BOOKS

Mon semblable, mon frere

David Sexton

AS IF by Blake Morrison Granta, £14.99, pp. 256 Me too! Me too! Here's a thriving new literary genre, taking up the slack left by the waning of the travel fad. Soon it'll be a section in the bookshops and libraries, somewhere between Memoirs and True Crime: Me Too.

In Black Mischief, the arrival of Dame Mildred Porch's 'Cruelty to Animals' mis- sion in Azania is welcomed by Viscount Boaz under a misapprehension:

`We too, in our small way, are cruel to our animals' — and here the Minister for the Interior digressed at some length to recount with hideous detail what he had himself once done with a woodman's axe to a wild boar 'but it is to the great nations of the West and North, especially to their worthy representa- tives that are here with us tonight, that we look as our natural leaders ....'

He was ahead of his time. Nowadays a go- ahead publisher — Granta, Picador would be pleased to give him a commission to expand on the story. There are careers to be made here. In February 1993, two ten-year-old boys abducted two-year-old James Bulger from Bootle Strand shopping centre in Liver- pool, took him two and a half miles away to a railway line and there battered him to death with bricks and an iron bar, leaving his body to be cut in two by the next train. The horror of this crime would have made the case famous anyway but its impact was greatly multiplied by the grainy pictures from a security camera of the child, seen alive for the last time, from behind, putting his hand trustingly into that of one of his killers, as he is led away to death.

It was the young Scottish journalist Andrew O'Hagan who me-tooed first. In the London Review of Books, he bravely disclosed a number of interestingly compa- rable atrocities he had himself committed as a boy: flogging an infant, setting fire to stuff, 'clubbing the neighbour's cat to death' and so on. This innovative essay was quickly republished by the Guardian and made O'Hagan's name. Since then, he has gone on to greater things. In his first book, The Missing, he investigated the West case, on the basis that people he grew up with had gone missing too. Strangely, Blake Morrison, picking up the Bulger baton, has omitted to mention O'Hagan's dashing first leg in the relay (although his encomium of The Missing is splashed over its cover). This new species of self-incriminatory male memoir is partly a by-product of the growth in 'therapy' and partly a delayed response to feminism: the personal is polit- ical for us too! Hence all those tearful, gluey books about fathers and sons, all that paternal and filial couvade. Nick Hornby's confessions to football mania are the most charming manifestation of the new candour, since eagerly imitated by trainspotters, aspirant pop-stars and the like. Even when not criminal, intimate dis- closures are difficult to pitch accurately, however, without range-finding precedents. (On the other side of the Atlantic, Nichol- son Baker began well with his no-holds- barred accounts of an office lunchtime and bringing up baby but met consumer resis- tance when he so enthusiastically put his hand up to being a dedicated wanker, assuming that everybody else was equally hard at it, if only they would admit it.) Blake Morrison, since his retreat from full-time journalism, has been hard at work in this literary confessional. And When Did You Last See Your Father?, published in 1993, won the Waterstone's/Esquire Non- Fiction Prize and, aptly, the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography, as well as coming warmly Hornbyed. It's a grippingly frank memoir of his father in life and death, seeming to justify its outrageous proclama- That's the trouble with these flats. You can be dead a long time before anyone notices.' tion of family secrets (an affair) by its no less unshrinking admissions about his own life. He describes losing his virginity with the family maid; he portrays himself mas- turbating in the bath Cade white snakes swirl in the water').

Such material cannot be easily duplicat- ed. Ackerley himself wrote about his dog Tulip as well as his father. Morrison, with no Tulip to turn to, has gone back to mur- der, having so movingly sung 'The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper' earlier in his career. The Bulger case inherently had no more to do with him than with anybody else — although there is a feeble regional link, Morrison making some little play with being a fellow Northerner, though Skip- ton's hardly Scouse. But the crime obvious- ly offered enormous opportunities for me-tooism. On the one hand, Morrison has three children himself, whom he would nei- ther like to see murdered like James Bul- ger nor to become murderers, like Robert Thompson and Jon Venables. On the other, he was once a naughty boy himself. So off he went with a commission to attend the trial and have a think.

The book that has resulted is not quite a success, as Morrison himself perhaps secretly knows. He has done a lot of homework, trying to give enough depth and resonance to what remains centrally a court report to justify its appearance in hard covers several years after the event. But the result is just true crime with knobs on.

As If opens with an orchestral prelude. For 20 pages, he describes the Children's Crusade of 1212, in which many children were led to their death by another child, Stephen: 'them too', you see.

Stephen, in his sky-blue donkey-cart, is as far from Bootle Strand shopping centre as the year 1212 is from 1993. Yet the Children's Crusade and the killing of James Bulger do have elements in common. Innocence and the loss of innocence. Faith and the betrayal of faith.

Above all, for Morrison, they're both really `stories about grown-ups', not about children.

He then proceeds through the case, in workmanlike reportage studded with verite details about what it was like to be there: he buys a cappuccino, he drinks Murphys, he takes a pee or two (a recurrent certifi- cate of authenticity in the new frankness). About much of this, one feels as Mia feels in Pulp Fiction, when the John Travolta- character says: 'I'm gonna take a piss.' `That was a little more information than I needed to know, but go right ahead.'

