All posts tagged slang

Ladysmith by Giles Foden (1999)

Published the year after Foden’s famous debut, ‘The Last King of Scotland’, ‘Ladysmith’ is even longer, weighing in at a chunky 362 pages. He must have been working on them at the same time and this prompts the thought of considering them as two prisms or perspectives, from different periods, on their subjects – Africa, white people in Africa, colonialism and war.

Talking of dates, I realised Foden probably wanted the book to be published in 1999 as this marked the centenary of its subject, the start of the siege of Ladysmith. I wonder if the actual publication date was aligned as well i.e. in October or November. In fact one of the characters wonders whether the siege will go on for decades and his diary of it will be dug up a century hence, in 1999 (George Steevens the journalist, p.175).

Anyway, Ladysmith is a dazzling feat of imagination and bravura writing, hugely gripping, informative and entertaining. Also, it is very hard, grim and violent.

The siege of Ladysmith

The (Second) Boer War lasted from 11 October 1899 to 31 May 1902. Less than a month into the conflict Boer forces surrounded the town of Ladysmith in the colony of Natal on 2 November 1899 – occupied by British civilians, Asians and Africans and a contingent of the British army – and besieged it for 118 days, until it was relieved by British forces on 28 February 1900.

Prologue

The narrative opens not in Africa, but in late-Victorian Ireland (later on, we realise it’s about 1880). Four dramatic pages briskly describe the poverty and persecution suffered by the unnamed narrator, which drives him to join the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The underlying point is the implied connection between the Irish and the Boers, small subject peoples oppressed by the British Empire. He’s involved in a shootout with British police, escapes, is hidden by comrades in the Brotherhood, then smuggled to Liverpool, where he plans to start a new life in the colonies.

Part 1. Crossways

It quickly becomes clear that a distinguishing feature of the book is its very large cast of characters. Here’s a list of the characters who appear in the first hundred pages or so:

  • Bella Kiernan, 20, eldest daughter of…
  • Leo Kiernan, red-haired proprietor of the Royal Hotel, Ladysmith (p.19)
  • Jane Kiernan, 18, Bella’s blonde younger sister (p.24), admired by gunner Foster of the Naval Brigade (p.62)
  • Gunner Herbert Foster, likely young lad and beau to Jane Kiernan
  • Antonio Torres, barber, from Lourenço Marques in Portuguese East Africa (now named Maputo and Mozambique, respectively) which he left when his beloved Isabella Teixera da Mattos (p.93) married another man (Luís)
  • Mrs Frinton, thin, ascetic, grey-haired, God-fearing widow (p.47), most religious woman in town (p.125)
  • Mr and Mrs Star, the Ladysmith bakers (p.15)
  • Tom Barnes of the Green Horse regiment (p.20), writes long descriptive letters home to his mother and sister Lizzie, one of which includes burning down the house of an absent Boer including piano and music (pages 60 to 65)
  • four journalists: George Steevens of the Mail; Henry Nevinson of the Daily Chronicle; Donald McDonald of the Melbourne Argus; William Maud the Graphic’s special artist (pages 21 and 120); MacDonald is coarse and racist (p.75); Steevens, small and bald and scholarly, is a legend for his calm under fire (p.76); Nevinson is more the neutral 40-ish narrator type (p.78) albeit a ‘dour figure’ (p.203)
  • Atkins of the Manchester Guardian
  • Perry Barnes, Tom’s younger brother who’s followed him into the army, a farrier by trade, aboard the same ship bringing the Biographer, Winston Churchill and thousands of troops to South Africa (p.26)
  • Lieutenant Norris, Tom and Bob’s superior officer
  • the Biographer who it took me a few pages to realise is not a photographer but a pioneer of moving pictures i.e. film photography – describes the loading and sea voyage of the Dunottar Castle setting off from Southampton to Cape Town – he grew up in Birmingham and considers himself an outsider at the captain’s table full of plummy posh officers (p.26); he is so-named because he works for the Mutoscope and Biograph Company (p.56)
  • Winston Churchill, correspondent for the Morning Post (p.30)
  • General Redvers Henry Buller (p.35)
  • Muhle Maseku, wife Nandi (who Maseku married when he was 13) and young son Wellington, one of thousands in a refugee column fleeing (p.36), he is separated from his wife and boy into a group of 400 Blacks by Boers who force them to work on building fortifications; in the rush down a muddy slope after a day working in the rain he breaks his ankle
  • Marwick, kindly Englishman from the Natal Native Affairs Department (p.38)
  • General Piet Joubert, Commandant-General of the Transvaal (p.40)
  • Major Mott, the military censor (p.43) started out ‘harsh’ and, as things become intense, becomes ‘merciless’ (p.97), proud possessor of a grand sealion moustache (p.195)
  • Mohandas Gandhi, speaking at a Hindu political meeting and interviewed by the Biographer (pages 54 to 57)
  • Bob Ashmead, soldier sharing a tent with Tom Barnes (p.58)
  • Dr Sterkx, doctor in the Boer camp who looks after Muhle Maseku and his broken ankle (p.66); turns out it was his house and piano and music Tom Barnes and his troop burned down and took his wife Frannie prisoner into Ladysmith; he makes primitive crutches for Muhle who he gets to become an assistant; they watch battles from a nearby hill
  • Mr Grimble of the Ladysmith town council, local farmer and leading light in Carbineers (p.86), producer of fruit jams (p.104)
  • Archdeacon Barker (p.88)
  • Lieutenant General Sir George White, overall commander of the Ladysmith forces (p.171)

The start of the bombardment

The first shell from the surrounding Boers lands in Ladysmith on 2 November 1899. The town council debates evacuating the wounded and non-combatants. Jingos are outraged. Nevinson the journalist is developing into our eyes and ears and visits the station as the first long train of wounded and women and blacks and Indians pulls out. The telegraph line has been cut so he advertises for Blacks to be paid runners i.e. sneak through the Boer lines and get to the nearest British town in order to get his despatches sent back to London. Since they might be shot on sight the Blacks are charging £20 a journey. Nevinson hires a boy, Wellington, who’s the son of Muhle Maseku who we’ve seen being co-opted into the Boer camp then breaking his ankle. Nevinson includes not only his own despatches but letters friends want posted, including Tom’s to his mum.

Bella and Jane discuss their boyfriends, how long the siege will last, what will happen afterwards. Bella drops by the Star bakery. All food is rationed now and can only be bought with coupons. Bella pays triple the price for a loaf of bread which turns out to be adulterated and makes her sick.

General of the besieging Boers, Joubert, allows trains of wounded and non-combatants to be taken to Camp Intombi down the railway line. Jingos christen it ‘Fort Funk’ (p.106). (According to Wikipedia, the Intombi Military Hospital was some 5 kilometres (3.1 miles) outside Ladysmith and run by Major General (later Sir) David Bruce and his wife Mary. During the siege, the number of beds in the hospital camp grew from the initial 100 to a total of 1900. A total of 10,673 admissions were received and treated at Intombi.)

All classes of men are conscripted into digging defensive trenches and sangars. Torres the barber is bombed out.

Ladysmith measures not 3 miles in any direction. By 5 December 1899 some 3,500 cylinders of explosive iron have been thrown at it (p.123). Growing stress at the ceaseless barrage of incoming shells. Night-time burial parties. Food becomes scarcer. Water from the river polluted with faeces. More and more disease. British forces make a few night-time sallies and spike one Long Tom, cause of celebration. But there are others and numerous other field guns surrounding them. The constant barrage continues.

Dramatic tension

In all kinds of novels the reader experiences an element of suspense and tension as they wait to see what will happen to the characters, how the story will pan out. Well, in a war story like this, there’s a pretty obvious brutal tension involved, as you read about all of these characters, share their thoughts and feelings and perceptions and that is…which of them are going to be killed, or die of disease, or be horribly maimed?

(Lots) more narrative

Tom and Bob are practising cavalry manoeuvres when interrupted by shellfire (they’re not hurt). At the Boer camp Muhle Maseku wakens to see his son, Wellington, has been caught carrying his package of messages through Boer lines, by members of the Irish Brigade, who are kicking and beating him and about to drag him away to execute him. Muhle intervenes, hitting the leader of the Irish Brigade, John MacBride, with his crutch and is shot in the thigh for his troubles, passing out.

(Mention of John MacBride is significant, because he appeared in the prologue to the entire book set, we later learn, around 1879, a member of the small group of Irish Nationalists which includes the unnamed narrator of the prologue. The significance of all of this is explained towards the very end of the book.)

The Biographer has made it by train as far as Frere where the line has been blown up by the Boers. Churchill has gone and got himself captured when the Boer derailed an armoured train he was riding in. The other correspondents are making a fuss to get him freed.

The Biographer is an eye witness to the Battle of Colenso, 15 December 1899. He gets involved in carrying stretchers of the wounded which is where he bumps into Mohandir Gandhi who, somewhat improbably, takes the opportunity to explain that all this bloodshed has helped him crystallise his worldview of satyagraha or non-violence (p.151).

Colenso was one of the three catastrophic defeats which were dubbed Black Week (Sunday 10 December to Sunday 17 December 1899) in which some 2,800 British troops were killed, wounded or captured (p.153). Buller sends, via the new helioscope system which has been set up to replace the broken telegraph, a depressed defeatist message to Ladysmith to surrender which the town’s commander in chief, Lieutenant General Sir George White, to his credit, ignores.

We are given the text of a letter Perry Barnes writes home to his sister from the camp at Frere i.e. Buller’s camp trying to get past Colenso to relieve Ladysmith. The point is that at the end of the narrative, Foden explains that one of the sources of the novel was an actual cache of letters written by one of his forebears who was in the siege.

A shell lands on the steps of the Royal Hotel blowing off the leg of a doctor who later dies. Bella ponders the mother she never knew, Catherine, from back in Ireland.

(At which point I realised this is probably the ‘Catherine’ we see getting shot dead by British police in Ireland in the dramatic opening Prologue. And realise at the same moment that the unnamed narrator of the Prologue must have been the man now known as Leo Kiernan, Bella’s father and owner of the Royal Hotel.)

Bella and Tom have slowly become an item though Bella is wary. Novels and love, do all ‘serious’ novels have to feature a love story?

Nevinson is astonished to spot the young Zulu he had sent with his despatches bathing in the river with his mother. Wellington explains how he was caught, beaten up, the documents taken from him, read and defaced, but he was saved from execution by General Joubert who instead tasked him with returning them to Ladysmith, which Wellington did by creeping up on a sentry post and chucking the bag in then running off.

Bella finally agrees to ‘walk out’ with Tom, they walk out to the empty orchard outside town and have first sex, breathily described: ‘She rubbed against the straining tip of him’ etc (p.187). Although they get as far as him licking her through her panties, she bridles, pulls back, unzips his trousers and masturbates him till he climaxes, giggling quietly because his name is Tom, and the big guns firing on the town are nicknamed Long Toms and she is holding his Long Tom in her hand.

George Steevens has had enteric fever for weeks and Nevinson is justifiably concerned for him and his sometimes hallucinatory feverish conversation. The bored journalists have amused themselves by setting up a home-printed broadsheet called the Ladysmith Lyre whose purpose is exaggeration, rumour and amusement.

Very long description of a cricket match put together by the General, between two teams called the Colonials and the Mother Country. Both Tom and Gunner Foster do good batting, to the admiration of Bella and Jane. Tribal courtship rituals. To his irritation Leo Kiernan is compelled to be captain of the Colonials. It all builds to a climax as Bella’s dad turns out to be an improbably fine cricketer (improbable because he’s never played the game before) and the Colonials are just one run away from victory when just the one shell is lobbed at the game by the Boers on the surrounding hills. It explodes sending red hot splinters everywhere but apparently harming no-one, the final ball is played, Bella’s dad misses it but it hits young Herbert Foster who had remained in his wicket keeper’s crouch and when Tom goes up to see him, realises he is dead, killed instantly by a liver of shrapnel from the Boer shell.

Part 2. The Tower

Two days later Jane is in deep shock, shell-shocked, PTSD, shakes, catatonic, throws up, can’t answer questions. Bella cleans up the vomit, remakes the bed, puts her in, goes downstairs to the hotel bar which promptly receives two direct hits.

When she wakes up in the makeshift hospital in the town hall, she discovers both her dad and she have gashes but otherwise unhurt. Leo has sent Jane with a nurse in that day’s train to Intombi. Leo takes Bella to see the hotel which is utterly ruined. She reclaims some dirty clothes and sheets from the wreckage then her dad takes her to the network of caves along the river Klip, where bombed-out women and children are living.

Gaza

It’s unnerving to read the account of a population traumatised (and killed and mutilated) by relentless, merciless bombardment on days when, making coffee or lunch, I turn on the radio and hear more grim details of the relentless Israeli bombardment of Gaza. Even more eerie to read about the huge network of tunnels the homeless men and women of Ladysmith constructed in the soft soil alongside the river Klip, reminding me of the vast labyrinth of tunnels Hamas has are said to have created in Gaza. Rightly or wrongly I couldn’t get the contemporary resonance out of my head as I read descriptions of crying women and children surrounded by unrelenting, random death.

‘When will it end?’
‘I never thought I would see myself like this.’
‘Mummy!’
‘My God, I have no hope left in me.’ (p.231)

It was as if they’d gone back in time to a prehistoric era; it was as if they were real cave-dwellers now. (p.234)

1899. 2023. Some people think the human race changes, that ‘humanity’ is moving forwards and upwards, that we are ‘progressing’. I don’t.

More part 2

Bella is settled into a dugout cave, has sort of bed made up for her by kindly Mrs Frinton. Standing outside she notices the Portuguese barber, Torres, digging. Turns out he’s digging up unexploded munitions. When a shell comes over Torres grabs her hand and yanks her over and into the men’s tunnels. Here a rough uitlander makes an off-colour remark prompting Torres to fight him for the lady’s honour. Arguably, this section should have been called ‘The Tunnels’ as the narrative dwells on Bella’s completely changed circumstances and how poor and alone and ill and hungry she feels. It’s called The Tower because in her distracted mind she creates a shimmering tower rising above the ruined town, an image of transcendence and escape.

On Christmas Day 1899 a shell lands nearby spattering Bella with mud as she was dressing in her best blouse, she spends hours rocking on the floor in despair. Her dad arrives with a letter from Jane at the military hospital who, mercifully, has recovered.

