We’re fast approaching Booker Prize season and it feels like a great opportunity to share our favourite bygone Booker-tipped titles. One of the most memorable and marvellous is The Underground Man by Mick Jackson, shortlisted way back in 1997. Set in Victorian England and inspired by the real-life eccentricities of the fifth Duke of Portland, this is a fictionalised account of that gentleman’s life (although the truth is eye-popping enough, if like us, you feel compelled to do a bit of research after the final page). The story of a haunted soul who builds a network of tunnels beneath his ancestral home and descends into lonely madness, it’s a moving, funny and spellbinding read.
The story is told via excerpts from the Duke’s diaries and retrospective witness testimony, beginning as the tunnels are about to be completed after several years construction. Stairwells and passages run beneath the house, linking tunnels that are wide enough to take horse and carriage and spirit the now ageing Duke secretly around his vast estate, accompanied by Clement, his loyal retainer, and shielded from the curious eyes and gossip of the outside world.
One of his favoured retreats is the mausoleum that he built for his parents. A diary entry of one particular visit recalls the Duke bowing by their stone effigies, musing on how he has grown old in their absence and is troubled by a fragment of memory, something lurking in the recesses of his mind that holds the key to his perpetual turmoil. ‘What is it I cannot remember?’, he wonders, and herein lies the crux of the matter, as the restless burrowing and roaming of his estate reflects his inner quest.
With more than a dash of Victorian Gothic and splendidly droll humour, Jackson paints a vivid picture of the noble oddball. Although prone to vanity and cutting a dapper figure in his snug velvet trousers, the Duke doesn’t wish to be seen in public. Consequently he is rumoured to be insane. His thoughts certainly veer towards the delirious, many pages of his diary expressing wide-ranging philosophies: the art of running a bath, the horrifying passage of kidney stones, how a bad night’s sleep may leave a trace of itself on the sheets, ‘a remnant of melancholy’ which when rewarmed the following night, reactivates the insomnia.
Hypochondriacal and subsumed by memories, the Duke muses frequently on the theme of abandonment, returning often to his parents. He remembers the boyhood fear of visiting their bedroom at night to wake them and feeling only their absence in sleep, their minds ‘drifting on a distant plane. Together they had slipped away and lay wrapped in the winding sheets of dreams’.
Tiptoeing through life, the Duke is always and ever alone. Except for a sometime shadow, footsteps, a glimpse of a face. A presence that he occasionally senses, a mystery whose answer lies somewhere in the chaotic pile of his beloved home.
An inspired and poignant novel, we’d like to think that Jackson would have won the 1997 Booker Prize if it hadn’t been for the mighty Arundhati Roy, who triumphed that year with The God of Small Things.
The Underground Man by Mick Jackson is published by Faber & Faber, 272 pages.
