A Review of Ned Beauman’s “The Teleportation Accident”
Beam Me Up
I used to be a fan of the writing of Jonathan Lethem, and a lot of my fiction was influenced by him. There was just something about the fact that he was able to mix genres so seamlessly that I thought he was getting away with murder, and I wanted to try my hand at it. That said, my fandom of Lethem (at the time) led me to other authors who were doing similar things, such as Jonathan Carroll and — as it would turn out in the case of his sophomore novel, The Teleportation Accident — Ned Beauman. However, I must admit sheepishly that The Teleportation Accident has sat on my Kindle unread since its publication in 2012. The reason, I think, is because I was under the impression that this was a “difficult” book to read. It turns out that this novel is, in fact, very difficult to read, but it’s also very entertaining. I suppose that might be one of the reasons why, upon its publication, The Teleportation Accident was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
The novel centres on a theatre designer named Egon Loeser living in Berlin, Germany during the fall of the Weimar Republic. He is fascinated with the invention of a teleportation device unveiled during a play’s performance in the 1600s that killed dozens of people. However, he is also deliriously horny because he hasn’t had sex in a really long time. When a woman named Adele Hitler (no relation to Adolf) comes back into his life, he naturally wants to sleep with her. But then she disappears. And so, poor Egon follows her first to Paris and then to Los Angeles to win her heart and finally get laid for the first time in years.
It should be no surprise that Egon is described at one point in the novel as a “prick,” and he is one. His plight is one where you can’t laugh with him, but, instead, you’ll want to laugh at him since he’s so forlorn. You can also play word games with his surname — remove one letter “e” and you have Loser. I suppose you can play similar word games with his given name — remove the letter “n” and you have Ego. Whether or not you like The Teleportation Accident is going to rest largely on the fact that its main character has a big Ego and overinflated sense of his self, and is also a Loser because all he seems to care about is fucking. The novel doesn’t have the best overall rating from GoodReads, clocking in at a mediocre 3.4 out of 5 at the time I’m writing this, and I suspect that women might find this character a bit much, and maybe some men will think the same way, too.
However, what makes the book successful in my eyes is that it is wryly funny. It is, I must add, dry wit, but I’m a fan of that sort of thing and have a tendency to be dry in my own life, too, so I suppose you could say that it takes one to know one. What’s remarkable is that the author, Beauman, is currently 35-years-old (practically a baby in publishing years) so that means that The Teleportation Accident was written in his 20s — which seems to be an achievement because this is one academically-minded novel. Meaning: you may need a university degree in some artistic field to make sense of it. I’ll be honest with you and say that me and my journalism degree (a very hard degree to attain, believe me) didn’t always understand the references in this book. Nor did I get all of the reportedly-deliberate anachronisms, either. (To wit, the characters of this book try ketamine in ’30s Berlin, well before the drug was readily available.)
That said, the book held some fascination for me because I am also a student of Film Studies (my minor). I know my film history and understand that many Europeans, including Germans, invested in theatre or film found their way to Los Angeles in the 1930s, so I was fascinated with that element of the story. To a degree, The Teleportation Accident is a story about a man out of place, as much as it is a book that is a comedy of errors. The result is a book that gives you something to think about — why is it that some people seem to inhabit the wrong place at the wrong time? That the book makes this predicament kind of funny is one of its core strengths.
I did find The Teleportation Accident to be at times obtuse — I’m not sure if I understand it’s concluding chapter set in a Los Angeles of 10,000 years into the future. The book also has four possible endings, which I found to be a bit too fussy. However, I enjoyed it more than I probably had a right to. I even sympathized with Egon as he fumbles to get at least a one-night stand. And as someone who has let Jonathan Lethem go since he took something I said in an interview that I had with him while I was a 25-year-old freelance journalist and watched him put my words into one of his novels and a short story, I’m glad to find other writers who are mixing science fiction with more literary forms of expression. I haven’t heard a whole lot about Beauman since the publication of this novel, but he’s been active until 2017 as a novelist, so perhaps The Teleportation Accident is merely the start of plumbing the depths of a new writer that I hadn’t paid attention to. I need a new Jonathan Lethem, that’s for sure — at least an author I can be wise enough to keep some distance from so I don’t get mined by them for inspiration. Enough said.
Ned Beauman’s The Teleportation Accident was originally published by Sceptre in 2012.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
