Flaubert's parrot singing a new tune
Gilbert Adair
GEMMA BOVERY by Posy Simmonds Cape, L14.99, pp. 106
Gemma Bovery was initially published as a daily serial in the Guardian. In that form, I have to say, and much as I had always admired Posy Simmonds, I couldn't get along with it at all. (Judging by the numbers of complaints the newspaper itself aired on its letters page, I was by no means alone.) The pacing felt funereal, the idea of employing Flaubert's masterpiece as a knowing referential model struck me as just asking for trouble — I admired Posy, but not that much — and, not least, that maverick `e' in 'Bovety, even though self- evidently deliberate, chafed at me like a speck of grit in the eye.
Well, not for the first time, I was wrong. Or, as I now believe, Posy was wrong. (First-name familiarity is surely forgivable with an artist for whom one has such affec- tion.) Wrong not to have published her cre- ation all at one go as what it unequivocally is: a novel.
It's a novel in whose recreated world Flaubert's Madame Boyar), already exists Posy's narrator, the academic-turned-baker Joubert, becomes fascinated by Gemma precisely because of what he sees as her likeness to her near-namesake — and much of its charm derives from the ingenu- ity of the many parallels which Posy con- trives to draw between the two fictions.
In the Norman town of Bailleville ('Yawnville', a pun on Flaubert's 'Yonville') Gemma, the bored second wife of a boring English furniture restorer, idles the hours away with fantasies of refurbish- ing her damp, dreary house rather than, as her illustrious antecedent did, with the obsessive devouring of cheap sentimental romances, the Mills and Boons of her day. Emma's dream lover, the faithless Rodophe, has been wittily recycled as Patrick, a modish English restaurant critic. (How perfectly Posy-like of Posy to realise that restaurant critic is one of the emblem- atic professions of the Nineties, just as fashion photographer was of the Seventies and City wide boy of the Eighties.) Poor Gemma incurs debts no less disastrous than those of Emma before her. And when, in the book's closing pages, the parallels between the two women's fates become just too flagrant to ignore, Joubert actually calls Flaubert's novel to witness in an attempt to warn his English neighbour against falling into the same trap as her 19th-century alter ego (or alter egoist).
In vain, alas. Though the narrative con- cludes with a giggle-inducing pirouette, one it would be callous to divulge in advance, Gemma Boyer), ends badly. And, surprise, surprise, really quite movingly.
If its affecting denouement came as a surprise to me, it's because I'd never thought of Posy as other than a humourist; it may well come as a surprise to a lot of its readers because the book is, of course, what might be called a 'graphic novel', its narrative conveyed as much through car- toon-strip imagery as dialogue or descrip- tive prose. Some, indeed, will refuse to regard it as a novel at all and deem it unworthy of being judged alongside well, you can fill in the names for yourself.
This is a quintessentially British preju- dice. In France (and, yes, I know how grat- ing that is as a sentence-opener), it would be considered a literary breakthrough, at least as rich, absorbing and original as all but the most brilliant of conventional fic- tions. Every line of every drawing in the book, every square inch of every picture, is distinctively stamped with Posy's personali- ty, her unfailing sharpness of observation and gift for the drolly eloquent detail. More remarkable still, a similar compli- ment can be paid her dialogue. Of how many contemporary British novelists, many of them award-winning, many of them writ- ing in the same interchangeable style that famous style 'that never calls attention to itself, as critics euphemistically put it might such a claim be made?
'Madame Bovary, c'est moi,' said Flaubert. To which we can now add, 'Madame Bovery, east Posy.'
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