Something fishy about the sex
Julie Burch ill
CRIMSON by Shirley Conran Sidgwick, £14.99, pp. 600 Conran is, of course, a brand name. But even something as solid as a brand name may, these days, melt into air and drift downmarket. Thus Conran, once a byword for chic, has become a synonym for tat, as in Habitat. Proof that the name has lost its glamour comes on the back jacket bio of this truly appalling book; where once just mentioning her marriage to Sir Tel would have sufficed, Shirley now drags in 'fashion designer Georgina Godley, her daughter-in-law ', giving the term 'relative values' a whole new meaning.
Like the last piece of Habitat furniture I bought, this book is perfunctory, un- inspired and falling apart at the seams, which is a shame, because the blockbuster genre as a whole is far from worthless. The works of Jacqueline Susann, Molly Parkin and Jackie Collins tell us more, and tell us more skilfully and amusingly, about life in a certain semi-trashy fast lane in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties than any number of 'serious' books on the same sub- ject by Norman Mailer, Martin Amis and Brett Easton Ellis. With the exception of Susann's seminal Valley of the Dolls, the form probably reached its peak with Collins' 1977 masterpiece, Lovers And Gamblers; not only was it the most deadly accurate portrait of the music business ever painted but it contained, in the person of the hero's nerdy son, the most convincingly grungy depiction of adolescence since Holden Caulfield. Now, however, only Pat Booth writes with anything approaching the sass and savvy of the senior sorority. For the rest, the blockbuster scene is a barren wasteland. And it has been rendered so by Shirley Conran, Celia Brayfield and Jilly Cooper, all of whom seem suicidally intent on proving repeated- ly what we've always known; that the English middle class is Not Good At Sex.
Susann, Collins, Parkin and Booth all came from showbiz or working-class backgrounds; Brayfield, Conran and Cooper are public schoolgirls. Which means they can't help but be conscious that they are writing down. Blockbusters are great when they're lowdown, dirty and honest — 'Eat my meat, junkie bitch!' (J. Burchill, Ambition, 1989) — but when they go in for 'fine' writing (`The perpetually green forest of the hinterland, which still provided shelter for wild boar, rabbits and birds') they are risible. Like calling a napkin a serviette, or pornography `erotica'.
In such language does Conran relate the sorry tale of dying old biddy, Elinor, author of 22 — count 'em! — romantic novels, whose fortune is desired by her three granddaughters — the model, the tycoon and the socialite with the social conscience. Set in London, Los Angeles and the Med, but most of all set in the Sixties, the book has a remarkable lack of period grasp; the men, as in Cartland's Regency romps, have 'firm-hewn features' and the women have 'fey, elusive charm'. Whereas anyone looking at pictures of the age's icons, like Julie Christie and Brian Jones, knows that it was the other way around.
Such zeitgeistian figures as William Holden and Simone Signoret make cameo appearances at 'right rave-ups': the grace- lessness of the writing is hard to communi- cate without quoting verbatim.
'What's so terrible about escapist literature?' Annabel demanded. `Most women read it and why not?' Gran's books sell by the million,' Miranda said. `So obviously a great many people enjoy them.'
This sort of chippy defensiveness goes on for pages, and makes it very clear that what is wrong with this 'escapist literature' in particular is not only that it is not litera- ture, but that it is not even escapist. It is the sound of one hand clapping, of one voice cheer-leading, of one middle-aged, middle-class, middle-brow woman reassur- ing herself that she is not wasting her education by writing trash. But it is not just her background which makes Conran so unfit for the task; it is her opinion of sex.
Does she actually like it? Ninety per cent of the sex here is dismal for the women involved, and I always thought the Lace goldfish was a dead giveaway. I know that some people have strange tastes, and find attractive that which is not apparently so - dwarves, amputees, Gentile men — but there can be no sexually aware person who wants to shag a shubunkin. (Conran's got a thing about fish — 'She had thrashed around like a freshly caught trout on a grassy bank.' That's the most unappetising description of an orgasm I've ever encoun- tered, unless you're an angler.) On every page I found something which jarred on my nerves and spelling standards, which is the opposite effect to the one escapist literature is meant to have. Conran keeps comparing the smell of men to the smell of horses; interestingly, the Jew smells like a 'sweaty' horse while the WASP smells like a clean one. She spells jewellery 'jewelry', which I know is an option, but it seems to me typical of Con- ran's lack of feeling for the fitness of things.
Blockbusters depend most of all on their energy; the work of Susann, Collins, Parkin and now Booth fairly crackles with it, like sparks of static out of a cheapo carpet. The books speed towards their dénouements and destinations like whippets on crystal meth. Crimson, contrarily, seems utterly enervated, hobbling along like a sloth on its way to the dentist for extensive root canal work. Conran just obviously doesn't want to be doing this; she should• write her Margaret Drabble novel and have done with it.
'Crimson is the colour of passion, the colour of rage, the colour of blood,' pants the blurb. It's also the colour of embarrass- ment, and all concerned in this book's production should turn it. If you're inter- ested, Conran's also launching a scent of the same name, though I don't know why she bothers. She's already selling some- thing that stinks.
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