The Last Man in Europe Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE LAST MAN IN EUROPE

  ‘Dennis Glover has dared to burrow into the moral universe of George Orwell, there to look through his unblinking eyes upon the malevolence, vanity, cowardice and deceit that menace the potential for a decent society. The result is a story rivetingly told, not only of Orwell’s insight and courage, but of his torments, his loves, his gut-wrenching struggles. Read this book to better know and understand an essential figure of the twentieth century, whose writing and example still speak to us with urgency.’

  DON WATSON

  ‘I began The Last Man in Europe in a sceptical frame of mind. By the time I finished it, I regarded it as a quite astonishing achievement. This is a novel about George Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four, written uncannily in the style Orwell would have used if he had decided to write a novel about his own life. The result is a fascinating, compelling and, in the end, deeply moving work, a wonderfully accurate and entirely unsentimental tribute to the political writer who grasped with greatest penetration the meaning of the European catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century. Glover’s Orwell is fully imagined and precisely understood. With The Last Man in Europe, a major new literary talent has been revealed.’

  ROBERT MANNE

  Published by Black Inc.,

  an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd

  Level 1, 221 Drummond Street

  Carlton VIC 3053, Australia

  [email protected]

  www.blackincbooks.com

  Copyright © Dennis Glover 2017

  Dennis Glover asserts his right to be known as the author of this work.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Glover, Dennis, 1964– author.

  The last man in Europe: a novel / Dennis Glover.

  9781863959377 (paperback)

  9781925435665 (ebook)

  Orwell, George, 1903–1950. Nineteen eighty-four. Authors, English—Fiction. Literature and society—Fiction. English literature—Social aspects—Fiction.

  Cover design by Peter Long

  Cover illustration by Kevin Sprouls

  Typeset by Tristan Main

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  PART II

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  PART III

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  PART IV

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  Jura, April 1947. It was his third day back on the island but the first he had managed to get out of bed. He knew what he had to do: transfer to paper the ceaseless, grinding monologue that had been working through his mind since … when? His days at the BBC? The betrayal in Barcelona? The discovery of the proles in Wigan? Those glorious summers of his youth? Prep school and H.G. Wells? He couldn’t remember; perhaps the obsession had always been with him.

  The view from his desk was desolate: the ground sodden and grassless, and the early spring flowers already spent. The late frosts and rains had played havoc with the place. He could see a dead calf in the next field, which meant rats. He roused himself and sat up straighter. Almost absentmindedly, he typed ‘i.’ at the top of the page.

  He glanced at his watch. It was midday of the first day of Double Summer Time, meaning it was actually twelve plus one – or eleven plus two, depending on how you looked at it. What with the bolshiness of the islanders towards such matters, no one here could ever agree what time it really was. He took off his watch, wound it forward one hour and strapped it back on his wrist.

  To mark the paper was the decisive act. He’d got somewhere the previous summer, but only with incidental parts, like Goldstein’s secret book, and they’d all have to be redone. Now he faced the hard part: the story. A Clergyman’s Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying he had opened with the ringing of clocks, and Coming Up for Air with George Bowling nipping out of bed. It was an easy way in – perhaps too easy, but he could get it right in the next draft. He felt a jolt in his chest and his mind drifted to his illness, but he regained control before the thoughts could lead anywhere.

  Then the right words came, the way good writing always does, in a rush. He put his hands to the keys and the letters began to indent the paper:

  It was a cold, blowy day in early April, and a million radios were striking thirteen.

  He lit a cigarette and read the line over. Something wasn’t right. There was a looseness about it. Connolly would have attacked the scansion, just as he had all those years ago at prep. And the radios – they smacked of Wells and Huxley and science fiction, which was the last thing he wanted. He picked up his pen and began amending. Satisfied, he read it back again:

  It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

  There was no turning back now.

  1

  Booklover’s Corner, Hampstead, March 1935. He had reached that age when the future ceases to be a rosy blur and becomes actual and menacing. It was a good sentence, and he set the pen down next to his notebook. Menacing. Yes, this was going to be his best novel so far, although sadly it was drawn directly from life – his own. It was about a failing poet, Gordon Comstock, in his early thirties, working in a dusty bookshop and living alone in an attic bedsit – halfway to the workhouse already. Good prose, he believed, should be like a windowpane, but in this case it would have to be a mirror.

  He had expected becoming a published author to improve his life in noticeable ways, but little had really changed, except his name – from Eric Blair to George Orwell, after the river in Suffolk where he’d fished as a boy. As he had done from childhood, he still wrote all the time, even when at work in the bookshop, where he was allowed to scribble as long as there were no customers to serve or new stock to shelve. It seemed the only time he wasn’t writing was when he was asleep – and even then he suspected his mind was secretly working on some book or essay or poem that only revealed itself later.