After two weeks Bella is sent by the river cave women to get provisions from the Commissariat in town. She visits the Royal and is distraught to see it looking like it’s been abandoned for years. In the ruins she discovers the Zulu mother Nandi and Wellington the messenger boy are squatting. Nandi tugs her skirts and begs and Bella gives her some of her precious supplies.

(The degrading immiseration of once cheerful well-fed westerners also reminds me of the imprisonment of the Europeans in the Japanese internment camp in J.G. Ballard’s ‘Empire of the Sun’.)

She goes to the Town Hall to see her father, is disconcerted to see that he is sitting on the military tribunal alongside Mayor Farquhar and Major Mott, and then horrified when they drag Torres the barber before them and arraign him for spying and treason, for which the penalty in time of war is death. Tom had reported seeing someone flashing messages using a mirror from some shrubbery on the edge of town, had fired into the bushes, missed the man who disappeared, leaving fragments of a mirror of the type which Torres used to sell from his barber’s shop, and the footprint of a boot with a big V on it.

The case is not proven but he is still roughly tied up and dragged off to the Dopper Church which has been surrounded by barbed wire and turned into an ad hoc prison for suspects.

Part 2 is much much more focused on one character (Bella) than part one had been with its cast of over 40. Now it’s all about Bella’s feelings at being bombed out, realising she doesn’t like Tom who obeys orders rather than listen to her, and hates her father after he defended the xenophobic unfairness of trying Torres.

Next day she goes back into town and to the Dopper Church, where she asks the guard to fetch Torres to the barbed wire where she apologises for everything and promises to do whatever she can. Then she goes to the ruins of the Royal Hotel, climbing gingerly up the ruined staircase to the Star Room where she finds her father, white with intense strain. His revolver is on the desk. He makes her swear not to try to find him till the siege is over but stay in the caves. In a flash it came to me that Leo is the spy, the traitor, the anti-British Irish Republican Brother who is signalling information to the Boers. I bet at some crucial moment we discover Leo’s boots have a big V pattern on them.

Part 3. Amours de Voyage

Rather mercifully, the narrative leaves Bella and her agonisings about Tom, the meaning of love, her father and Torres and we’re back with Nevinson, the dour journalist. ‘Amours de voyages’ is the ironic description Nevinson gives to the final delusions of his friend Steevens as he approaches the final stages of enteric fever. Nevinson visits the sheds at the (now disused) railway station to see for himself the vast abattoir and horse-stewing factory it’s been turned into, producing revolting foods such as ‘chevril’, made from boiling horses’ bones and guts.

There’s an interlude where Foden inserts newspaper reports, and Churchill’s telegram to Britain, giving details of his daring escape from Boer captivity and wild escape by train and walking the 300 miles north to Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique).

That night the Boers mount their biggest attack, seizing part of the vital Caesar’s Camp area. Nevinson finds command headquarters in total chaos and rides out to see for himself, ending up taking refuge in a sangar of the Irish Fusiliers, during the fierce battle and on into a sudden rainstorm. The British counter-attack and take all the key positions. 500 British soldiers killed to about 800 Boers. A significant battle. By the time he gets back to the cottage he’s been sharing with the other correspondents, Nevinson feels chill and ill.

Cut to Churchill taking a boat to Durban then hastening back to Buller’s relieving force, where he is greeted and filmed by the Biographer (quite a while since we’ve heard about him). They can see the terrible guns firing down onto the town but every attempt to cross the river Tugela is repulsed by the Boers who are firmly entrenched on the other side.

A slightly delirious, impressionistic description of the disastrous attack on Spion Kop, 23 to 24 January 1900, premonition of the Somme and First World War butchery. Ends with a letter from Perry Barnes back to Lizzy describing the slaughter and blaming the useless British generals (pages 303 to 304).

Dr Sterkx comes to the Zulu Muhle Maseku whose gunshot wound to the thigh is healing, says he will help him escape from the Boer camp into Ladysmith, if he will take a message to his wife, Frannie.

Bella now spends all her time by the filthy, faeces-full river, brooding, hungry and depressed. She is slightly deliriously metaphysical, staring at the same scene till it shimmers and wobbles, until she feels like one more shape in the lifeless scene (p.307).

Torres becomes desperate stuck inside the barbed-wired church. He becomes fascinated by the Boer woman who still has her goose with her. The reader realises it’s Frannie, distraught wife of Dr Sterkx.

Thrilling description of Muhle Maseku’s escape from the Boer camp during British shelling, under cover of drifting smoke, but still they spot and trail him, taking pot shots till he abandons the obvious route down a gulley and goes up the side and over land, hiding and resting as the full moon floods the landscape with light (p.314).

Tom is depressed, with the duration of the war, with guarding the church, with his ended relationship with Bella who just gives him a hard stare and turns away. So at some cheap estaminet he pays ten shillings to go with a Malay prostitute. Pleasantly pornographic: ‘A soft warm hood of flesh began to press itself over the tip of him’. (p.318). She blows him then rides him to a climax.

On the subject of sex we learn that the Biographer and Perry have been (male, same sex) lovers for some weeks, regularly jerking each other off in the river.

Bella seeks out Nandi and asks for her help. These days Wellington doesn’t smuggle food in, he spends all his time roaming round the surrounding country looking for the sign his father said he would make. That night Wellington appears to Torres inside the church and tells him to follow him. They wriggle through a small window he’s loosened, then sneak across the empty space to the fence which has a square cut out of it. There’s a sentry box but as he watches, Torres sees a female figure approach the sentry, engage it in conversation, then kiss. It is Bella, calculatingly distracting Tom.

Torres is led by Wellington through back streets, out of town to a copse where there’s a brazier with one of the town’s many observation balloons tethered over it. In a little while Bella arrives, they climb into the basket, undo the ropes, and drift into the sky, escaping the imprisoned town.

Tom is flogged for letting Torres escape, so badly he is sent to Intombi camp, where his bloody back is tended by Jane Kiernan. Wellington Maseku brings in his wounded, badly ill father, who he found hiding in a shallow burrow he’d dug to hide from the Boers, but weak and emaciated and his leg wound badly infected. Because of all the goods Wellington smuggled into the camp, the doctors say they’ll see what they can do.

Ladysmith is relieved. The Boers pull out and head north. Buller’s relieving force enters from the south. We are shown the characters reacting differently (Mrs Frinton, of course, praying). Most vivid is MacDonald coming across Nandi weeping at the front of the ruined Royal Hotel. She’s just learned her husband died of blood loss as a result of the amputation of his leg. Perry Barnes is decapitated by one of the last, random Boer shells. The Biographer, who had been filming his lover at the moment of his gruesome death, collapses in hysterics.

Paintings and patriotic accounts record General Buller riding up to General White, dismounting and shaking his hand as the crowds cheered but no such thing happened; Buller just rode blithely by.

Part 4. The monologues of the dead

An oddity. A series of short, sometimes very short (half page), texts by various characters from the narrative, being:

  • Tom Barnes (December 1901) – the British are in the ascendant and in this letter Tom describes razing Boer farmsteads he is completely disillusioned with empire, queen and country, thinks the entire war has been a shambles
  • Mrs Sterkx (March 1902) – an unforgiving description of the concentration camps the British herded Boer women and children into, where they died by their thousands
  • Nevinson (December 1915) – reporting at the conclusion of the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign, reporting that many think Churchill should be publicly hanged for his part in promoting the campaign
  • Bobby Greenacre (January 1916) – was about to sign up and go to the war when he is bitten by an adder
  • Nevison (November 1916) – talks about his friendship with W.B. Yeats, his lover Maud Gonne who has gone off to nurse soldiers on the Western front, leaving the man she married, John MacBride who a) had led the Irish Brigade in Natal and b) took part in the famous Easter Rising in Dublin; he heard that Bella and Torres landed safely in their balloon and are presumably living somewhere
  • The Biographer (February 1931) – during the main text the Biographer was always frustrated the moving pictures alone didn’t tell the full story; here he is now doing the voiceover for a Movietone News film about Mahatma Gandhi
  • Churchill (February 1931) – speech to the West Sussex Conservatives in which he takes the time to execrate Gandhi turning up to meet the Viceroy of India dressed in peasant clothes
  • Jane (May 1933) – multiple sadnesses; she has just buried Tom, who she married; and she remembers back to discovering her father dead in the ruins of the Hotel, having shot himself with his revolver and slowly discovered that he was the spy signalling information to the Boers; thought as much; then how she tracked down Bella and Torres, discovering he sold a bauxite claim for a fortune and took Bella back to Portugal where they lived the life of the 1910s and 20s rich, spats, feather boas and fast cars
  • MacDonald (December 1938) – bumped into Bobby Greenacre who is now an eminent lawyer, a KC in Australia
  • Gandhi (August 1942) – he has been arrested for publicly stating his party will not fight the Japanese if they invade India; so he’s been incarcerated, yet again; he marvels at the way everything – he, history – are misrepresented: ‘everything is distorted and misrepresented’ – this seems a rather obvious comment about the nature of fiction itself, and maybe about Foden’s own kind of historical fiction in particular
  • Churchill (27 May 1944) – a secret cypher telegram which indicates Churchill’s vehement dislike of Gandhi right to the end
  • The Biographer (July 1945) – retired now, he reflects on how Churchill will be kicked out at the election, how his time and his romance of the British Empire is over; the British will leave India as soon as they decently can; still, Churchill’s rhetoric and determination kept the British at it for six long years; respect
  • Wellington – reflects on the Sharpeville Massacre, 21 March 1960, the enduring wickedness of the Pass Laws in South Africa’s history; Wellington is a member of the African National Congress (ANC) and in prison for burning his Pass Card in front of the press; he is being represented in court by a young Nelson Mandela; he remembers Ladysmith, the experience of being in prison, and reflects how, for people like him – South African Blacks – it has never been otherwise

Obviously deliberate that a Black African is given the last word in this story about Africa.

Foden’s multifarious styles

There were fairly frequent moments in ‘The Last King of Scotland’ when I was surprised by an oddity of Foden’s prose style, but assigned it to the narrator. But there are more here, so I’m concluding they’re part of Foden’s essential approach to language.

Formal prepositions

He has an old-fashioned way with prepositions, for example he insists on using their full formal versions, ‘upon’ instead of ‘on’, ‘whilst’ instead of ‘while’.

He is much given to the old-fashioned inversion of phrases to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition.

People were saying that the first real shots of the war had been fired at Dundee, to where a column had rashly been thrown forward. (p.45)

Flight to Intombi was now a measure of which many non-combatants availed themselves. (p.105)

In a battered hansom cab Churchill, together with Atkins of the Manchester Guardian, went up to the Mount Nelson Hotel to plan their campaign and to conduct interviews with the military staff staying in that grand residence, before leaving for East London by rail, therefrom to catch the mail packet to Natal. (p.52)

Is this meant to convey the archaic quality of late-Victorian prose, the formality of late-Victorian social life, or the stilted pompousness of this particular pair of characters? Or does Foden just regard it as a valid form of phrasing he can mix in with other far more modern, even slangy, phraseology? Whatever the motive it results in a text which is a mosaic, or mashup, of multiple tones and registers.

He has a similar fondness for an antiquated use of the word ‘so’.

The Klip took a tortuous course through the town and its environs, and the bank in parts was fairly high. It was so where he was walking… (p.119)

Wouldn’t this be more naturally be phrased as ‘it was like this where he was walking’? Is the unusual phrasing ‘It was so…’ intended to evoke Victorian phraseology, because I’m not sure it does. It reminds me more of Captain Picard’s catchphrase in Star Trek Next Generation: ‘Make it so.’ It’s a conscious style decision; Foden repeats it later:

Forced to meet this turning movement in the British attack, the Boers had had to extend their line. Churchill reported it so. (p.295)

It’s one among many odd, anomalous, unmodern turns of phrase which Foden deliberately deploys. Much earlier in the book, describing the town council debate about whether the non-combatants should leave the town:

Others, in particular those who had suffered injury to family or property from the bombardment, were all for leaving the soldiers to it and getting out from under the shadow of shell. (p.87)

‘The shadow of shell’ is an odd phrase, isn’t it? It’s not Victorian or modern, if anything it reminds me of the alliteration of Anglo-Saxon poetry.

Ornate phrasing

There are many such unorthodox or contrived phrasings, not massive in themselves, just a continual trickle of unusualness:

‘Let me explain,’ intervened Bella, in agitated fashion. (p.111)

But there were larger quarrels, ones in which such discriminations counted for naught. (p.189)

All seemed set to enjoy themselves in fair measure. (p.195)

This sounds more like Shakespeare than late-Victorian prose.

Yet, if truth be told, there were other constants… (p.214)

Is the deployment of ‘if truth be told’ an attempt to mimic late-Victorian oratory? Is it conscious pastiche or irony? Or is it Foden writing in his own style? Does his own style combine this odd range of registers, taking in modern slang, through boys’ adventure clichés, oddly formal word order, to passages of fairly contemporary psychological description and analysis?

Slang

Ladysmith above ground could get very nippy at night (p.230)

‘There must be something we can do,’ said Bella. She reached up and clasped his fingers, with the wire between them. Torres gave a dry laugh, but he did not remove his hand. ‘I cannot see how. Unless you mean to bring guns and spring me out.’ (p.262)

Use of the word ‘spring’ made me think of a 1940s film noir, or the thousands of American movies where the associates of criminals ‘spring’ them out of gaol.

Grandiloquent

But sometimes Foden’s prose is the opposite of slangy and goes beyond historic pastiche to take on a conscious pomp and circumstance, as here, where the correspondent Nevinson is meditating on the futility of war:

No wonder that the armies of the past vanish, their ancient dead only rising from the furrows of buried time to laugh, invisibly, at the very pageants of memory by which we seek to summon them. (p.286)

Grandiloquent, meaning: ‘pompous or extravagant in language, style, or manner, especially in a way that is intended to impress.’ I understand that this grand style reflects the personality of Nevinson who, as the novel progresses, becomes increasingly prone to grand reflections on history i.e Foden is capturing the style of a specific character.

Grandiloquence of a different type is deliberately deployed in the climactic scene when Ladysmith is finally relieved by British troops and you can feel Foden reaching for a different, feverish style to try and convey the emotional release of the moment, to evoke the hysteria of the crowds:

The crowd opened to let them [the liberating army] trot past, and then followed as they swung into the main street, the vanguard of an exultant avenue of humanity, each crying or laughing as the moment took them, letting go their emotions as if the siege walls had tumbled in their very breasts (p.331)

‘Very breasts’. The whole liberation scene is written like this, in a deliberately high heroic but sentimental Edwardian style, which is very noticeably different from most of the rest of the book.

