A novel with a built-in death-wish

Peter Merrington

The Extinction Club
Robert Twigger
London: Hamish Hamilton
2001

This is a very peculiar book. It is a novel, but it is also an autobiographical documentary narrative where the first person narrator is none other than Twigger himself, rather than some or other fictional persona. These issues are not in themselves what make the book so peculiar. These are fairly customary features of post-modern textual practice, where genre distinctions between fact and fiction, history and legend, are broken down. However, it is Twigger’s person in the text, and the behaviour of this person, that makes this book so peculiar. It also makes reviewing awkward, because criticism of the attitudes and behaviour of the narrator becomes criticism of the person of the author himself, and unfortunately the narrator lays himself open to some rather sharp criticism.
        The subject matter of this book is however extremely intriguing, and well worth exploring. In The Extinction Club Robert Twigger (or his narrative alter ego bearing the same name) is offered a huge advance from a fictional American publishing house to write a book on the subject of a very rare Chinese deer, known as Milu, or Pere David’s Deer. Milu has peculiar characteristics unlike any other deer, with a tail like a horse, hooves like a cow, and antlers facing in the reverse direction to those of other species. Milu survives solely in a herd kept, for centuries, by the emperors of China in a highly protected game park near the Forbidden City. With the onset of the twentieth century, old imperial China collapses under the influence of competing western nations and the disturbances of the Boxer Rebellion (1900). After this uprising and the siege of the foreign legations in Peking, the deer in the game park are all eaten by the rapacious colonial soldiery, and the herd is thus destroyed. However, in the 1890s, Pere David, a French missionary and naturalist, quietly ships several live specimens of Milu to scientific colleagues and to game reserves in Europe, and a herd now survives into the twenty-first century in the protected environs of the safari park at Woburn Abbey in England.
        The central topic of Twigger’s The Extinction Club is a narrative of how he goes about finding and following up these facts, researching this book, becoming acquainted with Milu, with imperial and colonial Chinese history, and with the thorny thickets of applied research. Unfortunately what might have been a truly remarkable opportunity runs into the sands. Twigger is offensively self-regarding, and at times foolish and immature in his presentation of self. He shows off as an author (using words like ’inspissate’, and ’integumental’, and ’canescent’ and so forth and yet not achieving, ultimately, the depth and excitement, textually speaking, which would legitimate such usages); and he shows off as narrator-character-in-the-action, boasting of his acquaintance with important people, and being thoroughly immature at times.
        He flaunts his working relationship with ’Klaudia’, a young American publisher’s editor, but never once volunteers the name of his wife, even though it seems that his wife holds the fort and washes the dishes on his behalf much of the time. His wife gives birth to a first-born son, but he still does not introduce her as a real person and goes off on his own for several weeks on a sponger visit to Woburn Abbey estate. It appears that his wife is Egyptian, and a number of scenes occur fairly arbitrarily in Cairo. His wife thus takes on a truly invidious role as representing all those ’foreign’ ’oriental’ brides so sought after by a certain class of Englishman and thereafter forever silenced and abused. This is very peculiar. In as much as this novel deals with post-colonial issues (looking back on colonial Chinese history and on the interventions in Chinese history of orientalists and Sinologues such as the unspeakable Edward Backhouse) it would be an ideal opportunity to unpack this question of marriage and intimate relationships; yet Twigger is stupendously cavalier towards his Egyptian partner and this leaves in doubt the entire purpose (and integrity of purpose) of his venturing in the first instance into ’orientalist’ topics.
        The central topic is truly interesting, that is, the natural history of the Milu species, and the history of its survival, as well as the history of the Boxer Rebellion. The novel is organised into short sequences of two to five pages in length, and these move back and forth between imperial China at the end of the nineteenth century, and Robert Twigger’s own contemporary life in London, and his quest for information about Milu, as well as sequences where he works on his book at the house of his parents-in-law in Cairo. Unfortunately Twigger seems to have little common sense about narrative presentation and a great deal of these short sequences are either pretentious or petty or have very little bearing at all on the main theme. Some of these short sequences introduce intriguing characters and topics and sites from the past or the present, but fail entirely to bind them into the main thread. It seems almost as if Twigger wants to show off his experiences at any cost. As one who himself has researched on several occasions in Cairo, and in London and in Oxford, I find his need to expatiate on his own archival exploits in the London Library and the British Museum, and the Bodleian, and in second-hand bookshops in Cairo, an irritating undergraduate mannerism. Twigger perhaps wants to emulate the work of A.S. Byatt, who is a master of the genre of the post-modern detective-historical novel. Her Possession and Insects both come to mind as narratives that include features such as Twigger seeks to use in The Extinction Club. The final scene in The Extinction Club has Twigger fantasising of a shoot-out in the London Library between A.S. Byatt and one of his characters, a retired British Army major who belongs to an esoteric London club whose members compete to exterminate entire rare species. Perhaps Twigger fantasises here about the extermination of the stronger novelist, whose influence he needs but whose shadow he cannot tolerate.
        This is indeed a peculiar novel, not because it is experimental, which is a recommendation, but because it is so uneven, so immature, and so revealing of the vulnerable psyche of its author-narrator. The proof copy, on which this review is based, is also stupendously riddled with misprints, and errors in spelling and grammar; and it is to be hoped that these at least will be eliminated (although the irritation of reading is partly mollified by the game of ’spot the solecism’).

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