would he have to work to find a fault-line in this novel - something he could get the end of his knife into and start levering? The guy was nearly forty now, a ridiculous age to be making his first venture into fiction. But suppose it had been, as his bum-chums were doubtless even now preparing to say, 'well worth the wait'? God.
Tranter repaired to the kitchen, made a cup of tea and poured some dried food into a bowl for Septimus Harding. He went to look at his e-mails on the white PC, but found it unable to connect to the Internet. This often happened.
'SoftWare Works,' as Patrick Warrender had irritatingly pointed out to him when he'd had trouble before. 'A classic oxymoron. A palpable untruth. An actionable breach of the Trade Descriptions Act. Get a proper machine, Ralph.'
When my biography of Alfred Huntley Edgerton wins the Pizza Palace prize, thought Tranter, that's the time to upgrade.
Then, for no clear reason, the egg timer suddenly unfroze and Tranter's functional inbox was revealed. 'Hi there Bruno Banks!'
'Oh, piss off,' said Tranter and hit delete.
'Are you sure you want to del--'
Delete. God, life was complicated sometimes. The virtual world consumed more time than the real one: much more, in fact, since his connection with the real one was - to borrow a word he'd come across in a sci-fi magazine - asymptotic.
When he had deleted the junk and replied briefly to an invitation to the launch of a war memoir ('Out of London that day, sadly'), Tranter felt strong enough to sit down and tackle Sedley.
With a cup of tea on the table next to him and with Septimus Harding on his lap, he licked his slightly trembling finger and turned to Chapter One.
For forty-five minutes there was no sound in R. Tranter's sitting room apart from the rustle of a woody page going over at two-minute intervals. The Bosnian war criminal revved his motorbike unheard; the Polish boys whooped and shouted through a full first half in their back garden. Tranter's eyes moved steadily, hungrily, from side to side. Inside his head, the neurons went silently about their business, the axons and the dendrites dutifully fired and received.
But after twenty minutes, a brain scan would have shown, in the part of Tranter's cortex that registered pleasure, some signs of activity - slight at first, then intermittent, then growing after half an hour to a row of pulsing alpine peaks.
At page forty-six, he dropped the book with a whoop of incredulous delight. Sedley's novel was not just bad; it was embarrassingly, deliciously lame. Tranter threw back his head and laughed out loud; it was worse, far worse than he had even dared to hope. He shivered with pleasure - then had a moment's doubt.
He reread a few sentences to reassure himself he hadn't just imagined it. But no. It was that bad.
He fast-forwarded and read a paragraph from page 219. All clear!
Tranter felt tears of mirth in the corner of his eyes. Sedley had not invented anything. He had had the whole world - all of history, all of time, to say nothing of fantasy and other worlds - to choose from: people of all ages and both sexes in every country of the earth. But with the cornucopia of material at his disposal, Sedley had chosen to write up ... a few episodes from his own earlier life. It was a posh young man's coming of age; it even ended with his twenty-first birthday party - in dinner jackets!
But that wasn't all, Tranter thought. he'd written it in a style that was meant to be 'poetic' or something. There was phrase-making; there were descriptions that begged to be admired; and these purple bits weren't just intrusive, they were inept. Eye-catching similes were made from items that bore no resemblance to one another. It was arch, it was self-loving, it was impotent; it was so idiotic that Tranter felt a shiver of compassion for poor Sedley when he pictured the critical Culloden, the firestorm of derision that awaited him ...
He took up A Winter Crossing again and settled back into his chair. Phrases began to form in his mind. His review would write itself; it would strangle Sedley's career at birth; it would be a cause celebre - if that was the term he wanted.
And if only that had been the end of Sedley; if only Tranter's review had finished his career. But enough of Sedley's old school friends had gathered