ABOUT BEGAT
This entertainment for the Trump epoch (IndieBooks) has been called “the first significant fiction to confront the facts of our grotesque new age. Just as Muriel Spark’s Abbess of Crewe placed the Watergate scandal in an English nunnery, and Brecht’s Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui cast Hitler as a Chicago gangster, so begat, concerning itself with UCAS and Facebook postings, manages to be creepily topical and globally significant.”
This blackly comic tale is set in a grisly English university, too pre-failed to fail, where the students invent a mascot: an imaginary student, who bodes larger and larger as they empty into him all the worst of their ids.
He is monstrous, and even looks monstrous (being a bad online montage, a photoshop Frankenstein); but his nastiness is oddly irresistible, especially on social media. After a while his webpage gathers a following well beyond the university; he is elected to Parliament; his pronouncements push Britain into a nuclear confrontation with Iran; terror of missiles drives the population into the winter countryside, where they starve, slay each other and die; and the story ends with general apocalypse.
The author writes: “I produced begat in November 2015 in the blizzard-ridden hills above Budapest. I was working full-time preparing a student for her Cambridge interview: she wanted to read English lit. Alex was brilliant and easily got in, but talking to her about imbeciles she knew, about university admissions, and about Frankenstein (one of her texts), led me in the stormy small hours of Tuesday to dream of a pale student beside the thing he had put together; however it wasn’t Mary Shelley’s student I was seeing, and it wasn’t her monster. She wrote Frankenstein in three days, and as an experiment I imitated her speed; I wrote between tutorials; by Friday afternoon the story was done and presented to Alex as a souvenir.
These pseudo-gothic circumstances wouldn’t be interesting except for the odd fact I hadn’t then heard of Donald J. Trump.
When I lightly revised begat a year later, I looked at a couple of mediaeval romances about the antichrist, and was charmed to find the same orange hair, deformed fingers and unhuman blankness that had come to me in nightmare.
Perhaps charmed isn’t the right word.”