Notting Hill ghosts
Sophia Watson
STIFF LIPS by Anne Billson Macmillan, £14.99, pp. 375 Anne Billson's new novel has the most disgusting and irrelevant title of any book ever published. Even Will Self has not managed anything as horrible. (Billson almost has — her last book was called Suckers.) That aside (you can't judge a boo,k etc.), she has written a vastly enter- taining story.
Stiff Lips is exceptional in that it is a modern ghost story. Apart from Susan Hill's The Woman in Black (which fudged the issue of its setting but was certainly in the indeterminate past), the ghost story is an art form which has more or less van- ished. The Victorians loved them, and although we are now taught to despise most things Victorian no one has yet dared to suggest we must despise their literature. Fashions may change, but Billson proves here that there is still something very appealing in a truly ghostly ghost story.
This particular one is also the story of Clare, a plain `wannabee'. The object of her ambition is to live in a flat in Notting Hill and be a part of the party people cir- cuit. Her friend Sophie is 'the original Material Girl. Her idea of a spiritual expe- rience was walking through Harrods and being squirted by six different perfume saleswomen at once', and for Sophie every- thing is easy. She is blonde, rich and artistic and has a flat in Notting Hill. She dresses in varying shades of beige and has glam- orous (as far as Clare can see) friends in the media world. To poor Clare, who earns her living illustrating recipes, life is hideously unfair.
And then to cap it all, Sophie gets the ghost: I should have been the haunted one. I was the one who had been through the gothic phase at college, until Sophie had persuaded me to knock all that nonsense on the head and strive for the beige ideal.
The ghost is at first merely noise — heavy rock music bumping out crude lyrics at unreasonable times of night. Non-smoking Sophie's flat smells of cigarettes. Then the ghosts become corporeal: it has to be admitted the Victorians never went so far as sex with ghosts. And all of this is very spooky, spooky enough to make you put the book aside before bed and move onto something else, spooky enough that you find it hard to believe that chic, intelligent, satirical Billson is not going to rip all the veils away and laugh at you for having been so foolish as to be taken in by ghosts. But she does not. The ghosts remain ghosts. The inexplicable remains unexplained. The ending is nasty. The reader is given no reassurance.
As well as being a successful ghost story, Stiff Lips is an amusing satire on the Notting Hill tribe which is pictured as vain, pretentious, deeply self-satisfied. Ms Billson (look at her photograph: she is cer- tainly a 'Ms') is observant and very funny. When the ghost takes up with Clare, she cannot see it. But it is, after all, a Notting Hill ghost, so I started to take more trouble over my appearance. I endeavoured to hold my face in an alert, lively expression at all times. I stopped recycling smelly T-shirts from the laundry bag.
Poor Clare is a natural victim, but in the end, oddly enough, she is the one with the power to triumph over the malevolent Notting Hill evil.
Funny and spooky — an excellent combi- nation for a bit of light reading. Shame about the title, though.
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