  Despite all this hard work, despite years of tramping, policing the Empire and washing greasy plates to write about things that should have mattered, he had less money than ever. His appearance, even he could see, had the unmistakeable signs of failure: his hair too long, his fraying white shirts a dull grey, his unusually tall frame shrinking as his suits became baggier and more shapeless. There was a mouldering, moth-eaten-ness about him that without success and money he could never hope to shake. Even his voice – public school, but neither effeminate nor deep enough to convey the necessary impression of a successful writer – let him down. He certainly would never be mistaken for one of the sleek young literary lions whose frivolous must-read novels he was daily forced to sell. Bum-kissers!

  He looked up from the page. It had darkened outside, and with the electric light on he could see his partial reflection in the shop window. Actually, he didn’t look that bad after all. His collar was substantially intact, his jacket wor
n but decently tailored. Even his bedsit, he conceded, was clean and pleasantly furnished, quite a nice place to write, and just yards from Hampstead Heath. Maybe a quarter way to the workhouse, no more; he was not quite Gordon yet.

  He doodled, thinking. By an act of willpower, he had turned himself into a writer, occasionally half starving himself in the process, but apart from the usual reasons of vanity and the search for fame, he didn’t really know why. He knew instinctively what he was against, although even that required effort to pin down precisely. He was against the modern world, with its constant background noise of radios, its tinned food, thin bubbly beer, patent medicines, electric heating and contraception. He was against religion too – an obvious swindle, barely worth discussing. But what else?

  He lit a cigarette. Looking across the street, he saw a poster for Bovril, its torn corner flapping in the wind. Bovril, beef in brief. Advertising – another evil! But what about politics? He realised he hadn’t really given it much thought, except to hate imperialism for having sent him to Burma, wasting five good years of his life. In truth the things that really interested him were literature and being a writer. He sat back. A writer without any purpose or belief system, writing about writing – that’s what he was.

  He closed his eyes and, unbidden, a familiar vision came to him. He was outside, with springy turf under his feet and the warmth of the sun on his back. It was May, because the chestnut trees were in blossom and the smell of wild peppermint was in the air. He was at the edge of a clearing, completely alone, staring down at a sun-dappled pond, beneath which swam enormous fish, silent, contented, free. A breeze ruffled the elm behind him, and the only sound was the song of a bird – a thrush. It was the dream he’d had the night before, and now it wouldn’t leave his mind. It had been a luminous dream, bathed in sunshine: a vision of straw-coloured grass and azure skies, with here and there a shell-burst of cloud lending contrast. It was a place where time moved slowly and death could never reach, giving him the feeling of not being hurried or frightened the way everyone around him seemed to be nowadays. He was certain he’d had the dream many times before, but had no evidence to confirm it. Perhaps the idea of having had the dream before was part of the dream itself – a false memory. After all, you couldn’t prove anything existed if the only proof of it lay inside your head.

  The shop bell tinkled. A customer. Unlike Gordon, he actually looked forward to his battles with customers, and the chance to talk about the books he admired.

  It was that girl. Her name was Eileen – Eileen O’Shaughnessy – although she forbade him from calling her that, being known exclusively as Emily, E or, to her closest chums, ‘The Pig’. He had met her at the weekend, at a party his landlady held for students at University College. She was small, with thick, dark hair and a freckled face, and was, he reckoned, in her late twenties or thereabouts. She had fine features and swift movements and was distinctly attractive but rather intimidating – the sort who was probably head girl at a school where they played a lot of hockey. He pictured her as a schoolgirl, her sports outfit gathered tightly at the waist by a house sash, lending the plain costume an inviting dimension, the way a certain type of schoolgirl always managed.

  ‘Hello!’ She had caught him looking at her midriff. ‘Frightfully busy, isn’t it,’ she said, in the ironic tone he recalled from a few days before, and which he put down to the fashion, rife right then, for imitating characters from the novels of Evelyn Waugh – another bum-kisser. ‘I hope I’m interrupting some serious writing.’

  He closed the notebook. ‘You are indeed. An important scene.’

  ‘An illicit one, I hope. You want it to be a bestseller.’

  ‘Just slightly illicit.’

  She pouted. ‘Oh, how disappointing.’

  ‘I could spice it up a bit, if you’d like.’

  ‘Please do. Absolutely essential.’

  ‘You know about such things? Lewd literature, I mean.’

  ‘As you’re aware, if you can remember, I studied at Oxford. English.’ She lowered her voice conspiratorially. ‘Read Lawrence when no one was watching.’

  ‘One can’t be too careful. I read Compton Mackenzie under the bedsheets at prep. They beat me for it.’

  ‘I even have a degree. I warn you, though, it’s only second-class.’

  ‘Second-class is preferable; literature is always ruined when it’s too good. Actually, you can help me complete an important scene. You see, my hero lives alone in a bedsit, with a snooping landlady, and hasn’t anywhere to actually, you know …’

  ‘How unfortunate.’

