A man as a sometime thing
Albert Read
HARASSMENT by Patrick Skene Catling Bloomsbury, £13.99, pp. 280 The sensationally good-looking Michael Saques is a young man set adrift in a woman's world. All the influential figures in his life are women. His tutor at Oxford tells him that anything of any importance in literature was female. He looks despair- ingly at a chess board; the queen devours pawns, runs circles round bishops, castles and knights, while the ineffectual king just looks on, tottering from one square to the next.
Saques' youth is spent being passed from one man-eater to the next. He is first seduced by his matron: she holds him hostage in the infirmary, feeds him nutri- tious food and demands sex — like some- thing you might read in a Stephen King novel. There follow a whole string of ter- rors: the gardener's daughter, a pushy Oxford undergraduette, his tutor, Baroness Bouche from Zurich and a prison warder.
One of them, the beautiful and sexy Vir- gie Simms, shamelessly seduces him on a golf course and then offers him a highly paid job as the leading man in a sex educa- tion video. He accepts without knowing what is involved, drops out of university, and, even when he does realise that his naked body is to receive global coverage, he passively resigns himself to the task. The key moment in the novel comes at the party given after the video has been completed. Having been instructed to visit the unspeakably hideous Baroness Bouche later on, Michael is swept onto the dance floor by the beautiful and sexy Virgie Simms who then kisses him. `Harassment!', he cries. Most men would have been delighted. He takes his complaint to the court where he is faced with a female judge who is friends with the female defence counsel: his case is dismissed.
Our sympathy for Michael Saques is lim- ited as it is, given his irresistible attraction to women; but he is also hopeless, and incapable of making the right decisions. He is dominated by the women who come into his life. The novel is unconvincing in this respect: his downfall is supposed to be his looks when it is in fact his character. It is hard to swallow the 'victim of his looks' sad story when we all know that good looks male or female — combined with a strength of character, usually do you a lot of good.
The theme is role reversal. This is the way we treat women. They are bullied and used by men, they have no opportunity to exert their freedom and the institutions of law and education are stacked against them. Patrick Skene Catling is reprimand- ing men, or else he is showing us the shape of things to come.
Sexual politics apart, the novel can be taken simply as a comedy. It is a Boys' Own story — part fantasy, part horror — of what it would be like to be continually used by women. In parts it is funny — if not laughter out loud then at least a po-faced acknowledgment of a comical situation. Harassment rattles along enjoyably without being the hilarious sexual satire that it might have been.
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