Casual Cruelty and Deep Unhappiness: The Mystery of Love

The Mystery of Love by Andrew Meehan

Head of Zeus

Pp. 247

Subtitled, Constance and Oscar: A Novel, this reads as if Constance has written it (but in omniscient third person) and Oscar has provided footnotes and comments from prison. Her tone is practical and her writing as in a diary, full of capitals and ampersands. His is flamboyant and full of criticism and narcissism, interrupting her story – as he must have done in life – by suddenly introducing his affair with Robbie as an entertaining anecdote rather than as an admission of adultery to his wife. Constance wants to escape from suffocating existence and sees marriage to Oscar as a way to do this; she is hoping for intimacy but is not blinded by his brilliance and comes to see him as two different people. She refers to OW, the performer, who is intense but exhausting, and Oscar, the man behind closed doors, whom she loves with all his frustrating imperfections. “Oh for goodness’ sake, she said. Clever people are such exhausting company. Thankfully you’re only clever in public. & if you’re here to propose marriage, let’s get on with it.”

Oscar’s mother, Lady Jane Wilde (LJW) knows her son is gay and that his relationship with Constance will be purely for show and for progeny. “The week before the wedding, LJW had invited her for dank tea in a darkened room &, if it were possible to be both cryptic & overly direct, had spoken at length about syphilis & the absence of a cure for it.” Later, Constance has occasion to remark about LJW and her unwanted opinions, “It was impossible to ever know if the woman was being helpful or just plain vicious.” Constance may not be swept up in romance, but she does want to change her life. It’s reminiscent of the relationship between Romeo and Juliet where he spouts the romantic poetry and she is keen to get on with the physical aspects. He seems more interested than her dress than her desires; her appearance rather than her appetites, so she tells him, “Sex isn’t everything, Oscar. But it is something.” She is aware that something might be missing from the relationship but does not question it too deeply at the beginning.

The single-minded need to have children and remove herself from her upbringing causes Constance to sacrifice many idealistic notions. “Better not to consider other weddings in the middle of your own. For this was a gathering with all the vivacity of a queue for meat pies.” Oscar doesn’t enjoy the sex, as she learns on her wedding night, “But it delighted her that he would put himself through something he didn’t enjoy just to please her. How could he bring himself to do something he hated? So many delights in one day. This was how she knew he loved her.” This unlikely prose reads like a man writing a woman who has never actually talked to a woman. Oscar’s foot notes describe how he tried to imagine something interesting when with her, in much the same way as he did when he masturbated, which is incredibly offensive considering OW is meant to have and empathy.

Constance and son, Cyril

Once Constance does have children, she discovers they are not the solution to providing happiness, and she doesn’t adore them as some might expect a mother would. “You couldn’t just squirt out child after child in the hope that it would make you feel better about yourself. What were children for? To make the days so very long as well as fraught with danger.”

Committed to the Rational Dress Movement, Constance is critical of restrictive women’s fashion. “Was it such a crime to be able to move your arm in what you wore? What if she would be required to bowl a ball or paint a picture? But her aunt would not be told that a crinoline was a fire hazard. & what if she were to fall under the wheels of a carriage? It was like walking around with a building attached to you.”

Rational Dress Society cartoon

Forgiveness and humility radiate from Constance, as she is persistent and determined to make things work. “Marriages don’t fail. The arrangements just change.” She has no rancour over her position as a woman publicly humiliated by her husband’s homosexual affair and imprisonment, and reflects, “Oscar is not a bad person. In the eyes of the law he behaved wrongly, & for one so clever he was certainly a bit dim to bring all this upon himself.”

The author tries to steer the reader away from pitying Constance her plight by suggesting that isn’t how she feels about herself and that she was never deluded. There is a myth about the wronged woman that he seeks to dispel with a touch too much protestation. Oscar’s final footnote is to comment, “For I have caused you so much pain & given the chance I would cause you more.” Despite trying to re-balance the narrative and claim the outsider knows nothing about the internal workings of a marriage, Meehan hasn’t imagined a particularly credible character and this remains a miserable book full of casual cruelty and deep unhappiness.

Macho Noir: Paint It Black

Paint It Black by Mark Timlin

Victor Gollancz

Pp. 256

Nick Sharman has been around for a while apparently; this is the eleventh novel in a series of nineteen and counting, starting in 1988 (this one was first published in 1995). He is the narrator of these novels about himself, a South London ex-policeman now private detective, in a world where women exist only to be rescued or revenged, and full of the sort of hard man dialogue and soulless quips that would even embarrass Guy Ritchie. But author, Mark Timlin, is very popular – one doesn’t publish nearly twenty books in a series without being – and reviewers consider him to provide an “answer to the hardboiled noir of 1940’s America, uprooted lock, stock, and barrel to the dingy back streets of 1980’s south London”. I suppose I didn’t realise anyone was asking the question.

