Keeping up appearances
Kate Hubbard GHOSTING by John Preston
Black Swan, £6.99, pp. 320
Why should I, an apparition to so many, be troubled by apparitions myself?' So speaks Dickie Chambers, hero and narrator of John Preston's first novel, a man who suffers not so much from a crisis as an absence of identity. A stranger to emotion, opinion and desire, Dickie is beset by a discomforting 'sense of hovering above myself in varying stages of disbelief'. It is then the pivotal irony of the novel that he should become, during the 1950s, a tele- vision 'personality', though, in another sense, given television's appetite for bland- ness, it is entirely apt. As the gap between publicly perceived substance and privately experienced void widens, the apparitions close in.
Dickie's rise to the heights of quiz-show host and celebrity interviewer, a passage smoothed by his sole distinctive feature, a warm and melodious voice, is accompanied by a minimum of human contact. Preston's description of Chambers' family life, a comfortless, chilly affair played out against the drabness of post-war Britain, is both poignant and darkly comic. Dickie's father, temperamentally disengaged, if benign, becomes absent in body as well as spirit after accidentally drowning. For his mother Dickie is just another in a long line of dis- appointments. After a fire, from which he rescues her — 'Wasn't this what every boy secretly dreamed of, rescuing his mother from an electrified bed?' (a bathetic exercise as it turns out) — she succumbs to her nerves and the care of an institution. Later he passively endures the presence of a girlfriend; but sex, with its corollary of intimacy and exposure, is an alarming business and one avoided altogether during his ill-starred marriage.
Modern-day shrinks would, no doubt, waste little time in tracing Dickie's emo- tional isolation and inability to form adult relationships to a childhood bereft of human warmth. But this is the Fifties and Dickie, denied such officially sanctioned comfort and understanding, gropes blindly on, looking for direction to those who seldom have his best interests at heart. This is certainly the case with his closest approx- imation to a friend but actually his nemesis, the sinister Ralph, who, as the keeper of the secret of his sexuality, orchestrates and hastens his disgrace.
While Preston's prose falters over some hackneyed descriptions of Dickie as sexual degenerate and, subsequently, unkempt recluse, this is, in the main, a briskly paced, tightly controlled novel, whose images, especially of disintegration (the ghost of Chambers senior 'spinning around and around in the kitchen blurring away like egg white'), are deftly employed to reinforce the theme. It is impressive for succeeding on several different levels. An enjoyable satire of the world of television, with Preston perfectly catching the banality and humiliation of television game shows, it simultaneously builds into a frightening portrait of the dissolution of a personality, of a man both alienated from others and, more fatally, from himself. If the language falls short of conveying the bleakness and profundity of Dickies final realisation, with its wider implications, it remains a funny, sad and disturbing novel.
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