Bouvard and P��cuchet. Robinson (Kafka���s) and Delamarch...

Bouvard and P��cuchet. Robinson (Kafka���s) and Delamarche. Robinson (C��line���s) and Bardamu. Robinson (Keiller���s) and the Narrator. Beckett���s Mercier and Camier, and then Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot. The characters played by Richard E. grant and Paul McGann in Withnail and I (1987), written and directed by Bruce Robinson. A recent twosome: Kruso and Ed in Lutz Seiler���s Kruso (2014). And here���s another: W and Lars in Lars Iyer���s Spurious (2011; and then Dogma and Exodus).

Here we are at the end of Literature and Culture, stripped, bereft, embarrassed. We are children tromping in old boots���. This is Lars Iyer in ���Nude in Your hot Tub, facing the Abyss (A Literary Manifesto after the End of Literature and Manifestoes���.

A belief that one is living at the end of something is not unique to now; many people believed this in, say, the 1990s, and the 1890s. Maybe all people over a certain age. The beginning of the particular end that Iyer is talking about is dated back to the decade during which I was at boarding school, moving on from Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle to Lowry and Updike: Sometime in the 1960s the great river of Culture, the Literary Tradition, the canon of lofty works began to braid and break into a myriad distributaries, turning sluggish on the plains of the cultural delta���. By now ���literature��� as it used to be known ��� ���revolutionary and tragic, prophetic and solitary, posthumous, incompatible, radical and paradoxical��� ��� is ���a corpse and cold at that���; and authors have been replaced ���be a legion of keystroke labourers, shoulder to shoulder with the admen and app developers���. Conclusion: ���don���t be generous and don���t be kind. Ridicule yourself and what you do. Savage art, like the cannibal you are���. This is heady stuff, up there with the manifestos of yesteryear.

Enter two low-level academics, W and Lars, one in the south-west of England and the other in the north-east. Lars lives in an apartment that���s assailed by an apocalyptic damp (it���s ���off the scale���; the professionals shake their heads and mutter that they���ve ���never seen anything like it���). They bicker, tease, read books they don���t understand and drink neat gin. Briefly, they wonder which is them is Kafka and which Brod, before agreeing that they are both Brod. Canada, ���with its pristine blue lakes and bear-filled wilderness��� and its different kind of cold (���not a wet cold like over here���) is the place to go to, a place where one could be ���a different kind of man���, and Lars writes references for W (���the finest thinker of his generation���) and they hear nothing back, the Canadians are ���remote as Martians���. But their joint acceptance that they are living in End Times ��� and the notion that salvation might lie in books is a joke ��� goes to their head as least as much as the gin: ���I am his idiot, but he is mine, and it���s this we share in our joy and our laughter, as we wake each day into the morning of our idiocy, wiping the sleep from our eyes and stretching���.

On the other side of ��� or underneath ��� Exquisite doom is Hilarious doom. If the comedy here is black it���s not matt black, it���s glossy, even fluorescent: lurid, twitchy (odd spasms of hope still flickering uselessly, ���like the animals who come out of their burrows after winter, shivering but exited���), jerky ��� and now I���ve written that word I think of Punch and Judy shows, the way the puppets bash each other flat and then spring up and go through it all again and again. Spurious is threaded through with a crazy End Times glee, the glee that you feel when your team, which you do genuinely support, is losing five-nil and a balance is tipped, no way back now, and you decide that if they���re going to fail then let them at least fail spectacularly, with abject abandon, pile it on.

From Robinson, by Jack Robinson (Pen Name of Charles Boyle)