"Demons are forever" by Morton R Leader

A book about four lads and three ladettes set in the pubs of Northampton. 

The men are as shallow as they come, motivated principally by the chance of having sex. The girls are little deeper. As the relationships develop, we begin to understand more. Of the girls: Jill has a gambling problem, Jo is scarred by the unsolved murder of her twin, and Kaz has been having an affair with a married man she works with. The boys also have issues: Paul is terrified that if he loses control he might be violent, Ian is a control freak, and Oliver is into women's underwear and rather fancies his girlfriend's young daughter while at the same time being furiously horrified at the thought of 'kiddy fiddlers'.

It is a portrait of a section of society whose life revolves around birds and booze. I was reminded of, for example, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe; there are too few books nowadays that deal with this version of real life. It is a brave endeavour, because the thoughts of the characters would not at all be acceptable to more politically-correct readers: "he smiled thinking they could be out one night and he would know what Ian’s skinny bint had on under her jeans, that amused him." (Ch 12). Stuff like this can be challenging to read, but I knew characters such as these when, in my youth and before the time of the story, I drank in the pubs in Northampton. appreciated the author's raw honesty.

If the context of drinking beer in the midlands reminded me of Sillitoe, the stream-of-consciousness approach to the prose reminded me of Ulysses by James Joyce (with Dublin becoming Northampton). The author simulates the often-incoherent nature of though with sentences and paragraphs where the end has little relation to the start. To give a not-atypical example: "Oliver decided to have a shower after he had been to the toilet, better warn Billing he thought as he double flushed the toilet, laughing at the local joke. As he washed his body he thought of Jill downstairs, what was she buying?  She had a cracking body, he rethought should he have offered to get some for Cassy. This thought made him start to get erect, what was he doing? Downstairs was the fittest bird he had ever been with and here he was cracking one out in her shower. Too late he came before the guilt had kicked in, never mind they never had sex on a Wednesday anyway, he convinced himself." In a single paragraph we move from excretion to cleansing to masturbation whilst tangentially touching on Jill (who is downstairs gambling with Olver's money) and Cassy (Jill's daughter, whom Oliver fancies). Another example in which only a single sentence is used, is: "The balls on this guy, she couldn’t believe it, I mean she obviously missed him, they had been seeing each other for years but the cheek of him, one Sunday not at his beck and call and he sulked off, in all fairness that wasn’t like him, he was usually charming, wait what was she thinking, stop sticking up for him." 

I think this was an interesting attempt to reconstruct the thought processes of the characters and the author's use of the vernacular was faultless. But Joyce concentrated on only three main characters in a much longer book and even Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, in which the inner dialogues play a sort of tag, hopping from one head into another, has only a very few principals. This author attempted to get inside the thoughts of seven characters; I'm not sure this was wholly successful.

It was also interesting that, although we effectively resolved one storyline, rather brutally, and mostly sorted out what was happening between Oliver and Jill, the Ian-Kaz story was left wide open. 

Selected quotes:

• "you knew you were getting old when your gusset was now bigger than your knickers used to be!" (Ch 2)
• "The car was way too big for her driving talent, so she struggled to park" (Ch 2)

May 2022

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Gigi" by Colette

Gigi is half way between a short story and a novelette; I read it is a slim volume where it was paired with Colette's The Cat. Gigi was made into a musical film by Lerner and Lowe, who were also responsible for My Fair Lady; there basic theme of older man moulding and perhaps manipulating a younger girl, who then turns out to be stronger and more moral than he is, are obvious.

Fifteen year old Gigi is the daughter of a minor music-hall singer. Her grandmother and her great aunt, both one time members of the demi-monde, are trying to groom Gig to be a successful courtesan. But what Gaston, heir to a fortune in sugar, loves about Gigi is how natural she is.

For me, the most interesting thing about this story was the ruthless cynicism of the grandmother (now poor) and the great aunt (living off the fabulous diamonds and emeralds she acquired) as they educate this child into how to be a lady so that she can command a higher price.

Colette creates some wonderful characters with a few sure strokes of her pen. She also gives us some wonderful epigrams (although there was a moment when I felt that she was trying too hard to out Wilde Wilde):

• "The heron-like legs of a girl of fifteen" (p 7)
• "'But Grandmamma, I've got on my drawers and my petticoat.' 'Drawers are one thing, decorum is another.'" (p 8)
• "'Can't you ever manage to keep your legs together?'" (p 9)
• "'The three great stumbling-blocks in a girl's education, she says, are homard a l'Americaine, a boiled egg, and asparagus. Shoddy table manners, she says, have broken up many a happy home.'" (p 15)
• "Calling people and things by their names has never done anyone any good." (p 22)
• "For a woman, attention to the lower parts is the first law of self-respect." (p 24)
• "The telephone is of real use only to important businessmen, or to women who have something to hide." (p 26)

A lovely story but it rather left me wondering what people saw in Colette. I preferred the far less well known but, to my mind, infinitely better, The Cat.

September 2016; 50 pages

Other works by French authors reviewed in this blog can be found here

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God