The Extinction Club Read online

  The aim of the project was to protect Partula from extinction. It was the most spectacularly unsuccessful conservation project in history.

  Native Partula snails had been suffering hugely because of the introduction of Zuglandina rosea, a vicious killer snail that was not a Pacific native. Euglandina had been introduced to kill off an epidemic of escaped African land snails. These too had been imported, as a food item, presumably to satisfy a taste for snails on the part of the colonizing French. If the islands had been colonized by the snail-hating English, the train of events that led with plodding tragedy to the final extinction would never have happened.

  The story interested and amused the Major so much that I began to wonder if he had been hovering near the London Zoo that January day. In between bursts of peculiarly impersonal guffaws, he explained why this was a perfect extinction.

  (i) It was caused by the French.

  (ii) In earlier stages it was a random sequence of events that brought the snail to the brink of demise. How could anyone foresee that wanting a delicacy for dinner would result in the complete disappearance of a species?

  (iii) If the only fully documented extinction was such a random event, how could we hope to prevent other extinctions in the future?

  “By locking up people like you,” I remarked, knowing this would amuse the Major. He guffawed again, then grew serious.

  “My little excursions are beside the point. The eggheads at the London Zoo really believe they know how to conserve the animal life of this planet. But they cannot even save a snail. Other forces keep living creatures alive. Other forces! Perhaps you might not ask this question if I told you that the greatest threat to the animal kingdom comes not from pesticides or nuclear waste but from the way we think. A species dies because we can no longer think about it in the right way! We kill it with our thoughts. After that, twenty drums of cyanide dumped in a beautiful lake is a mere afterthought.”

  I almost became angry. Except I knew that that was what the Major wanted. He was watching me with his beady, alert, corn-passionless eyes. Waiting for a sign of weakness on my part.

  EGYPT III

  AFTER A week I have read all the books I have brought with me to Egypt. I need books. It becomes an obsession. I am only writing three hours a day—even if I get up at nine, that still leaves five hours until I can break the fast. I have never known such an insatiable desire for reading. Perhaps it is because I am fasting, nature’s way of distracting me from my groaning stomach. But more than the distraction, my perpetual hunger focuses my mind, makes it clearer than usual—how right, I marvel, the universal religious requirement to fast.

  I was already familiar with most of the new bookshops in Cairo: the American University shop; the French bookshop run by a smart Coptic woman who insisted on speaking French even if you spoke her first language, Arabic, to her; Madboulis for translations; the German bookshop for hooks in English about Egypt; and failing all those, the sometimes surprising selections in hotel bookstalls. My wife took me to all these places, but it only satisfied my need for books for a few days at most.

  Then she took me to the most overpriced secondhand bookshop I have ever been to anywhere in the world, including Tokyo, Nepal, New York (cheap), and London. The shop specialized in books about Egypt and the Middle East. The prices were so high as to make you stare intently at the neat pencil numbers inside the flyleaf—no way, you’re thinking, no one would dare ask that much.

  The only “cheap” things in the shop were prints of old maps and old postcards, at three Egyptian pounds each, and modern guidebooks. These items sold well. I never saw anyone buy a secondhand book. Then I deduced the logic. The books were not meant to be sold. They were too valuable for that. They were the bait to get people into the shop. Once there, the extremely high prices of the books would make the slightly high prices of the prints look cheap. People would buy these, leaving behind the books. It bad probably taken years to assemble such a fine and complete collection of Egyptiana. It might take years to replace it —so why sell? Use it to sell something cheap and replaceable like the prints or the thousands of tatty postcards.

  The old books were functioning like the Pyramids: there to attract tourists (well, that’s their function now) who could then be persuaded to buy carpets, papyrus maps of ancient Egypt, brass incense-holders, miniature stuffed camels with real leather harnesses, and conical wooden ballpoint pens turned from cedar wood.

  At first the high prices in the secondhand bookshop sickened me. But when I realized it was a scam to sell cheap prints, I didn’t mind anymore. In a way, I admired their business acumen, the thickset knitting woman who sat next to the wooden-drawered till, an eye on everything, and her articulate son talking American tourists through a hinged folder of prints.

  But I still needed my fix. From a hotel bookshop I reluctantly bought a Lonely Planet guide to Cairo. I’d read it quickly, I thought, then ditch it. For an LP guide this one was OK, though the tone of the author was pure backpacker—politically correct with a disabling dose of relativism balanced against a fun-seeking, anti-Islamic chauvinism. This guide announced categorically, on page 174, that there were no secondhand bookshops in Cairo.

  FAMOUS PHOTOS

  THE ADVANCE money had finally come through. Using this newfound wealth, my wife and I were able to move to Oxford. My parents lived nearby and said they would help when my wife had the baby. Leaving London was also a good way of putting distance between the Major and me. I’d been a student at Oxford, and the Bodleian Library, while less exclusive than the LL, had far more books. I had no friends in town, but that changed when I met the Novelist.

  Years before, I had read his first novel and liked it. I found it darkly humorous, though in the end the dark did overwhelm the humor, but I didn’t tell him that until much later. Coincidentally we both lived in Oxford and both had Klaudia as our editor. Klaudia gave my book about Japan to the Novelist, who said he found it funny. We agreed to meet for a pint in a pub where there was no music.

