Disgraced, deposed, and driven to the ‘underworld’ for the crime of political incorrectness, Harry Vanikin — formerly Professor Vanikin — has not left the London housing estate in which he hides for seven years. Even going so far as to cover up his windows, the seventy-year-old Vanikin lives the life of a discarded shadow, going about the motions of something called life and only occasionally visited by his sister, his tormenting nephew, and his fellow residents of the run-down housing project they call home. From these fellows, however, from these similarly mad and equally rejected beings, the ashes begin to stir, and a ray of hope appears for the man who once said: I tried to teach my students the truth; no one told me the truth was no longer wanted.
Vanikin in the Underworld is the story of the furthest down and possible redemption of an educator who can’t escape education.
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Excerpts
The boy has gone, striding down to Ahmed’s shop, and I am alone, or as alone as I can be. Vanikin in the underworld. Where were we? Ah, yes. Inappropriate teaching methods. I suppose it could have been worse. Socrates got the hemlock, Bruno, Wycliff, and Savonarola the stake and the fire, looking down and hoping the breeze was ministering to the flames. The university simply made no fuss and paid me my pension before laying me off. Estrella tells me my book is no longer to be found in the library reference system. My book. So much to tell.
Another day in my circle. I rip off a puckered square of kitchen roll and evacuate my nose into it before looking down to view the outcome, a Kandinsky miniature in grey, green, and red. My stomach, that aged coil of plumbing, is making small spiral noises, like tiny springs emerging from a captor mattress, and I must prepare porridge.
-from Chapter One
As I accept that it is the morning, I must prepare for my day. I heat water in my kettle, testing the great orange gas container with the ball-peen hammer to see how much remains. We are all of us hooked up to these containers, and Craig replaces them for a stipendiary fee when they expire. There is no working gas supply system at Europa House, a fact which exercises the gangling Estrella. She, like most of her generation, is well versed on her rights, and claims that the contraptions which Craig has rigged up in each of our battery cells — the original house has been divided and divided again to provide more hutches for the inhabitants — contravene various Health and Safety commandments. I wouldn’t know about that, although I do know that the last representative from the council to visit Europa House was so menaced by Craig that he had to take a month’s sick leave from his place of work. That awful hobgoblin Bertie Spedding told me that. Bertie Spedding, the Mercury of bad news and sniffer of ill winds.
My water ready in the singing kettle, I fill the basin, select a flannel — a choice of two, royal blue and washing-machine grey — and begin to soap and valet the various cracks and orifices of my awful old body. The body, writes Plato. A shadow which keeps us company. I can’t have a bath because the bath has a crack in it like lightning-split timber. It also has about a hundredweight of academic papers, newspapers, notepads dense with my scrawl, coverless books. Research, you see, for my next book, the follow up to my university-banned and universally unread debut. More later.
-from Chapter Two
Oh, I was good. Standing room only when Prof. Vanikin gave a lecture, scuffles at the door of a room full to bulging. The subject matter didn’t, as it were, matter; it was me they were coming to see. Gloomily, I reflect that they come still to my current hut in the forest, tiny pilgrimages in this battery-farm crazy house, but more of that anon. My seminars, too, over-subscribed and crawling with student life. I taught them about Spinoza and Wittgenstein, Descartes and Heidegger, Hume and Berkeley. I tried to draw it out of them, the philosophical urge, the itch to enquire, to ask of the universe: And you are? I wanted to make them see what they already knew, like the angles lurking unseen deep within the soul of Meno’s slave boy, the shy youngster Socrates questions about geometry, who has all the answers without knowing it. Then, the strange thing happened.
