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March 23rd 2009

A Ghost of a Chance

By shaneb

Commenting on the déclassé status of the modern hero in fiction, Martin Amis argued “Nowadays, our protagonists are a good deal lower down the human scale than their creators: they are anti-heroes, non-heroes, sub-heroes.” One hopes that this dictum holds true for David Milnes, author of The Ghost of Neil Diamond. For Milnes’s protagonist, bearing the blandly English name of Neil Atherton, is a lost man on the edge of the abyss.

Atherton has washed up in Hong Kong, dragged into the territory on the coat-tails of his wife, Angel. Back in England, back in the distant past, he had known modest success as a musician on the folk scene, touring the working men’s club circuit. But now he’s 48, these meagre stage triumphs are a fading memory and Atherton appears increasing redundant to his younger wife, who has carved out a niche for herself in the city’s corporate hierarchy.

The Ghost of Neil Diamond

Eventually, an exasperated Angel washes her hands of her husband, handing him enough Hong Kong dollars for a flight back to the UK with some to spare. But Atherton refuses to retreat with his tail between his legs. Like a drowning man who clambers into a sinking lifeboat, he falls into the ambit of Elbert Chan, a diminutive Cantonese businessman operating from a seedy backstreet office. Chan handed his business card to the Englishman after a rousing rendition of “Song Song Blue” and now dangles before the destitute Atherton the potentially lucrative prospect of being part of a celebrity tribute act.  Neil’s preparation for taking his place in a bizarre roll-call of the fake famous is not just to learn how to sing like Neil Diamond but, in some Zen-like way, to become the American superstar. 

While waiting for Chan’s purported connections with the entertainment managers of Hong Kong’s hotels to open doors, Atherton spends his nights on the floor of a language school’s classroom and purgatorial days wandering the humid streets of an alien city. There are echoes here of Poe’s short story, “The Man of the Crowd,” as the narrative tracks aimless, time-killing trudges among uncaring crowds.  

Ostensibly rooted in the superficial world of tribute singers and their milieu of corporate entertainment, this is a book that subtly plays with the tropes associated with its subject matter to raise some interesting questions about what represents the real, and what constitutes the fake. Crossing the spectacular Tsing Ma Bridge, for example, Atherton reflects on the engineers and builders who made this feat of engineering possible and compares their achievement with his own contribution to this world:

His sort need not be taken at all. There was, self-evidently, a need of some kind for people such as Neil Diamond, though surely even they must find it hard to live with themselves after a while. But whatever case could be made for the pedlar of trash and illusion, there was surely no case at all to defend one who only followed, the counterfeit and impostor running along behind. Surely there was no room on the ark for such a stowaway. 

This angst over how the professional impostor can maintain his self-worth reaches a crescendo in the novel’s second half, when Atherton’s attempt to usurp another Neil Diamond impersonator—a photocopy of a photocopy as it were—threatens to annihilate his personality.

This book has its comic aspects, but it’s a dark comedy, stemming from the howling despair of a man who is out of his element in every way. Although the story is filtered through the “shifting sand” of Atherton’s personality, the environment through which the main actor moves like a ghost is deftly evoked with economic flourishes. The notorious jams are captured with an unusual but apposite verb: “Down to his right, on his side of the water, was the Eastern corridor, built on stilts in the sea. It was flushed with traffic queuing for the crossing.”  The ambiance of the subterranean hotel bars that host acts such as Atherton’s is conjured with a reference to mirror balls that “shed loose change all over the dance floor.” And one of Hong Kong’s icons, the Star Ferry that shuttles between Kowloon and the island, is revivified with a simile that is both resonant and culturally attuned: “Children scrambled ahead and flipped over the back-rests, making a wonderful clattering sound across the teak decks, like the fall of mah-jong tiles.”

Above all, and appropriately for a locale known for its glittering facades, this book meditates on how the city can be framed in radically different ways: how it appears in the floor-to-ceiling panes of an exclusive hotel’s breakfast bar as opposed to the prospect offered by the windows of a McDonald’s (where Neil is at one stage reduced to eating in every day).

Despite some ragged edges—Chan’s transformation from failed wheeler-dealer to make-or-break impresario seems implausible, for example—this is a work of unexpected substance.

826 words