous. Though the plot is sauntering, well-paced and engaging, it is Beauman’s prose which makes The Teleportation Accident so enjoyable. The opening chapter, set in Berlin, is grandiose and labyrinthine; jousting, sparring exchanges are as complex as they are rewarding. It’s the pinnacle of Beauman’s prose, the relative complexity of which acts as a jarring wake-up call to the reader.
The wealthy, senile businessman Gorge (who suffers from ‘ontological amnesia’) fails to differentiate images and words from reality; the man-made, commercially powered ‘China City’ bears little relevance to China; the titillating Midnight at the Nursing Academy, which Loeser obsessed over, cannot replicate a real-life girlfriend. Consequently Beauman writes against the grain, in the manner of postmodernists such as DeLillo and Pynchon, and his prose is alarming—deliberately jarring and hyperbolic, a warning against the routineness of quotidian vocabulary, metaphor and speech patterns. It defamiliarises language; it may seem to be arrogantly obtuse to some, but its effect cannot be underestimated.
Comments