THE ability to knock off 800 words at the wave of a deadline is no more an apprenticeship for writing fiction than running a hundred yards is for the marathon. Indeed, training for the first is often a severe hindrance for the second, and novels by journalists come second only to novels by comedians for promising silver and delivering nickel, as the authors share with us their views on the media, marriage and mid-life angst.
All of which makes John Preston's achievement all the more remarkable.
In Ghosting, his first novel, Preston (arts editor of the Sunday Telegraph), leaps straight into the deep end of literary fiction, abandoning all the floats of easy familiarity. The subterranean world he creates - suburban postwar civility overlaid by the new-moneyed mediocrity of Metroland - is invention of the highest order, and the story, told through a mesmerically awful narrator, turns from tragedy to farce on a sixpence.
As a child brought up on Lewis Carroll's Alice, I was convinced I had only to crawl into the back of our television set to find myself in another, parallel world. For Dickie Chambers, only child of ill-matched parents (father who mapped his life with insignificant dates such as when he first ate tinned pears, and mother whose gear-stick knee he would occasionally sit on as she "grimly dismembered something in the kitchen"), this parallel world becomes the only one in which he finds any kind of identity - I am recognised, therefore I am.
Told in a series of flashbacks through the prism of his narrator's vanity and, in controlled and expertly contrived language, John Preston sets down the indignities of life, death and sex with raw truth, which like the experiences themselves are at once horrendous and side-achingly funny.
Chambers's alienation begins early In childhood he is literally separated from human contact through having to wear home-made grease-proof paper bags to protect his eczema-covered hands. But he is also set apart by a curious talent: his voice. The metamorphosis from schoolboy treble to modulated mastery of the airways - first the radio, then to game show TV (gloriously relished) - brings fame and fortune but no escape from the internal void.
Chambers is one of nature's bystanders. Even his one attempt to take the initiative, saving his widowed mother's life when their house goes up in flames, is doomed to failure. He throws away a promising career in the theatre (provincial rep, in cringeing and wholly accurate detail) simply by failing to open a door.
"Naturally I am reluctant to take responsibility for my life. How can I be sure it's really mine, if I hadn't picked up somebody else's by mistake?" He sees everything, but understands nothing, although, in Preston's sure hands, the reader does. As the novel progresses, however, the transparency of the unreliable witness becomes occluded and our complacency turns to terror as, like Chambers himself, we lose our ability to find firm ground in the sinister quicksand that surrounds him.
Chambers is a terrible bore, surrounded by people "who had seen the flash of silver in my tail-coats". We wouldn't watch this fellow (a man who has scout huts named after him) for five minutes on a wet afternoon in August, but through an extraordinary feat of writing on Preston's part, we end up (nearly) caring about him. Laced with irony as delicious and light of touch as Jane Austen, this helter-skelter journey into his square world, familiar yet unknown, is utterly compelling.