Dreamhouse, by Alison Habens

What an odd book this is. And in the best possible sense. I came across it some time ago in a list made by Scott Pack of books that hadn’t attracted the attention they deserved – a subject dear to my bruised, neglected heart. I ordered it (a used copy – the novel is now out of print) and then forgot all about it until I was looking through a pile of unread books behind a sofa – yes, I’m that disorganised – and found it, dusty, slightly forlorn, with the tagline you can see in the picture to the left of this: “One of the best first novels to appear this year”, which, given its current status (on Amazon UK, 11 used from £0.01) occasioned a rush of sympathy and anxiety, and the tiniest, tiniest pinch of schadenfreude, disguised as authorly fellow-feeling. I popped it in my bag and started reading it that morning, on the train to work. And I’m very glad I did.

The book was published in 1996 but the mood of the opening pages took me further back, to the early work of Mike Leigh: wonderful television films like Nuts in May and Abigail’s Party, with their fascinated, unnerving and nerve-raw take on aspiration, usually represented by Alison Steadman (coincidence, surely?) The heroine of Dreamhouse is herself a Steadman-like figure called Celia whose lifetime ambition, to celebrate her forthcoming marriage by holding an engagement party, is about to be realised. Celia shares a house with three other people, two of whom, inconveniently, have decided to host their own parties the same evening. Unlike Celia, they live in a world where bottom drawers are less important than mind-altering substances and feminist cinema. What can possibly go wrong?

The premise is farcical, but also appalling, for Celia at least, and the novel develops both the horror and the farce as though there were no significant difference between the two. Which is rarely true in real life, but is certainly true in certain forms of art and recreational drug use. Habens skilfully yokes both to the chariot of her novel, which runs amok within the walls of the shared (dream)house as it transforms itself into an inverted wonderland. Alice’s descent, for example, is paralleled by Celia’s ascent as she climbs the stairs to the first floor. There, she finds herself in a themed fancy-dress party and it will surprise no one to learn that the theme is Alice in Wonderland. That Celia is dressed in an improbably old-fashioned pale blue dress and has long blonde hair only adds to the confusion. In one sense, the novel is driven by this sort of muddle and displacement, like the finest Feydeau. Who people might actually be becomes contingent on a host of externalities: dress, place, expectation. Even gender is called into play, as the novel fills with competing Alices of both sexes and Celia’s one true self, as much a mystery to her as it is to anyone else, is called upon to define itself.

Celia is an anagram of Alice (I hope this isn’t giving too much away – I’m slightly ashamed to admit that I didn’t cotton on to this myself but had to wait until I was told…) and Dreamhouse, in its disarmingly inventive way, is itself an anagram of Lewis Carroll‘s Alice books, their elements, or some of them, being taken up and rearranged with the casual disregard for identity, and logic, of the original works, and with all their wit and delight in wordplay multiplied tenfold. Because, for sheer linguistic exuberance, Habens gleefully outdoes her inspiration by weaving wordplay – puns, assonance, spoonerisms, half-rhymes – into the very stuff of the writing. Everything, from Carroll to Joyce via music hall innuendo, gets tumbled into the mix. Here’s an example:

‘Within a matter of minutes my trousers were terrified and trying to come off. I hurried to help her remove her dress too, frightened little bit of flimsy that it was, for she was bellowing “Get off! Get off!” at the bottom of her voice. But I couldn’t get the frock off fast enough for her; it was frozen with fear, and some of the bottons got pulled off in the panic. Well, by this time she was everywhere. She came at me with open legs. Her body was all over my hands. She rammed herself at my rod, so soft I thought she would swallow me up.

Linguistic high jinks but beneath the dazzle is the description of what might have been a rape; and once again, this disjunction – this arbitrariness, if you like, within the language itself – between what’s said and what’s meant is at the very heart of what’s going on. In the dreamhouse nothing is stable, least of all the subjects concerned, as their clothes, their limbs, their members begin to do their feeling for them. The final court scene, towards which everything converges both within the novel and in its status as parody and anagram of the Alice books, is an absolute joy, told with an hallucinatory energy that would have left the Victorian don reeling. But it’s also the point at which the world outside this ersatz drug-induced wonderland comes back into play. It’s a world on the brink of chaotic involution; the fact that Glenda Jackson appears at one point – to refute the notion of sexual crime as a crime against property rather than the person – only adds to the general feeling that something larger is about to break through, something more real than apparent, or less topsyturvy. Connections begin to be made. There’s a death, a real death…

