New novel tantalises with veiled references to real people

The Last Word
by Hanif Kureishi
Faber & Faber
2.5 stars

Hanif Kureishi's writing - whether for stage, screen or page - has always walked a fine line between life and art, fact (for want of a better word) and fiction. His short novel Intimacy, later adapted into a controversial film, was infamously rumoured to narrate the break-up of a long-term relationship with the mother of two of Kureishi's children. His sister has also complained publicly that her brother has exploited his background, family and upbringing for his work.

Tempting as these biographical parallels so often are, joining the dots between singer and song is a tricky and perilous business. Kureishi's work is clearly personal. The protagonists of his masterpieces My Beautiful Laundrette and The Buddha of Suburbia are so very like their creator that one would be an idiot not to hear some echoes. But personal books are not necessarily autobiographical, a distinction Kureishi draws himself, however vaguely. Arguably his most moving work is the non-fiction memoir about his father. Of course, how much is real and how much imagined, how much the product of memory and how much researched, is still unknown.

The Last Word, Kureishi's seventh novel, has decided to have some fun with all this work-life imbalance. Take that title, which hints that Kureishi is offering something conclusive, definitive and, dare one say it, authoritative?

The story also whisks actuality and the imagination together into a frothy concoction. A young, ambitious man of letters, an ironic, priapic type called Harry Johnson, is commissioned to write the biography of Mamoon Azam, a revered, ageing and somewhat neglected Indian-born novelist. Literary circles spun, briefly, to the apparent origin: the real-life relationship between Nobel Prize winner V.S. Naipaul and his biographer, Patrick French. This dynamic duo offer, so it was whispered, a dead ringer for Harry's merciless desire to expose Azam's prejudices: his love of Margaret Thatcher, sexual cruelty, upwardly-mobile second wife and even his tweedy rural attire.

Of course, just when you think it is safe to feel certain about such hints, Kureishi sends short judders through the seemingly stable ground beneath your feet. So that title, The Last Word, is a nicely weighted phrase, whose multiple possibilities complicate first impressions. As the novel progresses, it doubles as a hymn to ageing: a writer surveying his late period, mainly in the gloomiest of terms. And just when we have been seduced by the notion that we are reading the thinnest of veiled Naipauls, the idea slowly dawns that the entire venture is a massive double bluff and Kureishi is really writing about himself, his own advancing years as a not-so-enfant-but-still-quite-terrible, and his posthumous reputation.

For a few pages, however, I wondered whether The Last Word might have needed a final draft. Dan Brown has been mocked, rightly, for the clanking brevity of his prose - that introduction to Robert Langdon as "Renowned Harvard symbologist". Yet in setting the scene for his characters, Kureishi gives Brown a run for his money. The opening scene, in which Harry's bibulous agent explains the economic benefits of writing Azam's biography, is full of Brownian motion: Azam is a "distinguished writer", "a novelist, essayist and playwright", whose second wife is a "spirited Italian woman in her early fifties".

Yet even as the story idles along with its author, there are flashes of brio. Rob Deveraux, Harry's unscrupulous agent, is a worthy creation after an Amis fashion. Knocking back cans of beer, and spraying food and gossip everywhere, he peddles a fine line in "sociopathic" sexist lingo: "Let's go out and rip some rectum, yeah?" It's the laddish precision of that "yeah" that makes the sentence credible, and reminds you why Kureishi is respected as a screenwriter.