Book review: If You’re Reading This, I’m Already Dead

We are in the last months of the Second World War, and Hamburg is being strafed by Allied bombers day and night. An old man called Otto Witte, who lives in a caravan and drinks boiled water because he has no tea-leaves to infuse, wonders if this is the last night of his life. So to divert himself he casts back in memory and tells us about the most brilliant and amazing episode in his career. He speaks in a natural conversational style and one of the many pleasures of this novel is to be found in Andrew Nicoll’s assured mastery of tone. His style is admirably fluent, capable of moving seamlessly from reflection and comment to rapid story-telling.

We go back with him to Budapest just before the First World War. Otto is then an acrobat working in a circus, and one day he goes to a cinema with his colleagues: Max, a weightlifter; Tifty, who does spectacular equestrian acts; the blind professor whose role is as “Mr Memory” like the chap in the Hitchcock version of The Thirty-Nine Steps; and the professor’s daughter, Sarah, who was “the kind of girl you marry”. The cinema, he remarks, was really good in these days, because there was no talking. The film they watch is a version of Anthony Hope’s novel, The Prisoner of Zenda, that Ruritanain melodrama in which an Englishman impersonates the king whose double he is. Well, you probably see what’s coming. Nicoll is preparing the reader for an even more audacious impersonation in a land as wild and almost as imaginary as Hope’s Ruritania.

There is a newspaper report concerning Albania, which has recently recovered its independence from the declining Ottoman Empire and fought a war against Serbia. It seems the Albanians, or “Albanoks”, as Otto calls them, are looking for a king, and one suggested candidate is a Turkish prince whose photograph in a newspaper suggests that he is the spitting image of Otto. So why not, perhaps?

Nicoll’s story is inspired by the strange fiction put about by the real, historical Otto Witte, a German acrobat and fantasist who claimed that he had managed to have himself crowned, and briefly accepted, as king of Albania in 1913 using a similar ruse. In Nicoll’s novel, Otto steals a camel and cash-box from the circus, and the soon-to-be famous Five set off for Albania – even though only the professor knows where the country is. There is a splendid scene at the Budapest railway station where Otto, posing as a the Graf von Mucklenburg, Keeper of the Camels of His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor Franz Josef (king, actually, in Hungary), bluffs the stationmaster to commandeer a train and a camel-wagon to take them to the Empire’s port of Fiume, whence they will find the means of sailing down the Adriatic coast to Albania.

In Fiume, they encounter a tiny, untrustworthy, violent naval officer called Varga, whom they compel to transport them and the camel – Varga obeying only after taking a fancy to the mighty weightlifter Max and being bested in a duel by Otto. None of this is to be taken seriously. The author’s tongue is firmly in his cheek, but, extravagant as scenes and plot are, they stop short of absurdity. Nicoll gets the balance just right, and not only because he regularly reverts to the frightening reality in which the old man Otto finds himself in as he recounts the story of his caper.

The extravagance of the plot goes further. Who should the adventurers meet in Dubrovnik but Sandy Arbuthnott, on release from a John Buchan novel, along with a nude dancer who goes by the name of Mrs MacLeod, but who will prove to be a famous or infamous, if later unfortunate, figure in the history of espionage, and also Sandy’s wild and fearsome dancers, the Companions of the Rosy Hours, borrowed from Greenmantle. (Sandy seems to have grown several inches and changed his appearance a bit, since we first met him in that novel.)

Arriving in Albania, the bluff continues to hold. The original intention may have been to grab what they can and then scarper, but Otto is, it turns out, rather taken with the idea of being not only a king, but a good one, working for the well-being and prosperity of his people. This allows Nicoll who, in his alternative existence as the political editor of a Scottish tabloid, to offer some wise words about what constitutes good government – and Otto to invite comparisons between his intentions and the reality of the leader of the criminal regime whose vicious folly has brought the bombs raining down on Hamburg.

It would be wrong to say more about the development of the plot, though it does require Otto to display his acrobatic skills in a manner that makes it clear that any film of the book will call for an actor with the panache of an Errol Flynn or Douglas Fairbanks senior to play the hero. Indeed the novel would make for a splendid caper-movie; Nicoll has indeed written the perfect film ending which, however, I shall not reveal.

It is a thoroughly enjoyable novel, and it works, not only because of the delicious absurdity of the story, but for two other reasons. First, while it is enriched by the echoes of other novels – what academic critics call its “intertextuality” – Nicoll exercises considerable self-restraint and never pushes his in-jokes too far or makes too many of them. Second there is an underlying seriousness in what he writes about love and friendship, and the nature and purpose of government. Otto is of course a fraud, but he might have made rather a good king. He also offers interesting reflections – even if you may not agree with him when, for instance, he says that “courage is a kind of muscle, like love, and the more it is used, the stronger it gets”. That may be true of love, but courage might well be a different matter: isn’t one of the experiences of war that a store of courage may be limited, and may therefore be used up?

If You’re Reading This I’m Already Dead

by Andrew Nicoll

Quercus, 422pp, £12.99