Issue 7

Now It’s Time To Say Goodbye by Dale Peck: Farrar, Strous and Giroux (US) May 1998

The author says in his dedication: "I wouldn’t wish this book on anyone." The reader can’t say he wasn’t warned. Peck (Fucking Martin 1993; Law of Enclosures 1996) has written a post-modern psychological thriller (as it’s touted) that is structured in good part around what’s not said and what we don’t learn about the protagonists. ". . . people don’t want to know the truth. They just want a explanation, and a end to things" (sic), says the town sheriff; and Peck, seizing on this thesis, is hell bent on denying the reader that satisfaction. It’s a clever ploy. If you’re left griping about the loose ends and the pointlessness of it all, then you fall under the sheriff’s critical observation that the average bloke wants only a clear "explanation." Point taken. Clever. But what else is going on in this "thriller" and is it worth the 458-page effort?

The narrative centers around the 45-year-old, rich and sophisticated writer Colin Nieman and his young lover, Justin Time (a pet name based on we never know what). They flee New York when the number of friends and lovers who have died from AIDS hits 500, and settle in a small, racially segregated Kansas town. The white half (Galatea) is dominated by the ambitious and manipulative middle-aged belle from Georgia, Rosemary Krebs. The black half (Galatia) by Reverend Abraham Greeving. White males Colin and Justin rent a limestone house from Rosemary, but their closest acquaintance is Wade Painter, a painter, and Wade’s main subject and amour, the pretty, black, street-smart boy, Divine. Webbie Greeving, who almost graduated from Columbia but had to return to Galatia to tend to her father, the Reverend, also hangs around the circle. Lawman Brown is the slow-witted town sheriff (white). Also white are Myra Robinson and her teenage daughter Lucy. All these characters and more have a voice in the novel - though not so distinct from each other as one would like.

The suspense begins when teenage Lucy goes missing (not that the reader gives a damn - she never seems real). The two gay newcomers are immediately suspect, a predicament not helped by the fact that Justin had been with her at the time of her abduction; and that the dark, menacing character (undoubtedly the culprit) is glimpsed more than once wearing Colin’s greatcoat and boots. Other mysterious occurrences have taken place as well: Local guy Eddie Comedy was found dead in his truck, a bullet through his head. Black man Melvin Cartwright has just left town. So have a couple other men. Slowly, the mystery unfolds as the town’s dark history comes to light. The key figure is albino Eric Johnson, the "white nigger," who was supposedly lynched for having "touched" seven-year-old Lucy, but who we suspect is lurking around town like Jason out of Halloween. And someone is lurking because Lucy’s severed fingertips turn up in the mail. The mystery gets resolved after a fashion (in a murky, totally illogical manner), but the haphazard plotting is annoying and the ending (as well as much of the novel) is simply dumb. The characters never fully develop (drifter Rosetta Stone refuses to talk of her dark past - ever; huge chucks of the protagonists’ past is left unmentioned; and there are a few small-town stereotypes to boot ); and - as I’m sure the author didn’t intend - the setting is not memorable.

Peck seems to try to balance his post-modern style and approach with the genre of thriller. Doesn’t work. (Rare example of where this does succeed is Rupert Thomson’s 1995 novel The Insult.) For those who enjoy a good thriller, the novel falls flat for lack of fulfilling that genre’s prime criteria (and most genres for that matter): a believable plot (difficult here) and, most importantly, a satisfactory denouement. For those who can forego the need for clear, even semi-logical explanations in hopes of gaining some deeper insight into, say, the creative process (another oblique theme) or whatever else the novel might spew up, then there are myriads of elliptical avenues to explore. But to return to the question, is it worth it? I’d have to say no, because - worst failing of all - this book is tedious. The lengthy, overwritten and overblown story - now and then with a big part of the puzzle filled in just for a tease - becomes too much of a tease in its own right. It’s bold and ambitious in its aim, and Peck can write, as he’s shown in his first two novels, but this one’s a big, fat turkey. J.A.

Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters: Virago (UK) 1998

Tipping the Velvet is a long, sprawling lesbian novel set in the early 1890s in and around London. It follows the coming of age of its first-person narrator, Nancy Astley, from her girlhood in Whitstable working in the family’s oyster-house business to her career in the music halls of London as a "masher" (performing in men’s clothes) on to a brief career as a "renter" (working as a rent boy in her theater attire) on to a period of being "kept" by the wealthy Diana Lethaby for the sole purpose of giving her pleasure, and ending finally in a solid and healthy lesbian romance with a socialist activist. It is Dickensian in its epic sweep with a full cast of odd characters, and in fact reads much like the 19th-century novel it purports to be. It is, simply, a picaresque tale (Moll Flanders and Tom Jones come to mind as well) of a plucky young lesbian trying to make it on her own, moving from one adventure to another before finding love and happiness just next door.