Nick Sharman gets a call from his ex-wife Laura in Glasgow to tell him that their daughter, Paula, has gone missing. He and his wife, Dawn, track her down to a field in Banbury where she is with a bunch of travellers, having accompanied her friend, Paula. Paula is a ‘bad influence’ and they have taken drugs, but she has a heart of gold; yes the clichés are that obvious. At this point, he could simply take the girls back home, “The case of the private detective’s daughter webbed up in the rave scene has come to a satisfactory conclusion.” Of course he chooses instead to track down the dealers and blow up a shipment of their drugs. They take their revenge by killing Dawn and their unborn child. He then retaliates in a plan that goes horribly wrong but involves a lot of killing, guns and explosives.

Ah yes, the guns. Timlin loves sex, violence, cars and travel routes. He describes ammunition as though it were a fashion accessory. He does love his detail – desperate to prove his tough-guy credentials like something out of a bad Ross Kemp documentary. He enjoys deadpan wisecracks; when he arrives at a secret location and is told, “We’re here”, he replies, “Everybody’s got be somewhere” as if that means something deep. 

When he gets onto his obsession with cars and directions, however, he sounds more like a boring salesman at an unspeakably tedious conference team-building dinner. “We got back into the Mondeo and took off down the secondary road in what I guessed to be a southerly direction for a few miles until we came to a village called Frating Green, where the A133 bisected the B1029, and we swapped cars again. I found a Volkswagen Golf GTI neatly parked on a grass verge, whose doors opened to my hoister’s key.”

And then there’s the bit where, despite the fact he has a teenage daughter whom he apparently adores, he still has sex with her friend, Paula, after she has specifically told him she is fifteen. “I had my arms full of a tiny, slippery little female who wanted a fuck. So I gave her one. Right or wrong, that’s what I did. And I enjoyed it, and so did she.” That is statutory rape; there is no question about this – it’s wrong.

There is clearly a market for this macho storytelling. It is a market that doesn’t get irony, and probably thinks that giving women their rights is as bad as giving them credible characterisation in a novel. This novel was published 25 years ago; that (fortunately) feels like a lifetime.

Friday Five: Non-competitive pursuits

I think it's fair to say that I don't like reality TV. I have mentioned this before. One of my least favourite sub-genres is the competition variety. You know the type of thing, where people are pitted against each other to paint a room or build a wall and then someone wins and everyone at home thinks they could have done the same and the real decorators and stonemasons go out of business while general standards plummet.

Although I like the celebrity dancing ones (especially the ice-dancing one), I know I am no expert. This is not true of the people who routinely watch the singing shows and then feel free to critique performances about which they know nothing. It also means that we are left with chanteurs who think that to belt and warble is the epitome of 'singing' and we are left without subtlety, nuance or character. Bob Dylan or Florence Welch wouldn't make it through the first round.

With performance and artistic pursuits, a lot is left to personal preference - A might like sci-fi or farce; B might prefer romance or Jacobean drama; C might swoon at ballet and metaphysical poetry and so on. It doesn't mean any one is 'better' than the other - it just means they shouldn't be judged against each other. In 'pure' sport if you run fastest, jump highest or throw something furthest, you win. You are the best at that particular thing. Don't get me wrong, some things lend themselves to competition and this is a good thing (not keeping the score during football games because 'it's all about participation' is ridiculous!) but when subjectivity creeps in, nothing is so clear.

Acting, comedy and writing awards are often suspect. Yes, they are worth something when awarded by your peers, but often they are voted for by a partisan panel - the more friends you have in the audience; the more likely you are to win. These tributes might provide a feel-good factor, but they are relatively worthless. Entertainment is not a science; nor should it be a competition.

5 Things that should never be a competition:

1. Cooking - as far as I am concerned you either cook because it is your job and you are paid, or because it is a way of expressing love and friendship to those around you. Eat with me and know you are welcome. Do not judge the temperature of the soup or the slicing of the vegetables. I have prepared this gift for you in my own way.
2. Surgery - there will come a day when cameras go into operating theatres and viewers vote on who best wields the scalpel. I'm surprised it hasn't happened already. Health is personal, although you wouldn't know it from those shows which 'expose' physical deformities and laugh at fat people. Some things should be conducted behind the curtained cubicle - pull yourself together.
3. Sex - it's personal and not up for discussion apart from between the relevant parties. According to late-night phone-ins (you hear a lot driving home from rehearsals) many people seem to be concerned about whether or not their sex-life is 'normal'. As long as you and your partner are happy with it, whatever you're doing, or not doing, is fine.
4. Raising children - I hate the use of nouns as verbs, so have resisted the urge to call it parenting. I'm sure it's pretty difficult to raise a child to be a reasonable and responsible human being. Just do your job and stop comparing yourself and your child to others. In some respects they're all the same; in others they're all different - don't bother worrying or boasting, and if you must do either, do it to yourself as no one else cares. Really.
5. Friendship/love - when I was little I used to refer to 'best friends'. Now I know that best is a superlative meaning 'of the most excellent or outstanding or desirable kind' there can only be one, by definition. I would now say I have many good or close friends - all of them special to me in individual ways and I love and admire them for their specific qualities. I would never try to rank one above the other. That's not how this love thing works.