Guest review by Philip Womack: FRANCIS PLUG - WRITER IN RESIDENCE by Paul Ewen

 

"There is something impish about Plug, a kind of naughty nature spirit thrust into the world of the mundane ..."

Photograph: Tatiana von Preussen

Philip Womack has written eight novels for the young, including, most recently, Wildlord. He has also published How to Teach Classics to Your Dog: A Quirky Introduction to the Greeks and Romans, for adults.

I had not read Francis Plug: How to Be A Public Author by Paul Ewen, but had heard good things, and so fell upon this sequel with eagerness, hoovering it up over the course of three days during the Christmas break.

Francis Plug is an author on the edge. He’s had some success with his first book, but even so, still lives in a garage. Despite his constant, heroic drunkenness, and a disastrous interview on Radio 4 (in the course of which he yells KNICKERS, though thankfully it is not broadcast), he is offered a position as Writer in Residence at Greenwich University. The writer’s dream. A stipend, congenial colleagues, eager students. He decides to take the “in residence” bit literally, and surreptitiously commandeers an empty office, putting a camp-bed up, and making the campus his playground.

Plug is both menace and maverick. He slopes off to the pub when he should be researching his novel or performing the (very limited duties) of his post. In speech and thought he rushes from non sequitur to non sequitur. His cultural range is vast, ranging from Doctor Who to Doestoevsky. One minute he is informing you that the singer Moby is descended from Herman Melville, the next he is buying a Hello Kitty purse. And yet, it all makes a strange kind of sense, as when he is supposed to teach a creative writing session, and brings a tyre he’s fished out of the Thames:

“Student: What’s with the stinky tyre?

FP: This tyre is from the past. It’s embedded with stones. See? They represent the passing of time. I have reunited it with solid, dry land.”

His other task is to bring in famous authors for the university’s literary festival. He wildly overpromises, offering Philip Roth, amongst others. There are many encounters with real-life scribblers, which range from the surreal to the hilarious. The comic set pieces are finely judged and, often, thrillingly close to the bone. Which of us writers has not had a moment when we would rather bury ourselves in a wine glass than give a talk? The only author he manages to hook in for the Festival ends up feeding the pages of his book to a shredder. Wonderful.

Interwoven with the action are Plug’s ruminations on his next novel, in which a nuclear bomb explodes in Greenwich; there are also well-considered literary critiques on campus novels (Plug is supposed to be writing one himself - the joke, of course, being that we are reading it). Some serious points are also made (a little too seriously, if you ask me - my only complaint) about tuition fees and writer’s incomes.

One of the worries many authors have about the increasing professionalisation of the writing life - creative writing courses, residencies, prizes, university posts and so forth - is that everything will shape into a corporate blandness. Writers are becoming a kind of bureaucrat, efficient administrators, reliable colleagues to the Academy. Workshops hone away rough edges and controversial ideas in prose and poetry; large publishers, worried about reputational consequences, discourage eccentricity.

Plug is a delicious, delirious antidote to all that. There is something impish about him, a kind of naughty nature spirit thrust into the world of the mundane. His optimism in the face of disaster is a tonic. Long may he reign - and I'd like to see him dancing on the tables at the Booker Prize dinner, please.

Francis Plug - Writer in Residence is published by Galley Beggars Press.

Philip Womack's Wildlord is published by Little Island Press.