Having a fabulous time

One of the joys of publishing with an independent online publisher is being able to re-publish one’s out of print work – hitherto doomed to a half-life in the ‘used’ section of the Amazon store, or to second-hand bookshops -– themselves fast disappearing. It’s a wonderfully liberating feeling, to know that one’s characters are no longer consigned to the limbo of the unread, but will be brought back to life in the minds of readers.

Having already brought about this resurrection with my second novel, Undiscovered Country, first published by Penguin in 1997 and re-published in 2010 by Arbuthnot Books, I turned my attention to Fabulous Time, originally published in 2000. The novel – a black comedy, set in Sussex, during the Summer of Love – needed some light revision, which necessitated re-reading it, and editing as I went.

In doing so, I found myself re-entering a very strange world indeed – a world peopled by eccentric old ladies and camp antique dealers; by homicidal rent-boys, dope-smoking pop-stars, superannuated actresses, and philandering artists. I couldn’t help wondering what on earth had drawn me to such shady scenes. Even though I’d always enjoyed the mingling of dark and light elements to be found, say, in Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’, or the films of Alfred Hitchcock, I’d never written anything in this vein before.

Yet the story seemed to demand exactly this kind of treatment. Writers such as Thomas Love Peacock, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde and, latterly, Evelyn Waugh and Angus Wilson, had celebrated the rich vein of eccentricity that runs throughout the English character. My own strange little tale of murder and mayhem in the Sussex countryside seemed part of this tradition. I’d become interested, furthermore, in what one might call the anarchic side of English life, and the way it has always subtly undermined the conventional.

This unashamedly Dionysiac strain has its roots in the pagan past – whose imagined hedonism and freedom from social restraint is encapsulated in Christopher Marlowe’s lines (later borrowed by Aldous Huxley for his own 1923 depiction of love-among-the-artists, Antic Hay):

My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawn, shall with their goat feet dance an antic hay…

It’s this pre-Christian celebration of misrule that’s to be found in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its decidedly English-sounding fairies, Cobweb, Moth, Peaseblossom, and Mustardseed, and its presiding spirit, Puck – or Robin Goodfellow – whose mischievous interventions bring about the play’s central misunderstandings.

And those things do best please me
That befall preposterously…

In Fabulous Time, much of the action ‘befall(s) preposterously’, and most of the characters are unconventional, if not actually bizarre. The central character, Constance Reason, an elderly artist of eccentric habits, was once a Slade School bohemian, at a time when that institution was presided over by the flamboyant figure of Augustus John, whose acolytes, in her disdainful recollection, modelled themselves on the great man, by ‘sweeping around in capes and those soft hats that only artists and poseurs wore…’ Connie’s sister, Leonora, belongs to a no less ‘arty’ crowd – that of the West End stage circa 1920, whose mannerisms she has sustained into old age.

Hardly surprising, then, that these two ageing aesthetes should accept without blinking the arrival in their midst of a gaggle of druggy rock musicians, whose appearance puts Iseult, Leonora’s long-suffering daughter, in mind of her mother’s theatrical friends – ‘incorporating as it does an abundance of velvet and satin, a predilection for kohl eyeliner and a fondness for large-brimmed hats and feather boas…’

Mingled with the self-conscious ‘decadence’ of the Vampyres and their entourage is something much darker, as embodied by Ray – beautiful but heartless boyfriend of Connie’s hapless nephew, Sandy. I wasn’t thinking particularly of Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane when I envisaged Ray, although he does bear a cousinly likeness to Orton’s louche charmer. In his venality and casual violence, Ray represents a different kind of anarchy – a destabilising element, threatening the established order. Something a bit gothic, in fact.

The gothic, in its various manifestations – from the 18th century romances beloved by Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, to the Hammer Horror films of the 1960s – is another quintessentially English tradition to which Fabulous Time pays homage. Because, without giving away more of the plot than seems necessary to tantalize prospective readers, the novel is also a ghost story.

For what seems like a long time – but is perhaps no more than a minute – the eyes of her late husband meet hers in the glass with a steady, mournful stare…

In debased form, the elements of the gothic horror story are also to be found in the classic murder mystery. Often combining the horror with a whimsical humour – one thinks of Agatha Christie at her finest – they achieve their effects by a judicious unsettling of the status quo. It’s no accident that most detective stories of the golden era (roughly, 1920 to 1950) take place in the most innocuous of settings – English villages, or country houses, not a million miles from Connie’s ramshackle dwelling, ‘Dunsinane’.

Fabulous Time is not of course a conventional detective story, any more than the Ealing comedies of the 1940s and 1950s were traditional knockabout farce. Both are intended as affectionate, if slightly waspish, parodies. ‘It would make a good film, along the lines of Arsenic and Old Lace or The Ladykillers’, said a kind reviewer, when the novel first came out. I’m very happy to be included in such company– and even happier that, thanks to the latest technology, the book is now available to new readers.