I think we 40-to-60-somethings are unforgetting this now, the way we grew up with the threat of nuclear annihilation. I can crane my neck around and see myself, aged eleven or twelve, awake under the duvet and contemplating the SS-20 and Pershing Cruise, wondering what it was all for, and wondering why everyone couldn’t just go home and get on with their life. It’s easy just to roll current trends on into the future, accumulating, and I did that, all the way to Armageddon. There was no way for me to forsee that as soon as 1989, that “go home” was almost exactly what everyone would do.
And then, as in previous wars, the poor bloody infantry, who on this occasion were us and everybody, did our best to put it all out of our minds. That was the 1990s, and very good some of them were.
But not all of us were able to: Gary Dexter’s debut novel All the Materials for a Midnight Feast (Old Street Publishing, July 2011) is a tour around the damaged mind of Nicholas, a man who became so caught up in the nuclear issue at university in the Thatcher years that he was never able to let it go: we join him aged 48, on an overnight coach to join an anti-nuclear rally at Faslane.
Dexter has a Dabbleresque past, and is responsible for, amongst other things, a Holmes parody called The Oxford Despoiler and a work of non-fiction named Why Not Catch 21? Nicholas, his creation, is at first sight a bit of a Dabbler himself: caught up in minor detail, old fashioned in intent, a man from England’s decaying margins (Hull) for whom the mainstream holds little attraction. The narrative takes the form of his scribbled recollections, put down on paper as the coach (here an example of the malice of inanimate objects) rolls ever so slowly north.
At first, Nicholas’s disjointed, out-of-sequence recollections make relatively little sense, but as they and the journey continue, they come together to build a wholly unexpected and extraordinary psychological picture of a man derailed too early by love and by events. Figures from his past emerge and assemble themselves and the memories gradually restitch. All the while, Philip Larkin, laureate of life’s derailment, waits in the background, increasing in menace through what must be his first appearance as a fictional character. Like Larkin’s Aubade and like Larkin himself, Nicholas’s journey ends with what something hidden from him chose, alone in company on a wet, cold, lonely night.
Although there is more to Nicholas’ eventual plight than just his failure to move on from the issue of nuclear disarmament (is his mental illness part of, or separate from, his obsession with nukes?), Gary Dexter is right to place him as the modern equivalent of that ancient pub figure, the old soldier to whom nothing else has happened since. Like Blimp and his old comrades, Nicholas inspires that mix in the reader of admiration for old battles fought and uneasiness, the wish to back away, and when the novel ends in a abrupt sequence of loop-closing coincidences, it is far too late in the day for them to be hilarious ones.
It’s literature’s job as much as psychology’s to tell the story of what happened to us as in the aftermath of living under the nuclear threat and all the loss of hope, the loss of the future and the cynicism that were its least bad consequences. All the Materials for a Midnight Feast isn’t a cheering novel of the sort older wars could sometimes propagate, but it’s a fine start on what must surely become an important genre as we veterans become old men and remember.