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‘ ‘How’s your life?’‘My brain hurts. Been in Oxford swotting and listening to a pair of dykes talk about organic food and sustainable energy.’ '
If you want to make me angry at your book, including a comment like that will absolutely achieve your aim. I understand that in context it was supposed to be quite jocular and an indication that the women talking are modern, straight talking people, who are casually taking back the hate filled words of the past, but it didn’t come off like that at all. I’m interested in the reclamation of words, but this word isn’t mine to reclaim and it didn’t belong to the characters who were saying it and it certainly isn’t a word the male author of this book should be using as an indication of edgy modernity. This passage sounded hateful, was accompanied by the description of one of the lesbian couple as a ‘dour Portuguese postgraduate’, a description presumably intended to show the undesirability of this lesbian relationship. The comment just sits there with no criticism of the word, allowing people to think this is a perfectly fine way for straight characters to talk about lesbian characters. It’s a small part of the ‘Nothing to Fear’ by Matthew D’Ancona, but it’s messed up.
But this socially unconscious misstep is almost slight when compared with the scorn D’Ancona turns upon the rest of the world. The middle classes, the working classes, the young; everyone who fits into these categories in this book is living an unhappy, unfulfilling life according to the author:
‘Like a herd of half-dead livestock, blinking in the unforgiving light of the early morning, they slouched towards the point where they would be picked up and carted off to unhappy destinations.’
There’s no sense that D’Ancona understands the reasons why people take ordinary jobs. It is never questionable whether these people have unfulfilling lives, his prose makes his opinions sound like statements of fact, as he ignores the possibility that ordinary people’s lives might possess some meaning, or happiness. Only the more privileged characters who work in top jobs, creative fields, or academia are able to contemplate meaningful achievement in this book and then they often still find a way to screw up their lives. What this book exhibits more than anything is condemnation of the majority of the human race. The bombastic prose used to describe the human background to the main character’s world sounds smug and knowing:
‘ Beside her stood a young couple, twitching with anticipation at the evening ahead…They would go out and drink heavily, Ginny thought, before going to a party, taking drugs and having sex in somebody else’s bedroom. In the morning, he would be as morose as she was needy.’
Every one of these minute players says or does something which the author indicates as idiotic, or banal, or pathetic, as if D’Ancona is happy to have his views confirmed. It’s such a conventional and lazy way to write people. He may as well just have written ‘Britain is broken’ over and over again, for all the purpose, or literary merit these descriptions had.
The plot of ‘Nothing to Fear’ is simple and sounds like the premise for a terrifying tale. Ginny has just gone through a divorce, with a partner who now alternately rejects and harasses her, so she has bought a run-down house with her divorce settlement. Her next door neighbour is a shy, yet oddly attractive computer programmer named Sean, who works strange hours and is extremely nervous. He intrigues her, they begin to form a friendship and after a protective episode involving Ginny’s ex-husband they become lovers. Then Ginny discovers a locked door in Sean’s house, Sean seems upset after returning from the locked room and Ginny decides to investigate. What she finds in the room causes her to run from the house that night and keep going until she’s safely at her friend, Peter’s house. The novel is heavily involved with the fairytale of Bluebeard’s locked room, a room where his new wife found the bodies of the pirate’s previous wives, so you can guess that running like this is not an overreaction on Ginny’s part.
From this point on Ginny freaks out in a monumental fashion. She’s entitled to go a little insane after uncovering Sean’s creepy secret, but she completely loses any sense of logic, or perspective and starts relating to Sean as a predator, who has set out a deliberate plan to demonstrate his power over her and eventually end her life. This idea is based on absolutely nothing, but self-centred thinking and animal fear, which causes Ginny to force everything Sean has ever done with her through this perspective, in an unthinking manner. Her reaction makes you question how real her academic nature feels; surely such an intelligent character could not be so deliberately unaware. I think the author is making a wider point with this reaction, one which links up with an earlier episode where a young Ginny gets lost in a supermarket and meets a monster. Once the monster is revealed as a friendly shop assistant Ginny believes the monster has disguised itself to fool the adults around her. Perhaps D’Ancona is trying to illustrate how extreme fear renders us all less rational and more childlike, but Ginny’s wilful rewriting of her relationship actually obscures this message with a heavy layer of stupidity. There were a lot of pages where I wanted to tell D’Ancona’s main character to get a grip, I actually found her inner dialogue a little hysterical (not a word I’d use lightly when describing women) despite the fact that what she’s found out would be horrifying to anyone if it happened in real life.
Shall I move on to the good now, because there’s good stuff walled in behind the failings of ‘Nothing to Fear’. Ginny’s working on a book about the meaning and purpose of fairytales, a source of research that seems to connect with Matthew D’Ancona’s personal interests, judging from the thoughtfulness of the arguments he creates for Ginny. Readers can find ideas about why fairytales are created, what part of the adult writer’s consciousness creates them and what they ultimately mean to human beings. Sean’s secret and the way Ginny talks about him ties him in explicitly with the male villains found in fairytales, especially the wolves, found in many fairytales and Bluebeard. Using fairytales as mirrors that reflect real human fear is a fascinating way of exploring the darkness of modern life, while keeping some old fashioned, simple horror in the story.
The atmosphere of the book vacillates between light and darkness, like all good horror films, understanding that the dark looks scarier when it is allowed to infiltrate the world of daylight to begin with, before the author switches all the lights off with one, sudden flick. Sean is a shaded character prompting the reader to wonder about what his intense secrecy conceals, however once Ginny goes into overdrive denying him any possibility of a soul, remorse or humanity I stopped seeing him as a mystery, or as a potential bad guy operating a disguise, instead I felt sorry for him, which is crazy considering what the author indicates he has done, and because I was looking for a way to justify his right to humanity I spotted the final plot twist well ahead of the author’s signals. There were parts of the books where I felt Ginny’s apprehension, as well as parts where I wanted to power through the plot because it was so creepily compelling and well paced, but then the narrative returned to thick passages of smug, social observation and all the tension was squashed out of the story.
There are some interesting secondary characters, like Julie, Ginny’s loyal best friend and honestly I think the author’s strength is in his characterisation of the characters he invests in. When he writes about people who have no place in the main story he is careless with them, but when he crafts characters who stand at the front of his stage he gives them all the motivations and histories a reader could want, even if these characters do still conform to conventional characterisations in part. When Ginny is not avoiding logic, or acting as a mouthpiece for observations on society she is intellectual and warm, attempting to be strong and self-sufficient. She could have been a great heroine, if she had been allowed to be.
Unfortunately this book wasn’t for me, but maybe you enjoyed it and you’d like to tell me why. Leave me a link to your review in the comments if you enjoyed, or didn’t enjoy this book and I’ll link to your review in the post. Otherwise all comments looked forward to very much.
