None of This Ever Really Happened was publisposhed in hardback under the title Travel Writing. The new title is fitting for a novel that places the author at the centre of a story that blends fact and personal history with fiction and is also populated by personal friends and famous writers. It must also be ironic, as there are passages in the novel that are drawn directly from real life, notably the sections that present the narrator’s travel writing about Mexico and Thailand and his summarised, back-story career trajectory which precisely mimics the author’s (their names are identical also – well, almost, the ‘r’ of Peter is dropped).

Both Ferrys (Peter [author] and Pete [narrator]) are creative writing teachers and in some ways the novel operates as a discussion of or guide to the techniques of contemporary fiction. A class discussion in which Pete Ferry instructs his assembled students is used as a framing device for a story which he acknowledges is partially made or sexed up. It begins with a car that Pete sees being driven erratically, as if the driver were heavily under the influence. He shadows it, agonising over whether he should help in some way, whether he would be able to confiscate the driver’s keys.

When the car inevitably ploughs into a lamppost, killing the beautiful, female driver stone dead, Pete is overcome with a profound and borderline obsessive sense of guilt: he feels that as the desire to intervene was there, he is deeply at fault for not acting on it.  He attends the funeral, meets the family, is mistaken for a lover and begins to take on the role of private detective in order make sense of her death or to pin blame on someone other than himself.

This quest quickly becomes all-enveloping, his friends begin to think he is crazy and his girlfriend, Lydia, can only rationalise the obsession by concluding that he was sleeping with the dead girl. Lydia is a strange one. The two are in a twelve-year relationship that emerged as a cohabiting convenience. It began as an aggressively open relationship, but having once been distant and off-hand, Lydia is now cloying and demanding. She wants what she  dismissed for so long as bourgeois and conventional.

None of This Ever Really Happened is a genuine page-turner. The narrator’s voice is hip and savvy and draws you in. The central mystery is well-plotted, the denouement unexpected (perhaps too unexpected, you couldn’t possibly guess it). The central characters’ relationships shift and develop pleasingly and convincingly: the narrative fragmentation underlines and justifies these shifts. Everything in it’s right place. It’s confusing, but it works. And yet, to end on a subjective note, it also irks. There’s something a bit irritating about the way a novel is written being justified in a creative writing class within the novel; about the author being so starkly present in his fiction; about a quick summary at the end revealing which characters exist and which are made up. Recommended then, but not without reservations…

Reviewed by Paul Engles

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