Editorial 131: November 2001
Is the repression of individual desires necessary for the individuation of the individual within society? One of the themes of Melvin Burgess’s daring new novel, Lady, My Life as a Bitch, is the interplay between the internal life of a troubled, semi-delinquent 17-year-old, Sandra Francy, and societal demands.
The novel starts as Sandra gets off with new boyfriend, Wayne, and the feeling makes her ‘shine’. The repetition of that thrilling moment is something she could do ‘over and over again until the end of my life’. Sandra is, then, a female Don Juan, endlessly and compulsively replaying the thrill of connection with one new sexual partner after another. Wayne is not the ‘first boy ever, or even the first boy that month’. The only problem is that Sandra is getting ‘tired’. She sees conventional society as joyless drudgery stretching ahead: ‘Nappies and shit and exams and tests and work and forever and ever and ever amen.’
A constant theme in Burgess’s oeuvre is the reckless lengths that people will go to in the avoidance of pain. In Junk, his Carnegie Medal winning novel about drug taking, the world is blotted out by needles. In Bloodtide, it is safer to kill before you are yourself consumed. In Lady, we discover that Sandra’s father left when she was nine and now has a new family. She tells us: ‘if my rage had the ability to turn people into animals, half of Manchester would be on four legs by now.’ For her then, sexuality is not a path to intimacy but a protection against real contact.
Transformed into a dog and thus freed from social constraints, Sandra (or Lady as she is now called), is reduced to basic biological instincts: ‘We dogs, we just do what we want to do… I don’t think. I just do.’ Turning into a dog means that Sandra will remain forever under the dominance of what Freud called ‘the pleasure principle’*.
Some commentators have found the depiction of sex in this novel shocking. In a society where so much is sexualised, this can seem a kneejerk reaction to a novel which appears to be a tongue in cheek metaphor for existential choice – and Lady does not conclude that the sole pursuit of biological drives leads to human growth and happiness. This is an edgy, original and challenging novel of ideas that is also unexpectedly poignant – not least when Sandra/Lady finally chooses to continue ‘life as a bitch’. When pain and confusion cannot find a bearable and constructive path, it is an unsurprising outcome.
Plus ça change…
Commenting on the advance of corporate publishing in the 1980s and 1990s, an entry in the recently published The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English, tells us that ‘batches of children’s books tended to be handed over for review not to a specialist, but to any willing parents on the staff.’
Fast forward to the Bookseller of 28 September ’01, and you will find Sainsbury’s Baby Book Award judge Caroline Sanderson in an article on the quality of the titles submitted blithely telling us that she is ‘no child development expert, nor have I spent much time working in children’s publishing. My qualification for judging the Baby Book Award stems almost entirely from the fact that I have two small children of my own, the younger a baby of three months. But this carries with it a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t.’
Perhaps Ms Sanderson is being disingenuous. But is being a parent a qualification in itself for judging a children’s book prize? Being a Spice Girl is good if you want to judge the Blue Peter Children’s Book Awards but that’s a show business award, as it were. It had appeared that the Sainsbury’s Baby Book Award was aiming to pitch itself at a more serious level of debate.
* ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’ by Sigmund Freud, Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 11.
Lady, My Life as a Bitch by Melvin Burgess is published by Andersen Press (0 86264 770 3, £10.99).
The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English, edited by Victor Watson, is published by Cambridge University Press (0 521 55064 5, £35.00).
