Between Universal Particularities and Particular Universalities - the essay as a novel and the farce as an essay in Adam Thirlwell''s Politics
Abstrakt
In 2003 the British literary scene experienced a highly original debut in the form of the novel Politics by a young writer, Adam Thirlwell (1978), which was frequently compared to that of Martin Amis exactly thirty years before. Though critical reviews were rather polarised, Politics received laudatory commentaries from acclaimed novelists such as A.S.
Byatt and Milan Kundera. The book soon became an international bestseller and has since been translated into thirty languages.
The emergence of a unique talent was acknowledged even before Thirlwell''s first novel was published by the fact that Granta placed him on its 2003 list of Best Young British Novelists. Thirlwell''s novel shares several defining features with Amis''s debut novel, The Rachel Papers: they both deal with young people, with a special emphasis on their sex lives, both are satirical, provocative, disturbing and, in places, shocking, and both employ a highly distinctive narrative voice.
Yet the narrative voice is what most distinguishes the two novels as Charles Highway''s obsessive and anxious first person viewpoint in The Rachel Papers differs entirely from Thirlwell''s knowing and self-conscious narrator. The aim of this article is to elaborate on the multiple, seemingly incompatible yet, in fact, complementary narrative and discursive strategies Thirlwell uses in Politics in order to achieve the desired effect on his readers - the narrative perpetually oscillates between an essay on various themes and a mock-philosophical novel.
The article attempts to show that, despite its occasional immaturity, Thirlwell''s debut novel represents a unique and promising narrative voice in contemporary British fiction.