Alan Bickley

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An Afternoon with Dr Gabb

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I went last week for my monthly audience with Dr Gabb in his care home for the criminally insane. As ever, I was greeted on entry by a woman in a trouser suit who spoke robotically about love and equal regard. As ever, I found Dr Gabb in his favourite armchair that smells of urine. This time, he was on good form. After a few desultory remarks about the use of aorist imperatives in Greek, he announced that he wanted to take some exercise. I helped him with the correct placement of his dentures and then onto his mobility scooter, and followed him back to the entrance. As ever, I gave the Ukrainian guard a packet of Lambert and Butler, and he opened the door without comment.

On the Herne Bay seafront, Dr Gabb began his exercise. He accelerated to five miles per hour, then to ten, then to fifteen, every so often slowing to wave his arms from side to side. As we came in view of the Reculver Monument, he slowed again, this time to a stop. He produced a bag of uneaten chips from his lunch and began throwing them to the seabirds and the pigeons. When these were greedily eating, he took them by surprise with his walking stick. Letting out long grunts of joy, he killed five, and rode his scooter over their bodies until they were bloody pulp. He set off on another ride of a hundred yards and repeated his cull. When there were no more chips, he turned to me:

“It’s all done, Bickley,” he grated – “180,000 words.” He reached into the pouch and took out a mass of paper covered in his spidery, stroke-addled handwriting.

“Get the Chinese boy to type it into Word. If he complains about the sex and violence, tell him it’s all very Catholic in a real sense.” His laugh trailed off into a coughing fit.

I have now read Sebastian’s computer file of The Eunuch’s Ring. Writing under the name of Richard Blake, Dr Gabb has been called “The Ken Russell of historical fiction” – original, shocking, wholly indifferent to, where not contemptuous of, the conventions of the genre. This novel is a tale of serial murder in seventh-century Benevento, plus a bloody invasion by persons unknown for reasons unknown. It is, in my view, fully worthy of his genius. The royalties will surely keep his mobility scooter charged for the rest of his life.

What, though, does one say of the book itself? Not since The Blood of Alexandria has Blake/Gabb given us so sustained a study of the mechanics of power. Every character is corrupt or ridiculous, and the reader is never allowed the comfort of moral certainty. The spy Rodi observes and manipulates: a boy to whom truth is not sacred but negotiable, to be weighed and distributed like rations of grain. The Duchess  of Benevento, painted with all the subtlety of Hogarth and all the venom of Juvenal, totters between drunken grandeur and grotesque collapse. Her sinister steward has a hanging noose in his hand and fractured grammar on his tongue. We have a Papal Legate burping his way through theology, parodying the Church’s claim to unbroken majesty. Benevento itself is an overcrowded ruin that lurks within contracted but ineffectual walls.

It is not a book for the faint-hearted. Bodies accumulate, inventively dispatched. Love appears only as a cover for lust or calculation. The language veers from Augustan purity to barrack-room obscenity, sometimes within the same sentence. Yet beneath the carnage is a unity of vision. Blake/Gabb insists, as few historical novelists dare, that the past was not a backdrop for our present virtues, but a foreign country ruled by iron necessity, where pity was weakness and only ruthless cunning survived.

At nearly two hundred thousand words, the book is, of course, long. But one does not complain of excess at a Roman banquet. One reclines, one consumes, one occasionally vomits, and one returns to the feast. If there is repetition, it is the repetition of hammer blows; if there is grotesquerie, it is the grotesquerie of life itself.

I finished The Eunuch’s Ring at four in the morning, sickened, but also exhilarated. Like Blake/Gabb’s earlier novels, it is both history and indictment, entertainment and sermon. Whether it will find a mainstream publisher is doubtful—his refusal to flatter the neo-puritan sensibilities of the reading public makes him unmarketable in the current climate. But if published, it will be read, and if read, it will be admired, even if in private.

When I first took possession of the manuscript, I thanked Dr Gabb for the gift. He squinted into the wind, looking at the pigeons, and muttered:

“They’ll never forgive me, Bickley. But they’ll never forget me either.”

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