The Swearin Swearer's Swearin Sweared

Swearing is like jeans. Once, either historically-actually or else (more likely) in some mythic fiction of the past we like collectively to buy into, adults spoke with formal propriety and decency and it was young rebels and tearaways who swore. Now, if anything, it’s the other way around. Similarly, jeans used to be the kind of trousers young rock-n-rollers and noncomformists wore to show that they weren’t Slaves To The Man (who, naturally, Wore ‘Proper’ Trousers), whereas jeans are now worn by middle-aged fogeys like Jeremy Clarkson or Tony Blair or, er, me, and young people sheathe their legs in fancier, better-tailored strides. That’s fine of course. Wear what you like, I’m not the boss of you. My point is the obvious one: an odour of desperation clings to the middle-aged man who thinks it makes him cool to swear, or wear jeans, or play the guitar. The desire to be ‘down with the kids’ is undignified enough; the notion that one can insinuate oneself with those down-there kids by adopting styles, sartorial and linguistic, that they themselves regard as lame, old-people gubbins is just sad.

I’m not saying younger kids don’t swear. Of course they do. My hunch is they don’t swear as much, or with the same particularities, as middle-aged folk, but the coronavirus prevents me from doing the extensive sociolinguistic research needful to evidence such a hypothesis. I'm saying that middle-aged people swearing because they think it makes them appear edgy, sassy, unconventional—because they think it frees them from the shackles of middle-age—are Steve Buscemi in a “MUSIC ‖ BAND” T-shirt saying ‘how do you do fellow kids?’

Or perhaps that’s just me. I swear quite a lot, it’s true. I fear I’ve internalised the idea that swearing is big and clever—although I’ve also, I have to say, internalised some quite significant taboos about swearing: I rarely if ever say ‘cunt’ for instance, although it’s acquired ‘fuck’-like levels of ubiquity with many people I know (it still strikes me as misogynistic, in the same ballpark as ‘bitch’). My eighteen-year-old daughter swears little, certainly around her parents, but I think with her peers too, whose interactions I sometimes (inadvertently of course) overhear, in real-life or via snapchat or otherwise. If I had to guess I’d assume that once swearing becomes something middle-aged-people do openly it becomes, a fortiori, something young people want to avoid doing, so as to keep that vital clear blue water between them and us. Quite right too.

Melissa Mohr’s Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing (Oxford 2013) sketches two main semantic fields where swearing is concerned, one derived (as it were) from above and one from below. The former, linked to serious business of swearing oaths and so on, derives its taboo words, the expression of which releases the pent-up or articulates that our passions exceed proper restraint, from the divine: God’s wounds as they say in hey-nonny-no historical novels. God! Jesus! and so on. The latter relate to what Bakhtin calls the lower bodily stratum: shit, piss, fuck, bollocks and the like. The story about the Deadwood screenwriters is that they wrote their characters using the second kind of swear-words although historical 19th-century Americans largely used the former, because when they tried historically appropriate swears they struck modern audiences as quaint and underpowered. In order for their swearing to register as swearing, the Deadwoodians had to utilise the second type of words. Actually I suspect the crossover from one to the other happened later than we might assume. Lennon caused genuine shock as late as 1969 when, in ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’ he sang ‘Christ! you know it ain’t easy.’ It's a line that seems vanilla to 2020 sensibilities, although Mohr’s point is that these two magisteria actually cross-over, both practically (hence the titular ‘holy shit!) and conceptually.

That said, I'd argue there’s a kind-of Nietzschean Genealogy of Morals point about swearing that Mohr doesn't really address. We all swear, but we all also understand that there’s something low about swearing. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s high-born Knight is proud of the fact that he ‘nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde’: ‘villainy’ meaning not law-breaking but pertaining to villeins, commoners, of low-birth. Our public-us, our Sunday-best ps-and-qs-minding selves are our posh selves, and much of the release a good profanity entails comes from our sense of breaking through those restraints, of embracing a temporary lowness and vulgarity as a holiday from the formality of higher social standing.

Actually I think my point, or the argument I’m making, is twofold: that as class flattens (without, of course, going-away) it becomes generational: middle-aged people with houses and salaries are ‘high’ in a material sense, in relation to the new ‘low’: young people lugging-around debt, working zero-hours contracts, for whom a mortgage is a distant dream. But young people are ‘high’ in another sense, being by definition wealthy in that which our world today values most highly of all, youth itself; where the decaying, lined and bald (or more pathetic: the botoxed and surgically taut) elderly are ‘low’ by virtue of lacking that thing. How ‘youth’ became the prime socio-cultural value is an interesting question in its own right—it certainly wasn’t always that way. But here we are. I mean look at me. I’m not old, bald, set-in-my-ways, conventional, Establishment, and I can prove it: ‘fuck!’

You see?

So, yes. Colin Burrow argues that ‘many of us now liberally sprinkle our language with swearwords to show we have a liberal attitude to sex and to bodily functions’ and I think that's right. But I wonder if it's also the case that many middle-aged people liberally sprinkle their language with swears to show that they're cool, my doods, which is to say, with-it and uninhibited, untainted by the hideous constraints of old-age. Which is to say:

These thoughts are occasioned, in part, by Jackson Ford’s The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t With Her Mind (2018). Not the novel so much—which is fine, if a little over-long, and over-busy, too scared of losing its reader’s attention to ever let any of its runaround settle—as that title. Arresting, no? But: why the asterisk? Whose pudeur are we protecting with such maladroit bowdlerism?

The girl (not, I note, woman) of this book's title is Teagan Frost: a 22-year-old undercover agent working for a US government black ops. That she can move sh*t with her mind speaks to her superpower: telekinesis (she calls it ‘PK’), a talent she alone possesses, or so it seems at the beginning of the novel. The story here is that Frost gets framed for an unusual murder: Steven Case, killed in such a way that only Teagan, and her Magneto-style talents, could be responsible: strangled by ‘a piece of steel reinforcement bar—what house builders call rebar ... twisted tight like it was nothing more than a length of wire [wrapped] around his throat so deep that it's almost decaptitated him’ [93]. Teagan just wants to kick back and enjoy a beer, but instead she has to go on an action-filled LA runaround, trying to clear her name, solve the mystery, and repeatedly getting tasered (try to hit her with a metal bar and she can move that sh*t with her mind to stop you, but luckily for Ford's confection of narrative tension her skills don't work for bullets or tasers: ‘a taser prong launches at around a hundred and eighty feet per second; way too fast for me to stop’ [132]).

This is all fine: fast-paced and eventful, and the pages flap by rapidly enough. That's not to say it's especially good. ‘Jackson Ford’ (a pseudonym for nobody-knows-whom, although we're told s/he has previously published ‘sixteen bestselling novels’) goes all-in for the kinetic, thrusting prose style, so as to communicate the excitement and urgency of everything. So the weather's not hot, ‘the heat grabs me in a fist, beating down from the sky’; and rather than laughing a character ‘clutches her stomach howling with glee, erupting into another guffaw.’ Instead of closing her eyes, a woman ‘slams them shut.’ That kind of thing. But this a diminishing returns sort of strategy for the reader, and leaves the writer liable to active badness as s/he scrabbles for yet another over-forceful piece of phrasing. Exhibit A: ‘Annie accelerates, long legs exploding out of her willowy body’ [17]. Sounds painful.

