Zulfikar Ghose

Hulme's Investigations into the Bogart Script Zulfikar Ghose

At one level, this is an absorbing mystery which keeps the reader wanting to know where the next twist in the narrative will lead: who is Hulme, what exactly is he investigating, and what has Bogart got to do with it all? At another level, this is a very funny novel in which a parade of characters who could be movie or crime fiction stereotypes, men and women familiar to the popular imagination, keeps the reader absorbed with their wildly unpredictable actions. There are Walt and Rosemary on some kind of odyssey across the United States, sometimes in a jumbo jet and sometimes in a wagon train, for this novel moves across time and space without respecting linear progress. Behind all the fast-moving action, there are the mysterious communications between Walt and Hulme, expressed sometimes as high wit and sometimes as apparent nonsense but in a language that, while it immediately amuses the reader, springs the surprise of a philosophical insight into reality. Several Hollywood scripts are rehearsed as though the investigation was into the mystery of the human condition, the search of the soul for paradise. In the end, Walt and Rosemary are led, as though by fate, to a cottage high up in the Rockies from where they are granted a vision of America as if they beheld the world in its original purity. This is a novel unlike any other. The clue to its design can perhaps be glimpsed in the Author's Note, which hints at the idea of a narrative driven by the aesthetic impulse generated by a philosophical conception of the nature of language. It is a work of high literary art, which will engage the interest of the most demanding reader, and yet it can be read at the simplest level of a story that entertains the reader to the end.