Although (obviously) white middle aged American writer protagonists with a fetish for Shakespeare should be a red flag that I’m being pandered to, I have to admit that Arthur Phillips’ The Tragedy of Arthur is the book I’ve inhaled the most defenselessly this year.
The premise of the text is simple: A lost work of Shakespeare has been discovered. The book in your hands is the first publication of the play. The introduction to the play (all 200-some pages of it, contractually obliged) is the confessional family story of the man who sold it to the publisher, and who now (for reasons endemic to the story) believes it to be a forgery by his long-time grifter father.
The narrative voice is charming, self-doubting, furiously introspective and confused enough to serve both plot and character. The family drama unveiled through the “Introduction” is a tensile triangle of love, distrust, hurt, yearning. (And though the ending is a bit weak, I can’t help but read it and think of the narrator earlier apologizing for Shakespeare himself, whose endings were always the weakest parts of his plays).
The play at the end is convincing to a lay eye as a plausible lost work of Shakespeare (I read the whole thing searching for the obvious error, speculated earlier by the doubting narrator, that would give the lie to the whole thing [my best nominee, the word “Dad”? – though it predates the publication of the play in the OED, it appears nowhere else in Shakespeare per my Ctrl+F’ing and would be an obvious poetic device]). Moreover, the debate between footnoters and the resonance of some parts of the play (generously to the careful reader, some parts that even go uncommented on by the commentators) with the family drama that precedes it gives the reader more dimensions to look at the work from. And it’s rare to find such a dimensionality in a popular novel.
The meta-textual engagement, interpreting everything in the story through Shakespeare in order to finally interpret “Shakespeare” back insofar as his imputed work determines their own story – expertly balanced. The trick of the novel – the existence of an unpublished play that may or may not be their father’s forgery – is accomplished with just enough steady aplomb and just enough showy exhibitionism to make you believe alternately that this could really happen – that a man could know everything about the Bard and his time and textual forensics and fool the world (and Arthur Phillips, the novelist, makes a winking case to the reader that it would be him), or else a son could be so convinced of his father’s conniving that he’d be incapable of seeing what the rest of the earth has discovered, a literary miracle. My ambivalence at the end of the text about the authorship question is exactly what the author wants to achieve, I imagine – and I am suggestible, therefore, to all his philosophical questions about the value of authorship itself, insofar as it determines how we relate to a work.
It’s a book I’m sad to have to give back to a library. It’s a book I think I might like to return to for a second reading someday.