HOWZAT

Some members of Wu Ming were in their early twenties when they started writing Q. The new novel is a more accomplished piece of work. In Q the characters often seemed dwarfed by the huge historical events going on around them. 54’s scope is no less ambitious, but has a refreshing lightness of touch. The portrait of a world-weary Cary Grant, impatiently coaching the flabby impersonator that MI6 have found as a stand-in while he travels to Yugoslavia and then racked by guilt on a visit to his ailing mother in Bristol, is utterly convincing.

The book is also filled with nods and winks that add a humour that was missing in Q. The American TV rejoices in the name of a McGuffin Electric Deluxe. McGuffin was the name Hitchcock gave to a plot device around which he generated suspense. “I read a ludicrous and revolting book written by somebody called Fleming,” Grant tells his friend David Niven before recounting the plot of Casino Royale. “They’ll never make a film out of that! ” scoffs Niven, who, of course, will go on to play Bond 13 years later.

I ask whether they worry about hitting a false note when using real characters and if they occasionally feel limited by historical fact. “No, I don’t think so,” Bui says. “You just have to get into the cracks of history. For example, we don’t know very well what Cary Grant did during 1954 when he didn’t work in cinema. We only know he went on holiday to Hong Kong, but for the rest of the time he led a very private life. What we did was fill up this empty space.”

Those cracks have proved fertile territory. Although its members still wear their masks, Wu Ming is anonymous no longer.

54 by Wu Ming is published by William Heinemann, £16.99 (offer, £13.59)

The name game

‘A strange electricity in the air . . .’

Agnano Allied base, Naples, January 6: They’d brought him there shortly before Christmas. A present for the troops, the showpiece for the new recreation area. Then work had been suspended and he had been left there with only two armchairs, a table, the old jukebox and the picture of the president for company. Doubts and hypochondria racked his self-belief. Will I still make people laugh, keep them interested with the news, move them? McGuffin consoled himself by thinking about past glories.

Fully assembled on February 16, 1953, in the factories of McGuffin Electric, near Pittsburgh, he had been one of the first deluxe models turned out by the company. The Bainton family had bought him in an electrical goods shop in Baltimore. From his very first beginnings, McGuffin had proved to be a truly extraordinary television set. On March 5, after less than a month of life, he had delighted the master of the house with the sensational news of the death of Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, better known as Stalin. McGuffin’s last scoop had been that Moscow possessed thermonuclear bombs like the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since then, nothing. He had been switched off one evening in mid-August, and never switched back on again.

Resold for the simple fact that he didn’t match the Swedish furniture in the new sitting room, he had not moved since arriving at the military base on Christmas Eve. No one had even bothered to plug him in.

The faint light of a bicycle flashed across McGuffin’s empty screen. A young boy was cycling along slowly beneath the streetlamps, looking furtively around. This was not a normal bike: above its front wheel, on the carrier, there was a big, wide, wooden platform.

McGuffin picked up a strange electricity in the air. He felt something stirring inside. The boy. The bike. The platform. A life of flight from that dark place where everyone seemed to have forgotten him. But how could he attract the boy’s attention? The door widened with a squeak, and the boy’s face peeped in.

“Take me with you! Carry me off!” McGuffin longed to yell. But the boy appeared to need no incentive.

Edited extract from 54

© 2002 Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., Torino. Translation © Shaun Whiteside 2005

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