Prose poetry

And sometimes into the mix Foden throws long, lyrical sentences of prose poetry. Here’s the funeral of the highly literate correspondent George Steevens who dies of enteric fever after a long delirious illness:

A soft rain was falling and, every now and then the donkey pulling the hearse let out its ghastly bray, which echoed between the silent rocks. On the way, Nevinson saw Tom Barnes and his friend, who stopped and saluted in the moonlight. This silvery pall, falling down through ragged edges of cloud, reflected on the hearse, the glass of which was covered in black and white embellishments, and on the lines of white crosses marking the graves of earlier fatalities. (p.290)

It doesn’t have the lustral mellifluousness of, say, the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde, but it is obviously a conscious effort at lyrical landscape painting.

Playful prose

Sometimes Foden indulges in wordplay, picking up on his own phraseology for the lolz:

So that day the censor escaped the unconscious wish of the correspondents – although as he had been on the lavatory at the time, it didn’t really count as a hair’s-breadth escape. Some did escape by such a measure. (p.102)

I had to read that twice before I realised the phrase ‘such a measure’ is referring back to the hair’s breadth (that the person he goes on to talk about, Bobby Greenacre, did escape death by a hair’s breadth). This picking up, echoing and playing with his own phrases occurs fairly often. The soldier Perry Barnes swears when he describes the murderous effect of the Maxim gun:

In his notebook, the correspondent marked the expletive down as a double dash. That night dashes were to the point, and points also: the searchlights at Buller’s camp and in the invested town again communicated by flashing Morse on the clouds. (p.293)

See how he picks up and plays with his own phraseology.

I’m not complaining, I’m not meaning to criticise in the negative sense. The opposite. I’m celebrating the complexity of Foden’s style. I’m trying to analyse out some of the many different lexical tricks or quirks, along with the varying registers, tones and strategies going on in Foden’s prose style, which make it sometimes odd and unpredictable, always interesting and highly readable.

Imperial politics

Strangely, there’s relatively little politics in the book. Early on there’s a set-piece argument or friendly debate, between the journalists Nevinson and Steevens, about the point of the British Empire.

Nevinson, in his youth tempted by the teachings of the anarchist Kropotkin, puts the standard liberal view that the Boer War is unnecessary and has been fomented by jingos such as Lord Milner, Cecil Rhodes and Joseph Chamberlain purely out of greed, to annex the Boer republics so Britain can get its hands on their diamonds and gold.

‘Do you really believe in that stuff any more, after wat we’ve been through these last few days? Is Empire really worth it, George, after all?’ (p.83)

And his colleague, Steevens, puts the standard riposte that the war must be won because failure, or even weakness, will inspire the hundreds of millions of other subjects of the empire to rise up and end it. Nevinson:

For if Ladysmith fell, why not Natal, the Cape, indeed why not, as subject peoples everywhere saw that it was possible, the Empire itself? (p.48)

When Nevinson points out how shabby and squalid many of the doings of the supposedly ‘noble’ Empire are in reality, Steevens is given some pithy lines about how the Empire shouldn’t be judged by any of its practical applications, but as a platonic ideal of perfect community and administration:

‘I’m with Thucydides, I’m afraid. On the Athenian Empire. It may seem wickedness to have won it…but it is certainly folly to let it go….

‘It’s the vital ideal of Empire one must hang on to – however tawdry the reality, however full of outrageous postures and cheap tricks. We’ve got to keep aiming at something beyond the truth. I suppose, at base, it is all to do with spreading light.’ (p.84)

I enjoy bits like this not because I agree with them (at all) but because it’s a point of view you never hear nowadays, drowned by today’s blanket execration of everything to do with the British Empire.

Also, reading contemporary debates about the point of an empire from the 1880s, 1890s, 1900s and so on, sheds quite a bit of light on absolutely modern issues in international affairs. Michael Ignatieff’s series of books from the 1990s wonder whether there aren’t many countries which are too poor or chaotic to run themselves and where ‘the international community’ needs to step in and run them in order to save the populations from massacre – Bosnia, Yemen, Syria, Gaza.

Obviously he’s not talking about the same kind of exploitative conquest as characterised the European empires but, to many of the peoples watching the arrival of Western armies in, for example, Iraq or Afghanistan, the subtle moral differences made by liberal commentators are irrelevant: they were just the latest waves of Western invaders and they needed to be resisted.

Twentieth century politics

The short final section four has a powerful but, I think, questionable affect. In very short order (i.e. in a hurry) we are shuffled through extremely brief descriptions of:

  • the concentration camps set up in the later stages of the Boer War
  • the First World War
  • the disastrous Gallipoli campaign
  • the Easter Rising in Dublin
  • three or four brief snippets which ask us to consider the role of Winston Churchill in twentieth century British history and the defeat of Nazi Germany in particular
  • ending with Wellington talking about the Sharpeville Massacre, the ANC, Nelson Mandela and the struggle against apartheid

This is a lot of stuff to take in and process. In my opinion, too much. As in ‘The Last King of Scotland’ only more so, it feels as if the novelistic subject matter – the focus on people, their characters, and interactions and thoughts and feelings – is swamped by the powerful associations attached to the historical events Foden describes.

Just considering the role of Winston Churchill in twentieth century British history and the defeat of Nazi Germany, in particular, but also his increasingly outdated attempts to preserve the British Empire, is a vast, simply enormous subject. Its scale and complexity completely overwhelm the thousands of fine and beautifully imagined details Foden has filled his book with (the descriptions of the fruit in Mr Grimble’s orchard spring to mind, or the cricket match, or Torres’s escape from the church, Major Mott’s sealion moustache, and hundreds of others).

This final section feels like wave after wave of overwhelming, each one eclipsing the one that went before – concentration camps, Gallipoli, the Easter Rising, Indian independence, the Second World War – the scale of each of them is too enormous and also too historical, in the sense that it’s more interested in political issues than in people.

And the last wave, the last three pages containing Wellington’s thoughts, his references to the Sharpeville Massacre and then onto the figure of Nelson Mandela, now universally acknowledged to be a secular saint, completely erases everything that went before, burying much of the fine detail so carefully depicted in the previous 350 pages, to become the abiding image and memory of the book. It’s a shame.

I can see that Foden intended these snippets to demonstrate that history doesn’t end with one event but is a continuum and that people’s lives continue way after the significant events they’ve been part of. That’s seems to me a fine and fairly traditional strategy for a novel, thousands do the same thing, tying up loose ends of characters’ afterlives. It’s the fact that Foden associates every one of these loose ends with major political events which is the dubious decision, a decision which – to repeat myself – risks swamping the subtlety and detail of much of what came before.

Christian feminism 1899

Mrs Frinton, in normal times a figure of fun (to Bella, anyway) for being an uptight old widow lecturing everyone about Our Lord, in wartime becomes reliable and solid (if still given to lectures). At one point she tells Bella all this trouble is down to men, the same everywhere:

‘They [men] are just like us, really,’ [Bella] ventured. ‘Only most of the time we don’t realise it.’
‘That’s a very new-fangled view,’ said the widow. ‘It’s not one I hold with myself. You or I wouldn’t fight – not just brawling, I mean, we wouldn’t be fighting this war. This – it’s all men, just men. Believe you me, when we get to the Good Place, we will find many more women there than men.’ (p.229)

I know plenty of feminists who would wholeheartedly agree, 123 years later.

Credit

Ladysmith by Giles Foden was published in paperback by Faber Books in 1999. References are to this Faber paperback edition.

Giles Foden reviews

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Posted by Simon on December 20, 2023

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Razor Girl by Carl Hiaasen (2016)

‘This is Florida, the land of batshit, trigger-happy motherfuckers.’ (p.82)

Andrew Yancy

The most notable thing about Hiaasen’s 14th novel is that it is a direct sequel to his 13th, featuring the same protagonist (former Monroe County detective Andrew Yancy), the same girlfriend he ended that novel with (Dr Rosa Campesino), and the same running feud with the owners of the vacant lot next to his, on the island of Big Pine Key, who are threatening to build a mansion which will block out Yancy’s restful view of the sunset.

At the start of book 13 Yancy was kicked off the small Monroe County police force for assaulting the husband of his then-mistress. Bonnie Witt. The easy-going head of the Monroe police, Sonny Summers, had to drop Yancy after the press furore about the assault, but got him a job he cordially hates, as a health and safety or ‘roach’ inspector of local restaurants.

Yancy is ‘a tall, lean man with a baked-in Florida tan’ (p.134) in his early 40s. He is a regular smoker of dope, who sometimes does his job or gets involved in the novel’s various criminal escapades, half-stoned. Like other Hiaasen heroes he is too honest and blunt for his own good, ‘prone to an acid bluntness that produced poor results careerwise…’ (p.55)

As usual with Hiaasen, Yancy was soon joined by a blizzard of other characters, all of whom are given complicated backstories and then placed in ever-complexifying situations and interlinking storylines.

Buck Nance

The central thread which just about keeps all the complex storylines of this novel together concerns a popular reality TV show titled Bayou Brethren, about a family of rednecks who live and bicker on a chicken farm in the Florida panhandle.

The star of the show is one Buck Nance, a middle-aged redneck with a long salt-and-pepper beard, who runs the chicken farm and so has acquired the ironic nickname Captain Cock (p.58). He lords it over his brothers, has a tough bitching wife, Krystal, but is also screwing a ‘sex-crazed’ mistress with the porny name of Miracle, on the side. (It is a given in all Hiaasen novels, that American marriage entails infidelity.)

In reality, like everything in Hiaasen, the entire show is a meretricious fake and a scam. Buck’s real name is Matthew Romberg and he and his three brothers ( Bradley (TV name: Junior), Henry (TV name: Buddy) and Todd (TV name: Clee Roy, p.68) are actually from rural Wisconsin.

They were in an unsuccessful band named Grand Funk Romberg (a jokey riff on the actual American hard rock group, Grand Funk Railroad) when they were talent-spotted on account of their hick appearance and cast as the central characters in the new show (p.71). The brothers have had to be extensively coached in every aspect of the Florida redneck life which their adoring fans consider them to epitomise: the Cajun accent, the chewing tobacco, the down-home oaths and jokes, it’s all fake.

Lane is kidnapped

The novel opens with Buck’s agent, Lane Coolman, a no-nonsense, cynical New York talent agent working for Platinum Artists Management who owes his career and wages and expense account lifestyle to Buck’s success, arriving in Miami to supervise some ‘gigs’ Buck is scheduled to give. These ‘gigs’ consist of Buck sitting up on stage telling good ole boy stories and jokes while a guitarist noodles folk melodies behind him and Lane supports and whispers prompts from the wings.

Instead, as he drives from the airport to his hotel, Lane is kidnapped by the criminal Zeto (full name Juan Zeto-Fernandez) and his sexy, unhinged sidekick, Merry Mansfield. They use a technique known as ‘bump and grab’ whereby Merry bumps her (stolen) car into the rear of Lane’s hire car. When he pulls over and gets out to remonstrate, he notices her jeans are down to her knees and her knickers pulled down and she is shaving her pubic hair while she is driving. Merry is the Razor Girl of the book’s title.

Lane is speechless with astonishment and anger, as he watches Merry apologetically pull up her panties, then quickly becomes addled with lust. Thus, when Merry declares her car a write-off and asks if he can give her a lift to the nearest service station, Lane readily agrees. But when they get there, Zeto is waiting with a gun, climbs into the passenger seat and orders him to drive. He’s done gone and been kidnapped, the sucker.

Martin Trebeaux and beach renourishment

In fact, typically for Hiaasen’s comedies of accidents and misadventures, it turns out Zeto and Merry have grabbed the wrong guy. Zeto had been hired by a New York mobster, Dominick ‘Big Noogie’ Aeola, from the Calzone crime family (p.139) to kidnap a crooked businessman named Martin Trebeaux, who was scheduled to drive a similar colour car along the same highway at the same time and looks similar to Lane. Oops.

Why was Trebeaux the intended target of a grab? This requires a bit of explanation. Trebeaux runs a big company resanding Florida beaches in a process known as ‘beach renourishment’. This is because global warming and rising sea levels are washing away lots of Florida’s luxury sandy beaches. Trebeaux’s company, Sedimental Journeys, rakes up tonnes of sand from just offshore and replenishes vanishing beaches.

So far, so reasonable. But Trebeaux is a crook. His company has been dogged by scandal. Firstly, the resanding process tends to muddy up the water and produce thousands of dead fish which wash up ashore, putting off the very tourists it’s meant to attract. Discovering this early on, Trebeaux moved his  sand dredging operation to the Bahamas, shipping the sand back to Miami. But it had the same environment-destroying impact in the island and when this was reported on the news and even prompted a BBC investigation, he was forced to shut it down, too (p.32).

Then Trebeaux took some bad advice from a contact who told him he could use sand from a ‘burrow pit’ (something I think we would call a gravel pit) on the edge of the Everglades. This Trebeaux proceeds to excavate and ship to the beach behind the Royal Pyrenees hotel. But the sand from this source turns out to be not only hard and sharp but to contain recycled asphalt and even broken glass! Soon after it is laid, tourists start cutting themselves to shreds and trade to the hotel plummets.

And this is where the mob comes in because the Royal Pyrenees hotel is owned by them and managed by their man, Dominick ‘Big Noogie’ Aeola. This is why Big Noogie had hired Zeto to kidnap Trebeaux. But Zeto screws up and kidnaps Lane, who quickly makes it clear he’s the wrong guy. Nonetheless, Zeto and Merry tie and gag Lane while they ponder what to do with him, Zeto casually weighing the pros and cons of killing him.

Long story short, after failing to bump Len off on a boat, Zeto reluctantly agrees to take him along with them when they have another go at bumping and grabbing the actual Martin Trebeaux the next day and, during the confusion, Lane manages to wriggle out the window of the car he’s being held in and run off, eventually finding a payphone and calling his boss in LA.

Buck’s disastrous gig

Now the important thing about Coolman being mistakenly kidnapped is that he provides a vital psychological support to his TV star Buck Nance when the latter does his ‘gigs’. Buck has a guitarist strumming along in the background but it is Lane’s reassuring presence just offstage that gets him through the gigs, giving him confidence beforehand and prompting him if he dries, as he tells good ole boy stories and jokes to his redneck audience.