Soon the me-toos are coming thick and fast. James Bulger was stoned to death?

Stone-throwing: an emblem of boyhood. I can remember it from my own: cross-legged on the shingle, aiming at a Tango can .. . It can't have taken much to hit on this method of killing. The bricks were all around.

The perpetrators were truanting (`sag- ging')? 'I don't blame anyone for sagging. I've sagged, in a different way, myself, says Morrison, later excusing this feeble near- miss by pointing out that at his village school he was in a class of three, so `if I'd truanted at Jon and Robert's age, it would have meant a third of the eleven-plus candidates going missing'.

Thompson and Venables persistent thieves? 'At ten I stole a Ferrari — a Dinky toy belonging to my cousin', says Morrison valiantly, doing his milksop worst. They copied something they saw on television? The child Morrison copied Wimbledon, Z Cars and William Tell. They lied like Trojans when questioned by the police? Morrison can do better here:

Speaking for myself: yes, I tell lies. I used to lie to my parents, to escape them. I used to lie to teachers, to get myself off the hook. I grew up among lies.

After this little effusion, he has a moment of hesitancy:

Not that I'm comparing myself with Robert and Jon. T & V and me: a tricky business. I don't mean to diminish their wrong-doing, or to exaggerate mine. But I do feel I under- stand their lying.

Everything he denies there he repeatedly does, just as he fears.

If he can't produce his own battered cat or axed boar out of a hat, he'll still do everything he can to oblige:

Didn't we steal sweets . .. Didn't we torment younger children? Didn't my cousin and I airgun starlings from the telegraph wire? And other cruelties, dimly summoned: frogs squashed with bricks, fledgling swallows outed from their mudpacks and dropped to a swiping cricket bat below. Nothing like murder (nothing is like), but not particularly nice or good.

That's his best offer here: squashed frogs, ad lib.

Horribly, it appears that James Bulger may have been violently sexually abused by his murderers, who may perhaps in turn have had inappropriate sexual experiences for their age. Morrison, in the ickiest sec- tion of As If, refuses to let even this go by without a little autobiographical contribu- tion. He wasn't himself sexually abused by his parents or any other adults (`until an assistant librarian at university made a grab for my balls as I passed him in the stacks near Romanticism') but, he says, resource- fully, 'we abused each other instead'. As a boy, he played 'Doctor and Nurses' with little girls until he was 'eleven, twelve, thir- teen'. 'Did that, does that, make me an abuser? Of my sister, as well as cousins and friends?' he asks.

Then, he tells us, at 16 he took his turn among seven boys having intercourse one after the other with a 14-year-old girl, drunk in a broom cupboard, at her own birthday party, although he didn't have full sex with her himself. He also describes in mock sexual terms his current caresses of his own small daughter: 'A child in my lap, being read to, and I find myself erect.' It is, he explains, 'Not desire but love's ecstasy, suffusion, bliss, warmth in your lap, the rub of a little bottom on a prick.'

Such confessions can be valuable when others recognise that they have had the same experiences but have lacked the courage to discuss them before. However, they can also leave the volunteer stranded embarrassingly far from the crowd: more `get you' than `me too'. Which is this?

The purpose of all this comparison- seeking is, of course, to make it difficult to condemn Venables and Thompson as directly as they were condemned in court:

There's too much Us and Them in it, a denial of shared humanity. I prefer to look at Robert and Jon in another way: as children I recognise from my own childhood, and as children I recognise from being a parent The boys weren't innocent. But they weren't murderous either.

Such an approach runs the risk, Morrison admits, of 'liberal goo, moral relativism'.

He doubts any ten-year-old has 'a sense of the awful irreversibility of battering a child to death with bricks'. But equally he declines to condemn the parents too. `Their parents failed, but so do• most par- ents. I, too, have lashed out . . ' It all begins and ends in waffle:

Who are we to blame for what we are? Our- selves, our parents, their parents, genes, soci- ety, history, environment — not any of these, though maybe a bit of all.

Such fundamental indecisions would matter less if he could produce a convinc- ing account of how this particular crime actually happened, but the book has no light to throw on this (Morrison inclines a little to the maleficient-video theory). Fatally, he admits:

There are days I half-escape my broodings and decide Robert Thompson and Jon Venables were oddballs and no more, that nothing's to be gained by raking over the murder ....

I just wish the computer made a mistake with the profit figures more often.' It's a decision the reader comes to share.

As in his poetry, Morrison is not helped by the extraordinary porosity of his style. Several times on every page there's an allu- sion that serves no special purpose other than to demonstrate that he is steeped in literature. It never becomes evening with- out talk of scarfing up the tender eye of day or darkness falling from the air. There are tears, idle tears and trailing clouds of glory. Martin Amis is impersonated at length. There are scraps of Eliot (lear in a handful of shale') and masses of Larkin, from getting out as quickly as you can to `astonishing the brickwork'.

The voice not heard here, as always, is that of the victim. Morrison mentions hearing Jon Venables crying on a police interview tape, 'terrible baby-baby wails'.

Please God, never let me hear a child cry like that again. Or rather, let those who think these boys inhuman hear their all-too-human distress.

But who heard James Bulger's cries?