There’s sex aplenty, too. Nancy’s first love is the masher Kitty, first seen playing the small-town halls in Whitstable where Nancy forms a crush on her. Kitty hires Nancy as her dresser and soon the two travel to London, sleeping together in a narrow bed where they come - and come - to know each other intimately. Kitty doesn’t want their relationship to be known, however, and goes so far as to marry their manager. Nancy flees in distress and puts in her time as rent-boy (delightfully decadent passages, these) before being picked up by the wealthy and manipulative Diana to be used as her toy "boy." Nancy must strap on a leather dildo and do her duty which she wholeheartedly - and expertly - performs. Diana’s circle of lesbian friends who meet at the posh Cavendish Ladies’ Club present quite a picture. When Diana introduces her "boy" Nancy, dressed beautifully in her boy’s attire with her short-cropped hair, the ladies are fascinated - though one fussy "tom," Miss Bruce, objects to the male costume and Nancy must dress more as they do, which in many cases is mannish but not the full monty: take Dickie with her monocle and her "boiled shirt and bow tie." These ladies sit around smoking, reading newspapers, gossiping and working on the suffrage issue. They’re out of touch with street-smart Nancy and the lower classes, whom they tend to look down on even while pursuing their feminist causes. Nancy finally stands up to her Sapphic master, gets thrown out of her prison of a palace, and moves on to find real love - and lots more sex - with a plain-looking social activist   who introduces her to a new lezzie crowd at the dockyard saloon (tattooed pool players and fun-loving working class females). The whole wild cast meet up at a socialist rally (seems most of the female socialists are lesbian) and all is resolved to satisfaction. The author’s contemporary imprint is seen in the refreshingly open attitude to lesbianism and the explicit lesbian sex. The novel is a bit long and drags at first - my biggest complaint - but it picks up and develops into a fun, racy romp of a read, giving a backstreet, late-19th century portrait of London - with nice period details - such as you'll never enounter in Dickens. J.A.

Personal Demons by Christopher Fowler (short stories): Serpent’s Tail 1998

Obscure 80s English rock band The Dancing Did used to fuse history and nature in their songs about rural England, creating the image that the country and its countryside formed an entity that can get pretty nasty with we humans. Christopher Fowler also hints at the same theme in his horror/thriller novels like Psychoville and especially Disturbia, but in place of the Did’s dying countryside he uses a ‘dying old lady’ called London. London appears or is mentioned in just about every one of these 17 stories with "Unforgotten" proving there is still a fight in the old girl yet. Maybe this Englishness is the reason Americans have called his work "quirky" but it is more likely that Fowler earned that adjective by not following the conventions of horror writing, and after reading this collection and a novel or two it is quite hard to actually pigeon-hole the author. The stories appear in chronological order with a wonderful dig at horror conventions as well as a thought or two about ‘author as God’ wrapping the collection together at the end. On the way there  we meet Spanky - the title of Fowler’s fifth book - who is one of the fallen angels, trying to get back into heaven ("Spanky’s Back in Town"). The familiar name Jonathan Harker appears in a wonderfully intelligent and funny, lost Bram Stoker ‘Dracula’ manuscript ("Dracula’s Library"). Brett Ellis, another familiar name, appears as a yuppie doomed to be one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ("Phoenix"). We also meet Judy Merrrigan, a character in the forthcoming novel Soho Black, who gets involved with a sort of Greekish deity that evokes memories of Fowles’ The Magus ("Midas Touch"). For those of you who work in an intelligent building that keeps you all warm and secure, really panic if the fire alarms go off! ("Wage Slaves"). Fowler says that he rarely writes "anything as dark as the real lives we lead" and two good examples would be the soccer/wife beating "Permanent Fixture" and the dog/flat sitting "Looking for Bolivar." There is no information on previous publications but one or two have been published elsewhere. "Armies of the Heart," a kind of ‘Jesus-died-for-somebody’s-sins’ tale, was in Love in Vein 11 and, "Inner Fire," a science fiction story of a frozen London, was in another anthology. All in all a very good, representative collection of stories by a writer who still has a day job...not bad! MGS

     Christopher Fowler in the Barcelona Review:
     Short story Home Again
     Interview: Christopher Fowler, A Very Personal Demon
     His biography also makes interesting reading.
     Review of Disturbia.

Billy Dead by Lisa Reardon: Viking 1998

The good thing about reading a manuscript is that there are no cover blurbs or reviews to prefigure the story. Billy Dead’s very tight beginning introduces us to first-person narrator, uneducated Ray Johnson, learning that his wife-beating, town-thug brother Billy has been murdered by someone who "must have been meaner than him". But if the reader were expecting a brother-looking-for-revenge type thriller to follow then their expectations have already been dashed by the odd behaviour of Ray who, well, not only hears animals talk and whistle - a bug and a raccoon will help him ‘find’ Billy’s killer - but can even hear the pain of an ice cube cracking in a drink. His behaviour becomes a little more disturbed with the arrival of "The only person in the world who scares me more than my brother.." - his little sister Jean: and then the reader realises that Ray and Jean have had an incestuous relationship. The story covers just the few days from murder to funeral but it is Ray’s thoughts as he slowly remembers his childhood with Billy and Jean - of all the sad sickness, abuse and torture that went on in his formative years - that is the backbone of the book. As his memories unravel the darkness of his sorry family saga, Ray also starts to unravel and 10 years of suppression and frustration come to the surface, along with the fact he actually misses his revolting sibling Billy. It is a delicate web that Reardon spins and I wouldn’t want to break the thread by giving any more of the plot away. Incest (the word appears once in the book) and child abuse play a big part in the novel and Reardon will get some flak from certain quarters but in no way is she trying to be sensationalist:   this book is not written to titillate. It is a story where there is no dividing line between love and hate; it is about ignorance, poverty, domestic violence and profound love.... and the destruction and resurrection of family. It is complex, harrowing, sad, and at times very funny - an exceptional debut novel. MGS