So Buck turns up for his ‘gig’ at a bar called the Parched Pirate on Duvall Street in Key West and, without either the guitar player (whose absence is unexplained) or Lane (who we have seen being kidnapped en route to the gig) Buck’s set goes disastrously awry. Instead of the usual stories he panics, forgets his script and ad libs some off colour jokes from Wisconsin about blacks and then about gays. This turns out to be a terrible idea because the Parched Pirate is actually a gay hangout.

The upshot is there’s a riot, Buck is grabbed, beaten up, has his shirt ripped off and his long grey beard forcibly chopped off with scissors before he can flee for his life, ducking through a maze of back alleys and eventually hiding out in the tangled branches of a huge banyan tree where he stays, thoroughly razzled, for the entire night.

During the ruckus he has lost his wallet and his mobile phone and he looks like crap. He has been reduced to bum status.

Enter Yancy

Believe it or not, this is where Yancy comes in, because next day he’s called to a restaurant run by Irv Clipowski (‘a long-distance runner with a goatee which he dyed goosewhite’), which generally has good hygiene standards, but where they’ve found hanks of grey hair in the quinoa vat. The hair has apparently been chucked there overnight and the reader quickly realises it’s the remnants of Buck Nance’s beard, forcibly cut off him by an enraged crowd and chucked through an open window.

Yancy clears up the sample of rogue hair cuttings and orders the restaurant owners to do a thorough deep clean of their kitchen.

As it happens, later that day, Rogelio Burton, a friend of Yancy’s who’s still a detective on the Monroe police force, mentions that a big fuss has kicked off about this TV star, Buck Nance, who’s gone missing and when, that evening, Yancey watches a few old episodes of Bayou Brethren out of boredom, he suddenly realises the grey hair in the quinoa looks identical with Buck Nance’s grey beard in the TV show. Huh. A clue!

Now, Yancy is bored with his job and pissed off because his long-term girlfriend, smart Dr Rosa Campesino, formerly of the Miami morgue (her job when he met her), now working in a hospital emergency room, has abruptly announced that she’s going to Europe, to Norway, without him. It feels like a snub and they part at the airport on bad terms. At a loose end, on impulse, Yancy decides, what the hell, he’ll have a go at tracking down this missing TV star.

Fallout from Buck’s bad gig

Meanwhile, the president of Platinum Artists Management, John David Ampergrodt, known as Amp, is going nuts because Nance’s homophobic, racist jokes were recorded by some of his audience and immediately posted on YouTube. Not only that, but Buck’s unhinged girlfriend, Miracle, becomes convinced that the missing Buck has run off with some other woman and so hacks into the Bayou Brethren‘s Facebook page, adding a photo of Osama bin Laden and making it look like Buck is jokily comparing his own beard with the famous terrorist’s.

So Amp finds himself in the midst of a major PR disaster, when Zeto lets Lane rings up desperately begging for a ransom to be paid so that mad Zeto doesn’t waste him (while Zeto and Merry are still holding him). You can see why Amp doesn’t immediately believe Lane or grasp the seriousness of the situation. 12 hours later Lane rings from a roadside phone box to say he’s managed, as we’ve seen, to free himself from his kidnappers but, again, Amp is too distracted by the crisis in hand to take him seriously.

(There’s a running thread that Lane has a wife, Rachel, who is planning to divorce him and is currently ‘revenge fucking’ her way through all the men in Los Angeles, notably Lane’s boss John David Ampergrodt, who routinely meets her at the Wilshire Hotel for quick cunnilingus and boning sessions [p.144]. We are given graphic descriptions of comic moments when Amp has his head rammed firmly between Rachel’s parted thighs and is slurping away when his phone goes off with an important business call. The hard life of a Hollywood agent, eh. Lane has a divorce lawyer working for him and trying to discredit Rachel. The lawyer’s name is Smegg [p.278].)

Pause for breath

So: what’s going to happen to Martin Trebeaux, who by now Zeto and Merry have successfully kidnapped? Where’s Buck Nance hiding out and what’s going to happen to him, now beaten up, penniless and beardless? Will Yancy manage to find Buck or will he get dragged into the whole Zeto-Merry-Trebeaux storyline? Will there be a happy resolution to Yancy and Rosa Campesino’s relationship, which seems to have fallen on hard times? Stay tuned, folks.

Main plot developments

There are so many complicated plot ramifications and complexifications it’s hard to keep track. Here are the highlights:

Zeto electrocutes himself trying to adjust the plug on the cable to an electric car he’s stolen, so he’s out of the story quite early on.

Trebeaux is handed over to Big Noogie who, with a hardass assistant (‘the man with the ivory toothpick’), attaches surgical clamps to Trebeaux’s ‘nutsack’ (scrotum) and then dangles him from a local railway bridge until Trebeaux admits the sand he rebeached the Grand Pyrenees with was sub-standard and promises to do everything in his power to fix it.

Merry astonishes Lane by bumping into Lane a few days after he escaped from her and Zeto and calmly asking if she can move into his motel room with him. Merry is a splendid fictional creation, a constant fount of unexpected and unpredictable behaviour. She refuses to conform to any conventions, kidnapping someone one minute then wanting to be their friend. She concocts extravagant and hilarious lies at the drop of a hat. After a brief period with Lane she then arrives on Yancy’s doorstep (see below). There’s a funny piece of dialogue where she explains to Yancy that she doesn’t regard herself as a criminal at all, but more of a performance artist (p.93).

Brock and Deb I need to mention Yancy’s neighbours. After he drove away the property developer who was trying to build on the lot adjacent to his house in the previous novel, the lot has now been purchased by a shyster lawyer, Brock Richardson, and his good-looking spoiled fiancée, Debbie. As with the previous owner, Yancy embarks on a campaign to drive them away, which includes drunkenly firing his rifle at beer bottles he lobs into the air close to the border fence when Brock and Deb are around. In a later gag he gets a buddy of his that he plays poker with to pretend to be a state archaeologist and ‘discover’ ancient teeth on the site, which he claims must have belonged to the Calusa native Americans who occupied this land thousands of years ago. The fake archaeologist immediately declares that all building works will have to be suspended while the site is fully excavated, much to Brock’s fury (p.177).

Pitrolux Worth mentioning that one of the book’s dozen or so storylines focuses on Brock’s role as the lawyer for a series of class actions he’s managing against a new wonder-product named ‘Pitrolux’. This is a combination underarm deoderant which also cures erectile dysfunction i.e. gives men boners which last for hours. Despite what he knows about its ill effects, Brock himself starts taking Pitrolux and his rock-hard, everlasting erections rekindle his love life with Debs, until he starts to suffer from the same side effects as all his clients, namely a) the erections won’t go away, last for hours and become really painful, and b) the growth of unsightly skin tags or polyps in the shape of tiny penises in his armpit, which Debs discovers and freak her out.

The diamond ring A simple incident occurs early on which turns out to become central to the plot. Yancy spies Deb poking around in the as-yet-unbuilt-on plot. He jumps over the fence and aggressively questions her. Turns out she has lost the massive engagement ring Brock gave her which cost him $200,000. She’s pissed off because it was slightly too big for her finger, Brock having originally bought it for an earlier, tubbier fiancée. Yancy pretends to help until Debs gets fed up and leaves, at which point Yancy picks it up from where it was lying concealed in long grass.

Yancy stores the monster ring in a tub of hummus in his fridge and what happens is, through various coincidences, a series of bad guys hear about the missing ring and come to pay Yancy visits. Thus, at one point Trebeaux and Richardson meet by complete accident in a bar and both mouth off about their woes. But when Richardson mentions the missing $200,000 ring, and that he thinks Yancy has stolen it, Trebeaux passes the news along to Big Noogie in a bid to impress his new mafioso boss.

Big Noogie immediately decides the ring will be just perfect for his son to give to his fiancée, and sends a couple of hard men round to Yancy’s to intimidate or, if necessary, torture its whereabouts out of him. They only have to start slashing up Yancy’s sofa before Yancy gives in and hands it over.

Merry moves in By this point half a dozen other things have happened. For a start, when Lane moves out of his motel into a smarter hotel, Merry has nowhere to stay and so turns up on Yancy’s doortstep. To his own surprise he takes a keen liking to her, for her independent, free-spirited sassiness. She’s great fun, an outrageous liar and flirt and fantasist. Some of her extended riffs are very funny and help to make this, at least in the first half, arguably Hiaasen’s funniest novel (for example, page 166).

‘You don’t know what to do with me, do you? I love that!’ (p.257)

There’s also broad comedy when Yancy’s estranged girlfriend, Dr Campesino, phones from Oslo and every time it seems, by bad luck, to be Merry who answers the phone. One time by bursting into the bathroom where Yancy is having a shower so that she answers the call from Rosa but then hands it over to an obviously naked Yancy (p.148). Yancy finds this (understandably) difficult to explain and Rosa for her part announces that she wants to stay in Norway.

Comedic though the shape of this storyline is, it contains a very serious social point. Rosa has worked all her life in either the Miami morgue or Miami emergency ward and she’s had enough. She’s snapped. She’s had a sort of breakdown. She just can’t face the sound of endless police sirens from morning to night, and she can’t face any more the task of patching up children – children – with extensive gunshot wounds. On one of their long, difficult calls Rosa tells Yancy how many murders there have been in Oslo that year. The answer: one. Two farmers got into a drunken fight and one hit the other with a shovel a bit harder than he meant to. Guns are illegal in Norway, so there is no gun crime, compared to:

a place as ethnically diverse and gun crazy as Florida. (p.298)

It’s a serious point about the stupidity of America’s gun laws and its out-of-control epidemic of violence and I read it on the same day there was a mass shooting in the very same Miami Rosa is talking about, Hiaasen’s Miami.

‘These people [the Norwegians] have evolved in a positive direction,’ Rosa said. ‘Americans are heading the other direction.’ (p.377)

Anyway, the fact that Merry seems to have moved in with him explains why she is present when Big Noogie’s goons arrive and why she helps to persuade Yancy to give in and hand over the diamond. Mind you, Yancy is easily persuaded because he is, at the time, lying on his sofa recovering from a bad knife wound to the gut. Knife wound?

Yes, because there is an entirely separate plotline which only really gets going in the middle of the book but then comes to dominate it. This rotates around a redneck cretin named Benjamin ‘Blister’ Krill who is a fanatical fan of the Bayou Brethren, so fanatical that he has a massive tattoo inked across his shoulders reading HAIL CAPTAIN COCK.

When Buck climbs down from the banyan tree the morning after the riot in the bar he sets about shoplifting a new shirt and hat and shades etc. But Blister Krill recognises his hero and tries to engage him in conversation. When Buck repeatedly rebuffs him (p.200), idiot Blister gets furious, whips out his knife and frogmarches Buck through the tourist crowds in Key West, out to the dock and onto a little put-put boat which he drives out to a knackered old boat he owns, a cabin cruiser named Wet Nurse. Here he handcuffs Buck to a bunk in the cabin until he learns some manners.

From this point onwards Blister becomes a sort of daemon ex machina, the wild card driving the plot. Things escalate when Blister, inspired by the kind of racist language Buck used at his ill-fated gig and which has triggered an outpouring of redneck bigotry across the internet, spots a foreign-looking guy on the tacky touristy Conch Train which weaves through Old Key West, goes up to him and starts yelling Islamophobic abuse.

This poor man, Abdul-Halim Shamoon, is from New York where he has a family and children and runs a harmless electronics retail shop (p.126). He’s loaded up on tacky souvenirs which he’s planning to take home for the kids when a rough redneck confronts him and starts spitting insults in his face. So Shamoon tries to get off the train while it’s still moving but falls awkwardly onto a tacky porcelain gewgaw he’s bought which pierces his sternum and punctures his aorta. There and then he bleeds to death all over his tropical tourist shirt and souvenir knick-knacks. Blister runs off into the crowd.

Hiaasen’s early novels feature some outrageously grotesquely violent incidents, such as the hitman who gets a dead pitbull attached to his arm in Double Whammy and the angry New Yorker who crucifies a crooked property developer to a satellite dish in Stormy Weather. Later novels try but, I think, generally fail to match the first fine careless insanity of these early incidents. Having Shamoon fall on some tourist gewgaws and bleed to death isn’t outrageous enough to be blackly funny. Instead it feels genuinely tragic and sad.

Anyway, Blister runs off, but some bystanders provide identification of sorts and the ‘murder’ of Shamoom gets mixed up with the ongoing disappearance of TV star Buck Nance in a whole load of complicated and twisted ways.

Yancy, bored and hoping to impress his ex-boss by solving the crime, picks up various clues which lead him to Blister in his crappy apartment, where he’s barely begun questioning him (with absolutely no authority; he is no longer a detective and the head of Monroe’s Police force has emphatically told him to stop interfering) when Blister takes a ‘spazzy’ swipe at him with a knife, not stabbing him but raking a cut across his stomach.

Luckily enough Yancy was accompanied by Merry, who manhandled him out the apartment, into their car and ran all the red lights to get home to a hospital ER in 6 minutes.

Being the tough guy hero of a thriller / obstinate failed cop and stoner (take your pick) Yancy refuses to stay in hospital overnight after he’s been stitched up, and insists on going home where he can lie on his own sofa and get pleasantly stoned while Merry tends to him. Which is precisely the moment Big Noogie’s hoods choose to arrive and threaten to turn over his house till they find the $200,000 engagement ring.

Complicated, isn’t it? There’s a lot more. Blister then kidnaps Lane Coolman as well as Buck and ends up with both of them handcuffed to bunks in the cabin of his rancid old motor yacht. The only way the two men can persuade Blister to let them go is with a plan which goes beyond any bounds of sanity or probability: the three concoct the idea that Blister will join the cast of Bayou Brethren as Buck’s long lost brother. It’s Blister’s idea, and he comes up with a long and extravagant backstory to justify his sudden appearance in the show. Lane is one tough, cynical agent and, despite having been kidnapped and handcuffed to a bunk in a rancid old boat, he can actually see Blister’s plot twist working.

The result is that Blister releases them from their handcuffs, takes them back to the mainland, Lane calls Amp at the agency’s office in Los Angeles, pitches the story and, to the reader’s increasing disbelief, Amp flies out to meet the (by now genuinely psychopathic and dangerous) Blister in person.

This storyline now spins way out of control leading to a scene where Blister is taken for a spin in Amp’s private jet along with his common law wife, Mona, and Lane and Buck as they drink champagne and discuss the finer points of the contract he’s going to be signed to. All is going well until Amp’s big black bodyguard, Prawney, makes a grab for Blister’s Glock semi-automatic which he’s been carrying round for the past hundred pages. The gun goes off, shooting Prawney through the cheeks and in the chest. Amp orders the pilot to turn the plane round and land back in Key West. Well, as business meetings go, that wasn’t a great success.