This, though, is not my main point. The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t With Her Mind is fine; not Proust but fine. What it definitely is, though, is sweary. Given its title this shouldn't surprise us, although it seems to have caught at least one reader on the hop.

One person found this helpful. And why not? It's true: ‘Yo take that shit out. I said, fucking quit it’ [3]; ‘[She's] the bouncer no one fucks with’ [4]; ‘“Shit,” Annie says ... I find her staring at a clusterfuck of tangled cables’ [9]—and we're not even into double figures, page-count-wise. The whole of this novel is ‘what in the almighty storm of fuck is going on?’ [144] and ‘fuck you, man’ [260] and ‘motherfucker come on!’ [405], all the way through. I don't doubt that there are 22-year-olds who talk like this, but if ‘Jackson Ford’ has really published sixteen best-selling novels I'm guessing s/he is closer to middle-age than his/her protagonist and I start to wonder if the effing and jeffing isn't his/her way of in some sense evoking youth. Story-wise The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t With Her Mind is YA; but the book's swear-word quotient rather excludes it from that bookshop classification. It's not Scarface level swearing, where the swear-words are so continuous that monotony starts to erase them from perception (I can't remember who it was described British squaddies' use of fucking as merely a warning that a noun is coming). In Ford's novel there are just enough fucks and shits to mean that we keep registering them as fucks and shits. Which leads me to the question: why? Because swearing is edgy, and cool, and young perhaps. Because it is believed to add spice. Because it connotes rebellious hipness of youth. Fuck you grandad. Music. Lightning sigil. Band.

It's perfectly possible, and I suppose even likely, that the asterisked ‘sh*t’ on the cover was a publisher's, rather than an author's, call. But it's also what's on the inside title page, and on Bookscan, and so is, I suppose, actually what the book is called. And I'm going to suggest it's, well, lame. It's not as if there's any doubt the word with this photoshopped starburst over its nipple is shit, after all, They're not fooling anyone. More, we understand that shit, here, means stuff. No reader will pick this book up assuming that Teagan's powers are a peculiarly specialised mode of laxative. Why call a spade a sp*de? What makes it especially evasive is that the whole premise of the story concerns a character who lives a life without the reality-principle inhibitions on thought that constrain the rest of us: her thought becomes, magically, action.

You recognise the blog title's allusion. In one of his books about language, Anthony Burgess celebrates the syntactical versatility of fuck, and recalls how during his wartime service he overheard a mechanic tell the driver of a broken-down army lorry: ‘the fucking fucker’s fucking fucked.’ A glorious sentence, I think we can agree. And if I prefer fucker as a generic non-specific noun, over shit and certainly over sh*t, it's probably because fucking is a doing, a joy and sometimes a making, not a signifier of waste and decay. Of course, your fucking mileage may fucking vary.

Grammars of Whimsy

No one seems to know the exact etymology of ‘whimsy’. Originally the word meant ‘dizziness, giddiness, vertigo’ (‘obsolete’ says the OED, quoting Charles Blount in 1656 complaining of being ‘troubled with such a whimsey in the head’, and also Thomas Middleton's play Old Law: ‘in my head already,/The whimzy, you all turne round’). From there the word came to mean crazy notions or eccentric beliefs: in 1713 William Derham declared that ‘our Inability to live in too rare and light an Air may discourage those vain Attempts of Flying, and Whimsies of passing to the Moon.’ It's a short step from that to the word meaning crazy fashions or eccentric behaviours. Macaulay’s 1848 History notes that some Cavaliers ‘had what seemed extravagant whimsies about dress, diversions, and postures.’ Since then the term has softened further, such that it now means a light-hearted playfulness and caprice, inventive triviality.

It sounds like it ought to be derived from whim, willpower’s flightier and more distractible cousin, but the etymologists say not so: ‘whimsy’, in fact, is preceded by the word ‘whim-wham’, ‘fanciful or fantastic object; figurative a trifle; in early use chiefly, a trifling ornament of dress, a trinket’, which dates from the early 16th-century. The OED provides a mini-essay on possible origins:

Etymology: A reduplication with vowel-variation, like flim-flam, jim-jam, trim-tram, all of which are similarly applied to trivial or frivolous things. The history of the group of words of which WHIM n.1, WHIMSY n. and adj., and this word are the chief members, is not clear. The existence in Old Norse of hvima, to wander with the eyes as with the fugitive look of a frightened or silly person, and hvimsa, to be taken aback or discomfited, suggests the possibility of an ultimate Scandinavian origin; but, seeing that whim-wham is the earliest recorded of the group (contemporaneously with the similar reduplicated forms mentioned above), an indigenous symbolic origin is more likely; in which case whimsy may be related to whim-wham as flimsy to flim-flam.

Whimsy is opposed to grave, to serious, to the timeless verities. If you tend to see the present age as a shonky falling-away from a prior golden age then you’ll likely see modernity as whimsical (Rowland Hill in 1832 advised us, sternly enough, to follow ‘the pure and simple gospel of Christ, but not intermixed with the whim-whams of the present day’). By the same token, if you have greater trust in modernity, and see the past as a kind of amateur hour, smaller scale, given to eccentric superstitions like putting pigs on trial for witchcraft or buying indulgences from the Pope, then whimsy will start to connote historical-ness, or at least the Laura Ashley, Sealed-Knot, Renaissance-Fair manifestation of it.

Michael Wood, reviewing Pynchon’s Against The Day for the LRB, records his worry, as he started chapter 1, that the novel would be a thousand page block of mere whimsy:

Many readers can’t bear whimsy and never make it far into books containing cute animals and characters with funny names. I’m not wild about whimsy myself, and a first glance at Thomas Pynchon’s new novel had me worried … Here on page 1 is a group of boy adventurers called the Chums of Chance, heroes of a series of jolly books with titles like The Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit and The Chums of Chance Search for Atlantis. The narrator addresses us as ‘my faithful readers’ or ‘my young readers’, adopts a verbose and patronising diction to match.

But, he says, he needn’t have worried. As the book gets into its stride Wood finds not whimsy but something else, a little less than kitsch and more than kind:

‘Whimsy’ is not the word for any of this. Pynchon has an extraordinary, open-ended affection for whoever and whatever is not serious—that is, not wholeheartedly committed to rationality, purpose and greed. Most of his stories—and his novels are crowded with not always connected stories—are about drop-outs of some kind, or people who would drop out if they could, characters who are trying to focus their disagreements with what he calls, in his new title and throughout the text, ‘the day’. ‘He had learned,’ we are told of one character, ‘to step to the side of the day.’ Resistance to exploitation ‘must be negotiated with the day’; people who don’t know what’s about to hit them are said to be ‘pretending to carry on with the day’. Of course, ‘against the day’ also, or even chiefly, means ‘till the day comes’, and that is part of Pynchon’s point. Beyond or outside the current day is our image of its counterpart, a lure or a threat, a world far worse or far better, doomsday or deliverance or even both. A character finds himself ‘facing west into a great flow of promise, something like wind, something like light, free of the damaged hopes and pestilent smoke east of here’; and the words ‘longing’ and ‘yearning’ recur with astonishing, eloquent frequency.

I have read Against The Day and think this is spot-on. I am currently reading a metric tonne of contemporary Fantasy, and it is troubling me with a certain whimsey in my head, partly on account of the sheer quantity of it, but also in terms of a certain preponderance of a fay, ornate tweeness. The stuff that isn't brutalist ultraviolence is, as often as not, elaborate congeries of whimwham. Presumably there is an appetite for such stuff.

