review- Guardian

2            Ian Sansom

            The Guardian, Saturday 29 August 2009

            Article history

Robert Twigger will be familiar to readers from his self-exploring, self-excelling non-fiction; most famously and delightfully, 1997's Angry White Pyjamas, in which he recounts his year spent learning aikido with the Tokyo riot police. Twigger appears in his books as a sardonic, terribly English, grandly-self-appointed-but-nonetheless-slightly-apologetic-about-it kind of guru figure, who travels, adventures, writes, and is a proponent of what he calls "lifeshifting". He now extends himself further, lifeshiftingly, into fiction, with Dr Ragab's Universal Language - which is basically a Paulo Coelho book as written by a funny English bloke.

Dr. Ragab's Universal Language

by Robert Twigger

304pp, Picador, £12.99

Buy Dr Ragab's Universal Language at the Guardian bookshop

The narrator is a wimpish slacker living in west London who has been commissioned to write the history of a German aluminium company. He is also obsessed with bunkers, air-raid shelters, abandoned tunnels and pill-boxes - something to do with "their darkness, their permanence". He dutifully travels to Germany and, during the course of his research, discovers a manuscript - hidden, miraculously, in a bunker - written by a Dr Ragab, proposing a method for learning a universal language. He also discovers an account, by a Martin Hertwig, a relative of the founder of the aluminium company, of how he learnt Dr Ragab's universal language and used it to save himself from imprisonment in a bunker in Germany after the second world war. The book consists of the bunker-obsessed narrator's translation of Hertwig's manuscript, with the narrator himself enjoying various minor adventures and self-revelations before eventually overcoming his "lack of push and thrust", leaving his own metaphorical west London bunker, and moving to Egypt.

Hertwig's account of his tutelage under Dr Ragab in Cairo in the 1920s is believably odd and thoroughly entertaining. Ragab is the kind of spiritual teacher who encourages self-awareness through pointless activities such as jumping up and down while talking, and drawing mystical symbols in the sand. It is not clear whether he is a crank, a genius or a huckster. But whatever Ragab's true identity, his teaching, as the narrator explains, "was about, or seemed to be about, maintaining concentration, or, rather, a certain intensity of involvement in the task - almost despite the absurdity of it all".

One reads on, despite the absurdity of it all. Curious episode follows curious episode with, it seems, mere adjacency the governing principle. Hertwig and Ragab go on a journey to visit the lost pillar of Seth. Hertwig is trapped in a bunker by roaming brigands. There is a thinly veiled satiric attack on the Swedish author Sven Lindqvist, author of Benchpress (1988), merrily traduced as Sven Marquist, author of A Short History of Bodybuilding. Lots of other weird stuff happens - penis piercing, bunker building, post-Holocaust chaos.

The real pleasure of reading Twigger derives from his knowing things other people don't, knowledge he has carefully cultivated. His non-fiction books combine Boy's Own adventures with sharp observation and esoteric ideas; now, as a novelist, he treats the form as essentially just another vehicle for transmitting this extraordinary knowledge. Dr Ragab's Universal Language is thus part allegorical quest, part philosophy and part pure hokum. Which is why Coelho springs to mind - but also Denis Diderot, or Jonathan Swift, or Herman Hesse: writers who created work both outlandish and quite universal.