Cannonbridge by Jonathan Barnes Read Free Book Online

Century . A pretty bland, vanilla title, I’m sure you’ll agree. Over the course of its composition in the last month, however, I have come to understand that it might much more accurately have been called something like this.” Out of his pocket Toby pulls a black remote control. He touches one of the buttons and the screen behind him changes. One set of words is replaced by another. Toby reads them aloud: “Matthew Cannonbridge: Fraud.”
    Is there, at this, a gasp from the audience? A murmur of unease? Even a nervous titter? Toby cannot be sure.
    He goes on. “And it might just as well have been called this...” Another click, another shift of words. “Matthew Cannonbridge: The Invented Man.” Click. “Or this: The Cannonbridge Delusion.”
    Toby steps forward. Caroline’s face is turned away, her expression obscure.
    “The contention of my lecture, then, is this: quite simply, that Matthew Cannonbridge never existed. That his life and work and biography are all the invention of some modern hand. That the Cannonbridge story, ladies and gentlemen, is an elaborate deception perpetrated on us all for some baffling reason. That everything from The English Golem to National Virtue to The Mystery of the Whispering Pontiff has been faked. That all of it represents a highly sophisticated confidence trick which has been played on the international community and on the reading public for more than fifty years.”
    At the back of the auditorium a man walks out. Professor McGovern, uniquely, in Toby’s experience of her, seems completely frozen, uncertain as to what to do next. J J is trying to appear amused as if in the hope that this will yet prove to be a jest, some pawky piece of academic humour.
    “ J’accuse ,” says Toby with a flourish, starting to enjoy himself now, “this man.”
    Another click and the picture changes again, now to show a lean, serious-looking bearded man of around thirty. “The late Professor Anthony Blessborough, author of Forgotten Genius , which, as most of you will know, was the very first critical study of Cannonbridge, published shortly after the Second World War. Now, whether Blessborough invented Cannonbridge knowingly or whether he actually believed in what he was writing I cannot be certain. Nonetheless, I feel sure that it was then, with this book, that the Cannonbridge conspiracy began. But what still eludes me is the question of motive. I do not yet know why this colossal and outrageous fraud has been perpetrated upon the world.”
    Some of the audience are talking now, some outraged, some concerned, some entertained. Only the man in the pinstripe suit still seems to be listening with real intensity. As before, his talismanic mobile phone is held up steadily before him.
    At the back, another person leaves. And then another. One of them shouts, before the door slams shut, “Nutter!”
    Now, Toby really begins to warm to his theme. He improvises. He freestyles, he plays to the crowd, he loses control of his emotion. He allows himself to be swept up and gives himself over to the moment. It will be some time before he realises quite what a show it is that he puts on.
    In the end, Toby is allowed to speak for a little under eleven minutes—the novels and short stories and plays that he believes to have been faked, the widespread tampering with the archives, the expert falsification of records, the long-term bribery and blackmail of the academic world. Each claim is more scandalous than the last, each more dementedly complex and frothingly baroque. More of the audience leave, while others stay and laugh openly. Thomasina looks ashen. Salazar tries hard to seem sorrowfully noble. Caroline might be in tears. The man in the pinstripe suit, however, drinks all of it in, that phone held out before him the whole time, as if warding away something evil.
    Toby has just begun to explain how he believes Cannonbridge’s epic verse cycle The Lamentation of Eliphar, Mununzar’s Son to be a