Read Lost for Words: A Novel for Free Online Page B

China, or Russia, or Cuba, but in the state of Banality!’
    As a man who had just come back from a conference in Europe, Alan was wholly committed to a borderless continent of high-speed trains and fluid exchanges of rich cultural traditions, but as he passed the pair he couldn’t help wishing that Didier would go back to Paris where he belonged.
    The conference had turned out to be a trade fair for digital gadgets and fatuous theories. His worst two hours were spent with an extremely pretty Korean-American girl, who gradually eroded the effect of her physical allure by trying to persuade Alan that the future of fiction lay with Alternate Narrative, an ‘empowering and proactive’ software that allowed the reader to choose alternate outcomes.
    ‘It creates a participatory reality,’ she explained, ‘which is like a concrete experience of freedom in our lives and in our creative choices.’ Two boxes appeared on the screen, one saying ‘Kill’ and the other, ‘Don’t Kill’.
    ‘With Alternate Narrative the “language game” really is a language game,’ she said with inexplicable mirth.
    After a while she slowed down and entered into a more reflective relationship with her program.
    ‘It really becomes a mirror for the user’s psyche,’ she said, staring at Alan as if they were trapped down a mine together. ‘I mean if the reader chooses to kill a character, what does that say about the reader’s own “character”. In other words, what narrative are you in? What narrative are you in, in your own life right now ?’
    In the end, Alan had bought the program to save Monica from the humiliation of wasting so much emotional effort.
    The taxi drew up outside Katherine’s building and Alan, with a litre of airport vodka and an Alternate Narrative to sweeten his return, hurried inside.
    Katherine was waiting for him in the hall. She was wearing her pale-green dressing gown with nothing underneath. They kissed and then he led her by the hand into the drawing room.
    ‘How was your conference?’ she asked.
    ‘Completely banal,’ he said, sinking into the big armchair. ‘Talking of banality, I saw Didier in the street with Sam Black, just round the corner. I didn’t know they were friends.’
    ‘They’ve become friends through me,’ she said, straddling the armchair, just as he’d imagined.
    She was so perfect it took his breath away.

 
    9
    Penny had been asked by Malcolm to check out Tobias’s favourite novel, All the World’s a Stage. According to the blurb, itwas ‘an ambitious and original’ novel, written by a young New Zealander from the point of view of William Shakespeare. It gave a ‘richly textured portrait of Jacobean London’, as well as taking the reader ‘inside the mind of the greatest genius in all of human history’. Penny felt instinctively that this one would be a survivor. Choosing a New Zealander would be a salute to the Commonwealth and at the same time the theme was patriotic and educational. With the Long List being announced tomorrow, she plunged straight in. She couldn’t wait.

    ‘William!’
    ‘Ben!’
    ‘Do you know Thomas Kyd and John Webster?’
    ‘Lads,’ said William, giving the men a friendly nod.
    Thomas returned his smile, but John continued to scowl out of the window, ignoring William.
    ‘John would as soon bastinado a man’s shanks as shake his hand,’ explained good Master Jonson. ‘He was not yet thirteen when he murdered the blacksmith he was apprenticed to. News came in that day of great Marlowe’s death and John was thrown into the blackest grief. “There’s a great spirit gone,” quoth he.
    ‘“Indeed the tears lie in an onion that should water that sorrow,” quoth the blacksmith, whereupon such a choleric humour came o’er John that he lifted the glowing poker from the coals of his master’s furnace and plunged it into the wretched blacksmith’s entrails. Never a man died with a more astonished expression on his face, unless it was