Nights at the Oprah

The Blue Suit

by Richard Rayner

Picador, pounds 9.99

Richard Rayner may be living in California and engaged to a Finn but, my goodness, this book is frightfully English. He's a sort of Hugh Grant of literature; but, unlike Grant, Rayner is keeping the honest bread from the mouths of business girls. I've met his type through respectable friends; decent women who, rather than end up writing lifestyle features for the Sunday Times, have gone into hooking. "Can you pop round?'' they say, "I've got Pay Corps Pete coming over and he wants something special. There's a drink in it for you. Bring your gown."

And there's Pay Corps Pete in shorts and schoolcap, trembling. "I've been a bad boy, Matron." "You have indeed, Pay Corps Pete. A very bad boy. So bad that I'm not going to beat you myself. Do you know who is going to beat you?" "No no. Please. Not the-" "Yes. The Head Master." Thwack! "Leggo! Yaroo!"

Rayner has been a bad boy. Such a bad boy. He used to steal books while he was at Cambridge. The rest of us just ran up huge bills and waited to be sued like gentlemen. Not Rayner. But now he's in love, and wants her to love him. To love him however awful he is. "Perhaps we all have this dream'', he says, "to tell everything and yet not forfeit love.'' So off we go. Blame St Augustine, blame Rousseau, blame Mao's Cultural Revolution with its public self-criticism sessions, blame Oprah Winfrey: we are in the grip of confessional mania, and Rayner has walked into its clutches with a knowing smile, waving his withered, crusty sins like a badge of membership.

At first, I had a theory. My theory was that is a clever satire on literary post-modernism. Rayner, you see, is stealing books. That's what authors do, except Rayner is doing it in reality. How Popperian; what a good joke about intertextuality. But the means by which he reveals this witty joke is itself a text. Now if someone could only prove that he stole his typewriter, well, there's a Ph.D. for the asking.

This nice theory collapses, however, when Rayner - no, perhaps we should put him in quotes to show we're as knowing as he - when 'Rayner' starts nicking other stuff. Credit cards. Silver. Paintings. Breaking and entering. One tries to crank in more lit. crit. nonsense about Raffles and Gentleman Jim but it just won't work. He's either a thief or a fantasist, and it really doesn't matter much either way; pokey or the booby-hatch beckon, but 'Rayner' goes on ducking and weaving and thinking himself a fine fellow for keeping his options open. Rayner-not-in-quotes has said that, when people complain about the absurdity of some scene or other (the theft of a painting struck me as particularly improbable), it's always a part that was true.

By the end of the book, I had lost patience with his acquisitive adventures and was longing for some genuine hard case - a leathery GBH operative, say, or Terry Eagleton - to creep up behind him with a sockful of wet sand. I decided to forget all the intertextuality fudge, the nature-of- reality, redemption-through-abasement humbug, and take the thing at face value: here are the memoirs of a small-time crook.

But there is something here: the foundations of a clean and supple style, and a precise sensibility waiting to be ensouled. Rayner dedicates the book to Paivi, his wife-to-be. I think we can believe that to be irony- free. I wonder whether he hasn't made a category mistake about love; whether it's not that he hopes she will love him despite his oddness, but fears she loves him because of it.