At times, the energy of Dreamhouse is simply too much to absorb. Nothing, in the end,  is more exhausting than something that is itself inexhaustible. And for all its Aliceness, and its playful quizzical vigour, Habens’ novel is driven by something more than the final impossibility of defining what we mean by identity, and the fun this might produce. Like Tim Burton’s recent film based on the Alice books, it aims to do more and ends up doing slightly less. In both cases, it’s a question of narrative imperative being stronger than the kind of epistemological questioning Carroll engaged in. For all the visionary élan of Burton’s film, his need to simplify the story into good and evil plays against, and ultimately defuses, the gleeful relativism of the original books. In Habens’ case, the very real plight of Celia, of who she is and of what she might become, runs counter to the very procedures that give the novel its form, its charm, and its startling originality. In this sense, the novel is too rich a concoction for its own good; a concoction in which the parts of the book can begin to seem greater than the whole. But to say this is simply to recognise – and acknowledge - the book’s ambition, which is immense.

Whoops!

I accidentally published an unfinished review of Alison Habens’ novel Dreamhouse a couple of minutes ago. If you saw it, wipe it from your mind! The finished article is on its way…

One short blast on my trumpet

Some reviews are just too good not to share. This review of the title story of my collection, The Scent of Cinnamon, by writer and translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni, is one of them.

Bear with me.

Sarah Salway: An Appreciation

This is another one of those posts that starts off with a disclaimer, I’m afraid. I first met Sarah Salway a few months ago when she bought me lunch at Waterstones in Piccadilly, but we’d been in touch for a while before that, emails that covered a lot of shared ground and that gave me support when I most needed it, for which I’ll always be grateful. Any claims I might make to critical objectivity are therefore unlikely to be taken seriously, so I’ve decided to come clean and call this piece an appreciation, a flag-waving if you like, something that marks out an event and draws the attention of others to it. Because attention is what Sarah Salway deserves. Each of the three novels I’ve read by her is, in its own way, a startling and original piece of work.  Tell Me Everything, the second to be written, but the most recent to appear on the shelves in a spanking new edition from The Friday Project, is typical – if only in the counter-intuitive sense that it does something the others don’t.

Sarah’s good with titles, taking scraps of everyday language and holding them up to be looked at more closely, not entirely trusting them, certainly not at face value; it’s a technique she stretches to the limit within the books as well. Tell Me Everything is no exception. It’s an imperative, and it has a touch of threat but also a sense of wheedling. We’re asked to be told everything by inquisitors and by lovers, by children who can’t get to sleep and think we may have the magic word that will make that happen. We tell people everything because we trust them or because we’re afraid. But everything isn’t always synonymous with the truth. In the end, everything might just be the story that best fits the bill. Molly, the sixteen-year-old heroine and narrator of the novel, learns in the first few pages of the novel that stories have the power to change lives, often unpredictably, and that the people to whom they’re entrusted aren’t necessarily always worthy of that trust. What follows may look like a textbook case of unreliable narrator, but Sarah makes it more interesting, and less textbook, by letting us in on the secret, at least in part. Molly knows when she’s lying – the stories she tells have a very specific role to play in her new life, which depends on their ability to charm as much as Scheherazade’s once did. She’s making herself a new life by making up an old one. At the same time, her ability to see what’s happening around her is clouded by what parents tend to call an over-fertile imagination, as though that were possible. Everything is grist to the ever-grinding mill of Molly’s creative remodelling of the world as one story tumbles over, and changes the nature of, another. The best stories are often produced by withholding information, and that’s something else both Molly and her creator know full well. Everything, in other words, in its own good time. Even, as the last resort, the truth.

Molly has things in common with Verity, the narrator of Sarah’s first novel, Something Beginning With (another simple, and brilliantly apposite, title). She’s young (though not as young), looking for love, and friendship, and purpose. The basic material the novel draws on isn’t that far from the world of Bridget Jones, but the novel couldn’t be less like BJ’s Diary, or anyone else’s. Whatever the packaging might suggest (and Sarah was signally ill-served by her original UK publisher; the edition pictured here is, once again, published by the Friday Project), nothing could be less chick-lit(e) than this novel, from the epigraph by Barthes (“The alphabetical order erases everything, banishes every origin”) to the Reading Index at the end, which, like the book itself, is both playful and thoughtful. Barthes’ comment is relevant not only to this novel (arranged, for those who haven’t read it, in alphabetical order), but also to the way in which Molly uses stories to cancel her past and start again. Stories, like the alphabet, find structure where otherwise no structure would exist. And there’s something arbitrary about both until they suddenly become natural. What makes this novel such a joy, among other qualities, is the fact that the story structure is woven so skilfully into the anti-narrative structure of the alphabet. The first three entries are Ambition, Ants and Attitude, the last three Zest, Zoology and Zzzz. Even better, these entries cross-reference to other entries further down or up the line. At the end of Attitude , the reader is invited to see Dreams, Impostor Syndrome, Wobbling. It’s hard to resist, and, finally, how you read the book depends on the kind of reader you are. Whatever you do, from the moment the choice is offered, you find yourself obeying Barthes’s injunction: ‘Cut! Resume the story in another way!’ Verity (and the irony of the name will not be lost, or side-stepped) is self-deluding and astute at the same time; like Molly she’s both the artificer and the victim of her fate. The structure of the book, so arbitrary on the surface and yet so subtle, also provides the sort of intimacy one might expect from a diary or letter, as though we were being enabled to watch the actual process of Verity’s making sense of things, or trying to, from the disparate scatter of objects she finds in her head. One of the unexpected bonuses of the book is the way its form allows what appear to be digressions: nostrils and weaning in Japan spring to mind  - in one sense the book looks like nothing but digression – and yet everything is pertinent, everything pulls its weight. Not a word – or letter – is wasted.

