Making an impact
James Walton
ZIG ZAG by Lucy Robertson Doubleday, £13.99, pp. 204 The plot of Lucy Robertson's first novel is a simple one. Zag is born in late Forties Cornwall. Her mother immediately devel- ops incontinence and dementia, her father goes off to Kenya and is fatally bitten by a snake. Zag and brother Zig are then brought up by a traditionally repressed spinster, and while Zig is sent away to board, Zag is educated at local schools where she is regularly nailed to toilet doors by the other girls. The two siblings then head for Kenya themselves. Zag has a night of passion with a 'native', is ostracised by the other Brits there, and returns home when her letter to her guardian requesting the money Zig owes a local pimp causes the old lady to drop dead. Zag duly collects her inheritance, returns to Kenya and sleeps with her newly affianced brother. The book ends.
Verse
When everything important is going to pot it might be a good thing that verse is not (important I mean), to those who matter, keeps healthy and slim, sees others fatter.
Verse has a way of not giving a hoot for the economic forecast and the ten gun salute.
May it go on forever not wasting ink on what our betters expect us to think.
Alan Dixon
If this précis suggests a novel for which `overstated' would be an understatement, it can give no indication of quite how exces- sive the whole thing is. Robertson is clearly suffering from an ailment common in liter- ary debutantes: the obsessive desire to Make an Impact, with its unmistakable symptoms of irritation of the reader, purple patches all over the prose, and occasional bouts of hysteria. It infects every part of her writing.
For a start, there's the morbid addiction to adjectives. Many of Robertson's nouns have four apiece, though her preference is for two. A typical sentence thus reads, `They would briefly rest their pale, warm hands or their dry, powdery lips on my cross, sweaty forehead.' After a few pages, the reader is gasping for an unadorned noun. Instead, Robertson is experimenting with increasingly destructive descriptive combinations. She is especially drawn to alliterative and para-rhyming forms, even if these don't make sense (`that haunted, hunted house') and a push-over for any- thing tautological: 'humble deference', 'peaceful tranquillity' and 'gauche clumsi- ness' all occur in the space of a few charac- teristic pages, for example, to be quickly followed by the cunning triple repetition of `banal and meaningless small-talk'. The characters, from the 'crabbed, crotchety' guardian to the 'golden, glorious' brother, above all the expats in Kenya (mostly 'dour, sour' apart from the 'fragrant and flower-like' Arabella) are never more than bundles of such epithets, whom the reader must flesh out from the many other books, plays and films in which they have appeared.
Over-writing also undermines both Robertson's ironising (the sledgehammer attack on the British colonials has a satiri- cal impact considerably less than that of Cany On Up the Khyber) and her argu- ments for life's essential cruelty: by the time an old woman's corpse has had its face chewed off by cats, Zig Zag has already provided almost as many grisly, deadpan deaths as Evelyn Waugh's entire canon, and it's only page 33. Finally, the incest scene at the end fits in with nothing that has gone before and seems to represent simply one last despairing attempt to Make an Impact while there's still time.
The effect of all of this is that a novel which seeks to be colourful, finishes up being merely lurid. Its relentless misan- thropy consequently fails to disturb and reads less as a savage indictment of All of Us, than as a bit of a whinge, in which the only genuinely troubling question raised is 'Hasn't Doubleday got an editor or some- thing?' Perhaps there are glimpses of an energetic talent buried somewhere here, but they remain just glimpses. If Zig Zag were the school composition it so often resembles, it would undoubtedly be returned with 'Must try less hard' written at the bottom.
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