In some ways, you’ve got to hand it to Craig Raine. Two years ago, after a distinguished career as a poet and all-round man of letters, he published his first novel — and received a series of reviews that, as Woody Allen once put it, read like a Tibetan Book of the Dead. According to virtually all of them, Heartbreak was fragmented, name-dropping, pretentious, and not really a novel anyway: more a loose collection of thoughts, revealing an alarming obsession with sexual organs. But with The Divine Comedy, Raine responds with almost heroic defiance. If you felt like that about the last book, it seems to shout, try this one for size.
In Heartbreak, for instance, the fragments were comparatively chunky, even featuring some recognisably extended narrative. Here, the bits of story barely get a look in amid all the literary, personal and anecdotal reflections on what they might mean. As for that possible obsession, the only change is that it’s men’s rather than women’s parts which now take centre-stage.
Rysiek Harlan, one of two adulterous main male characters, is introduced immediately — but only for a paragraph. He then disappears until page 33 while we get — among much else — an extended anecdote about the perils of circumcision; a discussion of phallus-related birth defects; a re-imagining of the rape of Dinah from the Book of Genesis (apparently she just wanted some uncircumcised sex action); and a scrupulously sourced analysis of the size of Joseph Brodsky’s, Ernest Hemingway’s and W. H. Auden’s penises.
Not long afterwards, poor Rysiek is left to suffer impotence for another 30-odd pages while Raine ruminates on Stravinsky, Aristotle, Francesca Ennis, the egotism of Primo Levi and several more writers’ genitals.
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