Trebeaux and Juvenile

Now he’s come all this way south to sort out the sand situation, Big Noogie likes it in Key West. After Trebeaux had been hung off the bridge and made the wise decision to co-operate fully with the mob, he’d been flown to New York to meet the heads of the Calzone family who made him an offer he couldn’t refuse i.e. took over his company wholesale (p.139). On the way Trebeaux had introduced Noogie to a scam he’d never heard of before, which was to get hold of a dog and dress it in a hazard jacket and pretend to be disabled so as to blag a better seat on the plane. Americans appear to call this a ‘service dog’ (p.410). When they fly back to Key West together, Trebeaux wants nothing more to do with the dog and the Noogie finds himself looking after it and slowly getting to like going for regular walks through the tourist crowds of Old Key West and along the beach. Yes, life here is nice and relaxing.

Anyway, Trebeaux is still orientating himself in his dangerous new situation vis-a-vis the mafia, and is unpacking in his hotel room when there’s a knock on the door and Big Noogie’s mistress, a big florid flake nicknamed Juveline (a name she acquired when a New York cop couldn’t spell ‘juvenile’ on her arrest sheet) walks into his room and asks whether he fancies a mind-blowing fuck. Trebeaux says yes and they go for it. Soon she has become his mistress, two-timing the Big Noogie.

Trebeaux knows this is a very bad idea but is turned on by the sheer outrageousness of the situation and they keep having regular sex, Juveline explaining that Big Noogie is such a big, fat, middle-aged guy that he isn’t that interested in it. Also, Noogie doesn’t get jealous if she disappears for days on end to her relatives’ houses or shopping and such, which gives her plenty of opportunity to be unfaithful.

This plotline reaches a peak when Trebeaux tries to pull a scam on the Big Noogie, bullshitting that he has heavyweight connections in Havana Cuba who will do a deal to supply world-class pink sand from Cuban beaches to make the Royal Pyrenees beach the envy of Florida. Unwisely, Trebeaux lets Juveline talk him into taking her on the 2-day jaunt to Havana.

Only trouble is that Juveline talks in her sleep and one night cries out ‘Harder, Marty, harder’, much to the surprise of Big Noogie lying next to her, who instantly realises what’s going on (p.389). Thus, when Trebeaux has landed and made himself at home in Havana, and goes to meet Juveline off a later flight, it is not Juveline he sees walking through passport control but the same hardman who applied the surgical clamps to his nutsack and helped dangle him off the bridge. Ah. Oh. Bad. In fact Trebeaux’s body is discovered a few days later, buried on a beach. So, that’s the end of him, then.

Funny

Razor Girls may well be Hiaasen’s funniest novel, meaning the one which made me laugh out loud the most. For two reasons: Yancy develops a really buddy-buddy routine with fellow detective Rogelio, which leads to lots of snappy repartee:

YANCY: ‘The human bloodhound is what they call me.’
ROGERIO: ‘A pain in the sphincter is what they call you.’ (p.87)

OK, so it’s not Oscar Wilde, but in the context of a fast-moving, American crime comedy caper, and in the context of the sustained backchat between the pair, it’s good, it works.

But the main reason is for the indefatigably unpredictable behaviour of fantasist and survivor Merry Mansfield. Almost everything she says and does is wonderfully confident, bluff and canny. Unquenchably amoral. At several points Yancy realises it would be wise to tell her to move out and make a break with her, but she’s just so much fun to have around.

It was hard to picture an even-keeled relationship with a person who took her last name from a  dead movie star and and crashed automobiles half-naked for a living. (p.284)

Men

Once again, as in many previous Hiaasen novels, the entire male sex comes in for sustained criticism, yet again, for their pitiful addiction to sex. Flash most men some boob or a whiff of your panties and they turn into drooling slaves. Most of this comes from the mouth if Merry, inventor of the shaving pubes scam, who has the lowest possible opinion of pathetic men.

  • Merry said, ‘Men. I swear.’ (p.44)
  • ‘Men are so pitiful.’ (p.93)
  • ‘his poor little pecker…’ (p.119)
  • ‘You men.’ (p.134)
  • He said, ‘Yeah, I know. Us men, we’re pitiful.’ ‘Totally, Andrew.’ (p.190)
  • ‘Men, I swear.’ (p.285)
  • She had had ‘a lifetime of being disappointed by men.’ (p.360)
  • ‘Men are the worst.’ (p.364)
  • ‘Men are so freakin’ predictable.’ (p.415)

One touch on the pecker and men become ‘immune to rational thought’ (p.388). I wonder if Hiaasen made the same kind of sustained criticism of women or Jews or blacks or Muslims, whether his liberal readers would take it all in good spirit and laughingly accept the sustained barrage of negative stereotypes.

American slang

Hiaasen’s novels are notable not only for their very dense plots, overflowing with colourful characters and garish incidents, but for the aggressive ‘attitude’ of the narrator himself, who freely uses street slang and swearwords to describe his characters and their doings, and liberally sprinkles the text with those handy terms for things and actions which Americans just seem to have and we Brits don’t. I found this novel particularly rich in new terminology, in fact I became addicted to collecting them.

  • app = short for appetiser. ‘His calamari app.’
  • baggie = a brand of plastic bag, Yancy uses them for stashing mank he finds on his restaurant inspections, such as rodent ‘scat’
  • baked = stoned
  • to ball = to fuck cf. to bone. ‘Is she still balling that dickface Drucker?’ (p.370)
  • to bang = to fuck, cf, to ball, to bone. ‘Don’t bang a stranger.’ (p.404)
  • bank = big money. ‘You saved the agency some serious bank.’ (p.63)
  • a beat-down = a severe beating. ‘So I can cancel your beat-down?’ (p.414)
  • berserk-o = adjective meaning wild, crazy. ‘The beserk-o side of the place [Miami] was basically all you saw, if you were a cop or a coroner.’ (p.190)
  • to bitch someone out = nag someone, generally a woman bitching out a man (p.252)
  • blow smoke = to bullshit, make something up. ‘… that didn’t mean Trebeaux wasn’t blowing smoke.’ (p.182)
  • to bone = to fuck
  • bonehead = ‘A stubborn, thickheaded and determined person that doesn’t think things through before acting upon them’
  • boner = erection (p.374)
  • to brace = to meet, to confront (p.393)
  • a bumblefuck = insult
  • Bumfuck = generic term for inconsequential settlement in the middle of nowhere, as in Bumfuck Wisconsin or any of the other anonymous mid-Western states.
  • a bump and grab = a type of criminal scam: one crim bumps their car into the back of the victims car; when the victim stops, they’re hijacked / kidnapped
  • to bus tables = to be a waiter
  • buy the farm = to die. ‘… a biker who’d bought the farm at Mile Marker 19.’ (p.304)
  • buzzed = adjective meaning ‘stoned’
  • to can = to fire. ‘No wonder the sheriff canned your ass.’ (p.188)
  • chunk-muffin  = fat person (p.36)
  • cockhead = variation on dickhead, an idiot, an annoying or vexatious person (p.367)
  • cold one = a beer (p.306)
  • cooch = pussy, fanny, vulva. ‘…shaving cream all over her cooch…’ (p.260)
  • to crack the blinds = of closed blinds, to prise them apart to spy through them (p.327)
  • courtesy fuck = a guy buys a woman dinner, chocolates etc, she owes him a courtesy fuck
  • cracker = term of contempt for poor whites, particularly of Georgia and Florida, dating back to the American Revolution, and derives from the cracked corn which was their staple diet
  • to dick around = to waste time (p.309)
  • dickface = loser, idiot (p.370)
  • dickweed = an asshole or idiot so pernicious they are like a weed (p.384)
  • dirtbag = person who is committed to an alternative lifestyle to the point of abandoning employment and other social norms i.e. washing
  • to do = have sex with. ‘I’d do her.’
  • Dogpatch = name of a fictional poor rural community in the U.S., especially in the South, whose inhabitants are unsophisticated and have little education. Hence its use as an adjective: ‘A Dogpatch moniker like Clee Roy should have stuck in his head.’ (p.188)
  • a doobie or doob = a joint, cannabis cigarette (p.328)
  • dopp kit = small bag made for transporting toiletries in a convenient and portable manner
  • douche, short for douche bag = ‘a dick, an asshole, a jerk, whose crass behaviour has led them to be compared to a cleansing product for vaginas.’
  • a dust bunny = ball of dust and fluff (p.326)
  • dweeb = abbreviation of ‘dick with eyebrows’, implying the person is a walking penis
  • flake = an unreliable person; someone who agrees to do something, but never follows through (p.311)
  • four-top = table for four in a diner
  • to frog = to punch someone in the upper arm or chest with the middle knuckle partially extended to inflict a sharp concentrated blow
  • fry cartons = generic name for the kind of flimsy, grease-stained cardboard cartons you get takeaway fast food in
  • fuckwhistle = idiot, moron, one who lacks the most basic common sense to make correct decisions
  • fuckweasel = person who behaves in a sneaky manner to create favourable circumstances for themselves at the expense of others
  • gank = to steal. ‘I think the asshole who lives next door might’ve ganked it.’ (p.181)
  • gas up = fill a car with petrol (p.346)
  • goatfuck = a monumental screwup. (p.410)
  • goober = term of affection for a lovable, silly, lighthearted person: ‘…a crew from ET [was] interviewing some sunburned goober’ (p.97)
  • googan = a person wearing trendy sports clothing that is completely clueless in the ways of fishing
  • goomah = a mafioso’s mistress
  • grab-ass = the act of wrestling or chasing another person with the intention to touch or squeeze that person’s butt
  • a grow house = a room or rooms or larger space where marijuana plants are grown (p.245)
  • a hardass = someone who takes no shit off anyone, someone who expects to get their own way and won’t take no for an answer; dominating (p.364)
  • hard chargers = party animals. ‘Rogelio didn’t screw around on his wife, never stayed out late with the hard chargers.’ (p.82)
  • hardcore = adjective meaning serious, intense, relentless. ‘This judge is hardcore.’ (p.370)
  • honcho = a person in charge of some group or function. ‘The network honchos…’ (p.247)
  • horn, on the = on the phone
  • horndog = a guy or girl that is always horny. ‘He couldn’t rule out the possibility that he was a hopelessly shallow horndog.’ (p.284)
  • iced = adjective meaning killed or completed, depending on context. ‘I’ll have [the contract] iced by the next time we walk.’ (p.238)
  • an innie = belly buttons come in two shapes, innies and outies
  • to jack = ​jack something or somebody (for something) to steal something from somebody, especially something small or of low value (p.322)
  • jackoff = a stupid, irritating, or contemptible person
  • jag = ‘To “be on a jag” or “go on a jag” means to be completely unrestrained, whether you’re on a drinking jag or a crying jag.’
  • jazzed = expression of extreme happiness. ‘I am totally jazzed to hear your voice.’ (p.238)
  • jewels = penis and testicles. ‘I mean she’ll kill me, cut off my fuckin’ jewels and kill me all over again.’ (p.90)
  • jizz = semen (p.268)
  • Johnson = penis (p.374)
  • junk = cock and balls. ‘Next she made him dunk his junk in a bucket of ice cubes…’ (p.287)
  • landing zone = woman’s genitals (p.331)
  • look fly = look smart, well presented (p.359)
  • mash = press hard. ‘He mashed the Lobby button half a dozen times…’ (p.309)
  • meathead = overmuscular man, too much time at the gym, can’t string a sentence together (p.292)
  • meat hog = muscle i.e. goons i.e. hired enforcers (p.322)
  • mick = Irish (noun or adjective) (p.373)
  • mo-fo = adjective, short for ‘motherfucking’, suggesting ‘big’ (p.180)
  • a mope = a person of any race or culture who presents themselves as uneducated and possibly criminal either by behaviour or clothes
  • a mouthbreather = a retard: someone so stupid they never learned to breathe through their nose
  • nooner = a sex session during a lunch break or around noon; made famous by Al Bundy of ‘Married with Children’. ‘She promised him that she was done with payback nooners at the Wlshire.’ (p.409)
  • nosebleed heels = heels so high your head is in the upper atmosphere, hence the nosebleed
  • a numbnut = someone who is a constant source of trouble, an individual who screws up, or constant makes mistakes
  • nut sack = scrotum; male characters in Hiaasen novels are always getting something bad happen to their nut sacks, in this novel Trebeaux has some surgical clamps (hemostats) attached to his balls
  • nuts = testicles
  • on the lam = on the run, very old slang
  • a peckerwood = used by Afro-Americans to describe a rural white southerner, usually poor, undereducated or otherwise ignorant and bigoted (p.381)
  • to peel out = to drive or go away. ‘Yancy grinned at the sight of the Taurus peeling out.’ (p.190)
  • to peel rubber = to accelerate an automobile very rapidly (p.364)
  • piece = gun (p.370)
  • poon = woman’s genitals. Short for ‘poontang‘, ditto (p.308)
  • a pop tab = the flip top on drink cans
  • to pop a tent = to have an erection that shows through your trousers, or erects a bedsheet
  • pussy hound = ‘a dude who’s main goal in life is balling ladies.’
  • rearview, to put someone in your rearview = get over someone, move on (p.302)
  • rebar = reinforcing steel used as rods in concrete.
  • revenge fuck = joins mercy fuck, courtesy fuck and sportfucking as categories of fuck. ‘Rachel was the undoubted queen of the revenge fuck in a town with many contenders for the title.’ (p.42)
  • the root prong = of a tooth (p.178)
  • salvor = ‘a person engaged in salvage of a ship or items lost at sea’
  • sawbuck = $10
  • scat = poo; ‘rodent scat’ (p.84)
  • schlep = noun: a long and tiresome journey; verb: to make a long and tiresome journey. Yiddish (p.373)
  • to screak = to make a harsh shrill noise : screech
  • shit-bird = a completely useless individual who is unaware of their own complete uselessness
  • shit-heel = adjective. ‘…his shit-heel brothers…’ (p.221)
  • shitkicker = insult
  • shitstick = insult
  • shitsucker = insult
  • shitweasel = person who is sly, sneaky, and opportunistic; someone who is looking to slip their way into a shitty situation and make it even shittier
  • a shucker = someone who shucks oysters, clams, corn, walnuts etc out of their shells
  • sick = adjective meaning really good, cool or very impressive
  • a slim jim = a tool used to open doors on cars, by ‘pulling up’ the lock within the door, hence the verb, to slim jim a car. ‘… content in mid-life to be slim-jimming cars…’ (p.275)
  • slut puppy = person who uses their adorable looks to attract a partner or partners for a casual sexual encounter
  • to snitch out = to betray. ‘A million bucks says you wouldn’t never snitch out your wife.’ (p.358)
  • to spazz out = sudden, fast movement(s); to go mental (p.373)
  • spazzy = adjective meaning clumsy or inept, with an overtone of demented or mad. ‘Benny Krill had made one spazzy swing with the blade…’ (p.192)
  • to stare down = verb: to look fixedly at someone in a hostile or intimidating way till they look away
  • a stare-down = noun: the act of looking fixedly at someone in a hostile or intimidating way till they look away (p.386)
  • stoner = someone who regularly smokes marijuana: there are many different types of stoner
  • swag = merchandise. ‘He promised to donate a truckload of Brethren swag to an auction benefiting the local kids’ baseball league…’ (p.248).
  • tanked = stoned
  • tank suit = a woman’s one-piece swimsuit with high-cut legs. Merry wears one (p.300)
  • a thundercunt = that much more cunty than an ordinary cunt. ‘She’s a major thundercunt.’ (p.62)
  • toot = to snort, generally cocaine (p.329)
  • to tune up = to give someone an attitude adjustment by beating their ass. ‘… the man who’d just tuned up Rick and Rod…’ (p.275)
  • a tweaker = a methamphetamine addict; derives from ‘tweak’ which is a slang name for methamphetamine’. ‘Mr Nance isn’t just some homeless tweaker.’ (p.47)
  • unspooled = adjective meaning unhinged, bonkers
  • weed = marijuana aka grass
  • a whack job = a nutcase, a lunatic
  • to whale at something = to hit something forcefully and repeatedly
  • to whorehop = to go from one (loose) woman to another, regardless of consequences (p.61)
  • to wig out = ‘to suddenly become unnecessarily worried, anxious, upset, or paranoid most often while under the influence of an intoxicating substance, especially marijuana’
  • wild-ass = adjective meaning crazy. ‘The van driver figured out they were being tailed, and made a wild-ass turn off Flagler Avenue.’ (p.362)
  • wood = an erect penis; thus ‘to get wood’, ‘to have wood’. Brock Richardson: ‘Never waste good wood.’ (p.288)

