Having read and enjoyed one novel by Christopher Beha I went on to read the two other novels he has written so far. The first was What Happened to Sophie Wilder. It was enjoyable but slightly baffling. Its most interesting story line deals with the demands put upon a young Catholic by a dying man. The subject of dying and how we go about it is pertinent and the resolution to the problem in this novel is unsatisfactory - or rather I found it so. Which doesn't mean to say that I did not enjoy reading the book or that my admiration diminished for Beha as he continues to create highly readable and interesting novels that do not play around with form but instead conjure up interesting characters facing the dilemmas of being human.
The second novel I read by Beha (or the third in total) was Arts and Entertainments. The book concerns a man who, mainly because of economic pressure, becomes a participant in reality television. One of the quotations on the frontispiece is this, from Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes :
What characterises so-called advanced societies is that they today consume images and no longer, like those of the past, beliefs.
Once again, I am one hundred percent glad that Beha is writing the kinds of novels he does. However, with this one, I kept thinking The Truman Show covered the same territory pretty comprehensively. While Beha is interested in the nature of reality in a world of "reality" TV, I find this question only moderately interesting as I don't watch reality TV. Beha probably hopes to highlight our relationship to reality more generally, using reality TV merely as an emblem or paradigm. The character in the novel who controls the reality TV programme the central character gets involved in observes that he thinks watching things like the Superbowl on television is actually better than being in the stadium seeing it in real life. Given that many people at stadium events these days can't see the stage or the field and do watch most of the action on screens set around the event, one can in fact be present at an event and watch it on a screen simultaneously, as it happens. I guess it's worth highlighting such absurdities.
Beha is also concerned with the fascination that we are encouraged to have for celebrities - but again I don't take much notice of celebrities and therefore I don't feel passionate about this element of modern life, while being aware that there are numbers of people who live in a strange bubble of fame and numbers of people who allow quite large chunks of their conscious thoughts to be taken up with speculation about those famous people. Before celebrities, royalty and the very rich occupied the same space in our imagination.
The reality TV programme controller, by the way, is a former priest who discovered when a television crew came to make a documentary about his monastery that he had actually not been looking for God all his life but for an audience. Having made this discovery, he left the priesthood and turned to TV. His comments about audiences suggest he sees an audience as an abstract entity not unlike a deity - or at the very least a force of some kind, in its own right:
"The audience only has one way of expressing its interest - by watching. They might watch because they love you. They might watch because they hate you. They might watch because they're sick. Doesn't matter. Is that good or bad? The question doesn't make any sense. Good is whatever the audience watches ... The audience is all there is."
The overwhelmingly pervasive nature of reality TV in the book makes it a failure for me. It is a satire but its exaggerated grotesquery does not marry well with its attempt to be a work of realism. In other words, having chosen to write a book that is supposed to be about people like the reader, living in a world like that in which the reader lives, Beha failed to convince me that the world he portrays, in which everyone is part of a television entertainment or part of that entertainment's audience, is real - just as I am unconvinced of the reality of anything presented as reality TV on my television.
Never mind - there are great insights and interesting ideas dotted through the book and at no point did I get bored.
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