Whatever Happened to Harold Absalon? - Simon Okotie

What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us.

Georges Perec

It might be that the most boring of actions, the quotidian details of our lives, can become fascinatingly illuminating if focussed on in sufficient detail. The small, unremarkable events of our days, rigorously recorded, may provide a more accurate reflection of our lives than an account which focusses on the unusual or extraordinary. This is certainly what Simon Okotie’s protagonist, Marguerite, is hoping. Marguerite is a transport adviser to the Mayor of an unspecified city, closely resembling London. Unofficially, he is investigating the disappearance of his predecessor, Harold Absalon – the narrative takes the form of a report, written in the third person, for an unknown readership. Over the 200 pages of this report, Marguerite encounters Absalon’s wife, Isabelle, in a hotel restaurant, follows her down the road, and boards a Routemaster bus. 

The main figures of the novel are kept at arms-length from the reader. Although he isn't explicit in his judgements, Marguerite shows himself to be a relatively old-fashioned thinker. His early thoughts reveal that he sees the world as being divided into white and blue collar work, with wives staying at home to provide evening meals. Whilst he attempts to record his thoughts in scrupulous detail, he cannot avoid these preconceptions from colouring his account. Little is said about Absalon himself. There is a suggestion that he was marked out by class, or by race, but the reader is given only the sparest of details: ‘Harold Absalon was from a different background to the others in the office, but was at the same time their superior... So often, in that situation, when someone was from a different background to the great mass of the people then they would not, could not be led by that person. There could be real problems - people would want, in my experience, to tear that person apart’. His wife, the subject of the investigations, is reduced in Absalon’s mind to a pair of freckled breasts and the occasional flash of blonde hair.

Likewise, the action, such as it is, is largely incidental; the bulk of the text is taken up with Marguerite’s detailed meditations on subjects such as king and queen-sized beds, decathlons and the nomenclature of T-junctions and cross-roads. Chapters 18 - 23 deal with the way Marguerite chooses to sit in his seat ('His left leg in the aisle, his right leg wedged into the well between his seat & the seat in front...it effected the drawing of cooler air through a gap in his left trouser leg directly to the region of his genitals' whilst also 'providing him with a firm foundation for swivelling counter-clockwise in his seat as he looked over his left shoulder at the scene of the top of the stairs, whilst shielding his face') and the prevalence of female conductors on public transport. Marguerite clearly believes that this barrage of information is essential to prove his diligence to the readers of his report, but he often finds his reflections get in the way of key events: 'satisfied with this conclusion, Marguerite looked up to see that Isobel Absalon, her friend and baby, had disappeared'.

Okotie’s editor, Nicholas Royle, has previously said that the most important words in a novel are the ones which the author decides to leave out, and this is definitely true of Marguerite’s narrative. Whilst the main body of the text is concerned with a forensic examination of the physical world which the detective inhabits, his more relevant personal thoughts appear in the footnotes, which pop up at seemingly random points. These 26 brief footnotes form a story in themselves, describing a tale of jealousy and possible revenge, in which Marguerite becomes increasingly implicated. Here, he talks about his own relationship with his quarry, and the events which prompted his investigation: ‘The success of Harold Absalon's career seemed to be inversely proportional to my own… colleagues started calling me Harold… After a while, I managed to enter the marital home. I put cameras in the bedroom… What I found in the nightly footage was increasingly shocking to me, to the extent that I thought that I must be losing my mind’. Meanwhile, the main narrative takes on an  increasingly paranoid tone, as Marguerite fears he is trapped on the top deck of the bus by ‘agents’; his report loses objectivity, becoming more self-consciously literary: ‘He came to the end of the chapter, wondering what, if anything, might occur between this ending and the commencement of the next chapter'. 

The way that Okotie uses detailed analysis of objects and situations in place of psychological insight is reminiscent of Perec’s work, most notably An Attempt At Exhausting A Place In Paris, whilst there are hints of Italo Calvino in the metatextual flourishes of Marguerite’s foot-noted third-person narrative. Interestingly, Marguerite’s determination to cover every possible eventuality in his report, which so often leads him down philosophical dead-ends, recalls Robert Anton Wilson’s ‘sombunall’ (some but not all) philosophy, which stressed the undesirability of absolute declarations. 

Overall, Whatever Happened to Harold Absalon is an inventive and original debut novel, written with humour and an admirable sense of ambition. Okotie struggles to maintain the high-wire act over the course of the whole book, with the level of detail demanding an extremely high level of attention from the reader from beginning to end, but intrigue is maintained through the clever use of footnotes. Nothing is ever certain in a novel which undermines its characters and challenges the reader. James Ward, organiser of the Boring Conference, has spoken of 'the transformative power of attention', arguing that 'attention and focus and patience can take a sneeze and turn it into a page from a diary. It can take a packet of Munchies and turn it into a museum'.This is what Okotie's debut does, forensically examining the situation of the upper deck of the Routemaster bus, manipulating the seemingly extraneous detail to craft a dark and mysterious story in the subtext.