So, the Daily Mail chooses to have the book reviewed not by a book critic, but by a veteran media iconoclast who lists "character defenestration" as one of his hobbies on his Facebook profile. I wonder why. Then there's the Daily Beast and Guardian blogposts, both of whom are worthless as pieces of literary criticism but gets quoted over and over, by news sources whose sole coverage is to refer the trouncings handed out elsewhere. Plus reviews in NME and The Quietus, neither of whom are normally associated with interesting writing on literature. Leaving us essentially with one very scathing review in the Guardian, and a fairly positive one in The Times.
Fascinating to follow how the media response develops. I wonder if it's always this bad, and this stupid - a spin that gets developed in the first few hours, and then mostly just recirculated (as by Independent) or elaborated upon (as by the Daily Mail).
I'm still not sure what to make of this book. It's a mouthful. I do just a handful of pages a day, partly because I don't have a lot of time, but mainly because that's what feels right. For me it needs time to gel, and it does, substantially.
Some elements do not work well - notably his rants on familiar subjects, which too often seem badly integrated and superfluous. Perhaps because his strong views are already overly familiar, but he ought to have taken that into consideration before putting them so directly in a novel. Also, in part they are frankly less than interesting because they express strong and uncompromising opinions about things he plainly doesn't understand much about, which is not so much provocative as boring and irritating. Some of his ideas are just too simple to be appealing or interesting when stated directly, such as his soliloquy on Churchill.
Other elements lodges themselves powerfully though. The Wretch struck me as a forceful representation of Morrissey's own self-image, if one chooses to see him that way "Oh see how words as old as sin/fits me like a glove". The sparse and snappy dialogues puts me in mind of kitchen-sink drama - they are quite cinematic, tells the story and defines the characters in much the same way. They work on that level, provided you accept that there doesn't really seem to be any very differentiated characters, they all seem to represent the same collective entity. Perhaps they'll acquire more individuality as they die, each in their own way.
Personally I think the "overwrought hyperbolic prose" criticism is pretty much irrelevant. Firstly, as The Times points out, what would you expect? This is a person who put, in an upbeat two-minute pop song, the words" Spending warm summer days indoors/writing frightening verse/to a buck-toothed girl in Luxembourg", to say nothing of "But fresh-lilaced moorland fields/cannot hide the stolid stench of death". It's not an endearing style to many, but it is a potentially viable one. If done well, which of course is the issue, but it is hard to escape the feeling that more than a few of these critics have not really tried to tell. For my part, I don't think he always pulls it off, but I also think it provides many of the best moments in the book, and overall I do not think it is something that detracts from the value of the book, although a good editor might have turned it to a forte. But then I'm rather partial to flowery language.
The focus on the sex scenes is even more ridiculous. If Morrissey had written convincingly, realistically and economically about the sexual act, I would have been utterly amazed. It seems entirely appropriate, both to him and to the book, that he is unable to.
The main question I have is whether it all comes together as a whole or not. If it does, then flowery, ornate prose and other shortcomings will not fundamentally matter. If it doesn't, then it's a failure.
So far - powerful, messy, uncompromising, certainly imperfect and occasionally arguably inept.