Here, for instance, is C.S.E. Cooney's Desdemona and the Deep (Tor 2019)—not by any means a bad book, despite that bizarre cover-blurb praising it for being ‘festooned to the eyelids’ (I happen to prefer my eyelids unfestooned, thank you very much). Desdemona Mannering, wilful daughter of a mining millionaire, pauses her campaigning on behalf of girls with phossy-jaw in order to descend into an adjacent dimension and recover the men her Daddy gave to the goblin erl-Lord, Kalos Kantzaros King of Kobolds, in return for certain mining rights. ‘Take as many miners as you want in exchange,’ H H Mannering declares; ‘they are the tithe. That's the bargain’ [45], which is not what ‘tithe’ means, but never mind that. Desdemona passes from her Gilded Age North-America via met-by-moonlight fairies into the grottoes of the underworld, encountering on her way all manner of rococo kitschness and prose-style gildings, not all of them ridiculous. There are characters with names like Tattercoats Bubbleguts and Umber Farklewhit. There's a good deal of rather mannered levity (‘never trust sopranos, especially ones that exude sticky mucilage!’ [100]). Characters caper, literally: ‘with a caper of his shining hooves, he fluffed the remains of his apron’ [167]. All well and good, if manifestly out of favour with any natural thing, a confection rather of hammered gold and gold enamelling to, as the poet put it, keep a drowsy Emperor awake:

Desdemona and Chaz slipped away to walk in the orchard. Branches glittered. Gold. Silver. They flowered, bore fruit-like gems. Gem-like fruit. Desdemona snapped off the prettiest branches as she passed under them ... smiling wryly, Chaz followed in the wake of her demolition, silently collecting fallen boughs and arranging them in a bouquet of precious metals that sagged with jewels. [181]

It would get tiresome if overextended, but Cooney doesn't outstay her welcome. That said, there are negatives as well as positives with the brevity strategy: ‘whimsical,’ says one Goodreads reviewer, ‘but rushed and insubstantial.’ That's right, I think. It's not the artificiality that's the issue, it's the sterility. To say that your golden trees bear fruit-like gems, and then to concede that you might as well call them gem-like fruits, is to make a tacit confession that all this ornateness is interchangeable and therefore arbitrary. When Yeats speaks of his amazing, Byzantine, gold-and-jewels robot bird:

Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,
More miracle than bird or handiwork,
Planted on the starlit golden bough,
In glory of changeless metal

... his point is how such a contrivance fails to capture any of the ‘complexities of mire or blood’ that constitute actual living. Eternal but inert, ‘a mouth that has no moisture and no breath/I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.’ Hardly the most auspicious of Coleridgean allusions, that. Gong-tormented indeed.

What's missing, in other words, is Pynchonian transitoriness, the sense that the best stories balance stringency and acquiescence against the day: this day, the one that's already slipping away. Whimsy, we could say, is ornate without being complex, trivial without thereby banishing any of the profounder disaffections, a rotatory unadvancing mode of art (dizzying, perhaps, in that slightly nauseous sense). The issue isn't ‘cutesy’ cooties, or any emotionally-straitened reaction against sentimentality. The issue is the incapacity of this bejewelled idiom to express the yearning Wood so astutely identifies as the crucial part of the decaying lyricism of Pynchon's vast novel.

I don't mean to pick on Cooney, whose book I enjoyed and whose gorgeous sterility is perfectly fine, if you're in the mood for that kind of thing. Besides, as I say, there's a lot of it about at the moment. The trick, I suppose, is supplying your readers with something actually dizzying—properly disorienting, wrongfooting, head-spinning—rather than the kind of ersatz ditz so many of these books actually trade in. Students nowadays titter at that Milton line from Comus: ‘how Charming is Divine Philosophy!’ But the fault is in our usage, a contemporary discourse that has diluted charming into nothing more than a polished manner and a pleasant smile, and so removed it from its originary relationship to charm, to deep magic and the ability to hold your listener frozen to the spot with your glittering eye. All this, in other words, relates to the larger cultural logic of disenchantment. Once upon a time grimoires contained spells to harrow up our souls, freeze our blood, make our knotted and combined locks to part and each particular hair to stand an end, like quills upon the fretful porpentine. Now what we have are grammars, to regulate and moderate all our varieties of discourse. There's even a Grammar of Whimsy. It can be charming, but only in the modern, disenchanted and diluted sense of that word. And it can just be irksome.

CILIP Carnegie Award 2020

So: the shortlist for this year's prestigious Carnegie Medal for best children's novel has been announced today:

• The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta, illustrated by Anshika Khullar
• Nowhere on Earth by Nick Lake
• Lark by Anthony McGowan
• Patron Saints of Nothing by Randy Ribay
• Lampie written and illustrated by Annet Schaap (transl by Laura Watkinson)
• Voyages in the Underworld of Orpheus Black by Marcus and Julian Sedgwick
• On the Come Up by Angie Thomas
• Girl. Boy. Sea. by Chris Vick

The Carnegie is always an interesting prize, and doubly so if one happens to be teaching a course on children's literature (as I have been doing this year). There are at least two ways in which it merits discussion: one, since the judges just have a really good record of choosing strong, thought-provoking, worthwhile books; and two since many school English teachers, mandated by the national curriculum to teach contemporary fiction, take their lead from the prize, bulk-order the winning title for their school libraries to teach it. That gives this medal a special place in the broader culture of ‘young people reading’.

I don't know who is going to win the 2020 title, nor do I propose to enter into barren speculation on that topic. Instead I'm going to meditate a little on whether there has been an identifiable trend in recent Carnegie winners—the last nine winners, say, to take us back to the beginning of this decade. In what follows I appreciate I'm running the risk of generalising and therefore flattening the specificity of what is a properly diverse set of novels, especially if considered shortlist by shortlist. But I do wonder if dystopia has become something of a culturally dominant force lately. The Hunger Games is one of the best-selling series of the century so far; Harry Potter takes its charming old-school, er, school into pretty dystopian territory when Voldemort comes back and establishes a fascist dictatorship. Other series like Noughts and Crosses, Divergent, and The Maze Runner spin variations on the same dystopic vision. Game of Thrones, popular among teens and adults both, is a dystopian Fantasy of rare grimness and horribleness. Once upon a time James Bond (the movies, I mean: Fleming's novels were always dour and self-hating) was camp and colourful and carefree escapism; now it is scowling, dark and testicle-crushing. Superman used to be bright colours and antic adventure; Batman's bashing-up bad guys would be embroidered with on-screen POW! and SMASH! pop-ups. Now we're offered fare like Batman Versus Superman (2016), which was, as we remember to our sorrow, two grown men joylessly punching one another in the rain for many hours.

I don't want to overstate things. There's still a lot of joy in a lot of popular culture, of course. But it does seem to me as if the really popular culture-texts, the ones with the most extensive global cultural penetration, all skew dystopic. And whilst the Carnegie titles haven't enjoyed quite the sheer scale of success of Potter, Hunger Games and Twilight, they are interesting and significant texts nonetheless.

So is there a trend? The prize has been running since 1936, but I'm going to concentrate on the 21st century, and our decade in particular. The 2001 winner was this installment of Pratchett's Discworld sequence; and as charming and funny and clever as any of them.

