ego.istic.org

Many years ago, my grandmother used to play a game. If the cat was asleep in the middle of the floor when she came to do the hoovering (as was its wont), she would see how close she could get the hoover pipe to the cat without waking the latter. This was a fine and entertaining way of making a chore fun, a la Mary Poppins, but alas! she was too good at it. One day she got the hoover so close that the cat's tail shot up the pipe. Apart from waking the cat (thus losing the game), it also made its tail go permanently stiff. As cats use their tails to balance, the effect on the poor moggy's agility was, one might say, catastrophic. The cat never learned to cope with the loss. In fact, it never fully absorbed the fact that it couldn't climb like it used to, so it spent the rest of its days mostly falling off things.

To my mind, mystery novels and certain kinds of jokes are the same type of game. The author aims to give as much information as possible without actually letting the audience know the crucial point. In a murder mystery, the critical information is who dun it; the author shows the reader many clues, trying to make the identity of the murderer completely obvious without quite revealing it. In a joke, the teller needs to give you all the elements that will go into the punchline: in a long-winded lead-up to a pun, he will repeat them a few times, maybe even wording it in a contrived way to make extra sure the listener notices what he's doing, but still wants to make sure the listener doesn't see the punchline coming until he is ready to deliver it. ‘Treading on one's punchline’ is what happens when one gets too close and awakens the cat.

Obviously, the easiest way to get your hoover closer to the cat is to turn it off; similarly, one way to give your audience more information is to do so without really telling them anything at all, that is, to misinform or misdirect them. Ronnie Corbett took this style of joke-telling to its extreme. He would give long, rambling monologues, with as many unrelated asides as possible between the set-up and the punchline. In the field of murder mystery, one of the acknowledged leaders is Agatha Christie. She would give out clues like candy, but so many of them would turn out to be red herrings that none of them convey any useful information to the reader. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a supreme example where she makes it entirely obvious throughout the book who the murderer is, without once actually telling you.

I have always been a fan of this style of story-telling, common in murder mysteries, but also found in other works from ‘Citizen Kane’ to The Star; I have also been intrigued in the act of joke-telling since the earliest age. A shelf full of ancient joke books in my parents' house attests to the latter, and my dog-eared 1993 edition of the complete Sherlock Holmes (bought for me at the time to wean me off Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey) to the former. Anyone who knows me off-line will be able to confirm that my sense of humour persists to this day, worse luck. Anyone who has read my short stories will readily accept that my view of the form is very much as described.

This has led me to start running my whole life as if I'm hoovering the cat. I'm always serious but I never show it. I always tell people exactly what I mean, in such a way as to make them think I don't mean it at all. I think that a sentence with only one meaning is wasteful. In this way I manage to let myself be completely frank and open without ever letting anyone know I am doing so. And to guard against the possibility that I might accidentally say something informative, I lace everything with a web of interconnected misinformation and non sequiturs.

Dishonest though it sounds, the game is a guarantee of honesty. I would never lie, just as a mystery author would never narrate an untruth, because that would be cheating: it would spoil the game altogether. I'm not playing for money or bragging rights, just for my own entertainment: it's a game of solitaire with the whole world as my marbles. Breaking the unspoken rules of this game would be cheating myself; it would ruin the carefully constructed edifice I've built with the events of my whole life, and my beliefs, desires, and fears, as the foundation. In any case, I could never lie to further the plot, because I've become so used to giving a clue, a hint at the dénoument or punchline, in everything I say. Not only do I tell the truth, I tell the whole truth. I have often said that I have no secrets of my own. I will, of course, not divulge anything that responsibility to other people says I shouldn't, but I make it almost a challenge that I will answer any question fully and frankly—as long as I am convinced the questioner really wants to know the answer. Like playing twenty questions, the knowledge that at any time one of my fellow players could ask a crucial question that gives it all away, gives the game an added piquancy, a tingly excitement that is with me all the time.

It's also a collaborative game. My story has structured itself in such a way that my different friends have disjoint sets of clues: if ever they could work together effectively and realise the right information to share they could spoil the ending completely. But I have ensured that no one can give the right information away without also revealing things about themselves they might rather keep unknown. Already, more than one of my friends has told me that being friends with me is like watching a TV series out of order: every time I say something, something I told them several years ago starts to make sense. Even this very blog has been infected by the spirit of the game: my choice of what subjects to cover is heavily coloured by what in particular I want to hint at this week.

Sometimes I fear that I am making it too complicated for people to follow. I know that sometimes people have trouble with my first meaning, never mind the subtext. Maybe in the end, the joke will be on me, as I realise there is no punchline at all. Or, perhaps, I have it backwards. Maybe I'm completely transparent, and I like to think I'm being subtle, so I convince myself that nobody spots the obvious signals I broadcast. Maybe everyone knows the plot but me. Maybe the cat has been awake all along, and it just doesn't feel threatened enough to react. You get to decide: I can't hear its purring over the hoover.