Spoiler warning: I spoil the plot of this 1950s pulp fiction novel early, often, and remorselessly.
I picked The Silver Eggheads off a shelf of battered paperback pulp fiction in the Glasgow branch of Oxfam Books. Like all good pulp fiction, the illustration on its cover is absurd and confusing. A flesh-coloured humanoid with simple socket holes for eyes and a mouth, two-pronged grabbers for hands, ball-joints for knees and elbows, and hemispherical breasts covered with the solitary piece of clothing: a white bra. Just next to that creature, a seemingly human man in a mid-century sort of lounge outfit and a sailors’s hat reaches across a metallic console of dials and gauges as if to grab the flesh bot. In the extreme foreground of the image, looming in from the left hand side of the frame, a glass balloon with suggestions of facial features that are once again socket holes skitters across the floor with thin metallic appendages that end in unheimlich four-fingered hands.
This is kind of a brave book. The direct desperation and lack of composure of the narrator combined with the omnipresent situating of events in specific locations in London reminds me of a very particular time in my life. In the way that good writing does it reminds me of the good and also the bad and shameful that I’ve pushed down as the mistakes of a younger, stupider person. I have never made the kinds of grandiosely bad decisions that are going on in this story, nor was I ever quite sobeholden to the parasocial spectator culture but I remember all of it. I remember the acid feelings it gives you in your stomach. I wouldn’t have remembered it without this book. It’s feral. It’s a great excavation of the sexual desperation, the directionlessness, the feeling of London.
Although LyseDoucet’s [sic] habit of introducing herself as a background character with a huge wink to the stalls grated a bit after a while, I ended up very endeared to this book in the end. I remember live coverage of the war in Afghanistan on the BBC growing up, and the image of Lyse Doucet on some balcony with explosions in the background is strong in my mind. She’s a badass, and this feels like a relatively well executed diversion for her. The debt this owes to The Grand Budapest Hotel, or maybe that that movie owes to hotels like this, is clear.
I finished reading this book on a plane to Amsterdam and in the end, it felt right to be reading it in aviation-land. It’s an airport read. I got what I wanted from it in that it gave a little bit of insight into the Russian media and political landscape of the 00s. I learned some new names and had my memory of others reinforced. That said, there’s a bit of self-aggrandising in here and there’s not a little bit of misogyny. Maybe that’s authentically what a slightly mercenary TV producer in Russia sounds like, though.
This went straight onto the Bad Smart People book list. I did find Midge in particular kind of absurd, like an even more extreme Thérèse Raquin, but I suppose we’re meant to find her ridiculous.