Doctor Criminale by Malcolm Bradbury Read Free Book Online

was a great international figure, the man known as the philosopher for our times, the Lukacs of the
Nineties; I was an out-of-work hack from the provinces. He was one of the superpowers of contemporary thought; I was a pygmy from Patagonia. He was the keynote speaker; I was the footnote or
appendix. Seemingly no great congress of world writers, no international meeting of intellectuals devoted to whatever it might be (world peace, human rights, the survival of the ecosphere, the
future of photography), no high-level diplomatic reception to celebrate some new treaty of cultural friendship and co-operation, was complete without the presence of Criminale; I of course was
never invited. Here was a man who measured out his life in summit conferences, ministerial receptions, congress programmes, Concorde take-off times; my main travelling adventures were attempts to
get to work on the decrepit Northern Line. While he travelled the world in the best interests of modern thought, staying at grand hotels – the Villa d’Este in northern Italy,
Badrutt’s Palace Hotel in Saint Moritz – of such splendour that even the chambermaids had been finished in Switzerland and the desk clerks had degrees from the Sorbonne, my idea of
luxury was a bottle of aftershave for Christmas. No, there seemed little or nothing that could possibly link together the lives of Bazlo Criminale and myself.
    Even so, over the next few days, as I began to research the man for the one-hour programme in the arts documentary series ‘Great Thinkers of the Age of Glasnost’ that Nada
Productions – the small independent company that Ros ran with, as she put it, ‘my big friend Lavinia’ – was offering to Eldorado Television, I naturally came to know him
better. These were not easy days, I assure you. No cheque came from my collapsed newspaper. There was no word of compassion, never mind compensation, from the Official Receiver who had so kindly
taken over its troubled affairs. Luckily I had Ros’s offer of bed and board – though the board was, it became very apparent, completely dependent on the bed. Each night Ros would claim
her rental in the great gymnasium of her bedroom, where her experiments in revisionist gender-pairing and new theories of orgasm proved remarkably demanding. Ros was one of those people who believe
that the outer parameters of sex have still not been entirely discovered. Each morning she would rise refreshed, to water the houseplants, feed the armadillo, and set off, bright as a new BMW, for
Soho and the small one-room offices of Nada Productions.
    And each day, a little more weary from what had so refreshed her, I sat down in the country kitchen of the town house in the Bangladeshi district behind Liverpool Street station to set to work
on my new career: reading and noting, sifting and filing, computing and scrolling, trying to find my way around and into the complicated and mythical figure of Bazlo Criminale. Each evening, fresh
and bracing as an arctic storm, Ros would return, bearing yet more books and journals, photos and clippings, files and faxes, by or about or otherwise pertaining to our subject. Next we would
consume the oven-ready vegetarian low-cholesterol pastas I had slipped out to buy during the afternoon, and then retire to the upstairs laboratory for yet more advanced physical research.
    Then each next day I would get up, feeling a little less whole than before, and return to my other duty, the probing and pushing and plotting and planning that took me just a little closer to
the mysterious world of Bazlo Criminale. Small wonder that before long I began to feel like one of those nameless non-heroes that live in Samuel Beckett’s novels – a hermit of thought,
a tired scribe whose every written word is each day collected and taken away by some higher power, a worn and lifespent soul whose every recollection and every bodily juice has somehow been
squeezed out and extracted for use elsewhere. And