Sarah’s most recent novel, Getting the Picture, was first published last year. It’s an epistolary novel and makes more than a passing nod to one of its most illustrious predecessors, Les Liaisons dangereuses, not only in the epigraph, but thematically as well. Like Laclos’ great novel, it contains more than a simple exchange of letters (intimacies?) between two people. It’s an interesting form to choose, and it’s not hard to imagine – on the basis of Sarah’s earlier novels – the kind of fun that can be had with it, the possibility it offers of stories that fail to mesh, or that mesh all too well into something none of their tellers might have contemplated. Getting the picture is the hardest thing in the world to do when what we are is an integral part of that picture. It’s the old ethnological problem, but it’s intrinsic to the nature of story-telling as well, and the letter is – or was – perhaps the most basic unit of written story-telling available to us. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is the lengths to which Sarah takes this. Epistolary novels generally involve dialogue between two or more characters, but what this book contains, almost entirely, are letters that are never answered, often for very good reasons, or whose answers are concealed from the reader, only becoming visible through the filter of those who receive them, and respond, not always happily. This creates enormous scope for humour, misunderstanding and intrigue, all of which are exploited to the full. The book is a kaleidoscope of contiguous, closed elements that nonetheless play off – and with – one another, to comic and moving effect. The full picture, denied to the characters in the book, gradually comes into focus to its reader. There’s a gentle humour to some parts of the novel, and a genuine malevolence to others; and it isn’t always clear which is which. It’s the darkest of the three books, and not because it’s set in a residential care home; perhaps the darkness comes out most insistently, and creepily, in the book’s portrayal of obsessive love, something that – it occurs to me now – is at the anxious, over-eager and possibly unworthy heart of all three books’ main characters. Together, they’re a great achievement, as dense and light – and deceptive – as the perfect tiramisu.

All These Little Worlds

Volume Two of the new series of short story anthologies produced by The Fiction Desk is now available. Its name is All These Little Worlds and you really ought to buy a copy, if you haven’t already subscribed (the wiser option…). The fact that I have a story in this one, as I did in the first – and no, you can’t have too much of a good thing – means that I can’t do a proper review, so I’ll just say that the first review to arrive says the collection is even better than the first one. Here’s a taste of it:

All These Little Worlds doesn’t disappoint; it’s a more assured collection than its predecessor, with a set of funny and poignant stories that flag up the Fiction Desk series as one to keep an eye upon in the coming years.

Oh yes, and Scott Pack has some nice things to say about my contribution here.

The next volume will be out in the new year, which would make an annual subscription an ideal Christmas gift now, wouldn’t it?

The courage and loneliness of it

Vanessa Gebbie has taken time off from promoting her exceptional first novel, The Coward’s Tale, just published by Bloomsbury, to talk to me about Any Human Face, now out in a brand new paperback edition, with a picture of a mysterious young man and a baby blue Vespa on the cover, as well as a quote from the Daily Telegraph that I’ll leave you to read for yourselves. We talk about the book’s title and where it came from, the sense of corroboration one writer can give another, and loneliness, one of the central concerns of the book, and one that wasn’t planned in any way. But loneliness never is.

You can read what we both have to say here.