No dystopia here! Hopping forward to 2008: Reeve's Arthurian novel won, a book that creates a notionally ‘realistic’ 6th-century in order to think about the power and endurance of legends and the legendary:

Then to 2009, when Gaiman's Graveyard Book won. Now I don't want to sound like I'm sniping at Gaiman's success (and this novel has been very successful indeed). There's undeniably a lot to like about this novel, a retelling of Kipling's Jungle Book in a postmortem world of graves, ghouls, ghosts and vampires. I suppose we could say it's ‘about’ death, but although it is inventive and enjoyable I wonder if it doesn't, ultimately, pull its punches on that existentially desolating subject. I wouldn't call it cutesy. I might call it cute, but cute is OK. I do think it's a little, well, safe.

We might say: that's only right, since it's a children's novel. But my point in listing these earlier titles is to suggest that the Carnegie saw some manner of pivot in 2010 towards rewarding a much darker and more dystopic kind of text. First off, then, 2010's winner: the final volume of Patrick Ness's excellent Chaos Walking trilogy (the previous two installments of which had been shortlisted and longlisted respectively) won the prize in 2010.

There's a great deal to say about this trilogy, much more than I can manage here. It starts as the story of an all-male settlement on a distant planet, men and boys who have somehow been altered so that they cannot help but hear the cacophonic thoughts of others. Ness's cleverly-rendered ‘Noise’ (some playful typography that never becomes egregious) uses telepathy to capture the claustrophobic oppressiveness of a certain kind of toxic interpersonal environment. (Twitter used to be fun when I started using it; it's getting more and more like Ness's Noise, and increasingly I find myself wondering if I should be a Todd and run away.) We start the Chaos Walking trilogy believing that the women of Prentisstown have all died of the ‘germ’ that infected the men and made them telepathic; and also that this bug was released upon the human settlers by the alien aboriginal Spackles. The truth, we soon discover, is otherwise: the women are still alive, though elsewhere, and the Spackle are not to blame. But although Ness's storytelling is always lively and interesting, and although he is a funny as well as a moving writer, he is absolutely unsparing in his representation of the way violence harms the self as much as it harms others. The scene in the first book where Todd stabs a Spackle to death is genuinely upsetting to read; and the descent of the various populations into war in the end makes grueling reading. Prentisstown, and its Donald Trump-ish fuhrer Prentiss, are the stuff of a straightforward dystopian vision. [A movie is on its way starring Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley: 2021, we're told]

Ness won the 2011 prize as well, for the heartbreaking A Monster Calls.

The cover, there, sports two Carnegie medals, as you can see, since Jim Kay also won that year's Kate Greenaway prize for illustration (awarded by CILIP, the same people who administer the Carnegie). As well he should: his images for this book are amazing.

But then, the whole book is amazing. The monster is a sort of giant animated yew tree, and the person on whom it calls, always at 12:07, is 13-year old Conor. Conor's mother is dying of cancer; his father lives on the other side of the Atlantic, and his grandmother, who cares for him, is distant and cold. He's bullied at school and something of a loner. The monster tells him three stories, and in return Conor must tell the creature his own nightmare. But the monster's stories deliberately eschew moralising; they are tales of human suffering and loss. In his waking life, as when he finally fights back against his bullies, Conor seems to be in some sense possessed by the spirit of his troublesome monster. His mother's condition worsens, and at 12:07 she dies in the hospital. If I describe this book as ‘Not Now Bernard, but for bereavement’ I in no way mean to belittle it. Not Now Bernard is, in its small way, a masterpiece.

The original idea for A Monster Calls was Siobhan Dowd's, herself a previous Carnegie winner; she passed it over to Ness to write up because she was dying of cancer. But the premise stands or falls on how well the monster is written, and Ness does an extraordinary job with that. His monster possesses just the right touch of the sublime:

This in turn grounds the emotional directness of Conor's relationship to his dying mother, which you really would have to have a heart of stone to read without being moved.

You couldn't call A Monster Calls a dystopia. But it is very, very far from being a bag of laughs, and in this novel Ness here brings the same unflinching approach to psychological trauma that shapes the representation of actual violence in the Chaos Walking books.

The 2013 winner, Sally Gardner's Maggot Moon, certainly is dystopia, though: of a venerable, old-school, Nineteen-eighty-four-ish stripe.

That's Standish Tredwell on the cover there: a misfit, dyslexic, one-blue-eye-one-brown-eye kid in an Orwellian alt-historical 1950s (I'm guessing) Britain called the ‘Motherland’: deprivation and oppressive surveillance, disappearances and secret police, children at Standish's school beaten, sometimes to death, for noncompliance. Standish lives with his Gramps in a ramshackle house in distant ‘Zone 7’ whilst the Motherland North-Korea-ishly pushes ahead on a grand and pointless moon rocket project. It's a well-written but remarkably dispiriting read, Maggot Moon; or I thought so. But more to the point, there's something queerly old-fashioned about this dystopia. Hunger Games, or in their more schematic ways Maze Runner or Divergent, construct dystopias extrapolated from the experience of modern teens; Maggot Moon extrapolates a 21st-century teen dystopia from the experience of 21st-century teen's grandparents, all boiled cabbage and nosy neighbours, shonky totalitarianism and petty spite. It's a strange and oddly nostalgic mode of dystopia, this; though dystopia it certainly is. But perhaps that's only right; the -algia part of nostalgia means ‘pain’, after all, and one way of characterising the current shift to the right in world politics is as a call to turn back the clock, to return to some earlier version of the world. Gardner's book could be read as an unillusioned examination of that idea.

Which brings us to Kevin Brooks' The Bunker Diary; 2014's winner and easily the most controversial recipient of the Carnegie Medal.

Teenager Linus Weems is asked by a feeble-looking apparently blind man to help him load something into his van; duped and drugged, the next thing Linus knows is that he is waking up in a windowless underground bunker. The only only way in or out is an elevator, which his captor, ‘The Man Upstairs’, controls.

Over time various other people are deposited in this prison; the youngest a nine-year-old girl. Linus records it all in his diary as the Man Upstairs withholds food until the captives kill one another. Some die, or commit suicide; others kill. Eventually the elevator stops running; the inmates deduce that the Man Upstairs had passed away, or moved on, or been captured, and they resign themselves to their fate. It's a heroically grim and forbidding story with an exceptionally bleak ending: everyone else is dead, and Linus's diary entries trail off to indicate that he too has expired.

There is a kind of Saw-lite vibe to The Bunker Diaries; and a stubborn refusal to permit the readers any kind of catharsis which is either boldly admirable, or else just annoying. But the reaction to the book's win was way out of proportion to the matter at hand. It approached hysteria in the Telegraph, and the Guardian, reporting it, managed to slap a picture of the (I don't doubt, charming and personable) Brooks onto their website that made him look like a stare-eyed loon.

From that report:

Brooks was named winner of the Carnegie on Monday, joining a long roster of prestigious winners which includes Arthur Ransome – who won the first ever award in 1936 – Alan Garner, Penelope Lively and Philip Pullman. The Bunker Diary, which was turned down by publishers for years because of its bleak outlook, is told in the form of the diary of a kidnapped boy held hostage in a bunker. Awarding him with the medal, judges said he had created ‘an entirely credible world with a compelling narrative, believable characters and writing of outstanding literary merit’.

But writing in the Telegraph, in a piece headlined ‘why wish this book on a child?’ and describing The Bunker Diary as ‘a vile and dangerous story’, literary critic Lorna Bradbury vigorously disagreed. She called the book ‘much nastier’ than other dystopian fictions such as The Hunger Games and Divergent, writing: ‘Here we have attempted rape, suicide and death by various means, all of it presided over by our anonymous captor, the “dirty old man” upstairs who it's difficult not to imagine masturbating as he surveys the nubile young bodies (including a girl of nine).’