  ‘Yes. It’s rather causing him to go off his coconut. He’s met a girl, you see. A peach.’

  ‘A coconut with a peach. Sounds promising.’ She sidled up to the counter and leaned her elbows on it.

  He could smell her perfume. ‘He hopes so.’

  ‘I have to say, I can’t believe an enterprising young writer couldn’t invent some sort of bolthole in which to give this coconut and his peach a little privacy of an afternoon. Now, let me think …’ She scanned the shop, fixing her eyes on the staircase at the rear. ‘Maybe a room, upstairs from the shop where he works?’

  He had thought her fairly drunk at the party, and that that was why she had seemed fast and flirtatious in a way other women never were with him. Without the attractions of money and fame, he’d always had to rather force things along. But now he saw she was the same when sober. Proper, yes, but corrupted in a way that excited him. It struck him that while he’d been in love before – in Shiplake, Burma, Paris and Southwold – he’d never really been loved in return. He’d only just met her, but already he could tell: this was the sort of girl he’d like to marry.

  *

  Burnham Beeches, May. They had arranged to have a picnic together. The choice of assignation had been dictated by the simple fact that even though they were both adults, they had nowhere private to make love. In a world full of eavesdroppers and nosey parkers, privacy was only a theoretical concept to the unmarried and unmoneyed. The bookshop and their bedsits were little use, with owners and landladies always threatening to burst in unannounced, constantly snooping, and seemingly bent on enforcing some standard of behaviour people their age couldn’t possibly be expected to abide.

  The weather had been beastly all the spring but today the sun had come out, making it a lucky day to have made a break for the countryside. They walked for near three hours, hardly seeing a living thing but for birds and rabbits; even the villages they walked through seemed to be asleep. It was hard to believe such solitude existed thirty minutes from the city.

  Getting hungry, they topped a rise and halted, thinking not just of the picnic; a spot infallibly out of sight to passing strangers was needed. At that moment the sun, which had hidden itself behind clouds, reappeared, illuminating the valley below in a golden glow of sunshine, like one of those railway posters that enticed people like them to give up a few pounds for their annual trip to the Lake District.

  ‘Oh, look, Eric,’ she said. ‘The sun is lighting everything up.’

  Down in the valley, cosy whitewashed cottages appeared against the green, blue and yellow background, so far away as to be little more than dots, their windows glinting in the sun and wisps of white smoke curling from their chimneys. A small river wound its way through the valley. England! It felt warm, like summer. He hugged her from behind and they looked out over the scene, he noticing the first signs of grey in the roots of her hair but not caring, knowing there was even more in his. In a life that had become harder and duller than he had expected, he felt a sort of unalloyed joy, a childish delight, and he knew right then that this was one of those moments, like the happiest days from childhood, that would never leave him, and which would return in memory to taunt him, always.

  What he liked most about her was that she didn’t have to be goaded into it. She actually wanted him to make love to her, although she could undoubtedly have done better and the act involved considerable risk. Wh
at the Sunday papers would make of it! ‘Lewd Act in Forest’, ‘Couple Caught Coupling’, ‘Burnham Beeches Bliss’ and so on. There they were in a world in which the moneyless middle-class like themselves had nothing but their respectability standing between them and ruin, and yet she was willing to pursue joy before all else.

  And what did she have to gain? Without some sort of runaway literary success, he could never give her the material things most women of her class wanted. Despite being an Etonian, he wasn’t going to inherit anything of much value – or become editor of the Times or make it to the senior ranks of the civil service. But she didn’t seem to care. She really didn’t. She wouldn’t make him throw it all in for some bowler-hatted purgatory worth five hundred pounds a year and a green-doored villa owned by the building society.

  ‘There’s no one around. Now, while it’s safe,’ she said, taking him by the hand and leading him into the wooded field by the path. ‘We can eat afterwards.’

  A few rows of trees back and they entered a small clearing, almost completely encircled by a wall of saplings making a natural fortress of privacy. It seemed vaguely familiar, like a place he had been in his childhood. They stood opposite each other. Before she even kissed him, she began taking off her clothes, laying them on the ground as if to make a bed; he copied her, rolling up his jacket into a pillow. She’d done this before, possibly many times, he thought. Finally, she got down to her intimate items, which she removed without ceremony.

  He watched her with awe, seeing her action for what it was: a defiant rejection not just of the moral system that bound their kind to lives of dreary conformity, but also of the poverty that held the happiness of their kind – the unmoneyed lower-upper-middle class – in check. Her disrobing was political, a strike at England, the sort of act that could only be performed in private, when the villa civilisation and its moral enforcers couldn’t see you, and the salesmen with their advertising slogans and hire-purchase agreements and set-by schemes and never-ending bills were safely out of mind. It meant a sort of social annihilation if caught, which eventually they would be if they were foolish enough to do it over and again, but for now he pushed the possibility to the rear of his mind and got on with living.