The Liar

'And you want me to allocate resourcing?'

'I'd quite like some money made available, if that's what you mean. Grade Two surveillance should, do it.'

'I have to interface, as they say, with the Treasury tomorrow. Cabinet next week. Oh, look, you're not going to smoke are you?'

Christ! thought the Bennett, Tovey and Steele. Roll on the next Labour government.

Four

I

Tim Anderson considered the question with great care.

'I don't believe that the comparison with Oliver Twist, seductive and engaging as I would be the last to deny it being, is as valid as a first glance might allow.'

'But surely, Dr Anderson, the similarities are very clear. What we have here is a secret workhouse birth, we have a gang of boys set to work by the character Polterneck, we have the character of Peter Flowerbuck, who traces his own family connection with the Cotton twins, not unlike Mr Brownlow's quest in Oliver Twist, we have Flinter, who like Nancy is an agent of revenge. The parallels are surely most striking?'

Gary poured some more Meursault for Jenny and Adrian, never at any time taking his eyes off the screen.

'I am not going to consider failing to grant you the presence of narrative echoes,' Tim Anderson replied, 'but I would certainly find myself presented with personal difficulties if asked to deny that this is the mature Dickens of Little Dorrit and Bleak House. I'm sensing a fuller picture of a connected world here than we are allowed in Twist. I'm sensing a deeper anger, I find myself responding to a more complete symphonic vision. The chapter which describes the flood, the scene depicting the bursting of the Thames's banks and the sweeping away of the Den is a more proleptic and organic event than the reader has been confronted with in earlier novels. I would be laying myself open to a charge of being mistaken if I attempted to resist the argument that the character of Flinter is a development of both Nancy and the Artful Dodger which we can't be afraid to recognise takes us into a more terrified Dickens, a more, if you like, Kafkaesque Dickens.'

The interviewer nodded.

'I understand that the University has already sold the film and television rights of Peter Flowerbuck?'

'That is not substantially incorrect.'

'Are you worried that to do this before the manuscript has been officially authenticated might lay you open to future embarrassment, should it prove to be a fake?'

'As you know, we have taken on a number of new research fellows at St Matthew's who are working extensively on the text to determine its authenticity-level. They will be running linguistic particles and image- clusters through a computer program which is as reliable as any chemical test.'

'Authorial fingerprinting?'

'Authorial is the term often used, fingerprinting, that is far from wrong.'

'And how confident are you that this is genuine Dickens?'

'Let me turn that question round and say that I am not confident that it isn't Dickens.'

'Let me turn that answer round and say 'bullshit',' said Adrian.

'Hush!' said Jenny.

'Well, I mean. Symphonic visions.'

'I don't think it insignificant,' Anderson continued, 'that at a time when English departments at my university and hundreds of others are being threatened with cuts, a discovery of pure scholarship like this should attract such attention and validate so completely what has quite properly been perceived as the beleaguered discipline of English studies.'

'It's a very lucrative discovery, certainly. How in fact was it made?'

'I was alerted to the existence of the text by a student of mine from Newnham College. She had been participating in my seminars on Derrida and Sexual Difference and had been pursuing a number of independent lines of enquiry into the Victorian Deviant Ethic. She found the papers in the St Matthew's College Library hidden amongst old copies of Corn-hill magazine..'

'Did she realise what she had stumbled across?'

'She was not unaware of its potential lack of insignificance.'

'I understand that a philologist from your own department, and indeed college, Donald Trefusis, has expressed doubts as to the genuineness of the find?'

'I believe that I think it of immense value to express doubts. It is because of the Professor's repeated queries that we have been granted the necessary funding to research the manuscript.'

'Dr Anderson, many people like myself, who have read Peter Flowerbuck have been struck by the candour and detail with which sexual activity and the nature of Victorian child-prostitution is described. Do you think Dickens ever intended to publish?'

'We are currently trawling all biographical source materials for some clue as to the answer to that highly legitimate question. Perhaps I can turn it round, however, and ask, 'Would he not have destroyed the manuscript if he never wanted it read?' Yeah?'

'I see.'

'I cannot deny myself the right to believe that he left it to be found. We therefore owe it to him to publish