Cameo by Rob Doyle review – a fantasy of literary celebrity in the culture war era

Rob Doyle’s previous novel, Threshold, took the form of a blackly comic travelogue narrated by an Irish writer named Rob. In one episode before Rob becomes an author, we see him as a sexually pent-up teacher abroad, masturbating over an essay he’s marking. That the scene is an echo of one in Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised (once named by Doyle as the best book from the past 40 years) hardly lessens our discomfort, and it’s hard not to feel that our unease is precisely the point. “Frankly, a lot of my life has been disastrous,” he once told an interviewer – which might not be quite as self-deprecating as it sounds, given that Doyle has also argued that “great literature” is born of “abjection” not “glory”.

The autofictional game-playing continues in his new novel, Cameo, but instead of self-abasing display, we get a perky book-world send-up for the culture war era, cartoonishly dramatising the ups and downs of creative life. It takes the form of a vertiginous hall of mirrors centred on gazillion-selling Dublin novelist Ren Duka, renowned for a long novel cycle drawn on his own life, the summaries of which comprise the bulk of the book we’re reading. Duka’s work isn’t autofiction à la Knausgård: hardly deskbound, still less under the yoke of domesticity, he leads a jet-set life of peril, mixing with drug dealers, terrorists, spies, and eventually serving time for tax evasion before he develops a crack habit, a penchant for threesomes in Paris and – perhaps least likely of all – returns to his long-forsaken Catholicism.

Writerly pettiness is an ever-present source of comedy: abducted in Iraq (long story), Duka finds himself recording propaganda for Islamic State, during which he has the presence of mind to denounce “his literary rivals, including writers barely known beyond Dublin publishing circles”. Punctuating the action are free-floating monologues from voices recalling their connection to Duka, including an actor bitter about no longer playing him on screen, a punk novelist akin to Virginie Despentes, and – naturally – one Rob Doyle. There are excerpts, too, from the memoir of an unnamed author recalling his boyhood breakthrough of writing a story in the voice of the Predator (“It just hadn’t occurred to me before that I could enter the sensorium of an extraterrestrial psychopath”); plus – on top of all that – snippets from a near-future novel about a cab driver in a time of pan-European war, alien sightings and “cartel leaders in Mexico worshipping a new AI”.

Away from our anticipation as to how these strands fit together, Cameo’s energy lies largely in that sort of larky detail, narrated in a winningly deadpan register caught between bewilderment and weariness. The matter-of-fact present-tense narration, sprightly with hyperbolic intensifiers (he’s especially fond of “satanic”), generates terrific momentum and the satire is wicked. At one point, Duka – reinventing himself as an anti-woke comedian – is in demand as a rightwing talking head: “Whenever an interlocutor, invariably in firmer command of facts and statistics, seems poised to get the better of him, Ren accuses them of racism. If he feels he is in a particularly tight corner, he accuses them of paedophilia … Two months after his stand-up tour ends, he writes an article for the New Statesman titled ‘I’m Sorry’.”

While I frequently lost track of whether I was reading the life of the fictitious author Ren Duka or the story of what his fictional avatar gets up to in the novels written by him, you might take that as a mark of the immersion generated by Cameo’s conceit. It’s not all laughs, either; there’s a kernel of emotion when, on the brink of drug-induced breakdown in Berlin, “Rob Doyle” rings his sister for help – but she’s still unhappy because of her portrayal in a previous book, and the call ends disastrously when, deep in his own plight, he’s oblivious to hers.

Overall, though, such moments are rarer than in Threshold and Doyle’s 2022 memoir Autobibliography, as if he wanted a break from hanging himself out to dry as the bad guy. But that only makes this slippery jeu d’esprit harder to pin down. Is Duka’s improbably storied narrative – the writer as action hero, a fantasy of literary celebrity – a comic riposte to the accusation that autofiction looks no further than its own navel? Whatever the case, I suspect some readers will hate it – but also that Doyle wouldn’t want it any other way.