Double life of a ghost

JOHN Herdman's protagonists are usually single self-obsessed men who take the insignificant actions that govern their daily lives to a point of absurdity. Blowing them into justification for the downfall of others, for revenge or even murder. Or they rebuke themselves mercilessly over inactivity, cowardice, or a lack of moral concern yet are fastidiously anxious about maintaining their appearance and position.

Morality is often at the centre of their concerns. Hypocrisy and contradictions abound in a world which is always uncomfortably recognisable. Irony and humour are usually in evidence, though serious implications are never far away.

Early on, Leonard Balmain tells how he became involved in ghost writing Torquil Tod's memoirs. It is a melancholy fact of experience, he says, that one does many things at 50 that one would not have contemplated at 25. First, you are asked to write a review. ``No harm in that especially if you are fearless and incorruptible, strong-minded, and impervious to blandishments.''

Then comes a newspaper column which in a few months becomes bland and anodyne. If things go badly this is followed by a collection of obscene limericks or a job copy-editing a fund-raising handbook. ``And if they go really badly, you could eventually find yourself replying to an advertisement for a ghost writer - and telling yourself that it is, after all, a thoroughly post-modern thing to do.''

Tod is Scots for fox or a cunning or untrustworthy person, which is not how Torquil initially appears. Balmain is at a loss to understand why he wants his biography ghosted in the first place. His conditions are exact. Balmain must put down what he says without embellishment, which obviously denies access to the emotional contours of the events Tod wants brought to life.

Like another account of a double existence, James Hogg's Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, the narrative is divided into three sections. There is Balmain's account of how the unfinished biography came to be written, the narrative itself and a small coda from Balmain's literary executor.

It is a story of deception and betrayal, of obsession and confused identities, but more importantly it is Herdman's best novel, where Tod never fully resolves the double movement churning inside him - ``to reveal and conceal'' - where his depression at the unapproachability of God leads him to the Devil and his fascination with the apocalypse is described as ``just an obsession''.

There is a solitary man at the heart of Frank Kuppner's narrative, or rather two anonymous men, who could also be one and the same. The narrator can be good company, full of observation and diversion as he describes the journeys his hero makes through the city.

Kuppner is an individualist, a writer who follows his own agenda, less concerned with narrative and structure than with image. He has a poet's eye for the telling detail, and, like Herdman, has devised an immediately distinguishable voice.

His narrator also ponders questions of morality, though he suspects there is no such thing as existence. Here he informs as he entertains, simplifies complex arguments and takes us into the heart of a solitary existence, detailing obsessions and preoccupations in a perfectly natural, almost seductively simple, way. ``This annihilation included a crafty race of remarkably intricate and subtle thinkers, who had triumphantly contrived, over a period of surprisingly few centuries, to elaborate a breathtakingly imaginative theory to the effect that every one of them (or most of them) possessed something else in addition to their physical bodies; something invisible and intangible which absolutely made them what they were. There was no trace of it anywhere - but it somehow got into their language, and they thought that that was all the evidence they needed.''

This is assumed to be the real self, so that what they actually were was not considered to be of the first importance. He, on the other hand, tells us he is ``supposed to be some sort of outsider''.

He is always ready to find significance in the everyday city flotsam and as incidents, memories, jokes and asides surface we are aware he is not only constructing a life for himself and the strangers he meets, but also for the objects and even the city itself, where everything changes into something else.

The weakness is consistency, that there is not enough substance, other than the narrator's voice, to connect each of the 91 short chapters. And yet the strength is the voice, the pithy examinations, wry comments, and bemused observations.

CARL MacDOUGALL