The Extinction Club Read online

  But that day I wasn’t looking at the sparrow as a sad reminder that we’ve cocked things up in the world; I was grateful for this fellow creature as an antidote to what I was writing.

  Somehow the bird seemed like truth.

  And what I was writing seemed vaguely false.

  That isn’t always the case. Especially with poetry; it’s what we strive for there, that spot-on feeling. Life is closer to poetry than prose.

  Spot on, in focus, somehow bracing. I looked at the bird and felt by looking that it brought me back to earth, back to reality, provided that truth feeling. The bird could not be vaguely false. The bird was true, provided the truth feeling.

  The wild animal, the mountain covered in flowers, the summer river—all these things are in focus if we care to look in the right way, if we can remain a little surprised by what we are looking at.

  I’m sure this is one reason why we like looking at wild animals. Their survival guarantees an intangible resource of truth.

  And it seems to work best with wild animals—wild birds, or rare deer like Milu. Pigs and cows and chickens don’t seem to work as well.

  THE PHONE CALL

  IT WAS in the same cramped flat as the above that I received the phone call. I’m in my mid-thirties and my wife is expecting our first child and I’m writing but earning no money when out of the blue the phone call comes. I’d been fantasizing about this phone call for ten years, ever since my final year at university. THE PHONE CALL that will CHANGE YOUR LIFE WITH MONEY. The phone call that happens to other people, usually in implausible movies. The phone call. I’d begun to doubt that it would ever happen; in fact, I dated my modest success in the last few years to the moment when I ceased believing in the phone call’s existence.

  My wife worked while I exercised my right to be poor. I’d written books, but it would be an error to say that I’d written them for money. My daily bread came from a variety of other sources, including teaching grammar to a Hong Kong millionaire’s son called Vincent Ho.

  Vincent was difficult to like. He had the hairless body of an alien and a barely concealed contempt for his Oxford-educated grammar tutor. Sometimes he would make me accompany him to the cashpoint for my wages. He’d casually draw out five hundred pounds and hand me a tenner, pocketing the rest in his designer hipsters as he headed toward Soho.

  I picked up the phone. It was my agent, my American agent. Her name is Brigitte. Even though I had earned her almost less than she had paid out on lunch for me, she had never lost faith in me. That kind of loyalty is very heartwarming. She’s an American, and Americans are both my favorite and most hated people. Brigitte was calling me from a mobile phone, it was that urgent.

  BRIGITTE: I have just heard the most amazing story in the world.

  ME: Great!

  BRIGITTE: I was at lunch with Andrew Howland—Lord Andrew Howland—you know, he runs Woburn, the safari park?

  ME: Oh, yes, I went there last year. (True, we went there after discovering Windsor Safari Park had closed and become Legoland, in order to satisfy an inexplicable urge to visit a safari park. Any safari park will do in such a case.)

  BRIGITTE: Andrew Howland told me that he has these amazing deer called Pere David’s deer, because they were saved from extinction in China by a guy called Pere David at the time of the Boxer Rebellion.

  ME: A fascinating time in Chinese history. In fact, my greatgrandfather fought there. (OK, he was there—whether he fought or not I didn’t know.)

  BRIGITTE: It gets even better. Andrew Howland’s great-greatgrandfather, the Duke of Bedford, brought these deer back to Woburn and bred them and they thrived, but the ones in China all died out. So his great-great-grandfather saved the species. And they returned some deer to China a few years back—isn’t that amazing?

  At this point I thought the story was OK, but not amazing. Brigitte then told me how much she could sell the story for, if it was done in the right way. It was a five-figure sum equivalent to about twenty years of teaching grammar to reluctant Chinese millionaires….

  (Huge, mind-blowing mental pause that lasts no time in real time but acts on my avaricious, cash-starved brain like sunlight and makes the story suddenly incredibly interesting.)

  ME: Actually it is a pretty amazing story. Are you sure?

  BRIGITTE: I just left the London Book Fair. I did a deal for a book about the history of racing pigeons for [a sum still huge but lower than our target]. Our story is better.

  Already our story.

  ME: YOU know, it’s just struck me, the Boxer Rebellion was a fascinating period in history.

  BRIGITTE: Precisely. The story has everything—China, the Boxer Rebellion, your great-grandfather, an English lord, deer….

  BRIGITTE AND ME TOGETHER: It’s Bambi with history! It can’t fail. (Sound of mental champagne corks popping.)

  ME: X grand?

  BRIGITTE: Maybe more, with foreign rights.

  Foreign rights!

  MY STORY

  BRIGITTE’S MASTER plan started with me writing a blistering proposal. That wouldn’t be too difficult. She told me she’d arrange for me to meet Lord Andrew Howland, the great-great-grandson of Herbrand Russell, the man who had saved the deer at Woburn. I looked forward to that, since I was not on familiar terms with any aristocrats, and somehow that felt like an omission in my life.

  At this point I felt very positive about the whole thing. It wasn’t just the money—though that couldn’t be ignored—it was the challenge, the opportunity to write something historical, researched, authoritative, almost academic—but with literary knobs on, and best of all without me in it. My previous two books had been deeply autobiographical. Some readers had even complained that the word I had appeared too many times on each page. I did my best to rewrite I sentences without the 2, but sometimes it just wasn’t possible. Self-reference was part of the package.

