She gives him a better definition of his duty: "Our job is to monitor the centres of power". So he began to challenge authority, all authority, "especially when governments and politicians take us to war, when they decide that they will kill and others will die."He continues to fulfill this duty with passion and anger. As he admits, his work, especially in this powerfully-written book, is filled with accounts of horror, pain and injustice. His triumph is that he has turned a slightly dubious and over-romanticised craft into a honorable vocation.Phillip Knightley's books include 'The First Casualty: the war correspondent as hero, propagandist and myth-maker' (Andre Deutsch). Winkler is horrid, horrible, a horror; full of horror and empty of everything else. Winkler inhabits a postmodern Gehenna, a scrabbling midden left exposed when the tide of culture - of religion and heredity, of purpose and dignity and whatever makes us even transiently secure in our existential horror - recedes. In Giles Coren's first novel, Winkler doesn't just inhabit it He is a postmodern Gehenna.
The few coherent memories he has are unreliable, based on faked evidence, rehearsed with ritual distaste His job is opaque, contingent, destitute of meaning. His colleagues are caricatures; there is more existence in a persistent puddle on his way to work than in the people he collides with. Their gestures, their movements about a semi-fictional London; their speech, actions: all are empty signifiers. And Winkler is too morally exhausted to attempt the construction of meaning for those around him. Winkler's default interaction is contempt or abuse, his disgust with the physical world - flopping flesh, sad food, corridor smells - boundless.His girlfriend repels him; he abandons her.
A fat woman is waiting on a Tube platform: he pushes her under the train. Nu? Nu? That's the seeming lesson of Coren's vast ranting exposition, the old Yiddish word now become the iconic utterance of deracinated humanity: nu? Nu? NU?The problem is that the reader becomes drawn in, not to Winkler's snarling contempt but to his relentless narcissism Winkler's disaffections begin to blur Winkler hates, loudly. Winkler has bad thoughts about the old Holocaust bore and war-rememberer, Wallenstein Winkler looks at us, mouthing "Nu?" Eventually, we look back, catch his eye "Nu? Okay What. Ever."And so when Winkler pushes the fat woman under a train, the act and its (literal) inconsequentiality lose their force; as, too, when he masturbates silently in front of a blind girl Fine.