If you consider ‘gripping metafiction’ a self-contradictory phrase (surely metafiction disables tension through its wink-at-the-audience style?), Nicholas Royle’s First Novel (Cape, £16.99), which is in fact his seventh, may change your mind. Royle (pictured above) teaches creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, and in this book he gives us Paul Kinder, who teaches creative writing at Manchester while trying to write a novel. The comparisons that we are invited to draw are clear, but to complicate things the novel also contains ‘Nicholas’, a character in a novella by Grace, one of Paul’s students; Nicholas has the same name and is the same age as the author. What makes us think and indeed hope that neither Paul nor Nicholas is truly all that closely based on Royle becomes apparent as the two characters’ stories darken and develop.
A summary like that can, of course, show very little. Only a highly recommended reading of this book will reveal the author’s technical control of narrative strands and motifs (aeroplane noises and dogging being two main ones) which initially seem disparate, but ultimately cohere perfectly, or the fine characterisation, through which Paul, Nicholas and Grace are revealed gradually, becoming clear to us properly only at the end. First Novel is a clever book, but as well as having brains it has guts: it begins slowly, but soon acquires the characteristics of a thriller, and the ending is a revelation. The usual complaint, namely that a writer writing about himself writing shows a lack of imagination, is wonderfully inapt here.
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