Saying that the novel ‘makes versions of the imprisonment narrative for adult readers, such as Emma Donoghue's Room, based on the case of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian who locked up his daughter for 24 years, look tame’, Bradbury questioned whether books like Brooks' were ‘good for our teenagers’.

There's no actual masturbation or rape specified in Brooks' novel: this is what we might call ‘projection’ on the evidently rather fevered imagination of Lorna Barbara. But it is undeniably a grim read

Also grim is 2015's potent winner, Tanya Landman's Buffalo Soldier:

This centres on Charlotte, a slave girl in 1860s America who is freed by the Emancipation Proclamation but who finds her life is no better off, and in some respects is worse. It is a vivid and powerful piece of writing, but far from comfortable: Charlotte's parents raped and murdered and Charlotte herself raped and threatened, she decides she'd face a slightly reduced risk dressed as a boy. And it is as a boy, 'Charlie' that she joins the US Army, and becomes one of the Buffalo Soldiers, African American regiments (but with White officers) sent out to subdue Native Americans. Part of the point of the book is the way the brutalised subaltern in turn will find and brutalise any sub-subaltern power presents to them: the freed Blacks in Landman's novels are at the bottom of the social heap, until they meet the Native Americans. Charlie ends up in a relationship with one Indian, ‘Jim’, and I wouldn't say the novel is bleached of all hope. Nor can we really call it dystopian, unless ‘dystopia’ seems to us a reasonable description of the Civil War-era and postbellum USA. Which we might well think.

I was disappointed in 2016 that Francis Hardinge's extraordinary novel The Lie Tree did not win; instead we got One:

The story, here, concerns conjoined twins Grace and Tippi, one of whom falls in love with a boy. It ends (I'm avoiding spoilers, but) sadly. That the whole thing is written in a kind of formless free verse speaks, perhaps, to an ambition to achieve a lyric intensity of pathos, although I'm sorry to say I found the verse slack and clumsy, and the story without this gimmick (cruel of me to call it a gimmick, really; but there you go) is a short-story and rather underdeveloped narrative. It being impossible for anyone but a monster to withhold their sympathy for Grace and Tippi's situation, the emotional through-line is one-dimensional and more than a little manipulative. Perhaps what I am saying here reflects only my crusty old and hardened heart. At any rate, and although this is a mimetic novel, containing a good deal of practical day-to-day stuff on what life is like if you are half of a conjoined doublet—which is to say, we cannot call it a dystopia—nontheless it is a text that takes it as axiomatic that to be young today is to be burdened, simulataneously isolated and claustrophobic; to be tragic (if tragically hip). If I, an oldster, ask The Youngling what their life is like, will they really reply I fall upon the thorns of life I bleed with such sentimental focus? Is there a sentimental component to the dystopian vision?

We're getting nearer to now. 2017's winner was Salt to the Sea, by Ruta Sepetys, a story about refugees that certainly approaches dystopic intensity, although it is based on an historical circumstance: the sinking, by a Soviet submarine, in January 30, 1945, of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a German cruise liner that was carrying a great many refugees to safety away from the advancing Red Army. The ship was massively overcrowded (there were more than 10,500 passengers travelling in a ship designed to carry 1,800) and when it sank more than 9,000 people, including 5,000 children, lost their lives.

Sepetys spares her four main characters Joana, Florian, Emilia and Alfred, variously German, Polish and Lithuanian, trekking across frozen landscapes, reaching the ship they think will save them and ending ... well, no spoilers, but: check the book's title.

Also historical, although 18th-century rather than WW2, is 2018's winner: Geraldine McCaughrean's Where the World Ends.

I admire this novel very much, and it is written with tremendous verve and power. Nor, since it is based (we're told) on a true story, do I want to give the impression that I'm bracketing it as dystopia-adjacent only to fit my larger argument. Nonetheless, there's a chillier Lord of the Flies vibe here, a sense of a society pared down by circumstance and grimly configured. Each year a group of men and boys from the Scottish island of Hirta (St Kilda) are taken by boat to one of the uninhabited St Kilda stacs to harvest birds and eggs for food. After a set time boat comes to collect them and they return home. But in the time detailed by the novel, in 1727, no one returns to collect them. Why? The lads on the island come to believe that the world outside has ended, and that they have been abandoned to endure storms, starvation and terror alone. Things (once again, I am avoiding spoilers) don't pan out quite so catastrophically, and it's misleading to compare it to Lord of the Flies in several ways, not least that there are grown men as well as children on the island. But what McCaughrean does in this novel is to enact, as it were, the formal strategies of dystopia, using the island (More's original Utopia is, of course, an island, separated from the mainland for defensive reasons) as a trope for isolation, communal despair and grief. You're never in any doubt, reading this novel, how grimly unforgiving and horrible a location the St Kilda stacs would be as a site of habitation.

Last year the winner was Elizabeth Acevedo's The Poet X, concerning which I can say little since I'm ashamed to say I haven't read it yet. I know from reviews that Acevedo herself is a renowned slam poet, and that her highly-praised novel is about a young girl called Xiomara Batistain, living in a deprived community in Harlem, who finds in slam poetry a way to express herself and to fight back against a hostile world. As for this year, I've no idea. Maybe we're about to pivot back to a kinder, gentler YA/children's novel; conceivably The Poet X already marks a change in that direction. I've only read a few of the longlisted titles, but none of them have been grimdark in any sense.

So where are we? It seems that almost all the 20teens winners of the Carnegie medal have been either dystopias or else narratives of trauma, suffering and misery. And one way of getting at the point I'm trying to make is that these titles (with the possible exception of A Monster Calls, and The Poet X) are dark in an unrelieved way: tragic but without catharsis. Indeed a thumbnail definition of today's Grimdark might be: a commitment to tragedy that is by definition non-cathartic.

What does this say about youth culture today? Because whatever it does say will, again by definition, say something important about 21st-century culture more generally, determined as that latter quantity is so hugely by YA, from Potter to MCU, from pop to SF. Why the scope and persistence of this taste in dystopia? The more hopeful reading might be the Jamesonian one: that dystopia is actually our age's way of ‘doing’ utopia, an age that can no longer believe in the wide-eyed ingenuousness of the epoch that wrote all those unironic utopian books, but which doesn't want to give up the idea that things might be made better.

Jameson's thesis in his Archaeologies of the Future is that dystopia represents an ‘Anti-anti-utopianism’ which is, in a counterintuitive way, utopian:

What is crippling is the universal belief . . . that the historic alternatives to capitalism have been proven unviable and impossible, and that no other socioeconomic system is conceivable, let alone practically available. The value of the utopian form thus consists precisely in its capacity as a representational meditation on radical difference, radical otherness, and . . . the systematic nature of the social totality [28]

[This new mode of] Utopia as a form provides the answer to the universal ideological conviction that no alternative is possible. It does so ... by forcing us to think the break itself . . . not by offering a more traditional picture of what things would be like after the break [323]

Maybe that's right; but I find myself wondering if Jameson's approach is the best way of talking about all this. It is, in a manner of speaking, a kind of assertive mourning for the injustices of the present, aimed at working through the horror towards something better. But maybe Freud's distinction between mourning and melancholia better glosses the present-day vogue for dystopia by leaning more on the latter quantity. Young readers connect with books like The Hunger Games or The Bunker Diary because they feel, in some symbolic sense, trapped in a desperate game, a game designed by adults to control and kill them. The real tragedy of the circumstance is that their suffering, absent catharsis, is not even tragic. ‘Within depression,’ Kristeva notes in Black Sun, ‘if my existence is on the verge of collapsing, its lack of meaning is not tragic – it appears obvious to me, glaring and inescapable.’ Those last two words describe the premises of many of these Westeros-Panem YA topographies rather neatly, I feel.

