List of the Lost – Morrissey
List of the Lost – Morrissey
Forget the numerous political
controversies and odd underperforming album – the release of
Morrissey’s novel List of the Lost has given the man the most gleefully vitriolic
critical kickings of his career. No opportunity to maul has been lost,
from the ‘more in sorrow than anger’ self-professed fans, to the more
numerous haters glad of the chance to stick in the boot. With this
bizarre, overblown, epically self-indulgent work the man Moz has
certainly left himself wide open for criticism. And yet. Consider this
review an ‘and yet.’
‘List of the Lost’ explores the doomed and disturbing train of events endured by the four young men of a relay team in the Boston of the 1970s, Ezra, Harri, Justi and Nails. The four divide their time between luxuriating in their own doomed magnificence, fielding and expediting amorous advances from female admirers, and training for the big upcoming race. But then Ezra accidentally kills a vagrant, and things turn very rapidly for the worse.
But the plot is not really the issue
here, it is just an excuse for Morrissey to wax lyrical on all the
obsessions close to his dark heart. Morrissey
the prose-writer is a very different animal to the sly, ambiguous,
understated lyric-writer. One could reasonably have imaged Morrissey
the novelist to follow the example of his hero Alan Bennett; subtle
and wry chronicler of social disillusion and embarrassment. Not so.
The writing is passionate, florid, ornate, stylised to the nth
degree, the story riffing on elements of lurid gothic melodrama.
Adjectives forge forth, exhaustingly vying to cram portent, meaning
and expression into every sentence. That applied also to his
Autobiography, which many
hated, and many adored. I was assuredly in the latter camp. Certainly
if you couldn’t stand the
Autobiography you’ll loathe this. And yet for many who had plenty
of time for the biography the prose this time round is just too vivid
a shade of purple.
That’s what’s got the critical
brickbats sailing this time round. One can certainly find a few
phrases cruising near Pseuds Corner, and plenty have, the most
frequent being the Bad Sex Award nominated scenes, with the infamous
mention of Ezra’s ‘bulbous salutation’. And yet this writing,
overheated, bubbling over, often has an enticing vigour to it too, its
intense frenziedly doomy languor oddly compelling.
It is scattershot certainly,
but hits home with a fair old frequency. I for one enjoyed moments
such as the shocking expressionist picture of the sinister tramp:-
“The human sickbed steps closer, a stench of stale medication vaporizing
from his gaseous and perished clothing…..a pitiful vision of life’s
loneliness, his timid steps suggest a man pushed past his limit and
now ready to feud with his own grave” – not to mention the
breathtakingly doom-laden and misanthropic rant the same tramp breaks
into. And if something somewhat
over-opaque turns up one minute, well, there’s often something
entrancing in its wake the next. And amidst all the
grand guignol there are some
rather moving moments too – there is an affecting poignancy in the
descriptions of one of the characters experiencing the sudden shocking
death of his mother, and the middle-aged loneliness of the team’s
training coach Rims, to whom the sound of teenage giggling only brings
to mind his own death. A continual theme is the omnipresence of death
and the effect this has on stifling the only life we have, and in this
at least, is reflective of the deportment in his songs.
Many critics, amongst their ‘is this
the worst novel ever written?’ invective, themselves more histrionic
than their target, tend to remark on the prose’s ‘humourlessness’.
This seems as basic an error as those who make the same charge at his
lyrics. You may not care for the continual archness, such as
description of college authorities as
‘catatonic magpies, theorists theorizing without ever getting their feet
wet’ or Rims’s constant put-downs
‘I saw that last track attempt
and I’d wonder exactly what you’d call it.
Performance art….Community Theatre?”
There are none of the laugh-out
loud moments I took from the
Autobiography (the bits about Sandie Shaw, and being asked to
clean canal banks for instance). But it is not humourless.
Another charge levelled at the book is
that it plays with a ‘–sub-Joycean stream of consciousness.’ Well,
again this is hit and miss, but I found many of the much reviled
alliterative asides have some charm,
“the
priest gibbered and jabbered his dutiful dribble”,
the “yakkety-yack
backchats and gabs” the “pumpkin of my pumping heart”.
In fact while the model of
writing is indeed the early 20th century modernists it
seems closer to an attempted amalgam of the endlessly digressive
inward thought processes of Virginia Woolf, and the muscular
adjectival hyperbole of Wyndham Lewis. I believe a fair few of those
sneering at this book would probably level similar insults at these
rather ‘difficult’ forbears as they do at this descendant.
Do I mean Morrissey is as accomplished
here as Joyce, Woolf or Wyndham Lewis? Certainly not, the quality is
far too wayward for that. And
yet that is still not the main reason
List of the Lost is not,
ultimately a success as a novel. That is for the same reason it is
often so fitfully intrigues. The book is an endless, obsessive,
utterly uncompromising meditation on the obsessions close to
Morrissey’s heart; a somewhat amorphously radical opposition to
authority (hero number two James Baldwin surfaces as a totem at one
point), the rather more specific ire against the meat industry, the
deceptions and disappointments of the sexual world, and such bizarre
meanderings as ruminating on the sinister political undercurrents in
Bonanza.
So was the Autobiography.
But this is a novel. Oscar Wilde (hero number three) may have managed
it, but few novelists succeed in engaging a reader when they make
every single character so blatantly a cipher of the author’s
worldview. The characters aphorise away (again, not without
entertaining, particularly with the outlandishly grandiose sardonic
exchanges between Ezra and his girlfriend) but they act as automatons
to the grand narrator, ultimately undermining the sympathy we have
with the outcome. A supernatural element somewhere near the middle
only serves to shake an already shaky plot apart still further.
Despite the novel’s short
length, I was beginning to lose interest before the end.
And yet, here we are again, and yet.
There is more weird fascination and utterly individual insight on each
page than you would often find in many whole books.
As ‘worst novels ever’ go,
that’s not a bad strike rate.
Any cop?
To say this is nowhere near as bad as it’s been painted is to damn
with too faint praise. Perhaps better to say that this is a book with
a completely singular and individual voice, even when that voice
rambles and misfires. While
ultimately a failure as a novel, it is something of a heroic failure,
and a frequently entertaining and weirdly fascinating insight into a
unique creative mind, working here at a weird tangent.
[First published on Bookmunch, 2016]
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