James Lasdun’s Seven Lies 

The narrator of James Lasdun’s Seven Lies [1], Stefan Vogel, is a figure we’re all familiar with. Forced out of his native East Germany, Stefan Vogel is the quintessential poet in exile – one of a generation of East European writers who have made a new home for themselves in America.  

Except that, as we swiftly learn, Vogel is an imposter. His ‘poems’ are merely bad German translations of English masterworks by poets (such as Eliot and Whitman) banned by the communist regime of the GDR. The fact that they have been published in leading literary journals in East Germany owes more to Vogel’s political connections than to any merit in the poems themselves. Yet on the strength of these poems (and with a little help from his political friends), Vogel has fled to the United States, there to bask in the role of the exiled political dissident.  The true Stefan Vogel is not a heroic literary rebel, the true Stefan Vogel is a cowardly fake.   

Nor is it only his literary imposture that haunts Vogel – there are other, darker secrets in his past, secrets that will be revealed as the book progresses. But all of this deceit has brought Vogel little happiness. He is a man pursued by the ghosts of his past, living in the constant anxiety of being exposed. What troubles Vogel is not so much a guilty conscience as a great weariness, the monstrous burden of having to wear a mask at all times and with all people. His dilemma is almost existential – he cannot be himself without destroying everything that he has become to other people, and therefore undoing his whole life. There is also, mixed with this feeling, the realization that all he has really achieved with his lying is a façade of the life he always wanted, empty of the feelings that were meant to go with it. This is the central irony of Vogel’s predicament – that the life his subterfuges have made possible for him is itself a lie.  

So crushing is the weight of this deceit on Vogel’s shoulders, that when Nemesis finally arrives (in the shape of a woman who throws a glass of wine in his face at a party) he seems almost joyful at the prospect of no longer being able to keep up the charade, and immediately sets out on the task of putting down in writing a true account of his life – an account that forms the text of the novel. In it, Vogel traces the evolution of his imposture, starting with an early pretense of being a ‘poet-intellectual’ to win familial approval, to a rapidly growing litany of lies in an attempt to impress a young woman he falls in love with and eventually succeeds in making his wife. Along the way, the reader gets a look at the nature of social life in communist Europe, but there is little here that has not been done before, and better, elsewhere (for instance, in the novels of Milan Kundera).  

Nor is the idea of a man haunted by his own deceit to the point where he longs to be discovered a startlingly original one. This is ground that Dostoyevsky has already covered, far more memorably, in Crime and Punishment. Besides, Vogel is not Raskolnikov – his motivations are petty (insecurity, desire) and his regret seems like little more than a slight queasiness, a gentle unease. This, I think, is the chief false note in the novel – that for someone finally getting to tell the truth after years of having to live a lie, Vogel seems strangely disinterested in his own life. Major life events are skipped through summarily, devastating memories are stated in the most matter of fact tone. It’s not just that the life Vogel is describing seems lethargic and directionless, as though his earlier self had simply drifted into its deceitful role, it’s also that his tone while describing it is that of a distant stranger getting through some boring chore.  

It is this lackadaisical quality that makes this an insubstantial and ultimately unengaging book. The plot itself has considerable promise – there are many issues of identity and conscience that Lasdun could have explored, including the insightful fact, merely hinted at in the final pages, that Vogel continues to see his malaise as his own, despite the fact that under the old communist regimes virtually everyone was, to some extent or the other, living under false pretences. But Lasdun seems content to let these possibilities evaporate without paying them any particular attention, as if the lack of motivation of his central character had influenced him as well. There is some extremely clever writing here [2], but there are also passages where Lasdun seems overly self-conscious. We are told at least a dozen times that things the narrator experienced felt as though they had already happened (every time this revelation appears it is in quotes) and Lasdun is ham-handed enough to make his protagonist major in Philosophy, so he can toss in some big ‘ideas’ every now and then. All I can say is: if you have to explain it, it isn’t working.  

The real problem with the book though is not that it isn’t clever enough – it is. The real problem is Lasdun’s failure to make his characters engaging. All the key players other than Vogel himself feel like caricatures, and even Vogel’s character is inconsistent and problematic – it seems hard to believe that someone could live so knowingly cynical a life, and be so clear-headed about it afterwards, and yet manage to be as idealistic and self-sacrificing as Vogel seems to be in the end. Part of the trouble, I suspect, is the length of the book – it’s barely 200 pages long, and Lasdun is trying to cram a lot of action into it, so that some key episodes get described in rich detail, complete with a deep exploration of Vogel’s feelings, while others barely take up a paragraph or two. There is also, perhaps as a consequence, the nagging sense that Vogel is being far from completely honest, and this entire tale is a fabrication.  

As the book ends, Lasdun seems to switch into a minor key. Vogel, beset by a growing disillusionment with his own life and with the American dream, fights back with a last minute attempt at heroism, with a final plea for the protection of our political innocence. We must not allow cynicism to overwhelm our belief in political ideals, Lasdun seems to say, must not allow our desire to help and protect our fellow humans to be overwhelmed by mutual suspicion and mistrust. This is an interesting twist, but one that sits awkwardly, in my opinion, with the rest of the book, It’s almost as though Lasdun, dismayed by the dispassionate and world-weary tone of his book, had decided to suddenly strike a note of genuine feeling in the last chapter. As if he had chosen to give us one fleeting glimpse of the truth, in a novel crowded with lies.  

Overall, then, Seven Lies is a pleasant but uninspiring read, a novel that just about manages to be interesting without being truly compelling. There is much about this novel that seems a little fake, (“Capricious monotone / that is at least one definite ‘false note’” as Vogel would probably say), but by the time you get to the middle of the book you have been gripped by the same soul-deadening inertia that seems to grip its main protagonist, an almost fatalistic need to go through with it, even though you already know how it will turn out and are pretty sure how it will all turn out.  

Notes 

[1] Seven Lies is on the long list for the 2006 Man Booker Prize 

[2] I particularly liked Lasdun’s delightful description of New York in the 1980’s as seen through the eyes of a Communist émigré, as well as this lovely description of ennui: 

“During this period I formed the idea that every phenomenon that comes into being represents a victory in a struggle against a force willing it not to come into being. I pictured this opposing force as a kind of Chinese Dragon, a Dragon of Stability, jealously guarding the status quo. It patrolled the borders between occupied and unoccupied space, and it lay curled and scowling at the threshold of every possible action. In order to open a window one must first slay the dragon posted to ensure that the closed window remains forever closed. The fire these dragons breathed took the form of waves of paralyzing inertia, a breath of which was enough to overcome you unless you had extraordinary vitality as well as unshakable belief in importance of what you wanted to do. More and more I found myself defeated before I could even move. Was it worth the almighty struggle, the expenditure of limited energy, to open that window, when after all nothing material would be changed by doing so, and when, even if I succeeded, another dragon would immediately be posted to ensure that the now-open window would now remain forever open? Increasingly, it seemed not.”  

- James Lasdun, Seven Lies pp 80. (W.W Norton & Co. NY, 2005)