The Stars' Tennis Balls by Stephen Fry

Hutchinson, 2000

Stephen Fry makes life terribly hard for himself. Having established himself as a journalist, comedian, actor and walking aphorism in the tradition of Oscar Wilde, he decided to begin writing novels. It is far from easy for such a renaissance man to prove himself sufficiently to critics in any arena but hardest in the world of literature. Hacks tend to be suspicious of people who put their hearts on their sleeves, and intolerant in the extreme of those who will insist on doing so on more than one jacket at a time. So, Fry's critics have been waiting for an opportunity to pounce and savage the man's books just as they did his character when he took an unscheduled break from Simon Gray's play "Cell Mates" in 1995. With The Stars' Tennis Balls, his first novel since Making History in 1997, critics in certain quarters have decided to put the knife in. Except for the aforementioned inconvenience of Fry's splendid and varied gifts, this is confusing. This book is not only a startlingly good read and as much of a page-turner as anything he has written before, but it is more subtlely thought-provoking too.

The Stars' Tennis Balls is, in one sense, typical Fry. This is doubtless what riles the critics so. He insists on populating his novels with unfashionable things like public school boys, thinkers and - perish the thought - adventure. In these days of novels which seem to be written with Booker Prize judges in mind, adults are left with only Harry Potter for comfort (the Potter books are referred to in Fry's novel with typical archness - he himself reads the audio book versions). Fry knows that the elements of great fiction are not just social critique and 'deep' questions posed indirectly, although they are of course present and correct here as they have always been in his work. What he adds is a genuine taste for the dramatic. After an unusually meandering beginning which ponders the issue of class and background and is something of a red herring plot-wise, the novel suddenly dives off into tense, filmic, psychological thriller territory. Between the main character's amnesia and escape, we are blessed with the now traditional Fry mentor and student episodes. Unhappy to let us stay put, though, Fry transports us across Europe into a world twenty or so years after the first section where the novel's unstoppable juggernaut reverses over all its former players. In passing we get drugs, sex, the Internet, email conversations, a probably unprecedented number of shoulder injuries, leg removal and a man whose favourite beverage is milk.

Fry has used lots of these tricks before: awkward but fascinating movements in time, questions of what constitutes the self and one's own reality being just two. This would be a fault were he not using it to wholly new effect. Characters here are not heroes, they are merely inhabitants of the pages and therefore the diary entries of cynical social climber Ashley Barson-Garland mix perfectly with the contrasting third person descriptions of the adventures of Ned Maddstone (the central focus of events but by no more a protagonist than Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses). Romance happens, but is convincing in that it ends without warning or explanation. There is adventure and there are deaths but good does not conquer evil. There is simply no clear-cut definition in this book of what constitutes those extremes. Perhaps it is that very cosiness that critics have missed.

The Stars' Tennis Balls succeeds because it is not set on either side. The narrator does not accept the brutal behaviour of the secret service officers or side with either class. Everyone's weakness is exposed, and there is ultimately no sense of contentedness, though justice by the end of the novel is done. In this sense, the novel follows Hamlet in its basic structure. The main character - a good willed and popular young man - is persecuted and by the combined cruelties of fate and man finds himself in a terrible situation locked away in feigned madness that he cannot escape precisely because he is a good person and has qualms. He has to escape his very nature to avenge the wrong that has been done to him. It is the difficulty of accepting the new, brutal and blemished character that the victim has become that makes the novel hard to swallow. We do not like to be told that there is no easy solution and that any revenge or vigilantism comes with shame as one becomes one's own enemy.

So, this novel marks a departure from the bawdiness of The Liar and the candour of The Hippopotamus. However, it no less successful as a novel, it is no less Fry-like for it. It is a more mature concept but handles it by upping the number of filmic sequences and eyebrow raising at contemporary culture. It is neither over-serious nor over-light and that puts it in a rather uncomfortable position (perhaps from