Blast from the past: The Teleportation Accident reviewed

He’d probably agree with Edward Gibbon’s assessment of history as ‘little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind’ but Ned Beauman’s instinct as to why we do what we do is a lot more basic. We’re motivated by sex: whether we’re having it or – as is more often the case in Beauman’s world – not having it.

And he might have a point. Take for example Ernst Hanfstaengl who described his former buddy, a certain Adolf Hitler, as “a man who was neither fish, flesh nor fowl, neither fully homosexual nor fully heterosexual… I had formed the firm conviction that he was impotent, the repressed, masturbating type.” A committed Freudian might call that motive enough.

Beauman’s Booker-nominated The Teleportation Accident starts off in Berlin during the Fuhrer’s rise to power and takes the hapless set designer Egon Loeser as its anti-hero. Desperate, self-obsessed and apolitical (Hitler “whoever he is, will never make one bit of difference to my life”), his only preoccupations are the renowned 17th century Venetian designer Andre Lancivini and his theatrical marvel, the ‘Extraordinary Mechanism for the almost instantaneous Transportation of Persons from Place to Place’, coupled with the stasis of his sex life and the disappearance of his one true love Adele Hitler (no relation) to Paris.

This transportation mechanism, which Loeser tries to recreate, allows actors to simultaneously disappear and reappear in various positions and different guises on the stage and, in a similarly spectacular fashion, characters and ideas weave in and out of the novel.