Extravaganza
Paul Ableman
The Bad Sister Emma Tennant (Gollancz £4.95)
'Tony's mother was sitting in the flat, on the sofa where Tony and I sit as far apart as Martians . . ' Do Martians sit far apart? Probably Jane Wild, fictitious narrator of Emma Tennant's new novel means that she and her boy-friend sit as far apart as an Earthman and a Martian would sit if there were any Martians and assuming mutual revulsion. Here again we have the problem of whether authors can be charged with the lapses of their creations. I say they can. The duty of any novelist is to produce clear prose with imagery that runs at least on Coleridge's maximum of three legs. Most of Jane's images barely hop on one. The only convincing defence against the charge of sloppy writing open to an author using a first person narrator who writes sloppily is for that narrator's voice to be consistent and convincing. Jane's isn't. It veers all over the shop, from would-be rich, beautiful prose to slummy vernacular when Emma Tennant remembers that her creation is supposed to be the illegitimate daughter of a forlorn Irish immigrant girl debauched by the lord of the manor. Jane, by miraculous processes of cultural assimilation which are never specified by the author, becomes a highlysophisticated film critic and vampire about town.
Possibly Emma Tennant firmly believes in ghosts, witches, warlocks and vampires but her book gives the impression of being a hastily-assembled farrago aimed at exploiting the lamentable modern flight from reason. The plot defies summary or even comprehension. But, as far as an attentive reading and copious note-taking will allow, here goes.
Michael Dalzell, a highland laird, impregnates a shop girl shortly before his marriage to a more suitable lady. Instead of lapsing into street whoredom in the approved Victorian fashion, the abused female brings her daughter, and a pack of demonic women, lead by the furious Meg, to live on the laird's estate where he glumly puts up with them for no very good reason. His bastard and legitimate daughters attend the same village school and throw stones at each other. Then Dalzell gambles away his money, loses his estate, inherits more money and moves to a fine house in dear old Hampstead. There his illegitimate daughter, Jane, metamorphosed into a cultured film critic, shoots him, mystically egged on by Meg who has conjured up a character called Gil-martin, originally invented by James Hogg, the Scottish novelist, to further her machinations. The illegitimate
daughter takes up with effete Tony, alleged to be an ace script-writer, and has a rotten time with her mother-in-law. Now confusion becomes indecipherably inspissated. Tony has a mistress called Miranda whom Jane, in her supernaturally befuddled state, assimilates to Ishbel (many of the names are redolent of black magic) her half-sister and decides to hand over to Meg for disposal. To prepare herself, she allows Meg to drink her blood. Then she tricks Miranda into going to a fancy-dress party where she traps her in a secret room and gulps her blood. She and her friend, Gala, a sculptor, then lug the empty to Meg in a taxi, presumably one of those licensed by the GLC for the conveyance of vampires and their victims. Jane, very properly, ends up on a Scottish moor with a stake through her heart.
Various devices are used to create some semblance of verisimilitude. The book opens with a forty-page preface, dated 1986, by an alleged media-personality and student of the famous murder case, supposedly giving an objective account of the affair and its curious aspects. He tells us that 'until recently. . . police photographs of the corpses, and bewildered statements from friends of the family have been all the evidente available'. But now 'a strange document . . has come to light'. This is Jane's confession, which forms the bulk of the book, and it is strange indeed. Its strangeness, however, lies not in the spooky events it recounts but in the fact that Emma Tennant who, in her last book, Hotel de Dream, demonstrated an authority over satirical comedy rare in contemporary letters, could have perpetrated it. There are many things lacking in the present work — not least coherence, characterisation, continuity — but the most melancholy lack of all is the total absence of humour, at least conscious humour. All of Emma Tennant's previous books, with the possible exception of the first, written under a pseudonym, are funny-satirical phantasies. They show an increasing sureness of touch culminating in the authentically witty Hotel de Dream. Now the author, perhaps attempting to extend her range, has swerved abruptly from that prosperous avenue into the present jungle of Gothic extravaganza and here, hack as she will with the machete of language at the menacing growths, she seems unable to clear even a negotiable path. The language itself is garbled, pseudo-poetic and self-indulgent: 'The lack of him has chained the objects in this room to their places, and has stopped the clocks so Gala will never come, and has filled the world with somnambulists who turned the world upside down, walking themselves one-eyed, Cyclopean, seeing from the eye in the ass the mess they made of it all.'
This is sorry stuff after the cool crispness of the prose in Hotel de Dream. Emma Tennant should shoulder the burden of humour once more. She is far more convincing as a woman taking an amused look at contemporary mores than as a woman wailing for her demon lover. Henri Cartier-Bresson once said that it is impossible to photograph India: it is too picturesque. Anyone who has ever tried will know the feeling. And I was reminded of this, reading Anita Desai's delicately coinposed short stories, which convey at once the stifling clutter, the eccentricity and the strange private worlds in Indian life. There is an emblematic quality about some of the individuals you see wandering the Indian scene: the mad beggars, the musicians, the eternally harrassed students, which she catches and expands in her tales of people who withdraw into themselves, whose essential privateness is threatened by the teeming world outside. Attempts are made to, establish and preserve individuality:, a child plays hide-and-seek and is distressingly forgotten by his playmates, an old man lies dying, ministered to by his successful surgeon son, who will not allow him a natural uniqueness in death by his own instincts. 'God is calling me', he cries 'and they won't let me go'. A young student, swotting for exams, harrassed by family, Is changed by a kind of vision he sees in the park, a young girl and an old man, transfixed in a sculptural pose of their love; a shy company wife gives a leaving party for people she hardly knows, and retreats gratefully into her family. In two stories the same composition appears, supremely important to the central characters: a wife, kneading dough in a tiny kitchen, heavy hair, red border of a sari, a child playing with a long handled spoon beside her. As in all of the best writing, detail universalises. Jennifer Fitzwilliams's heroine, Mona, is going through the agonies of adolescence In a Scottish village. Told in a bare, gauche style, the incidents are unremarkable, but the understanding of the slightly grubbY emotional and physical life of a bright but misunderstood child, sensitive, sexually experienced, but utterly uncomprehending of the delicate physical and psychological pressures she's enduring, is skilful and sYin" pathe tic. IVIaeve Binchy's London tales are immensely readable and often very funnY. She has an apt ear for bed-sitter dialogue and dinner party horror. Stalwart girls have abortions, buy chicken pieces for supPert search desperately for flats, gossip in the office, bravely ditch unsatisfactorily deceitful married lovers. Female self-reliance, sad but chirpy, is breesily what it's all about and though there is some gothic staginess and fanciful plotting, there are moments of great insight, pleasure and fun. I laughed, as they say, out loud.
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