The counter-intuitive part of all this, for a middle-aged fogey like myself, is that in many ways young people today have ‘it’ better than any previous generation. Quite apart from material improvements in the quality of life, the future belongs to them, as it always has. They can hardly lose. But then again, perhaps that is the problem. ‘Perhaps,’ Kristeva also wonders ‘my depression points to my not knowing how to lose—I have perhaps been unable to find a valid compensation for my loss.’ Difficult to see from where such compensation could be sourced. Chaos Walking and Buffalo Soldier are both, in different ways, about the terrible fallout from acts of colonial intrusion, but it may be that the relevant empire is less historical in these novels than it is the Empire of Trauma itself, under whose distant and implacable authority we all now subsist.

Peter Ackroyd, "The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein" (2008)

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Adaptation, as (for instance) from book to film, entails both simplification and complication. There's an obvious and a less obvious aspect to this. To start with the obvious: a 90-minute movie must inevitably simplify a novel, even a short novel, like Frankenstein. If, in a film version, all of Mary Shelley’s characters were included, and all spoke exactly the words she puts into their mouths, if every scene-setting were lingered on so as to bring-out all the specific details she mentions ... why, then, the movie would not only be fifteen hours long, it would be a very strangely shaped and pitched piece of work indeed, clogged with intolerable longeurs, exposition-heavy and wrongfooting. As well as simplification (the process, in effect, of modelling the original text in miniature), film-makers must adjust for the two key salient differences in media: novels are verbal and strong on interiority, films are visual and strong on exteriority. If one wishes to convey to a movie audience (or, mutatis mutanda, to a theatre audience, a TV audience, a video-game audience) what is going on inside a character’s head your options are limited. A monologue or voice-over, that clunky and crudifying convention, is one possibility. It is, though, a bad one. Better is to work with what you have, the exteriorities, in order to utilise the beauty of inflections, and indeed of innuendoes, to imply what is happening inwardly. It turns out in practice, though, that only the greatest directors can pull this off with any panache. Otherwise we find ourselves mired in the sink of visual cliché, where we know the main character is sad because it is raining and know that s/he is happy because the clouds have parted with meteorological implausibility and the sun is now shining. Don’t get me wrong: movies are capable of extraordinary and beautiful effects. But they aren’t as good at capturing interiority as novels, which is one reason why I write novels and don’t make films. There are other reasons, not least the lamentable lack of big-money producers hammering at my door waving fistfuls of moolah, but: you know.

I am not, to be clear, suggesting there's anything second-hand, or second-rate, about adaptation. So far as that goes I remain persuaded by Linda Hutcheon’s argument in her and Siobhan O’Flynn’s influential Theory of Adaptation book, a study that refuses to accept that an adaptation is in any sense a belated or subaltern matter (and which indeed argues, à la Derrida/Post-Card, that the line of influence sometimes runs the other way). It is not that James Whales’ Frankenstein (1931) or Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) are secondary to the, as it were, primary text of Mary Shelley’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Nor, Hutcheons argues, should we be distracted by the false criterion ‘fidelity’ when judging an adaptation. We should, rather, take every adaptation as valid on its own terms—for (she insists) the bald fact of intertextuality, quite as much as its uniquity, means that adaptation, in various ways, is what literature as a whole is.

Of course some adaptations are better than others, and setting adaptations alongside quote-unquote original texts can be a way of highlighting elements in both. Two aspects of Shelley’s original novel that are rarely or never carried-through into adaptations are: the Russian-doll narrative form (Walton’s outer narrative contains Frankenstein’s narrative which contains the Creature’s narrative) and her roman philosophe ambition—for her novel is actually a Rousseauian or Voltaire-ian experiment in prose, imagining how a Lockean ‘tablua rasa’ consciousness might fare in a world that judges on appearances rather than inner worth. We think of Frankenstein as a Gothic novel, but in many ways it’s an Englightenment conte like Candide (this is why Shelley sets her story in Switzerland, and afterwards in Edinburgh: those two great centres of Enlightenment thought). Her monster is not, whatever the adaptations say, stitched together from used body-parts—it's true that we’re told Frankenstein spends ‘days and nights in vaults and charnel-houses’, but that’s to examine corpses so as to deduce how the human body works, and more specifically ‘to examine the cause and progress of [postmortem] decay’ [ch. 4]. Shelley doesn’t tell us how, or from what raw materials, Frankenstein actually makes his golem, so that (she says) we are not tempted to imitate him. When Dr F. finally infuses the metaphorical ‘spark of life’ into his creation, it is during a scene which Shelley pitches as deliberately low-key, downbeat, anti-climactic:

It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

Contrast this with the scene in Whale’s uber-influential movie: ‘that great manic scene,’ in Michael Wood’s words; ‘—operating table hoisted on pulleys through the open roof of the tower to face the night sky, wild storm raging outside, whizzing electrical effects inside, all kinds of mad inventor’s equipment everywhere looking as if it would suit a power station in Toytown—as operatic as can be imagined.’ Compare it again with the even more hysterically hyperactive and overblown equivalent scene in Kenneth Branagh's version.

Whale is staging the external correlatives for his inventor’s interior excitement, and in doing so he sets-up a quite different emphasis so far as his overarching story is concerned. For Whale has jettisoned Shelley’s conte philosophe premise wholesale. His monster’s consciousness is not a tabula rasa; Frankenstein’s hunchback assistant, sent to recover a Normal Brain to fit into the creature’s cranium, has instead returned with an Abnormal one. Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein so beautifully parodies this moment: ‘whose brain did you take?’ Gene Wilder's Frankenstein demands of his idiot assistant. ‘Abby somebody,’ Marty Feldman's Igor replies. ‘I’m pretty sure that was the name on the jar. Abby Normal.’ Not Tabby Rasa, at any rate.

The point is that Whale’s monster is a rebus for the outsider, the socially rejected, the defective, not a vehicle for Lockean thought-experiment. The formal alterations Whale makes reinforce this: he does away both with Walton’s framing narrative—all that north pole gubbins—and with the monster’s own narration, nested in the middle of the novel. Shelley’s monster is superbly eloquent and articulate; Whale’s monster a lumbering, grunting hulk. Branagh, although he sometimes gets credit for directing what Wikipedia calls ‘the most faithful film adaptation of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel’, follows Whale in both these strategies, and indeed doubles down upon them: Karloff’s monster is ‘simple’, but de Niro’s monster is a bad  man before his death and therefore a bad monster after his resurrection. And by jettisoning the central narrative Branagh similarly flattens Shelley’s complex web of interacting subjectivities. This reduces the frame narrative to something approaching fatuity: Aidan Quinn’s Walton starts the movie a tyrannical captain driving his crew on towards the pole at all costs; then the movie reverts to its main narrative, Frankenstein’s story before returning, briefly, to Walton at the end: he has ‘learned his lesson’ and tells the crew to set a course for home. It's thin fare, narratively, and doesn't justify the frame narrative's inclusion.