Englishisms

In among the blizzard of Americanisms I was struck by a handful of times Hiaasen uses what I think of as very English terms, such as nitwit (p.361) and thick (p.215). I wonder whether he was deliberately trying to include as much novel slang as possible in this book i.e. it has a conscious philological interest over and above the storyline.

Once again I note that the woman riding cowboy style is Hiaasen’s (fictional) sexual position of choice, Merry riding Yancy (p.254) just as Dr Rosa Campasino rode him on the morgue dissection table and, later, in his bath. Appropriate for the general ‘girls on top, men are pitiful’ theme of so many of his novels.

Handy phrases

  • Sonny Summers wasn’t the sharpest tack on the corkboard. (p.47)
  • ‘Not my circus, not my monkey.’ (p.185)

Credit

Razor Girl by Carl Hiaasen was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2016. All references are to the 2019 Vintage Crime paperback edition.

Carl Hiaasen reviews

  1. Tourist Season (1986)
  2. Double Whammy (1987)
  3. Skin Tight (1989)
  4. Native Tongue (1991)
  5. Strip Tease (1993)
  6. Stormy Weather (1995)
  7. Lucky You (1997)
  8. Sick Puppy (2000)
  9. Basket Case (2002)
  10. Skinny Dip (2004)
  11. Nature Girl (2006)
  12. Star Island (2010)
  13. Bad Monkey (2013)
  14. Razor Girl (2016)
  15. Squeeze Me (2020)
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by Simon on June 16, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on June 16, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/06/16/razor-girl-carl-hiaasen/

The Roaring Girl, or Moll Cutpurse by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker (1611)

‘Perhaps for my mad going some reprove me:
I please myself and care not else who loves me.’
(Moll Cutpurse, the Roaring Girl)

According to Elizabeth Cook, editor of the New Mermaid edition of The Roaring Girl, The Elizabethan playwright Thomas Middleton was for centuries dismissed as just another member of the flock of playwrights who swarmed in London between about 1590 and 1630 and who collectively produced over 600 plays of all styles, shapes and sizes.

It was T.S. Eliot’s 1927 essay about Middleton, which made a solid claim for him being second only to Shakespeare among the playwrights of the era – not least because he wrote enduring plays in both the major genres, of tragedy (The Changeling and Women Beware Women) and comedy (The Roaring Girl and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside) – which began the 20th century rise of his reputation.

The Roaring Girl stands slightly to one side of Middleton’s comedies, firstly because it was a collaboration (with Thomas Dekker). (It is fascinating to learn that the majority of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays were collaborations, because of the furious demand of theatres which often only staged new plays for a week or two before requiring yet more audience fodder.)

It is also slightly unusual because it is based on contemporary fact, namely the life of Mary Frith, a notorious character of the time, widely known as ‘Moll Cutpurse’, who had gained a reputation for wearing men’s clothes and behaving like a young tough. Contemporary accounts describe her as ‘wearing men’s clothes, appearing on the stage, drinking, swearing, making “immodest and lascivious speeches,” prostitution, pick-pocketing, forgery, and highway robbery’. Frith inspired numerous contemporary accounts, including a chapbook written by John Day titled The Mad Pranks of Merry Moll of the Bankside (1610) and appearing in Nathaniel Field’s Amends for Ladies (1611).

Cast

Moll, the Roaring Girl

The posh men

Sir Alexander Wengrave
Young Sebastian Wengrave, his son – the ‘hero’
Neatfoot, his servant
Gull, his page
Ralph Trapdoor, his spy
Sir Adam Appleton
Sir Davy Dapper
Jack Dapper, spendthrift son to Sir Davy
Sir Guy Fitzallard
(Mary Fitzallard, his daughter, in love with Sebastian Wengrave – the ‘heroine’)
Sir Beauteous Ganymede
Goshawk, a deceiving gallant
Laxton, another deceiving gallant
Greenwit, assistant to Laxton in some scams

Curtilax, a Sergeant
Hanger, his Yeoman (both commissioned by Sir Davy Dapper to arrest his spendthrift son, Jack)

City merchants and their wives

Tiltyard, a Feather-seller
Mistress Tiltyard
Openwork, a Sempster
Mistress Rosamond Openwork – Goshawk tries to seduce her
Hippocrates Gallipot, an Apothecary
Mistress Prudence Gallipot – Laxton tries to seduce her

Act 1

Oddly, Moll, the star of the play, doesn’t appear for the entire first act. Maybe one aim was to make her eventual arrival onstage that much more ‘dramatic’. Instead both scenes of act one are set in Sir Alexander Wengrave’s grand house where he is grandly entertaining guests.

Scene 1

Set in the chambers of his son, Sebastian, into which is shown a young woman dressed as a disguise. This is quickly revealed to be Mary Fitzallard who Sebastian is in love with. Why, she asks, has he been ignoring her? Because, he explains, his father is grand and ambitious and is demanding a huge dowry from her parents. But Sebastian has a plan which he now explains: he has not seen Mary for a while because he is pretending to be in love with the notorious man-dressing, roaring girl, Moll Cutpurse. His father will be so worried about that match that he will see marriage to Mary as the preferable alternative.

Scene 2

Introduces us to Sebastian’s father, Sir Alexander, who is grandly hosting a party of posh friends who he proceeds to share his sadness that his son is driving him to an early grave by being in love with a ‘man-woman’, Moll Cutpurse. Father and son have a flaring row in front of everything and Sebastian stomps out and the guests leave. At which point a new servant presents himself, one Ralph Trapdoor who has been recommended to Sir Alexander. This is handy. Sir Alexander orders Trapdoor, and to find Moll, inveigle himself into her good books and find some way to destroy her.

Act 2

Scene 1. The three shops

The gallants who had been Sir Alexander Wengrave’s guests in act 1, are now seen drifting between three London shops, chatting to the shopkeepers, flirting with their wives and ribbing each other. We see Laxton flirting with Mistress Gallipot of the tobacco shop, borrowing money from her and telling the audience, aside, that he doesn’t like her much but strings her along with promises of a sexual dalliance, meanwhile borrowing money from her to spend on other women.

Finally, enter Moll Cutpurse, chatting and joshing with the shopwomen. Laxton – who has emerged as the randiest and most cynical of the gallants – pesters her to make a date with him and eventually she gives in and agrees to meet him at Gray’s Inn Fields at 3 that afternoon.

Trapdoor then enters, spots Moll, and quickly offers to be her servant, flirts and fawns over her. She’s suspicious but agrees to meet him, also, in Gray’s Inn Fields between 3 and 4. The gallants go off to chase a duck with spaniels on Parlous Pond!

Scene 2. A street

Sebastian makes a soliloquy about love during which his father enters, unseen, and spies on him. Sebastian notices this (‘art thou so near?’) and steers his speech round to indicating he is in love with Moll Cutpurse, to his father’s predictable dismay. Moll herself enters, accompanied by a porter carrying a large viol on his back (?) and Sebastian woos her. She is polite but rebuffs him – “I have no humour to marry: I love to lie a’ both sides a’ th’ bed myself” – saying she is chaste and will never marry.

Enter a tailor and there’s some crude joking about him taking her measurements for a pair of breeches, an item of clothing normally worn only by men, which Sir Alexander watches with predictable horror.

Sir Alexander comes forward and rebukes his son, saying that Moll will disgrace him because she is a whore and a thief, throwing in the fact that all the worst women in London are called Moll. Sebastian defends her against these general slurs – ‘Would all Molls were no worse’ and exits.

Sir Alexander is genuinely upset and, on this reading, I began to feel sorry for him. But he resolves to pursue and shame Moll. In a final soliloquy, Sebastian decides that he must share his plan with Moll in hope that she will help him and Mary.

Act 3

Scene 1. Gray’s Inn Fields

Laxton is hanging round waiting impatiently for Moll to keep her appointment. When she arrives, dressed as a man, he doesn’t at first recognise her. But when he does, she delivers a brilliantly impassioned speech in defence of women and attacking all lecherous men like Laxton who think that just because she smiles and jests and drinks a toast a woman is hot for sex, whereas she is just being human, and Moll draws her sword and forces him to fight, ferociously wishing Laxton was all men who think like him, so she could punish the entire sex.

LAXTON: Draw upon a woman? Why, what dost mean, Moll?
MOLL: To teach thy base thoughts manners: th’ art one of those
That thinks each woman thy fond, flexible whore
If she but cast a liberal eye upon thee;
Turn back her head, she’s thine, or amongst company,
By chance drink first to thee. Then she’s quite gone;
There’s no means to help her, nay, for a need,
Wilt swear unto thy credulous fellow lechers
That th’ art more in favour with a lady
At first sight than her monkey all her lifetime.
How many of our sex by such as thou
Have their good thoughts paid with a blasted name
That never deserved loosely, or did trip
In path of whoredom beyond cup and lip?

‘Have their good thoughts paid with a blasted name?’ It’s a rousing speech that rings down the ages and is still true. Moll cuts Laxton, he refers to the blood running and needing a surgeon and runs off shocked. — He has demonstrated his lack of manliness, his lack. He lacks stones i.e. testicles.

Enter Trapdoor enters. Moll, still dressed as a man, bumps rudely into him, flicks his face and taunts him to attack her. It’s only when he refuses, that she reveals her identity and he immediately fawns and asks to be her man. She calculatingly agrees, promises to pass on to him her hand-me-downs and they exit off to St Thomas Apostle’s, east of St Paul’s. — Trapdoor also shows himself to be all mouth and no trousers, when he refuses to fight with Moll-as-man.

Scene 2. Master Gallipot’s house

And now to another unmanly man, the nagged ‘apron husband’ Gallipot, whose wife despises him for being weak and feeble. This, we realise, is why she wishes an affair with Laxton (although in act 2 we saw how Laxton, in reality, despises her and only strings her along to extract loans from her).

Laxton has smuggled her a letter in which he blethers her with sweet words before coming to the point that he needs £30. She is just agonising over how to get this for him (and her anxiety about money, pawning some belongings but maybe being found out – in a flash reminded me of Madam Bovary and the horrible mess of debts she gets into 250 years later) when her husband comes in, wondering why she’s left the dinner party they’re hosting for friends.

Gallipot spies his wife reading but as he calls to her (‘Pru’) she tears up the letter and invents a sob story on the spot, saying that she and Laxton were engaged to be married, but he went off to the wars, she heard he was dead, and so she married Gallipot, but now Laxton is back and wants to claim her as his wife. Gallipot is horrified as he loves his wife and has had children by her which us why, when she cunningly suggests buying Laxton off with thirty pounds, he readily agrees.

The dinner party guests come out and comment on Mistress Gallipot’s unhappy appearance with much bawdy and obscene double entendres, some of them guessing that Master Gallipot is having an affair, that’s why she looks so upset. They say their goodbyes.

Whereupon Laxton himself enters, complaining about apothecaries (remember we last saw him being cut and slashed by Moll). In what is presumably a comic scene, Mistress Gallipot quickly conveys the lies she’s told her husband (that she and Laxton were engaged), Laxton picks it up quickly, and they both smile as Master Gallipot begs him to accept £30 to make all right between them. Gallipot goes into his house to organise the money and Laxton genuinely praises her for her quick-witted deceitfulness.

Scene 3. Holborn Street

Sir Alexander with some of his grand friends. Enter Trapdoor who silkily tells him that Sebastian and Moll plan to meet at 3 o’clock in his (Sir Alexander’s) chamber to have sex. So. They will trap the pair. To give a cover to their meetings, he instructs Trapdoor to behave as an angry debtor, and so the spy leaves.

His friends, Sir Adam Appleton and Sir Davy Dapper come over to talk to Sir Alexander and the latter reveals that his own son, Jack, is far worse than young Sebastian, he spends a fortune whoring, drinking, and gambling. Sir Davy explains he has decided to teach young Jack a lesson: he will arrange to have Jack arrested, hoping a few days in the Counter (the debtor’s prison) will make him realise the value of money and hard work.

Alexander and Appleton exit, and two officers enter, namely Sergeant Curtilax and Yeoman Hanger. Sir Davy gives them their commission to arrest young Jack and indicates the pub he’s drinking in, just over there, and leaves the pair to capture him.

