Mariella and Will

My favourite book programme turns up on Radio Four on a Sunday afternoon when the wonderful Mariella Frostrup brightens the darkening driving hours.

She treats all the self-publicists who turn up on her Open Book with the same nice mixture of amusement and respect. Britains' writers and publisher do not know how lucky they are. 

So surely an author should not mislead Mariella except for the best of reasons?

Yesterday the novelist Will Self, merely promoting his new novel, Butt,  gave an account of how he came across the word 'tontine', a key theme apparently of his Butt.

His explanation was hard to believe and came with no immediately obvious reason at all.

He said that he had first found 'tontine' while looking up another word in the dictionary.

He had never heard of a tontine  before.

The idea of a deal in which investors create a pot of money which goes to the last of them to remain alive?

A sort of gambler's pension?

The tontine had passed him by, it seems.

Will Self is a man of wit and erudition.

The picture of him scrambling through his Shorter Oxford and, gosh, finding this word which would inspire his book?

I just didn't quite believe it.

The tontine, with its inbuilt incentive to murder the other participants and scoop the pool, is quite a favourite theme of novelists.

I can believe that a man as philosophical as Will Self has missed the odd Agatha Christie.

But Robert Louis Stevenson had a go too.

The Wrong Box is true black comic - almost Selfian for its day. And with a movie too.

My favourite is P.G.Wodehouse's 'Something Fishy' (beautifully republished recently by Everyman) in which the tontine pot goes not to the last man standing but the last to remain a bachelor.

But Will Self's  'dictionary story' had a good ring to it, an encouraging sense of serendipity for crossword puzzlers everywhere, a touch too of the post-modern, the art of the art-of-the-book-programme.

That's it.

He's a satirical novelist on a book tour.

I wasn't supposed to believe him.

I don't suppose Mariella did either.

Comments

[ian payne]

Ooooooooooohhhhh Noooooooooo Noooot Wiiiillll Seeelllfff !!!!!

[Candadai Tirumalai]

The Italians seem to have made innovative contributions to financial arrangements, among them the (potentially sinister) tontine, proposed by Lorenzo Tonti, a 17th-century Neapolitan banker.
Before reading your blog I had associated it with Haiti, where apparently it can refer to credit and related arrangements.
It is good that the Editor of the TLS is sharply aware of the author in his role as self-publicist.

[Bill Hilton]

He did namecheck the Cleveland Tontine restaurant, near Northallerton, and acknowledged that it was run by friends of his. I recall tales of him visiting the place from seven or eight years back, so the word was in no sense new to him.

[Ajith Edassery]

'Tonsure' and 'tontine' ?

Ajith
PS: Pls excuse my ignorance

[Susan Balée]

I wonder if he was looking up "tonsure"? That's how I found "tontine." Now a book about murderous monks with the last one standing being made pope -- that would be a novel for Dan Brown to write!