In fact Branagh’s is a much-too-frantic adaptation, in which neither actors nor camera can ever be allowed to rest but must constantly be hurtling forward or spinning around or swooping up and down. It also contains a lot of goo and gunk, lashings of blood and slime and amniotic fluid, Kristevan abject matter that illustrates something not particularly well brought-into-focus overall, something about childbirth (poor old Cheri Lunghi as Victor’s mum, dying in a bloodily rendered childbirth at the movie's beginning) and sex—the creature is animated not by lightning, but by a gigantic phallic tube pumping a mass of wriggling electric eels, like gigantic spermatozoa, into his chamber.

Whale’s adaptation is better because it is cleaner, both formally (there is real subtlety in Whale’s precise movements of the camera; a slow pan up or down here, a restrained dolly zoom there) and in terms of what is represented: Victor’s spacious castle, the unhurried pace, Karloff's superb make-up, so often copied because its so eloquently copyable. It is hardly original to note that Whale, a gay man who confronted the conventions of his time by sharing his house with his partner, here made a movie about queerness, about the way society refuses to accommodate gayness, and how awkward and ungainly and, well, monstrous this state of affairs renders gay experience. The knee-jerk hostility of the villagers metaphorises the moral panic queerness so often provokes, just as the scene in which the monster plays with and then kills the little girl Maria by throwing her in the lake, reads like a bold appropriation of homophobic slurs (‘won’t somebody think of the children?’ and so on).

What is Frankenstein, after all, but a story about how a man makes another man without going through the scare-quotes ‘natural’ process of female mediated pregnancy and birth? Whale’s monster captures how physical, how erotically embodied one’s sense of self can become: the monster’s hefty, masculine frame poking out of its too-small clothes: so very unmissably male, so physical, so somatically overdetermined. It's also a film that apprehends the queerness of what, talking of his own project, Whale called ‘the ritual’. Here’s Michael Wood again:

Karloff and Whale had an argument during the shooting about the way the creature was to kill the little girl he was innocently playing with. Karloff wanted to ‘pick her up gently and put her into the water exactly as he had done to the flowers’, but Whale wanted the girl to be thrown into the water, in what Karloff called ‘a brutal and deliberate act’. Whale insisted, and trying to explain to Karloff and the rest of the cast, now committed to a view of the monster as an ugly, lovable innocent, said: ‘You see, it’s all part of the ritual.’ The ritual, I take it, involved the violence of the creature’s innocence, and horror in this sense would be closer to tragedy than we like to think, or would be tragedy as grand guignol, provoking pity and fear in unmeasured proportions.

According to Wood ‘the creature is dangerous and bewildered: we can’t really give him our sympathy or refuse it to him – well, we can sentimentalise him, but only if we refuse to pay attention to the ritual.’

The important thing, in the movie, is that we can’t regret his creation, and not only because there would be no movie without him. We can’t feel it was wrong to create him, and the whole question of the creator’s caring or not caring for his creature, so important in Mary Shelley, is entirely absent here. Frankenstein has made not an animated doll or puppet but an ungainly travesty of a man, a would-be person who suffers, beseeches, smiles, rages and murders. The creature can’t die, even when he is killed off, because we don’t know what to do with this life so curiously pitched between the human and the non-human, because he represents not only our fear of the unmanageable but also our addiction to it. The making of the creature is not a blasphemy or a desecration, as the story is supposed to say; it is what happens when you want the rough beast to slouch towards Bethlehem to be born.

We can’t, I suppose, call the movie a full-throated celebration of gayness, since the emphasis of the movie (in this respect, Whale is taking his cue from Shelley’s novel, I think) is on the hostility of the larger world to difference and the unusual; but it is a powerful and enduring movie because it has something to say, and says it. That’s not really true of Branagh’s film, I think.


:2:

Which brings me to Peter Ackroyd’s The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008), another adaptation of Shelley’s story made by a gay man. In this novel the action is moved from Switzerland to England. Frankenstein studies at Oxford and befriends Percy Shelley, the two of them discussing the possibilities of animating dead matter. After Percy is sent down for his atheism Frankenstein follows him to London, and Ackroyd gives us a clothier’s yard of atmospheric metropolitan gubbins, heavy on the dirt (‘these alleys were like some black shadow forever following its steps. We picked our way around the prone body of a woman in the last stages of intoxication, her legs were covered with her own filth’ [20]). Victor lurks in morgues:

One middle-aged man, thickset with a heavy jaw and a shaved head, appeared to have been burned … livid red bruising and swollen limbs … the face of an adjacent female was almost unrecognisable, looking like nothing so much as a bunch of bruised and overripe grapes: I could fathom no reason for the savage pulping of her visage, unless it were some frightful accident. The rest of her body was quite untouched, and it occurred to me that with a new head she might have been an object of lust. [71]

I tell you what, mate, with a new head even I might be an object of lust. Anyway: Frankenstein hears that his sister Elizabeth is ill with ‘consumption’ and returns to Switzerland just in time to be present at her deathbed. Provoked by his grief, he returns to England resolved to discover the secret of life, and establishes a lab at the outskirts of Oxford where he is supplied with dead bodies by ‘resurrectionists’. Whilst working, he is also hanging out with all the important Romantics: Coleridge, Byron and of course Shelley (‘Bysshe was eager to explain his schemes of future happiness … a little community in Wales dedicated to the principles of equality and justice [and] an epic poem on the subject of King Arthur’ [159]). Soon enough his experiments come to fruition.

In the course of these trials I noticed that, in the corpses of the younger specimens, the phallus became erect at the slightest excitation … my work on the phallus was at first confined to an examination of the three columns of erectile tissue, but then I advanced to an attempt at the measurement of the spermal fluid. By means of the firm pressure of my fingers I brought one body to a state of ejaculation, at which point there came a groan; but no spermatozoa appeared. There was no fluid, but there was instead a sprinkling of material with the appearance and consistency of dust .[163-4]

Ackroyd does not stint us the penile stuff:

I backed away, taking a few paces, and found myself against the wall of the workshop … he seemed to lose interest in me. He noticed his penis, still erect, and with a groan he began to stimulate himself in front of me. I looked on in absolute astonishment as he laboured to produce the seminal fluid. What monstrous issue might emerge from one who had died and had been reborn? His most devoted efforts were unavailing, however, and he turned to me with a curiously submissive or perhaps embarrassed look. [183]

Look away granny, it's Wankenstein! ‘Had he,’ Frankenstein-the-narrator wonders, ‘sinned like Adam in the Garden?’ recalling the famous verses in Genesis where the father of mankind mucks about with his enormous schwanzstucker. After this scene of *clears throat nervously* monsterbation Ackroyd's creature jumps in the river and zooms off: ‘he was able to swim at an extraordinary speed, and within a very few moments he was out of my sight.’ Michael-Phelpsenstein!

Frankenstein spends a week delirious with shock, going up to the Lake District to recuperate. But the monster follows him.

