William Heaney, Memoirs of a Master Forger (2008)

I’ve been reading various books for various reasons: just finished Greg Bear’s new one (City at the End of Time [July 10 edit: look upstairs]); re-reading Adam Bede for this; reading Anthony Burgess’s Napoleon Symphony (So, wait til I tell you: I picked up a second-hand copy for next to nothing ... slightly tatty and ex-library, with stamps and scuffs, but a chuffing first edition for all that. It's really very good, too, qua novel. The older I get, the less bothered I am by Burgess’s tics and pretentions, and the more impressed I am by his manifold writerly virtues).
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Well, well. But the book I have enjoyed reading the most over the last few months is Memoirs of a Master Forger, by William Heaney, an author whose name is new to me. It is not out until October, but I urge and exhort you to make a note of the title and author. I got a bound proof from Simon Spanton at Gollancz, (Spanton the Spinmeister, as he is apparently now known: Sultan of the Harem of Hype). Actually he gave me a copy because he’s a friend of mine, and because he thought I might enjoy it. He was right about that. It’s an excellent novel.
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The book is the first-person narrative of Heaney, a middle-aged Londoner with a respectable job and a sideline in fraud and forgery to generate income for good causes. He also has an ex-wife, a fondness for red wine and the ability to see demons. The character's voice is very-well handled; tonally spot-on, amusing and urbane and perfectly suited to the telling of a what is an enormously readable tale. The demons (there are, we learn, exactly 1567 demons in the world, from demons that drive you mad or make you blow people up, down through the demon of collecting things to the demon of excessive footnoting—‘the cause of much of the madness and disorder you find among university academics’—and the demon of acronyms. The demons are amusing, and the novel delineates demon-haunted individuals (from homeless drunks to obsessive careerists) with tenderness and precision. They’re scary too:
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They are all squat, somewhat shorter than human beings, and are always slow-moving. Their substance is elusive to describe, being akin to something akin to loose soot. People who are sensitive to demons will often refer to them as a kind of shadow, but unlike shadow they are three-dimensional, detached and assert full integrity. Godridge in his Categorical Evidence refers to their substance as solid black vapour. Fraser, right from the beginning, called it swart cast. Believe me, it is no joke. The first time you encounter this substance in the form of these beings, you feel like your skin is being flayed. The terror is such that the fluid of your eyes seems to freeze at the sight of them. [80]

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Whilst Heaney is not exactly an exorcist, the book has something of the flavour of Constantine as written by P G Wodehouse. Reading, it occurred to me how sheerly pleasurable it is to sink into a really well-built, expertly handled novel. Superb stuff.