The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Back in 2012 I got it into my head that I would read all of the books on the Booker Prize Long List. I think I got through three before life happened. And now I’m angry because The Teleportation Accident wasn’t one of them, and I wish I’d read it back then. I’ll never be asked to judge the Booker Prize, and the winner that year, Bring Up the Bodies, was one of the best books I’ve ever read. But Ned Beauman deserved at least to have made the short list. Such a good read.
Beauman has a gift for writing long, dense sentences that flow around and back on themselves, with enough rhythm to carry you through and enough irony to make you smile throughout. And that’s just the sentences. There’s also a cast of absurd characters in miniature purgatories of their own creation. And the first half of the book is set in pre-war Berlin, but only by virtue of the year during which things takes place, not for any pre-war ideas or imagery.
The main character, Loeser, is a loser, essentially. But he hates Bertholt Brecht, and therein lies the challenge Beauman must have set himself, I imagine: how to write a novel filled with the kinds of delights that reminds readers that they’re reading, but convinces them somehow to get lost in the text anyway. I’ve read books before that were so good I had to stop and just think about how good they were. The Teleportation Accident was like that in places, but I couldn’t actually stop.
There’s love, or at least there’s lust, and there’s intrigue, or least there’s conspiracy, or at least there’s the best-laid plans of mice and men. There’s magic, which is to say science fiction, which is to say the opposite of historical fiction, and there’s historical fiction too. But none of that, none of any of it sticks out or becomes an artifact of self references. Ned Beauman is the kind of writer who breaks the rules but doesn’t do it for it’s own sake- this is not a hyper-modern novel, or a post-anything novel.
This is simply a well-wrought piece of fiction, and once you’ve read it, you’ll be mad you hadn’t read it sooner.