  Meanwhile, I rushed out and celebrated my soon-to-be-had wealth, my entry ticket to consumer normality: I bought a Leatherman Wave (which is the most expensive multitool in the world); a boxed collection of CDs by Herbie Hancock, a new mountain bike with suspension and huge pedals, the complete The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, a £120 trolley of food from Sainsbury’s, and, my greatest folly, a secondhand sailing cruiser for seven hundred pounds.

  EMPEROR

  IN 1598, to tempt the Emperor of China to convert to Christianity, Matteo Ricci brought with him:

  Paintings of Christ and John the Baptist

  A breviary with gold-thread binding

  A cross inlaid with precious stones

  Pieces of polychrome glass containing relics of the saints

  An atlas—the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of Ortelius

  A large clock with weights

  A small striking clock of gilded metal worked by springs Two prisms A clavichord

  Eight mirrors and bottles of different sizes A rhinoceros tusk Two sand clocks

  The Four Gospels translated into Chinese

  Four European belts

  Five bolts of colored linen

  Four cruzados.

  Ricci had already been nearly ten years in China. His list of presents had to balance that which he thought worthy against that which he knew the emperor craved. Prisms were good—excellent, in fact, for giving away to high officials. The emperor would love a prism. But a piece of glass, however clever, requires no maintenance. A clock needs to be wound every day and can easily stop working if it is not cleaned and oiled. In the streets of Peking it was customary to wear a black veil against the insidious street dust that rose everywhere in great clouds. Ricci hoped the dust might even get into his clock, as it sat ticking in the contented emperors throne room. If he were asked to mend the clock, he might have a chance to meet and talk with the emperor.

  Ricci had taken pains to establish his reputation as an educated man. At first he had dressed as a non-Buddhist bonze, a priest. But bonzes have little status in China. He then styled himself as a graduate, exchangi
ng coarse gray rags for a purple robe with a pale-blue border. Whenever he went outdoors he no longer walked but traveled by sedan chair, with a servant trotting behind him carrying copies of his twelve-page visiting book, forerunner of the business card.

  Instead of sporting the bonze s shaven head, he now wore his hair shoulder length, with a beard finer than any mandarin. He did not prostrate himself in front of other scholars. At last the graduate classes of China could listen to him without shame.

  When he entered the observatory in Nanking, he was able to show the embarrassed eunuchs that the Arab-designed torquetum, an instrument for measuring the position of the stars, was off by three and a half degrees. After it had been moved from Pingyang a century before, no one had thought to adjust it.

  But it had been Ricci s memory, rather than his learning, that had most impressed the Chinese. He used the Jesuit method of holding an entire page, of the language to be learned, in the mind’s eye as a basic reference and linking new words to be remembered to sentences on that page. Memorizing five hundred Chinese characters at one reading was not difficult for this strange scholar from a foreign land. For a country where advancement meant remembering the classics, this was a great gift indeed.

  As his reputation grew, Ricci at last gained permission to visit Peking.

  The emperor had seen no one face-to-face, apart from his eunuchs and concubines, for sixteen years.

  Sometimes he watched people from behind a slatted blind on a balcony above the dragon throne. On such occasions, he would hold a tablet made of precious stones to his face, to inhibit the uptake of air breathed out by his guests.

  Likewise, any visitor wanting to pay homage to the emperor was constrained by formality to hold an ivory tablet, three inches by eight inches, over the mouth when speaking so that the breath did not carry.

  The grand eunuch informed Matteo Ricci that he would appear before the emperor in the company of Muslim traders from Kashgar. These men brought jade for the emperor, which was worked with quartz sand as an abrasive. Their main source of profit was buying rhubarb in Kansu, where it grew abundantly, and selling it dear in Peking, where it did not. But at the last minute the emperor chose not to appear.

  Ricci never did meet the emperor, despite his present of the striking clock. His role as winder and mender of this clock ensured his close contact with the palace, but the eunuchs cleverly kept him from the celestial ruler Wan Li.

  Everywhere in the Forbidden City Ricci saw the dragon guardian of the Middle Kingdom, a benevolent beast associated with life-giving rain, having a camel’s head, a deer’s antlers, a hare’s eyes, a bull’s ears, a snake’s neck, a carp’s scales, an eagle’s five claws, and a tiger’s paws.

  LIBRARY

  AT THIS early stage I did all my research in the London Library. Until quite recently it had been possible to sneak into the library, which is the largest private library in the world, without being a member. But now there was a locked door, which could only be opened by a security guard behind a glass window. The security guard, along with the porters and other library menials, was wearing a silly red T-shirt with London Library written on it. This was just one of many blows to the old-world charm of the London Library, which I had been sneaking into, on and off, for the last ten years.

