Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish,” says Shakespeare’s Mark Antony. Countless parents have turned two fried eggs and a sausage into a smiley-face breakfast. Both are testifying to a remarkable human capacity to see symbolically, one that is affirmed every time a Scotsman in a kilt knows not to go to the ladies’ loo, despite the hieroglyph on the door.
Seeing symbolically is a necessary part of being human and, like everything necessary, it can go wildly wrong. The central character of Graham Rawle’s effervescent and kindly new novel doesn’t suffer from a failure of this capacity, but from its hyperactivity. The technical term is apophenia: seeing connections and resemblances and significance in random data.
Riley Richardson, the protagonist of The Card, does not think of himself as a sufferer and part of the novel’s charm is its refusal to pathologise him. At the outset he is writing an article for Card Collector Monthly about a card — No 19 in the 1967 Mission Impossible Chad Chewing Gum series — so rare its very existence has been doubted. It has been suggested that the card was deliberately never made to encourage collectors to keep buying packs in search of it.
It soon becomes clear that an obsession with collecting is only one of Riley’s quirks: he prefers to eat meals where each item begins with the same letter (“Last night it was Turkey and Tinned Tomatoes on Toast with Tiramisu. You can get some terrible combinations,” he says). He is inordinately proud that his cousin is Barry Manilow.
The engine of the narrative is two seemingly or actually disconnected events. A man who bears a resemblance to actor Peter Graves — Jim Phelps from Mission: Impossible — drops a playing card, the queen of hearts, in front of Riley. Then Riley gets caught up in a crowd waiting for Diana, Princess of Wales, to visit a hospice. When he starts to find other cards, Riley discerns a message: he is being recruited to prevent the Princess from being assassinated.
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Rawle balances the comedy and pathos of Riley with precision. Although comparisons will probably be drawn to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Rawle seems more akin to the French Oulipo writers, such as Georges Perec and Raymond Queneau.The novel both indulges and resists the desire to see connections in everything, with its icons in the margin — an italic x when an autograph occurs, a grey circle for grey-haired men. A reader so minded can spend a merry afternoon trying to untangle the exact significance of the equals sign or the black triangle.
Experimental literature such as The Card is sometimes unfairly caricatured as a soulless, cerebral crossword puzzle. Like his previous novel, the astonishing Woman’s World, compiled entirely from quotations taken from 1950s women’s magazines, The Card is as emotionally affecting as it is intellectually nimble. Rawle provides a telling and moving reason for Riley’s desire to taxonomise and interlace the world. His innocence may be mocked, but it is also profoundly open-hearted. Riley might not get to play the espionage hero, but he becomes the hero of his own life. His quest might not turn out as he imagines it, but it is nevertheless a quest.
Rawle’s designs for the cards that Riley finds are, as one would expect from an illustrator of his calibre, little joys in their own right. To be in Riley’s mind, a place where the fact that Barry Manilow is an anagram of Library Woman is meaningful, is a strange privilege. The world may be arbitrary, contingent and ungraspable, but The Card insists that the ability to turn it into a story is a minor miracle.
The Card by Graham Rawle, Atlantic, 336pp £16.99. To buy this book for £14.99 visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 08452712134