Something of my Self

Julie Burchill

wow!

by Amy Auden Mainstream, £9.99, pp.256 Here's a little story about modern fame. Quite recently I wrote a review of Jeanette Winterson's latest novel for this magazine. Most of it was about myself and my early jealousy of her, which had thank- fully turned into smug self-adoration as her books got worse. Just about two paragraphs at the end dealt with the book; the rest was all about me.

Even I, at the end, thought I'd gone a bit far; I would not have been surprised if The Spectator's literary editor had handed me my marching papers or a loaded pistol. Instead he raved about it. And then the let- ters started coming. From the humble and the famous, they all bore the same basic message: Julie, what a fascinating person you are. Why don't you write more about yourself and less about those boring old books you review? I'm glad to say that Wow! (awful title, like a Sixties boutique) gives me just that opportunity.

In 1989 I published a novel called Ambi- tion. On the very first page, the editor of a national newspaper dies in bed, if not with his boots on then with his hard-on, at the hands of his deputy, Susan Street, who then proceeds to turn herself inside out (don't try this at home) to collar his job from the evil media baron Tobias Pope. Tobias Pope is a bit like the old dad in Major Barbara, and when he and Susan aren't whoring around on five continents they have a good number of Socratic dia- logues about the nature of life, love and ambition.

Though Ambition looked like an airport book, all leggy brunette and Bacofoil letter- ing, it was more than a blockbuster. The shopping and screwing were held master- fully together by a backbone of quite sparkling feminist wit, if I do say so myself. It was far nastier about men than any chewed-nail Polytechnic polemic. It sold more than half a million copies in England, went ballistic in Germany and Italy and will next year delight the docile young women of China and Russia, as well as appearing on audiotape here.

What I'm saying is that Ambition was probably the last great blockbuster, referred to even by Professor Arthur Marwick in his book Culture in Britain Ssince 1945:

The new feminist star of the Eighties, though many hated her for her wickedly mocking ways, was Julie Burchill, whose first novel Ambition was more uninhibited that anything yet. The female chauvinism of the heroine Susan Street was a mirror image of Amis' John Self.

Like Madonna, Ambition crystallised a certain version of the New Woman at a certain moment in time.

That moment has gone, however, as surely as Mrs Thatcher and the shoulder pad. Women are well on their way, and such warlike tracts as Ambition now seem rather . . . dated. These days, domesticity is the new escapism and young career girls spend the weekend in bed with Joanna Trollope, Mary Wesley and Marika Cobbold (nice work if you can get it, espe- cially Marika Cobbold) and one ear on The Archers. The failure of Naomi Campbell's Swan is just the latest of a long line of blockbusters buried by the Aga Sagas.

But still the suckers keep on coming. And here, on cue, is Wow! — all Bacofoil lettering, leggy brunette and mobile phone without, all bitches fighting their way through bedroom and boardroom within. Here's an original story: editor of national newspaper drops dead on page one and four female hacks go after his job. Stop me if you've heard it. But, apparently, it `makes Ambition look like Janet and John'.

I could be nasty and spiteful and say that Wow! is so unsophisticated and unsexy that it makes Janet and John look like Jules et Jim. Which I will. It also demonstrates over the space of 318 pages just why the block- buster is well and truly busted. Shagged out. All over. Dead as the Filofax and the kiwi fruit and all those other little Eighties things.

For a start the writing is preposterous. `Amy Auden' hides two guilty men; the journalists Caris Davis and Lesley Jones. Caris used to play poker at our house, and as well as being great fun was an excellent writer married to a woman who had the most beautiful breasts in Christendom. Lesley Jones, on the other hand, is memo- rable as the only hack who could have made the Naomi Campbell Story seem slow-moving, as she did in her awful biog- raphy. You can't lie down with a dog with- out catching worms, and poor Canis' usual eye-bugging, finger-popping high style is utterly AWOL, presumed DOA.

Ambition was refreshing for the way it completely avoided the usual embarrassing blockbuster clichés; not a manhood or a moistness in it. More importantly, the heroine's sexual servility and career tri- `Follow me . . I have seen the light.' umphalism sat quite happily on each other's laps without undue agonising; her one true love is a man she first has sex with in a lavatory, and then over a garbage can in Soho, and she still responds to him like a sleeping princess awoken with a kiss. My Susan Street was as complex as any his Murdoch heroine (and a good deal more so than most of Margaret Drabble's), and this more than anything gave the book its unique appeal to young women as well as dirty old men and sweet young boys. (I'm, sitting under the table reading Ambition,' an 18-year-old Israeli youth wrote to the during the Gulf War, 'and the Scuds are coming down on us like crazy. But just the thought that one day I might meet a woman like Susan Street makes me think life's not too bad after all.') It's a pretty good bet that no hostages of war are ever going to have their morales (or anything else) lifted by the thought that one day they might get off with a girl like Zelda, Kiki, Mira or — zzz — sorry, just dropped off there — ah yes, or Mandl. These women have the sex appeal and sen- sual capacities of four ferrets, and you'd be just as keen to have them in your trousers. Their characters are so one-dimensional as to make them appear based on paper dressing dolls. And talking of clothes, the labels here are at least half a decade out of date. Rich media women wear Nicole Farb' and Jil Sander. In my experience, only the butchest male sports hacks wear 'cerise silk knickers'.

The sex isn't sexy, the ambition isn't thrilling, the gags aren't funny. It only has one point of interest to me; in its flagrant, unashamed apeing of Ambition, it makes me realise what a really dumb, hilarious premise I based my own book on back there in the over-heated Eighties. The idea that any F Street woman, no matter how bent on making it, would have eagerly con- sented to having SOLD tattooed on her forehead before being gang-banged by a gaggle of assorted Brazilian hookers, work- ing in a Thai sex show and hanging from her nipples in a New York SM dyke dive strikes me now as being not just grotesque- ly naive, but conniving with a view of successful women that is actually quite treacherous.

All I can say in my defence is that I was young, flighty and intoxicated by the pecu- liarly high altitude of the Eighties. And that, in the real world, it is not the female journalist who tends to bend, blow and brown-nose her way to the top; it is the male, who is usually only called upon to do these things metaphorically but would, feel sure, go all the way in most cases if there was a really yummy job in the balance. By ignoring this fact, and the way female ambition has moved on, .Amy Auden has written a book whose heroines are not modern women at all, but old- fashioned female impersonators. In the end, it was the cerise silk knickers that gave them away.