In the Absence of Absalon by Simon Okotie review – delighting in digression

In 2012, Simon Okotie published an extraordinary novel, Whatever Happened to Harold Absalon?, in which a detective known only by his surname of Marguerite goes looking for the wife of a man named Harold Absalon. I use the words “goes looking for” in a surprisingly loose sense, as during the entire book all Marguerite manages to do is go up and down in an elevator, and down the steps of a Routemaster bus. Anyone looking for a conventional detective story would have been wildly disappointed, for the novel is a series of digressions on absolutely everything except, it seems, the business he is charged with.

And now there is a sequel. Marguerite is no longer on the case. His successor is unnamed, and this time the action takes place in front of Absalon’s house. Absalon, who has been given the vague title of “the Mayor’s transport adviser”, remains as elusive as ever. As he will continue to be, one suspects, when the detective charged with finding him, or his wife, or both, dithers at the front door of his house like this: “As he traversed the short distance that separated him from the gate leading to the area in front of the townhouse as a precursor, he hoped, to opening it and moving towards the building proper, he realised that part of the reason for his reticence in describing the architectural and other pertinent details of the townhouse before him related to a hitherto unarticulated pressure to do so ...” And I have given you only half of the sentence.

In other words, this novel takes its predecessor’s conceit of narrative paralysis and, so to speak, runs with it. Perhaps better to say “stalls with it”. By page 122 the detective has got only as far as the stairs leading to the front door. Of course it’s taken him so many pages: he’s had to think about all sorts of things. Trousers (it would appear our detective has just two pairs, but that’s plenty to keep his mind ticking over), keys (how one cannot “fish” a key from one’s pocket if it is not on a keyring, etc), the differences between shop-bought and delivered pizzas (“the person or people who had prepared the pizza also cooked it whereas in the case of the shop-bought pizza the person or people who had prepared the pizza did not cook it ...”).

This is literature as insanity, the mind stuck in an endless loop – focused, it would appear, too closely on the job at hand. The detective story as existential crisis took form with Beckett’s Molloy more than 60 years ago; and the concept of the novel as crazed digression was first incarnated in Tristram Shandy, over 250 years ago. Okotie is in very good company – and has also set himself a high bar.

He succeeds. Superbly. Once you assent to the novel’s premise, that virtually nothing is going to “happen”, you are in on the joke – and yet you find yourself thinking rather a lot about the joke, at the same time as you enjoy it. Okotie was once a civic transport adviser, apparently, and while one hesitates to say there is anything autobiographical about the Absalon books, I found myself wondering if they were, in a way, an attempt to locate himself, or the past – or indeed a huge act of distraction performed precisely to avoid locating himself.

We learn fairly early on that the phrase “taken as read” is “the form of words that our investigator fears most of any form of words that he can think of”. I wonder why. It certainly suggests that we are not to take things “as read”. After all, the whole book is largely a matter of qualifications, of trying, in tightened and tightening circles, to get to the essence of what it is to be alive in a contemporary city. And of course it is also a joke about the very nature of the detective’s search for clues. For here everything is of equal significance: that is, immensely significant on its own terms, and yet, when placed against the wider backdrop, of absolutely no relevance whatsoever.