A small boat emerged from the other side … to my utter horror and amazement I realised who it was who stood in the boat … I could see the lurid yellow hair and the blank grey eyes. Now he held out his arms: his hands were covered in blood. [199]

Frankenstein scarpers, afterwards pondering what he had seen with the acuity and logical penetration of a Romantic-era Sherlock Holmes: ‘this visitation was evidence of some terrible event. I was sure of it. His bloody hands were the token of some crime perpetrated in vengeance.’ You think? At any rate, the monster kills Shelley’s wife Harriet, and later confronts Frankenstein in his lab (‘Are you my God? You were the first thing that I saw upon this earth. Is it any wonder that your form is more real to me than that of any other living creature?’ [227]). This is the occasion for a long, monsterly monologue: he learned to speak and read by eavesdropping on a labourer and his daughter sheltering in a barn; using Frankenstein’s notes he tracked down the sister he had loved before his death—she is Annie Keat, and he, we discover, was John Keat [sic]. But his reunion does not go well: ‘on seeing me she screamed out “my God! Out of the grave!” In a frenzy of fear she ran towards the bank of the river.’ [250]. She dies (‘of panic, or immersion, I did not know’).

The monster blames his creator. ‘I have read somewhere that suffering shares the nature of infinity’ he tells F., a reference to the lines from Wordsworth’s The Borderers: ‘suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,/And shares the nature of infinity’—which, since Wordsworth didn’t publish this play until 1842, is a quite remarkable prolepsis on the creature's part. ‘I am wrapped in anger,’ he assures Frankenstein, ‘and the contemplation of revenge!’ Rather than heed this warning, however, Frankenstein joins Shelley, Mary Shelley and others for a short holiday in a Thames-side villa near Marlow. Mary has nightmares and wakes screaming (‘I dreamed I saw a phantom by the window. It was a dream I am certain of it. There was a face’ [268]) but the party ignores all presentiments of ill. A local woman is murdered. The party return to London, hook up with Polidori and Byron, have a quick snack (‘William [the waiter] returned with the sandwiches. Bysshe fell upon them’ [328]) and resolve to visit the Villa Diodati in Switzerland, which Byron has rented for the season. Not, however, before another quick nibble: ‘William, without prompting, had brought over another plate of ham sandwiches. Bysshe attacked them.’ [330] The novel dallies on the shores of Lake Geneva for a couple of chapters:

“The servants tell me,” Byron said as we sat down to breakfast the following morning, “that a sea monster has been glimpsed in the lake.” [342]

Lake monster, surely? Or else, maybe, the Sea of Geneva? The Creature pops up to bug his creator (‘“Why are you here?” I asked of him. “Where else am I to come, if I seek for a companion?”’ [371]) and Frankenstein hurries back to London.

We're almost at the end of the novel now when, with hurried and ill-judged ta-dah!, Ackroyd pulls a twist ending out of his conjurer’s hat. It will come as a surprise, I suspect, to few readers: we discover that what the novel we've been reading is more Jekyll and Hyde than Frankenstein, and that, moreover, it’s all been in Frankie’s head. ‘Given to me by the patient, Victor Frankenstein, on Wednesday November 15th 1822,’ read the final words of the novel, ‘Signed by Frederick Newman, Superintendent of the Hoxton Mental Asylum for Incurables.’ There never was a monster; it was Victor killing all those people. The rapidity of this final turnaround is an extremely clumsy note on which to end, one notch up from “…and it was all a dream.’ The novels ends with that dull thud you experience when climbing stairs in the dark and reach the landing one step sooner than you think, so that your reaching foot slaps down hard. Is that it?

This twist ending is deflating because it forces us to reappraise everything we’ve just read. In part this is irksome because it boxes the reader into a series of more-or-less barren speculative forays (did he actually meet the Shelleys and Byron? Or was that also part of his hallucination? How did Shelley come to write her story about a character called Victor Frankenstein if she never met this Victor Frankenstein? Or is the idea supposed to be (as per that final date) that the narrator is actually called something quite other, but the balance of his mind has been disordered by reading Mary’s novel in 1818?) But it’s more irksome, I think, because it reverts the painstaking Whale-ian exteriorisation of the creature’s monstrosity so clunkingly back into interiority again. It sells the queer potential of the telling short.


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Here’s the cover art to the last book Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick published in her life, Touching Feeling Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003):

Sedgwick discusses it in her preface: the black and white photo was ‘the catalyst that impelled me to assemble the book in its present form’: the woman depicted, who is so awkwardly clutching that object, something like a gigantic pupa, or a wasps nest, made of sticks and twine, is the ‘outsider’ artist Judith Scott, with one of her pieces, a mysterious core ‘hidden under many wrapped or darned layers of multicoloured yarn, cord, ribbon, rope and other fibre ... whose scale bears comparison to Scott’s own body’. Elaine Showalter comments: ‘on the most immediate visual level, the photo is used to represent the act of touching feeling, the effort to hold and explore and seek comfort from something wordless and precious. For those familiar with Sedgwick’s own life and career, there are other correspondences. Sedgwick has often written about her own sense of alienation, outsideness, otherness, queerness.’ To be gay and out is to summon a monster as alter ego to walk the streets with you, to sit beside you on the bus, to join you at the restaurant table, and not only in the sense that homophobes, and a homophobic society, see you as a hideous Boris Karloff to be hunted down with flaming brands. Monster, as generations of critics of Frankenstein have noted, means something shown, something demonstrated (see the monster in the middle of that word), something not just meaningful, but meaningfully ‘out’. In classical times if (say) your cow gave birth to a two-headed calf, the birth was a monster in the specific sense that the gods were trying to tell you something (compare the French montrer; consider the original meaning of the English word muster). The best modern monsters are doing the same thing: Godzilla, say, is a monster in the demotic sense, but is also trying to tell us something (about, I suppose, the dangers of nuclear testing). The Mummy is a monster in the hide-behind-the-sofa sense, but it's also trying to tell us something (about the violation of history and memory entailed by imperialism, or something along those lines).

I take Sedgwick's choice of cover-art to be a way of talking about the monstrous beauty entailed by accepting, by hugging-close, one's queerness; a point (if I don't stray too far from the echt Sedgwickian line) as true of straight as gay individuals. We're all perverse, to one degree or another. Sex, as a human connection, is monstrous in the montrer-sense as much as in the Othello-ian beast with two backs, weird-creature sense. Ackroyd's problem, in his Casebook, is not that he tackles the queer aspect of Frankenstein's story, but that he's so plonking about it, so foresquare: his creature both male-model gorgeous (‘he was the most beautiful corpse I had ever seen ... the body itself was muscular and firmly knit ... chest abdomen and thighs perfectly formed’ [179]) and a literal embodiment of the sterility of same-sex desire, wanking dust and lurking in the shadows. Shelley's Frankenstein agrees to make his creature a mate, and only changes his mind at the last moment because he is afraid such a couple would populate the world with a race of monsters to overwhelm humankind. Ackroyd's monster begs his Frankenstein for a mate, but Ackroyd's Frankenstein refuses immediately; instead the final act of the novel concerns a machine of unmaking the scientist constructs, one that dissolves bodies down to their bones and then dissolves the bones themselves (he tests this on a ‘barbary ape’ he buys ‘at great expense’ at London Docks). F. hopes to use this is eradicate his creature altogether, although when he finally persuades the monster inside it proves useless. Apes, symbolic of heterosexual desire, can be unmade; but not the monstrous embodiment of queer sexuality it seems.

Casebook is a novel about London: more Newgate novel than Gothic, and a long way from the rational clarity and Adorno-Horkheimer inhumainty of Shelley's Enlightenment inspiration. Its problem is that it can't hug its monster; that it sees only sterility and, in its lumpen final twist, evanescence and hallucination in its creature. A much less eloquent articulation of queerness than Whale's.