  That first meeting was great. The Novelist told me all sorts of interesting stories about his travels and painted a great and lasting portrait of a place in the Welsh borders where he had spent two summers in a disused barn and the local undertaker had also been the publican. If Graham Greene veers uncontrollably toward whiskey priests, then the leitmotif character for the Novelist would have to be publican undertakers and the kind of humor they entail.

  The Novelist s great hobby was photography. Later I was able to admire many of his photos, but at that first meeting, or maybe the second, he told me something very interesting, almost in passing. He said that a survey had been done to find the three most famous photos in the world, and not just among Americans and Europeans but Chinese, Africans, Peruvians, and Melanesians as well. In doing the survey, people had been dispatched into jungles, deserts, and mountain strongholds armed with an ever-shortening shortlist of photos. From these the most recognized pictures were selected.

  They were (a) the picture of the atomic mushroom cloud, (b) the picture of Earth taken from outer space showing it to be blue and wisped with cloud—the picture that proved conclusively that the Earth was round, (c) … but the Novelist couldn’t remember the third most famous photograph. I made several suggestions. None was right. Whenever conversation slackened I kept returning to this game of thinking of the famous third photo. The Novelist joined in at first, but after a while I could tell he found it irritating.

  I should explain about the Novelist’s name. Though I had read his book, I had actually forgotten his name. Somehow we managed to meet without me remembering the name Klaudia had told me. Then it became too embarrassing to ask his name, and when I discovered his name after asking someone who had also read one of his books, I wasn’t sure how to spell it (it’s a strange spelling of a familiar word), and all this time I was thinking of him simply as the Novelist, as if he were a character in a Tarkovsky film. And actually, when I met him, I did think he looked a bit Russian, a heavys
et blond engineer from the Ukraine specializing in very heavy machinery, perhaps, or a deep-sea trawler captain from frozen Murmansk. The Novelist.

  BREAKTHROUGH

  SURVIVING AS a novelist is a difficult business. It’s hard enough to get people to remember your name, let alone buy your books. If a bookshop sells your book and doesn’t reorder, then the slim spine advertising your wares has disappeared. And as a writer, you begin to disappear.

  Klaudia at Auk Books had very high hopes for the Novelist’s latest novel. It was his fifth novel, but the first for seven years, and it was being touted as a “breakthrough” book.

  The breakthrough book is a mysterious concept. Everyone knows a book when it has broken through, but no one is quite sure how to make that happen. The breakthrough happens when the writer ceases to be just a name on a book with the same status as a name on a bank-account application form and becomes something different, more intimate, almost part of the family.

  A breakthrough is referred to, by people who have met him, by his first name or his last name—depending on which sounds coolest or most intimate. Dean R. Koontz is probably referred to “in-house” as Dean rather than Koontz.

  Sometimes the public have never heard of a writer who has broken through. This can be embarrassing—at book signings, for example. But the public knowing your name is merely a sign of celebrity. The real judges of breaking through are the trade and the press. Sometimes, bizarrely, the only knowledge they have of such an author is the fact that he has broken through. Generally this means the interviews with the author will cease to question his existence, his right to write, as it were, and concentrate instead on the pleasurable experiences the interviewer is having interviewing the author. Of course, there is a whole rank of other journos just waiting in the wings to tear into the breakthrough author, but often their evil attentions just help him.

  So the breakthrough has two effects. First, the outside world gives you permission to exist. Second, and more importantly, your books stay on the shelf in the bookshop. They get reordered. The book is given an extra chance to live.

  Klaudia hinted that the Novelist was about to break through. Somehow I expected it, even without being told. Maybe it was some mysterious vibe the Novelist was giving off. Outwardly, I noticed only one sign that things were changing, and that was the brand-new deluxe laptop he had allowed himself to buy.

  DIARY

  IWAS GETTING used to living in Oxford again. I had my routine of reading and writing and visiting Blackwell’s bookshop and having occasional drinks with the Novelist. I had taken to working in the garden in a shed with windows. It was pleasant looking up from my screen at the trees, but there were few birds, and no sparrows.

  I should have applied for a Bodleian Library card to carry on my research, but I told myself I’d do that very soon. Even though I had left Oxford twelve years ago, a lot of people still looked vaguely familiar. But the only people I identified positively were freaks and outsiders. Maybe they were more noticeable. Or maybe freaks and outsiders change less with time. Or maybe Oxford exerts a strange magnetic pull on such people.

  I saw the College Weirdo, or CW, in a supermarket. He was far thinner than I remembered him, and the slight resemblance to a bird had come right to the fore, a beady-eyed heron or wading bird with a neck that can bend backward to gulp down fish.