  In that period, between 1989 and 1999, more things changed or got swept away than in the previous hundred years. To clarify this absurd-seeming statement, I should say, more of the things I thought of as belonging to a previous era got swept away. Things that had survived two world wars, nationalization, and Margaret Thatcher got swept away. This is what I felt, and it’s connected to what I call the I’ve-always-arrived-too-late scenario. Japan was uniquely different pre-1985; I arrived in 1992. Borneo still had tribes that didn’t use money in 1986; by 1996, when I arrived, money was all too familiar. Egypt in the 1980s was a place still touched by the mysteries of the past; by 1993, it was just starting to be choked to death by cars bought with profits made from the new global economy.

  This is my own personal ax to grind. If it connects at all with the London Library, it is with the palpable modernization of an institution that had remained almost unchanged for a hundred years. And now that the T-shirts and security men were installed, it seemed, yet again, that I had arrived too late.

  The library is popular because it has a huge collection of old books all on open-access stacks. The stacks are dark shelves of books in a cavernous, windowless shell of a building divided into seven floors. Each floor is made of thick cast iron with holes in it, and it’s possible to see through each floor to the next. Just being there is enough to make you fantasize about shooting a film with a gun battle between the floors in the stacks; after all, theoretically, you could assassinate a reader on the seventh floor (say, one of the famous authors, such as A. S. Byatt, who frequent the place) by aiming carefully from the basement, which houses topography—my favorite section.

  After the attraction of the stacks, with their thousands of ancient, yellowing books in leather covers, comes the reading room, with its leather-topped wooden tables and leather armchairs. As a place for sleeping off a heavy lunch it is unparalleled, though there is a sternlooking librarian who sits with a Silence sign on his desk. Which, of course, just adds to the charm of the place.

  In the days before the security guard, the only concession to the twentieth century was a card-index system started in 1963. Before that, all acquisitions were entered into huge leather indexes. Card indexes are good if you are unfamiliar with the LL system (which you still should use for very early books), but once the complexities of the LL system are mastered, then it is extremely precise, rewarding, and quick. But until you master it, it seems illogical, chaotic, and slow.

  After the card-index introduction came computerization. This led to the ability to practice covert surveillance on the members of the library, generally either wealthy Londoners, writers, or people who valued the old-fashioned nature of the reading room.

  Introducing computers was a nasty turning point. One of the previous attractions of the place was that the staff never told you off. Because there was no cumulative record of books borrowed, they could never, at the point of borrowing, give you a stern lecture on fines and returning books on time. In fact, there were no fines. But once the computers arrived, they could keep a better eye on their—how do they think of us?—customers.

  Admittedly, it was remarkably easy to steal books from the old London Library. And it was one of those peculiar moments in life, felt to be salutary in some way, a mixture of sadness and exasperation, when, after a long search, one had to conclude that Wanderings in West Africa by Winwood Reade (1865) had been nicked.

  Add together security guards, men in red T-shirts, computers, a proposed tearoom (postponed for the time being), and surveillance, and the old, classy, clubland LL seems a long way away.

  Because it was impossible to sneak in anymore, I had to become a “member.” This cost £120. Being a member, however, made me feel proprietorial and therefore more entitled to feel upset by the changes. More upset than I’d felt before. I decided the staff of the LL thought it was being run for their benefit. It was the library equivalent of restaurants where all the waiters hang around at the bar having a great time while the customers get annoyed. Eventually such places go bust, I fumed to myself.

  It was thinking thoughts like these that drew me to the simple photocopied flyer that was mysteriously inserted into the book on my desk in the reading room while I was downstairs using the magnificent Victorian toilets in the basement. The flyer invited me to a meeting of readers disturbed by recent developments at the London Library. I had discovered the League against (modernizing) the London Library. I liked the way modernizing was in parentheses. The L(m)LL. My kind of league.

  ISBN ENVY

  ISCANNED A lot of books, which in my case meant holding the book, flipping through it, and not reading a word except the date it was published and any author info, especially the age of the
author (a) now and (b) when he wrote the book, how many books in total the author had written, and any exciting things he had done, such as fighting in wars or living abroad. Increasingly I felt under pressure from authors who had published large numbers of books. I preferred authors who didn’t start writing until their fifties; that gave me more scope for catching up. Writers who had exciting lives gave me cause for contemplating whether my own life was exciting enough. The ones who had a steady stream of publications dating from their early twenties made me start calculating on fingers and thumbs how many books a year I’d have to write to catch them up. Reading about other authors brought out the worst in me. Nasty ignominious stuff and certainly not researching.

  But the main problem, which dwarfed the date/age/lifestyle obsession, was my inability to stay awake very long in the library. The chairs were too comfortable, the air too charged with positive ions, the reading room too full of grumpy faux academic types leafing through back copies of Debrett’s Peerage, the laptop room (another ghastly innovation at the LL) TOO FULL of clicking, humming laptops, and I, if none of the above had put me to sleep, too full of food to be able to stay awake for more than half an hour. At university, I had spent long hours sleeping in libraries and had been rewarded with a negligible degree as a result. In those days, sleep was the only form my revolt against “the system” could take.

  But I also loved libraries. I loved the fact that each long-forgotten book could be a door into an unknown world. I loved the connections one could make, going from reference to reference, digging side shafts that joined up with each other. I loved the way books reached back into the past.