Into Babel
, Black Fountain press, 22 euro
Hugh Beech used to teach English in Kent, where he’s left behind his father, a recent widower, and a girlfriend he looks forward to cheating on in wild and unconventional Europe. To circumnavigate the mysterious ways, habits and customs as well as the indecipherable and rather chaotic behavioural codes of the Luxembourgish European school he now works in, Beech can only rely on his mentor Masterson, who treats him, literary references oblige, as a kind of English Lucien Rubempré. Mentor Mastersons’ prestige derives from past shenanigans and a passionate relationship with alcohol that have endowed him with just about the right amount of shadiness and roughness to come across as the student’s secret favourite – at least the male ones, to whom he seems to be ceaselessly quoting Pulp Fiction, Tarantino’s cult movie appearing as a sort of a running gag or a private joke over and over again during Leader’s fast-paced and frenzied novel.
Of course, cultural clashes await Beech, whose hopes of ridding himself of his loveless relationship will be fulfilled sooner than he could’ve expected: his colleague Ginevra, a French teacher with a reputation for cheating on her husband with mostly younger men, has set her sights on Hugh (whom she incidentally tells he’s number two on a list of “fuckable” people established by the female students).
As Ginevra kidnaps him for a romantic drive to a castle which inevitably leads to the two of them vigorously making love on the floor of what appears to be the chapel of said castle (the zaniness of the scene is somehow reminiscent of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49’s opening chapter), under the severe gaze of a pious and “seemingly appalled” Virgin Mary, with surrounding “angels and saints scowl[ing] in judgment”, Beech feels like he’s finally arriving on the old continent. And while his native country lets itself be seduced into Brexit by liars, he enters a relationship with a manipulative woman, who treats him as the toyboy he lets himself be turned into.
Hugh eagerly anticipates the few moments of sexual ecstasy with his lover during encounters usually scheduled before or after her riding sessions with Fabrizio, her cherished horse who never seems to be far from Ginevra’s thoughts when riding her lover. But Hugh is also confronted with the school’s opaque organisation, the challenges of being or becoming rich in Luxembourg and one of his students’ insistence on getting advice on creative writing while confronting him in a pseudo-ingenue-naïve way with text interpretations all of which border on the erotic or the plain sexual.
After ridding himself of his stuck-up Englishness, growing a beard as well as the thick skin needed for confronting multinational European madness lingering on every corner, Hugh is ready for what will appear to be his ultimate baptême du feu: When he has to replace a hungover Masterson on a school trip to Strasbourg, at the heart of the European institutions, he experiences both a European epiphany as well as the pains of having to look after a bunch of horny teenagers eager to get smashed as soon as you look away for a second or two.
Lost Illusions
Into Babel, James Leader’s first novel for adults is a cautionary tale about Brexit disguised as a Balzacian coming-of-age narrative with Lodgian campus-novel vibes and an almost encyclopedic number of intertextual references, at times spelled out very clearly, in Beech’s discussions with his students, at times more discreet.
The novel could be read as an allegory on good old Europe. Leader relies on almost any national cliché you could think of – such as the Italian Mafiosi who want to bribe Beech into giving his son good grades; the seductive, cheating, polygamous French femme fatale or the preposterous Greek, all of them talking with thick accents that feature in the text – to convey his message in a humoristic yet earnest way:that while Europe may well be a variegated heap of wildly incompatible people, a chaotic hotpot of disparate national identities, a kaleidoscope of opinions and modes de vie – it’s still a worthy conglomerate, a union that has been founded against barbarism, that has grown out of the naïve thought that one can stand united against war, hatred, and genocide.
It might be imperfect and at times almost unbearably bureaucratic or even corrupt, but it’s also, as Churchill’s definition of democracy puts it, the least of all bad unions. Thus, Leader’s novel could be deemed a worthy companion piece to Robert Menasse’s Die Hauptstadt, an engaged novel about how demagogues instrumentalise the EU’s flaws to reengage in monadic and solipsist national identities, a rapport written not from the outside, but within the system of European structures, metonymized through the European School where Hugh ends up taking a stance against corruption and injustice.
Beech himself is torn between clinging to a union his native country is about to leave and its severe shortcomings: a questionnaire left by Hugh’s predecessor Seamus Maccool sums up all the nefarious questions challenging the idea of a European project, targeting its problematic handling of the economy, pointing decisively at its repressed failures (“How do you spell Srebrenica?” asks Maccool) and its nation members criminal pasts, a list which then gets somehow outweighed by Hugh Beeches’ feeling of belonging he experiences in Strasbourg – two contradictory souls lie, ach, in the heart of Europe.
Two contradictory souls also lie in the heart of Leader’s novel: at times, Leader appears to be torn between the sheer freedom his zany narrative exudes, during which he emphasises European libertinage and permissiveness, and the moral stance he still wants to taint his novel with. Thus, there’s a moment where Masterson gets denigrated for having little empathy for feminist questionings, Pulp Fiction seemingly becoming a sort of codex for intellectual but exclusively boyish indie cinema, where Beech then jumps in as the good guy in favour of emancipation although his very own perception of femininity has just about covered every cliché of female desire: from the elderly voracious French woman he is shocked to find out is over 50 to the horny teacher-desiring teenager, not to mention the Eastern European secretary – at times, you can feel the male gaze trying to cover its tracks through a quick ticking-the-boxes feminist code of conduct. A case of having your feminist medal and eating it, too.
These are the moments at which Into Babel doesn’t work – when it tries to be both effortlessly funny (which it sometimes is) and moralistically essayistic (at which it also partially succeeds). Leader seems at times reluctant to follow his narrator into the fast-paced, incongruous cul-de-sac of its ending, somehow refraining from embracing its absurd end by adding the failsafe of a moralistic Unterbau that seems at times a tad obvious. Nonetheless, Into Babel remains an engaging read – at its best moments, it is a fast-paced and hilarious coming-of-age novel as well as a touching plaidoyer for the EU. As Leader’s novel itself, the EU might be imperfect, but, as literature itself, it’s one of the last bastions of peace, democracy, and tolerance in a world of crumbling values.