At Home With The Marquis De Sade: A Life by Francine du Plessix Gray: Simon & Schuster due out 1998

Just what it says it is, this life of De Sade takes us behind the doors and into the private world of the man who prompted psychiatrist Kraft-Ebbing to coin the term "sadism" in 1882. Interestingly, sadism was a minor feature of De Sade’s deviances. He was, we learn, as much a masochist as a sadist in the boudoir - asking to be whipped before he did the whipping - and preferring above all to be farted on by his prostitutes before engaging in anal intercourse. Born in 1740 Paris, De Sade’s mother was a governess and lady-in-waiting to Prince Condé. At age four the child De Sade threw a temper tantrum at the slightly older Condé and was sent away to his doting grandmother in Avignon - the first of his many banishments. He then went on to spend time in Jesuit schools where the students endured regular floggings by their preceptors as a matter of course and where sodomy was common practice: all combining to form De Sade’s character, as the author convincingly argues.

After a stint in the army he married the plain and ungraceful Pélagie Montreuil, daughter of the bright and highly ambitious Madame Montreuil, whose family had money but no familial link to the aristocracy. Mm Montreuil at first excused the sexual forays of her son-in-law, but eventually turned against him and plagued De Sade for the rest of his life. He and his wife, interestingly, got on well. It is speculated that De Sade awakened a passion in her that remained until their separation many years later when she rejected him in an about face as absolute as the fervor of her previous devotion.

De Sade preferred living on his estates in the Provence area rather than cavorting with Louis XV’s court in Paris and Versailles - one reason he became the media target he did. In his chateau in La Coste he enjoyed his own domain and the feudal rights he had over its villagers, whom he looked upon, quite literally, as serfs. While ensconced here - his mother-in-law raised his three children in Paris - he made excursions to Marseille and its environs where he kept "rented houses" for the purpose of extra-marital sex, as was the accepted fashion. But several incidents landed him in trouble: prostitutes didn’t liked being whipped - at least one we know was whipped quite badly - nor were they keen on sodomy or his "coprophilic perversions." Plus his near epileptic fits during orgasm scared the hell out of them. Depositions were filed and the pre-Republic parlement system, frustrated in their failure to make a dent in the power of the crown, were all too happy to vent their anger on a vulnerable member of depraved nobility. De Sade found himself in and out of prison for the rest of his life where he wrote his "pornographic" novels - Justine and Juliette and numerous other works. Bizarre as it seems - chalk it up to his megalomania - every time he was released he immediately set off to get himself into another scrape. In Marseille he fed Spanish fly to two prostitutes covered with anise "to increase flatulence." They were so ill that they accused De Sade of poisoning which landed him again in jail. Not long after this release, he and his wife hired an entire new staff of nubile young girls to live with them at La Coste. What followed were six weeks of debauchery, probably involving sodomistic "daisy chains" (the valet accommodated De Sade) which only ended when word leaked out in the village and the parents of some of the girls filed charges. A thirteen-year prison term followed. He was released after the fall of the Bastille, where he had recently been incarcerated, and went on to hold a minor position in the new National Assembly until Robespierre turned on all atheists and had De Sade thrown in prison yet again. Freed after the fall of Robespierre, his family - meaning his mother-in-law - had him committed to a mental asylum where he spent the remainder of his years, often conducting lavish theatrical productions with the inmates, which were open to the public.

The author brings De Sade vividly to life, recounting everyday details, much based on letters to his wife. We know he grew tremendously fat in prison and it is understandable when we read his letters to Pélagie demanding truffles, chocolates, jams, cakes "glazed on both side," and all sorts of gourmet goodies which she could hardly afford, De Sade having bankrupted them, but which she tried to supply. He was also allowed tailored clothes and a valet - hardly the roughest of incarcerations! - while Pélagie was reduced to meager lodgings in a convent. The historical background which takes us all through the fall of Napoleon is, too, mainly captured in the everyday details and personal touches, such as Louis XVI’s distress over his debilitatingly tight foreskin. At times the author appears over-sympathtic to her subject - referring to a particularly abusive incident later as a "frolick" - but overall it is a well-written, well-researched, highly vivid account of a man who suffered, so we conclude, from an astonishing case of arrested development - for which his name would be a more apt eponym. J.A.