Just at this moment Moll and Trapdoor stroll up and, spying Curtilax and Hanger in hiding, realise they’re about to arrest someone, Moll decides to save whoever it is. And so when Jack Dapper and his servant Gull emerge from the pub, and just as Curtilax and Hanger move in, Moll and Trapdoor run forward, holding the officers off and telling Jack and Gull to leg it, which they promptly do. Moll’s thoughts: ‘A pox on ’em! Trapdoor, let’s away.’

Act 4

Scene 1. Sir Alexander’s chamber

Sir Alexander and Trapdoor await Moll and Sebastian. Sir Alexander gets Trapdoor to place various valuables around the room, confident that Moll will steal them and, when they bring constables to catch her with them later, it will guarantee she’s thrown into prison, if not executed. They hide.

But instead, Sebastian enters not only with Moll, but with his true love, Mary Fitzallard, dressed as a pageboy. Moll comments wryly as Sebastian kisses Mary, in a boy’s outfit, and then expresses her gratitude to Moll for helping them. Moll observes the valuables laid out as if on purpose to tempt a thief but says that, since she is no thief, they do not tempt her. Instead Sebastian invites her to play on the viola de gamba which she turns out to be skillful on, and accompanies herself singing a couple of songs.

Sir Alexander steps forward and interrupts the playing but it has no great dramatic effect at all. None of the three seem surprised or worried to see him. The conversation carries on, whereby Sebastian appears to have been securing the money – forty shillings – to pay her (I think; I didn’t understand this passage). His father quizzes Moll who claims to be a music teacher and Sir Alex asks her to play the ballad about the witch.

Then Sir Alexander gives his son four ‘angel’s’, being gold coins worth ten shillings each. He has marked them somehow, maybe pierced them. His Cunning Plan is Sebastian will give the marked coins to Moll and, later, Sir Alex will get the constables to arrest her saying they were stolen.

This is act 4 and, for me, absolutely none of this love plot intrigue is working in the slightest. The Roaring Girl feels less engaging than any of the Restoration comedies I read.

Scene 2. Openwork’s house

Two of the merchants’ wives we’ve meant moan about how pathetic their menfolk are. Mistress Openwork laments that Goshawk told her a pack of lies about her husband being in Brentford with a whore, and told her he’d take her there to prove it. It was all lies, as Openwork discovered when she confronted her husband who is now standing in the shop waiting for Goshawk to arrive so he can give him a beating.

For her part, Mistress Gallipot laments that Laxton turned out to be a lying, unmanly deceiver, ‘a lame gelding’. Men get it in the neck in this play. It’s like a feminist manifesto.

This morphs into a long and really unfunny scene. Goshawk now arrives and wants to hurry Mistress Openwork into the boat he’s got waiting but first she insists on bringing Mistress Gallipot with them, which he reluctantly agrees to, then Master Openwork comes up and she furiously accuses him to his face of having an affair with a whore at Brentford. Master Openwork is vehement that this is a lie and then starts demanding who told her this lie and – to cut a really long story short – she admits it was the (now terrified) Goshawk. Enraged, Master Openwork draws his sword and Goshawk piteously begs for forgiveness.

Now, I suppose this is intended as one more proof that sweet-talking gallants are full of ****, but it took pages to get there and I found none of it either funny, or particularly well written. Master Openwork has a little soliloquy opining that the world is a rotten place full of cheats and liars. Well spotted, mate.

In part two of this scene, a young man dressed as a summoner enters and delivers a summons to Master Gallipot. It claims to be a legal document summonsing the Gallipots to court for breach of contract. This has been arranged by Laxton. We learn that after the thirty pounds he was given a few scenes ago, he asked for a further £15. Now Master and Mistress Gallipot threaten the summoner with violence who quickly takes off his wig and reveals himself to be one of the gallants’ associates, Greenwit.

Mistress Gallipot had gone along with the deceit earlier, but now snaps at the size of the sum being extorted. She turns to her husband and confesses everything – that Laxton led her on, but this was all a lie, she was never betrothed to Laxton. Furious, Gallipot now turns to Laxton who is trembling with fear.

With surprising chivalry, Laxton quickly makes up a version of a ‘confession’ which completely exonerates Mistress Gallipot, claiming he set out to seduce her as a challenge, when she claimed to him and his friends that women were virtuous, but she stood solid and unflinchingly loyal to her husband etc etc, and thus Gallipot is mollified and calmed down.

In fact so calmed down that he promptly forgives Laxton and invites him in for a celebration feast (!?).

So, by the end of Act 4, two merchants’ wives – citizens’ wives – have had their virtue assailed by two upper-class ‘gallants’ – Laxton and Goshawk – who both turn out to be lily-livered eunuchs. The women are smarter than the men and their husbands are made of finer stuff, loving and forgiving. And, it feels like half the play is over, as the forgiving merchants invite the foolish gallants in for a feast – something which generally only happens at the very end of a play.

Act 5

Scene 1. A street

Enter Jack Dapper, Moll, Sir Beauteous Ganymede and Thomas Long. Moll tells Jack how it was she who saved him from the sergeants and he thanks her. As a sidenote she explains she spotted Trapdoor was a spy and has disposed of him as a player shoves a halfpenny across the board. They are joined by Lord Noland.

At which point Trapdoor enters, like a poor soldier with a patch over one eye, accompanied by a sidekick, Tearcat, all in tatters. They approach Moll and her friends and, at first, pretend to be poor, maimed soldiers from the wars and beg for money. But the account they give of their foreign fighting and travels is so obviously garbled that Moll and her friends realise they are fakes.

Moll tears to eyepatch off Trapdoor’s face – the kind of stylised gesture which is taken to transform someone’s appearance in these plays and suddenly render someone in disguise, recognisable. Then, in a peculiar passage, Trapdoor shows off his skill at using canting terms, and Moll interprets his stream of canting for the benefit of her educated friends (Jack Dapper, Moll, Sir Beauteous Ganymede, Thomas Long, Lord Noland) so much so that they egg the couple on to a canting duel, telling Trapdoor they’ll give him some alms if he performs for them, and this eventually leads into Moll, Trapdoor and Tearcat singing a song entirely in canting language.

Paradoxically, this was one of the few parts of the play I really understood, because the situation – educated, well-off people patronise beggars – is easily graspable, and because the posh people’s dialogue is remarkably and unusually lucid. Thus after Trapdoor uses the term ‘niggling’, Jack says: ‘Nay, teach me what niggling is; I’d fain be niggling’ and a moment later Sir Beauteous comments: ‘This is excellent.’

Trapdoor is paid off and departs. I rather liked him, he was an honest rogue.

Now enters a gallant cutpurse and four or five followers, who threaten to attack our chaps, but brave Moll a) interprets all the cutpurses are saying in their slang and b) outfaces them i.e. intimidates them into abandoning their plan to rob our chaps. They are scared of her and her swaggering reputation. In fact, they truckle to her. Moll declares a particular purse was recently stolen from a man attending the Swan theatre and demands it be returned. The leader of the cutpurses meekly says he’ll see what he can do and they all exit.

The real-life Mary Frith was, apparently, known for righting wrongs and returning stolen purses (sounds a bit too Robin Hood to me) and this encounter prompts the other characters to say how she has been unfairly criticised by society. Now she gives a long speech declaring her innocence of all crimes, saying she merely is acquainted with criminals and knows their cant and tricks solely to help innocent victims. It is a speech in support of all people calumniated by society, not just her but all the women called whores and men called cuckolds who are entirely innocent. People call her Moll Curpurse and blacken her name because she dresses, does and says what she likes – the implication being that people resent and are jealous of her freedom.

MOLL: Good my lord, let not my name condemn me to you or to the world.

If Mary Frith had commissioned this play it could hardly give a more favourable portrait of her!

And so after this long scene of canting and cutpurses leading up to Moll’s second Great Speech, they all head off to the pub.

Scene 2. Sir Alexander’s house

The love plot of the play is resolved, namely Sebastian and Mary’s Cunning Plan works. Sir Alexander is still under the misapprehension that Sebastian is madly in love with and planning to marry Moll Cutpurse. He is at home with some of his friends and advisers when a servant comes in to tell them Sebastian and Moll have been seen landing at the Sluice on the Lambeth side of the Thames. But just as they’re planning to go and intercept them, Trapdoor (so we get a bit more Trapdoor) arrives to say the couple have been seen alighting at the Tower i.e. in the opposite direction. Sir Alexander is stung with indecision.

At this moment enters Sir Guy Fitzallard, mother of Mary Fitzallard that Sebastian is in love with. From the start he is aggressively angry towards Sir Alexander, telling him his (Guy’s) daughter wasn’t good enough for him, he blocked his son and Mary’s romance, well much good it’s done him and he hopes he’s happy that his son is now marrying one of the most disreputable women in London, ‘that bold masculine ramp’, Moll Cutpurse. He mocks him, saying he will soon be grandfather to a ‘fine crew of roaring sons and daughters’ who will stock the suburbs with crime.

Well, Sir Guy says – what would tortured Sir Alexander give if he – Sir Guy – could intervene and prevent it happening? He goes on to say, in front of the other nobles present as witnesses, that bets his entire wealth that he can prevent this marriage and, caught up in his enthusiasm, Sir Alexander, accepts the bet, saying he will immediately give Sebastian all those lands he had planned to, if he simply doesn’t marry Moll.

The authors really drag these final scenes out. Enter Moll (dressed as a man) for just a minute or so, just enough time for Alexander to berate her and her to mock him for his greed and short-sightedness, then exits.

So I wasn’t amused but irritated when the authors drag out Alexander’s and our agony even further by having Sebastian enter, accompanied by Sir Guy as if this is the final version of the wedding, and hand in hand with… Moll… wearing a mask. Sir Alexander is delighted his son has married anyone but Moll… but then she takes off her mask and he collapses prostrate that all his plans lie in ashes. God, get on with it!

Moll delivers a comic speech, telling him how lucky he is to have a roaring girl as a daughter in law, men will fear him, crooks will avoid him, and so on. Sir Guy asks Sir Alexander if he will hold to his bet (all Sir Guy’s estate against half Sir Alexander’s) but Sir Alexander insists – now he’s won the bet (the bet that Guy would be able to prevent the marriage of Sebastian and Moll, and it looks like he’s failed), at which point….

Moll steps aside and Sir Guy introduces the real bride who is, God be praised, Mary Fitzallard after all, ceremonially accompanied by Lord Noland and Sir Beauteous Ganymede, and followed by all the London merchants and their wives, so that all the characters are on stage for the happy finale.

Sir Alexander is in flights of ecstasy and in heroic verse praises his son and gives him half his wealth and lands – as promised – and then his beautiful new daughter-in-law, and they graciously accept. Moll points out that she has done everyone a favour organising this happy outcome and Sebastian says she will be rewarded. Sir Alexander apologises for misjudging her.

Enter Trapdoor (hooray, the only character I really like) who kneels before Moll and abjectly apologises for scheming against her, explaining that he laid out the valuables in Sir Alexander’s chamber, hoping to snare Moll, and that he also gave Moll the four marked gold coins (angels) as part of a scam to have her arrested. Moll is surprised, the onlookers are shocked, Sir Alexander abjectly humiliated, and apologises.

I found Sir Alexander’s explicit and clear statement that he has learned from his experiences not to judge people by their reputations and not to listen to rumour, more effective than the savage punishments which conclude Ben Jonson plays:

Forgive me; now I cast the world’s eyes from me
And look upon thee freely with mine own:
I see the most of many wrongs before thee,
Cast from the jaws of envy and her people,
And nothing foul but that. I’ll never more
Condemn by common voice, for that’s the whore
That deceives man’s opinion, mocks his trust,
Cozens his love, and makes his heart unjust.

Sir Alexander ends the play by saying this happy day will be celebrated every year, and he hopes all who have watched it will go away as pleased as he is.

Thoughts

Not funny

Maybe I read it on an off day, but I didn’t find The Roaring Girl at all funny. It contains scenes which are theoretically humorous, but failed to raise any smile to my lips. It lacks the delightful whimsy of The Shoemaker’s Holiday or, at the other end of the spectrum, the savage farcicality of Ben Jonson and his scheming grotesques.

It inhabits an odd no-man’s-land, in which everyone is a gull or crook of one kind or another but none of them really inspire entertainment. Moll’s speeches about how easily women are calumniated were the only things which really woke me up, that and the character of Trapdoor who I warmed to as the nearest thing to a Jonsonian imp, like Mosca in Volpone.

Overall I felt there was something too clever, calculating and rather mechanical about it, and kept returning to T.S. Eliot’s words:

The comedies are long-winded; the fathers are heavy fathers, and rant as heavy fathers should; the sons are wild and wanton sons, and perform all the pranks to be expected of them; the machinery is the usual Elizabethan machinery; Middleton is solicitous to please his audience with what they expect; but there is underneath the same steady impersonal passionless observation of human nature. (Thomas Middleton by T.S. Eliot)

Gender etc

Clearly ‘gender’ is a major theme of the play insofar as Moll is a woman behaving as men are supposed to, and not just men generally, but roistering, swaggering, canting, drinking, fighting men. And the play goes to some lengths to demonstrate how feebly unmasculine just about every other man in the play is, compared to her.

Feminist art and literary critics long ago developed a rhetoric about neglected women artists or authors and female characters who rebel, buck the trend and subvert the patriarchy, which make them all sound the same. They make ‘the patriarchy’ sound as if it was the same thing in 1603 or 2003, and rebel women all sound as if they had the same ‘smash the patriarchy’ mindset as contemporary gender studies professors. In other words, they make the past boring by being so predictably and narrowly ideological about it.

Obviously the figure of Moll is striking but what’s a bit more interesting is the way she was not suppressed by The Patriarchy for wearing men’s clothes and swearing etc. What is hiding in plain sight in the simple existence of this play, is the fact that, far from being in any way suppressed or silenced – as feminists love their heroines from the past to have been – Mary Frith was in fact lionised, widely written about and – in this play at any rate – praised to the heavens, depicted as a moral exemplar, teaching true Christian morality (judge people by their deeds not their reputations).

Feminist critics like to write about Moll ‘subverting gender norms’ and ‘transgressing gender-based rules of clothing and behaviour’ as if it was a thrilling conspiracy which only you and I, paid-up members of the feminist gang, can understand. And yet here she was up on stage in a play written to unstintingly praise her, to the applause of a fee-paying audience, in a play which was widely reprinted through the ages.

In other words, if she was ‘subverting’ anything, that ‘subversion’ was very comfortably accommodated in a best-selling play performed to approving audiences.

