Music For Torching was AM Homes’s follow-up to the
daringly controversial The End of Alice,
a fact which may explain much. The End of
Alice was a portrait of a paedophile which presented the protagonist as a
more rounded and considered individual than is normally the case for such
characters, and an explosion of righteous outrage duly followed. Homes, then,
is clearly not an author afraid of offending, nor of taking risks with her
fiction. She is also an extremely gifted crafter of a novel and deliciously
funny. Now, controversial and funny are often ideal bedfellows – think Lenny
Bruce – but there are always pressures to be addressed and humour can easily
slip over into fatuity.
That
said, for nine-tenths, maybe nineteen-twentieths, maybe even ninety-nine
one-hundredths of this novel I thought it was brilliant. It dragged me along
relentlessly, and I was totally taken into the lives of these (bizarre)
characters. It is the ending that causes the difficulty. More of that later.
We’re in
typical Homes territory here: dysfunctional adults, behaving mostly like
adolescents but on the cusp of a crisis. This is played for laughs, like
something out of a grungier Joseph Connolly or Mavis Cheek, but Homes is also a
serious writer, and in her comedy of disintegration there is always a tart
rejoinder to modern society: Alice presented
us with a disquieting mirror, forcing us to confront some unpalatable truths,
while This Book Will Save Your Life
asks questions about the nature of community and friendship. Music For Torching is a farce which
focuses on the way we use people, take them for granted, look for our own
gratification first. At least that’s what I decided at the end.
We first
meet Paul and Elaine when Paul is wrestling Elaine’s pantyhose down while she
attempts to wash up, and she inflicts a neck wound on him with a knife. They
fuck, riotously. Not much later, they decide they’ve had enough, set fire to
their house and flee the banality of their existence, with their two children
in tow, heading for a nearby hotel. So, it seems, we’re in stale and jaded
suburbia, midway between Carver and Cheever in the social scale, but with an
outrageous quality to the plotting which is all Homes. A sexual roundabout
ensues. Elaine has a lesbian tryst with her neighbour and friend, the Stepford
Wife Pat, and later, unsuccessfully, brutally, with a policeman; Paul is
screwing his son’s best friend’s mom, and also the passive-aggressive mistress
of his best friend, a woman who, during a lunchtime rendezvous, encourages him
to have his groin tattooed. Not an easy thing to explain to your wife, one
would think, but given that Paul has previously shaved off all his body hair
and taken to wearing sheer nightgowns, it is perhaps not surprising he gets
away with it. Even the children get in on the act: the couple’s oldest son, a
morose and uncommunicative boy, has a stash of fat-women porn in his bedroom,
which Paul later uses himself in one of his rare moments of solitude.
All of
this sounds like slapstick, and yet it works because Homes’s prose is so clean
and crisp. She doesn’t play it purely for laughs and, all the while we are
immersed in Paul and Elaine’s world, it feels entirely credible that someone
should take an axe to the living room table or that the architects would aim a
wrecking ball at the house while the family are still in it, waving out at
them. The novel creates, then, a register of its own, and it seduces the reader
into its strange, hallucinogenic world. Or does it?
As I
said, the ending of the novel is a difficulty for me. Without wishing to give
much away, the register I referred to – of barely restrained, comedic hysteria
– slips entirely into something else. The shift is extraordinary. It is a slap
in the face. It is so unsubtle it must surely have been deliberate, because
Homes is a superb writer, but why? After reading the ending, I had the horrible
feeling that I had completely misread the preceding 350 pages and that this
novel has a much more malevolent soul than I had imagined. Where This Book Will Save Your Life ended in
the same hopeful joi de vivre that had
inhabited the rest of the novel, here the similar tone of much of Music For Torching is not replicated in
the ending. For me, it doesn’t work; it feels cold and manipulative, out of
sympathy with what had gone before. It tries to pack an emotional punch, but
nothing has set up the reader for that punch so, when it comes, it feels only
dull rather than exerting any power. The characterisation has, throughout, been
of a kind which does not engage the sympathy of the reader so much as his or
her support. There is a big difference. When the crisis comes at the end, the
reader is not prepared for it and not able to respond appropriately. Quite
simply, I hadn’t been led to care enough, and it all fell flat.
