The Teleportation Accident – review

The Teleportation Accident, by Ned Beauman

It’s a tough life, being a hipster, and it’s even tougher when you’re a hipster in Berlin in 1933.

Egon Loeser is a sex-starved struggling set designer with an obsession for a sci-fi play in Hackney author Ned Beauman’s latest novel The Teleportation Accident.

Newly-dumped, he meets a woman he used to tutor when she was a teenager and falls head over heels in love with her. Following her across all the most exciting literary destinations of the Thirties, Forties and Fifties, the reader gets drawn into a sci-fi adventure full of B-movie monsters and philosophy straight out of an HP Lovecraft story.

It felt like a tough first chapter, but I didn’t have to wait long for this high-minded literary novel to get its hands dirty spinning a good yarn.

Part of its excitement is Beauman’s sense of humour. The way he skips between sci-fi, literary fiction, and film noir is enough to keep any bookish reader delighted.

Characterisation is smart and effortless, and the protagonist you hated for the first few pages will make you laugh out loud before you make up your mind to hate him.

The novel’s eye for detail keeps it grounded – the sparkling wine in which ‘they’ve decided to incorporate the hangover directly into the flavour as a sort of omen’, a face ‘like a flock of blackbirds just before it knew which way to fly’ – but the book’s metaphors also nudge you, wanting to flirt with you as well as seduce you.

And there’s a heart to the book that I did fall for. Loeser is obsessed with time travel, but it’s only after the war that the protagonist admits that he felt insulated against what was going on in Germany.

“I was riding along in a car with the air conditioning on and the windows closed and the radio on,” he says, well aware after the event of the people riding in cattle trucks into Poland at the same time.

The streetnames Beauman uses in the Berlin chapter – Königsbergstrasse for instance – stand for places in Hackney, and as he’s said in interviews, there sometimes lacks a sense of time and place. The people and parties don’t change; history seems merely a background.

Beauman might juggle his genres and play with pastiche, but ultimately his novel makes a serious impression and opens up difficult ideas to the reader with grace and humour. It’s also on the Booker longlist, and with very good reason.

The Teleportation Accident

Published by Sceptre
ISBN-10: 0340998423
RRP £16.99.