  The CW didn’t recognize me, because I only spoke to him twice when I was at college. Both times it was to ask for the salt. Back then he had been thirty-five when most students were twenty. He had been studying for some obscurely defined postgraduate degree, but had stopped halfway. But he still came into college every day, to eat alone in the great dining hall and later to have coffee, usually again alone, in the Junior Common Room. It was as if he were saving up his voice for Friday night, when he would command the Union debating chamber with his stentorian gibes/comments/interjections/musings, which always wiped the floor with the speaker and brought the house down laughing at his Oxford cleverness, his wonderful timing. To hear him in the chamber was to hear him alive, existing in the gay crucible of hardened glass that is public life. He never stumbled and he never hesitated—qualities in a debating adversary that are greatly unnerving.

  Then they discovered his diary. Or rather, in an act of incredible folly, he left it lying in the Junior Common Room after he had finished his coffee. The diary made its way through several hands on its way to the dean, a blunt, modern, officious man, friendly but intolerant, one suspected, of weirdos. And the diary, which contained at length the CW’s sexual ramblings over a Welsh girl of, it had to be admitted, considerable beauty, left the dean with little choice but to take action. Word was already out. The girl was worried, didn’t like the way he looked at her, now she remembered. The diary was rumored to be well written, but of extraordinary filth. The CW was banned from college. He continued for a short while to attend the Union, but his prospects were less than they had been. Years needed to pass for people to forget. He gave up public speaking forever.

  Twelve years on and he is birdlike and unbeaten in the supermarket. He looks fresher and healthier than he did, but dreadfully thin. He’s nearly fifty now, closer to death than to the halcyon days of university.

  The College Genius is also kicking around. Also thin. His first essay took fifty-five minutes to read out, which left only five minutes for discussion, but since he’d said everything, there was nothing left to discuss, so the tutorial finished early.

  His downfall came when he inexplicably didn’t get a first-class degree. From this blow he never recovered. Still kicking around, same part of town as the Weirdo, the posh end, a few miles from the colleges. I saw him in the off-license buying fizzy white wine. He looked frail, older than his years.

  PULPED

  WHAT I admired most about the Novelist was not his amazing flat on an island in the River Thames, nor the collection of excellent photos he had taken on his travels, which adorned said flat, nor even the fact that he had set foot on every single continent and visited over a hundred sovereign territories. What I admired most about him was his staying power. He’d published four novels, the last seven years ago. All were out of print, despite having won prizes and special awards and having garnered goodly praise in the serious reviews. “You know the most chilling words you can ever hear?” the Novelist used to joke. “You’re pulped.” Once he had rung the publisher’s warehouse to see how many copies of his novel they still had in stock. “Sorry, mate,” said the warehouseman. “We pulped you this morning. No copies left: now.”

  You’re pulped. The book has not just gone gracefully out of print. It has been exterminated by an avaricious publisher eager for warehouse shelf-space. Imagine how big a warehouse is. Imagine ever running short of space in a warehouse. Imagine how much space a thousand paperbacks take up. Nothing. Or next to nothing. Less than a cubic meter. You’re pulped. Mate.

  But the Novelist had fought back. In the seven years since the horrible pulping incident, he had written and abandoned several drafts of the novel that was now being touted as “the breakthrough.” In between, he had been on a screenwriting course in a vain attempt to learn the more lucrative art of writing for TV and the cinema. “Basically, I was crap,” he said, a broad challenging smile on his face. The Novelist didn’t want anyone to think he had grandiose notions about himself. Praise, if it came, would ring a silent inner bell that the Novelist kept hidden behind his trawler-captain exterior, and no one would know that the critics were right except his secret inner self. That he had a high opinion of himself I have no doubt. All writers do, though the areas of pride can vary, and English writers are very canny at keeping a low profile.

  The Novelist had kept on writing, returned again to the novel, gone to a deserted barn in Wales with the manuscript, written another draft, and then another. And now it was going to be his breakthrough novel, of that we were all convinced. And I assume, though I can’t be sure of this, that the advance matched the publisher’s expectations. He had a
new G3 laptop, after all.

  BOOK DEATH

  HOW DOES a book die? How does it become extinct? When nobody reads it anymore? When nobody buys it anymore? When libraries won’t stock it? When nobody remembers having read it?

  A book is a piece of the writer’s life. It is all those hours he sat alone talking to himself using a pen or a word processor, trying to both satisfy his conscience that he was writing some semblance of sense and keep his word count up for the day. A writer talks more honestly and less stupidly when he writes, or tries to. He’s a better person, or trying to be. A book is a record, and like a record, a CD or an LP, it contains enough to summon up life for us. Just add water in the form of attention to the words, and life comes to you from out of the fingers of the writer, from his heart and his brain down onto the paper and then back through your eyes to your heart and brain. A book is an act of sharing some of your individuality with others; books are keeping something alive.

  “You’re pulped, mate,” stops all that.

  EGYPT IV

  IAM WRITING longhand and in notebooks with paper that is just too thin for an ink pen. Over time, this is disturbing. I want to think my writing is high quality, not leaking through cheap paper. Of course, when you start worrying a lot about the externals of writing it means the writing itself is lacking, prison memoirs written on toilet paper are the counterexample that is supposed to make you realize just how lucky you are. This neglects the very real need to keep up momentum through a convincing show of behavior. Morale can fluctuate; if there is a solid routine and ample physical evidence of progress (sheets of paper, words written and counted), then it is easier to power through the difficult times when everything seems hopeless and pointless.