Iris Murdoch, The Flight from the Enchanter

There’s an Italian verb that doesn’t have a single-word equivalent in English. The verb is plagiare and the difficulty it presents to translators is all too evident when one looks at the alternative translations offered: borrow, crib, pirate, plagiarise. The word has all these meanings but it’s also used to describe the way one person can dominate another, determining their actions and controlling their lives to such an extent that they might be said to have no independent life at all. Plagio is recognised as a crime in Italian law, and it’s been used at various times to protect the weak from a state of virtual slavery and, less transparently and with more ideological intent, those deemed worthy of protection from the evil influence of cattivi maestri, usually defined as evil for sexual or political reasons. But it’s a hard thing to define in the end, and the line that separates charisma and plagio isn’t always that clear. Most of us have been fascinated by someone at one time or another, and felt the lure of that fascination as both enriching and demeaning, as an opening-out and a closing-in. In Story of O – to take a single example of the literature of masochism – these oppositions are folded into a seamless whole.

I’ve been thinking about plagio because I’ve recently finished reading The Flight from the Enchanter by Iris Murdoch, in the Penguin edition whose cover is reproduced here, which I’ve owned since the 1960s, and hadn’t read since then. It was odd to see how much of the book I remembered, odd to imagine the effect it must have had on me as a provincial schoolboy and to compare that book with the book I was reading now. Books have their own enchantment, and can take us over in ways that aren’t always beneficial, and I wonder how much the world this novel portrays – a world both recognisable and utterly foreign – helped shape the world I imagined I would find when I grew up and began to make my own life. In the opening chapter, a young woman called Annette – seen swinging from a chandelier in the cover illustration – walks out of her finishing school with the intention of educating herself. She tells the headmistress, I shall go out into the School of Life. Re-reading this, I found myself remembering entire scenes as though I’d read them yesterday. Other sections had the same effect; moving on I had the sensation that the the book, its arms wide open, was coming forward to meet me. I’m sure this is because the world it describes is the world I so fervently wanted to find myself a part of. A world of other-worldly academics and small magazines and unorthodox sexual relationships. A world in which the serpent – Mischa Fox – appears not only threatening but strangely vulnerable and guileless, as though knowledge, or whatever the enchantment might be, is both innocent and guilty. There’s a touch of Dorian Grey about it all, in a knowing post-Sartrean way, as though the portrait were as illusory as faith. A School of Life indeed.

Fox is the obvious enchanter and much of the novel is concerned with the flight from – and towards – him of most of the main characters, held in a web of their own and of Fox’s making, as anxious that others should be saved from it as they are to define their own distance and belonging. But there are so many other enchantments: the desire to crack a dead language that might have nothing finally to say but the routine business of a dead, perhaps ignoble world; the rented room in which two brothers make love to a young woman, daughter of a famous suffragette, while their mother slowly dies in the corner; the foolish, unrealisable ambitions of the brother of the woman, hopelessly tied to a review for which there is no future, whose only value lies in its resistance to Fox and his cunning, genuinely vulpine assistant, Calvin Blick; the anguish of a seamstress whose flight will be horribly interrupted and transformed, like that of Icarus, into fall. All of the characters are, in one way or another, enthralled and, inevitably, what enthrals can also, and often does, lead to disaster. But to be disenchanted is to lose faith, is to be free, and that’s something Murdoch’s characters can’t quite accept either, however genuinely threatened they might be. Their achievement of the good, in some cases, isn’t just hard-won; it also rings slightly false, as though they suspect they’ve been sold a pup.

As I do. Because, second time round, the novel strikes me as being oddly bloodless, the characters, for all their variety and charm, little more than marionettes in the hands of a very able puppet-mistress. And it’s striking that the winds of menace - alluring and chilling – should blow so resolutely from the east until one remembers that the novel was first published in 1956, the year of the brutally suppressed revolution in Hungary, and only four years after Murdoch left the Communist Party for the second time, the first time, in 1942, being for purely professional reasons. The social details, the factory in which Rosa works, for example, are creakily unreal, as is the Kafka-with-water government ministry in which another character struggles to maintain his position against the wiles of his young assistant. There’s an overwhelming sense of the novel as intellectual construct that surely wasn’t there when it was written, over fifty years ago, a construct that hovers on farce and is, occasionally, rather nasty. The suicide of one of its minor characters is particularly chilling, for all its expectedness. Which is not to say, of course, that the book has no value. It’s a novel that absolutely repays the effort, and pleasure, of reading it. But what it says may no longer be what its author hoped it would say. In the world of Goldman Sachs and Rupert Murdoch, and Silvio Berlusconi, Mischa Fox seems endearingly small fry. It’s hard to imagine anyone being plagiato by a man of his charm, or damaged by the ruthless and unpredictable charm of his wealth. And there’s something about the book that reminds me, although it probably shouldn’t, of Gabriel Josipovici’s small masterpiece, Only Joking, if only because the world the latter describes also has something about it of artifice, and of attention to a sort of reckless playfulness that was modernist then and that, in these post-modern days, still has something to say that’s both menacing and comic.