In other words, Moll entirely conforms to the deeply entrenched stereotype of the rebel-with-a-heart-of-gold figure which dates from at least Robin Hood through to any number of 20th century ‘rebels’, and which Hollywood has made billions of dollars carefully crafting and presenting to audiences who, for a happy couple of hours, can thrill to the ‘subversive’ exploits of James Dean or Bruce Willis or whoever the rebel-with-a-heart-of-gold figure of the hour happens to be, before going back to their suburban homes and their workaday world.

Yes, the figure of Moll may well ‘transgress’ half a dozen easy-to-list rules of Jacobean England – dresses like a man, swaggers like a man, drinks like a man, familiar with the criminal underworld like a man and this ‘daring audacity’ may well give feminist critics multiple orgasms – but at a meta-level I’d have thought it’s pretty obvious that Moll entirely conforms to the enduring stereotype of the naughty boy or naughty girl whose exploits we love sharing for a couple of hours at the theatre or cinema, before the entertainment ends.

And in a really deep sense, maybe that’s what entertainment – of all types – actually consists of: whether at the circus or a funfair or the cinema or a theatre – it’s entering into a world of excitement and thrills and kings and queens or cops and robbers or thrilling rides – all of which we pay for because, by definition, they are outwith the reality of our boring everyday lives, shopping, cooking, eating sleeping, and commuting to boring jobs in shops and factories and offices.

So when feminists rhapsodise that Moll ‘subverts’ the social norms of her day, all they’re really saying is that she’s in a play. Macbeth subverts the values of the time by being a king killer. Othello subverts the values of the day by murdering his wife. Volpone subverts the values of the time by being an outrageous crook. All the tricksters in hundreds of these city comedies ‘subvert’ the values of the time by virtue of being crooks and criminals. Is there a play from the period where the lead characters do not subvert one or other ‘social norm’ of the time?

Feminists just valorise and prioritise one among the many, many types of ‘subversion’ which occur in almost all these plays, because it is the one dearest to their heart, the only issue which counts for them, the issue of gender, the ‘issue’ which justifies their existence.

But, not being feminists, we are not constrained and blinded by their ideology, and so can read everything they have to say, assimilate it, take it on board, add it to our perspective, but still see that the play contains many other non-gender ideas and themes and images, as did the society of its day.

One of the most obvious is the language of crime…

Canting

Canting was one of the contemporary words used to describe the prolific growth of slang and argot used by thieves and cozeners. There was a very rich literature describing these, even at the time. Indeed, whenever there was a periodic outbreak of plague, such as in 1603 and the theatres went into lockdown, writers like Dekker and Middleton switched to writing satirical or descriptive pamphlets about London life, mostly concentrating on lowlife and criminals.

Dekker wrote a number of pamphlets about contemporary events, but his ones focusing on criminals or ‘cony-catchers’ include The Belman of London (1608), Lanthorne and Candle-light, Villainies Discovered by Candlelight, and English Villainies and he gives an often-quoted definition of ‘canting’:

‘It was necessary that a people, so fast increasing and so daily practicing new and strange villainies, should borrow to themselves a speech which, so near as thy could, none but themselves could understand; and for that cause was this language, which some call pedlar’s French, invented…. This word canting seems to be derived from the Latin verb canto, which signifies in English to sing, or to make a sound with words, that’s to say, speak. And very aptly may canting take his derivation a cantando, from singing, because amongst these beggarly consorts that can play upon no better instruments, the language of canting is a kind of music, and he that in such assemblies can cant best is counted the best musician…’
(Lanthorn and Candlelight by Thomas Dekker)

Anyway, the point is that this play is stuffed with canting terms and street argot, so much so that not only does the Mermaid edition feature notes at the bottom of each page explaining key words, but also (and unusually) a seven-page appendix devoted to canting terms. Highlights include:

  • darkmans = the night
  • lightmans = the day
  • shells = money
  • stamps = legs
  • curbers = thieves who hook goods out of open windows using a long stick with a hook at the end
  • cheats = the gallows
  • bing = to go
  • nip a bung = steal a purse
  • Rom-ville = London

And Act 5 scene 1 is a festival of canting – it contains the canting exchanges between Moll and Trapdoor-as-beggar, who drops entirely into canting terms to impress and/or confuse his educated interlocutors.

TRAPDOOR: My doxy? I have, by the salomon, a doxy that carries a kinchin mort in her slate at her back, besides my dell and my dainty wild dell, with all whom I’ll tumble this next darkmans in the strommel, and drink ben, and eat a fat gruntling cheat, a cackling cheat, and a quacking cheat.

Before Moll, Trapdoor and Tearcat then deliver a canting song! The footnotes again say that one of the best explanations of the profession or trade of cutpurse is again given by Dekker, who provided a neat explanation of key roles and terms, in this clip from The Bellman of London:

He that cuts the purse is called the nip.
He that is half with him is the snap, or the cloyer.
The knife is called a cuttle-bung.
He that picks the pocket is called a foist.
He that faceth the man is the stale.
The taking of the purse is called drawing.
The spying of this villain is called smoking or boiling.
The purse is the bung.
The money the shells.
The act doing is called striking.

You can look up these and numerous other obscure terms in the online version of the play, linked to below.

Related links

More Elizabethan and Jacobean reviews

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by Simon on September 23, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on September 23, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/09/23/the-roaring-girl-thomas-middleton-thomas-dekker/

Kipling’s style

Stalky & Co (1899) is the first of Kipling’s books which has made me actively dislike him. Like most Kipling prose books it’s a series of short stories, this time all set in a minor public school where Stalky, Beetle and M’Turk are the teenage heroes of various schoolboy scrapes and japes.

I’ll examine a short passage from the story ‘Regulus’ at length in order to identify the stylistic attributes, and the ideological or attitudinal worldview they reveal, in a bid to nail down why I disliked the book so much.

The story

In the boys’ Latin class Beetle gave another boy, Winton, the wrong translation of the word delubris. When Winton uses it in class the Latin teacher tells him off. As the boys exit the classroom Winton takes his revenge:

‘Why did you tell me delubris was “deluges,” you silly ass?’ said Winton.
‘Look out, you hoof-handed old owl!’ Winton had cleared for action as the Form poured out like puppies at play and was scragging Beetle. Stalky from behind collared Winton low. The three fell in confusion.
‘Dis te minorem quod geris imperas ,’ quoth Stalky, ruffling Winton’s lint-white locks. ‘Mustn’t jape with Number Five study. Don’t be too virtuous. Don’t brood over it. ‘Twon’t count against you in your future caree-ah.’
‘Pull him off my — er — essential guts, will you?’ said Beetle from beneath. ‘He’s squashin’ ’em.’
They dispersed to their studies.

Kipling’s style

What does Kipling’s style in this passage tell us?

1. The characters, the schoolboys, use Victorian schoolboy slang – silly ass, hoof-handed old owl etc. Fair enough. It’s the narratorial style I’m interested in:

2. ‘Winton had cleared for action’

An abbreviated way of saying ‘as the boys left the classroom Winton cleared a space around him in which to attack Beetle’.

3. ‘…and was scragging Beetle…’

Scrag is schoolboy slang, but its inclusion in the same sentence makes that sentence dense with information. It is very compressed, too compressed to understand easily.

4. ‘Stalky from behind collared Winton low.’

Again, this is very abbreviated: presumably it means Stalky attacked, jumped on or tackled Winton, but you have to work on it for a second to get clear in your mind what it means. This pause to register what a sentence means is also required throughout Kipling’s novel, Captains Courageous, which made it a very glutinous read.

5. ‘The three fell in confusion.’

You can imagine this being amusingly expanded by a different writer. Probably they went down in a confusion of arms and legs, formed a squirming, punching mass on the floor etc. Untold elaborations of the situation could have been developed. All are rejected by Kipling, who prefers to use a phrase clipped to an uncomfortable extent.

6. ‘Dis te minorem quod geris imperas’

Fair enough, they’ve just come out of Latin lesson.

7. ‘quoth Stalky.’

Why ‘quoth’? Said, shouted, quoted, expostulated, yelled. Of all possible words why choose one which my dictionary categorises as archaic? Because the boys like quoting – in fact live to a large extent by quoting – rags and tags they’ve come across, Latin tags, quotes from favourite books (lots of Surtees is quoted in the earlier stories; an entire story, The United Idolaters, is based around the fad for quoting the Brer Rabbit stories), arcane and out-of-the-way vocabulary. The point is that Kipling the narrator is using the same style as the boys, deliberately using archaic or quoted phrases. Why? What effect does it have? Two, I think:

a) It means the narrator’s style is aping his subjects’ style. The effect is to make Kipling complicit in, and embedded part of the world, he is describing. An accomplice to its values. The struggle in his stories is rarely between evenly matched opponents. We know Kipling is on the side of Mrs Hawksbee, the soldiers three or Mowgli a) in terms of action or plot, but b) also in terms of style.

b) Looked at from another perspective, it tends to show that Kipling can’t escape from this boyish point-of-view into adult detachment. (Another element: The Bible was thrashed into him as a boy and Biblical quotes and phraseology are all over his prose like chicken pox. The effect is rarely to add to his prose depth or resonance, as quotations in other authors might, but to hold it back.) My argument is that such quotations reflect a kind of flight from adulthood, an inability or refusal to write plain English prose as commonly written or understood by the people of his time. Given a choice between 1) writing a simple declarative sentence which accurately explains what is going on or 2) either i) quoting from the Bible or another archaic source or ii) using a clipped or compressed phrase, often slang or technical cant – Kipling always opts for strategy 2.

Kipling’s style is not good at explaining what is going on nor at describing things. I think he’s a terrible stylist. I’ve repeatedly had to turn for help to the excellent Reader’s Guide to Kipling just to understand what’s going on in many of the stories. Important facts, key turning points, moral cruxes are obscured, underplayed or hidden by his compulsive need to compress or obliquify.

8. ‘ruffling Winton’s lint-white locks.’

The boys are fighting. This phrase is schoolboy understatement made of two parts: the gentle, playsome verb ‘ruffling’ is chosen as deliberate irony because the boys are punching and fighting. ‘Lint-white locks’ is, again, ironic, but in a different way; i) a namby-pamby poetic phrase ii) focusing on a side detail unconnected with the actual fight going on. Both are distracting tactics or dislocations, understating and avoiding the reality of the violent fight. Why? Because Kipling assumes his ideal reader will share – or his style coerces the reader into sharing – the same understated schoolboy irony as the boys. We are pushed towards not only witnessing the action but sharing in the values of the participants. But I don’t share their public schoolboy values or tone or terminology, and I resent being coerced into doing so.

9. “‘Mustn’t jape with Number Five study. Don’t be too virtuous. Don’t brood over it. ‘Twon’t count against you in your future caree-ah.”

Stalky’s dialogue emphasises that even in the midst of a violent fight the boys don’t lose their addiction to elaborate phraseology and deliberately stylised pronunciation. There is a buried message here and in all similar situations – where a character remains loyal to verbal elaborations even in the middle of crises – which links to the ideological strand in Kipling portraying English public schoolmen as keeping their heads when all around lose theirs. Drake finishing his game of bowls before the Armada etc.

10. “‘Pull him off my – er – essential guts, will you?”

The use of ‘essential’ here is – presumably – either a quote or a fancy elaboration of speech of the kind the schoolboys delight and compete in. Fair enough. As dialogue it is consistent with their characters and values.

11. ‘said Beetle from beneath.’

Again, the reader could have done with just a tad of elaboration and explanation. When you consider it, this sentence has been pared back to the absolute minimum. Why? It’s connected in strategy to the abrupt final phrase, ‘They dispersed to their studies.’ That ends the whole sequence in the short story which is followed by a break in the text. The entire resolution of the fight, how the boys get to their feet, brush themselves down, whether they shake hands or threaten each other – all of this is omitted. We have no idea what happens. Kipling skips it all.

The absolute bare minimum of information is given. Why? Because chaps don’t blab. Whenever any of the trio begin ‘prosing’, one of the others is liable to kick them under the table. And they immediately shut up. Shutting up is a key element of this brutal schoolboy world. And Kipling’s prose narrative echoes the schoolboy code of clipped understatement.

Summary

I’ve used this short excerpt to show that, in my opinion, Kipling’s style:

1. enacts and reinforces the amoral public school values of his protagonists

2. coerces the reader, more or less overtly, to take their part, to sympathise with their nasty schoolboy values

3. goes to some lengths to avoid being a responsive, adult, freestanding style. Instead of simply describing what is there Kipling prefers to use:

a. Biblical quotes
b. Literary quotes
c. Schoolboy or military or technical slang
d. Schoolboy understatement

In my opinion, this ethic of manly (or adolescent) understatement seriously cripples Kipling’s style. It means for long stretches there is really nothing to enjoy in his style, except registering the quotes and the brevity. The brevity doesn’t add to the resonance or meaning, as it does in Hemingway: the less said, the more implied. Instead it makes things less interesting to read and sometimes so obscure you don’t know what’s happening. The less said, the less… said.

One more detail: The first sentence of the story ‘The United Idolaters’ is: ‘His name was Brownell and his reign was brief.’ This is describing the arrival of a new teacher (I refuse to write ‘master’ since this is to begin to accept the values and world of these posh people). But we are describing a teacher. He doesn’t reign. Using the word reign is an exaggeration. Seeing a teacher’s authority as a (monarchical) reign is to see it from the schoolboys’ point of view, to place vast importance and significance onto something which is utterly trivial beyond the school gate or even in the teachers’ common room. So sometimes Kipling will knowingly, mockingly exaggerate for affect, as well.

e. schoolboy exaggeration

There are other aspects as well which I don’t have space to list. Almost all of them have one thing in common, which is that they are evasions of telling the thing as it is; they are habits of a mind which is incapable of accepting things straight, but must forever be seeking archaisms, Bible phrases or stories, exaggeration or understatement, avoiding what is there. Seems to be embarrassed by simple statement. Is always hiding, concealing, ironising.

And in Stalky & Co you can see laid bare the sources of Kipling’s adult prose style in the coterie mentality, the exclusive slang and verbal mannerisms, and in the amoral sense of superiority of an extremely narrow class of emotionally stunted English public schoolboys.

And, as Kipling makes clear in Stalky, these are the stunted, blocked boys who became the men who went out to run the Empire on which the Sun Never Set…until they were eventually forced to hand it all back to its original owners.

More Kipling reviews

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by Simon on July 30, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 30, 2012

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2012/07/30/rudyard-kipling-style/