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From Pointless Park to Karl Marx Square
Why are the middle-class such
a worried lot? Peter Gruner finds out from Alexei Sayle
The Weeping Women Hotel by Alexei Sayle
Sceptre, £12.99
THERE’S an evocative scene in Alexei Sayle’s new book
when one of the main characters, Harriet, goes to a gym called
Muscle Bitch where there are “demented women running on
treadmills with crazed expressions”.
Somehow in The Weeping Women Hotel everyone is running, desperate
to keep up with appearances, or with their more successful and
wealthy or wise neighbours and friends.
Sayle says that as well as being a comedy, his novel takes on
some serious issues. He delights in pricking middle-class pretensions,
like the elevation of gardeners to “tree surgeons”.
“These days everyone gets a standing ovation for something,”
he says.
His own background is distinctly left-wing – his parents
were dyed-in-the-wool communists. And in the book, in the best
traditions of the social commentator, he is as keen to take
humorous pot shots at all levels of society. There are sly political
digs. He mentions that “Marxists are taking over the magazine
Puppetry Today” – an oblique reference to the huge
perceived influence of the former magazine Marxism Today, which
appeared at a time of fears about communist infiltration in
the media.
The novel weaves an unpredictable and darkly humorous tale set
in north London, around the rigidly landscaped ‘Pointless
Park’, where over-priced gastropubs, gyms and focaccia-eaters
are colonising former working class areas. Local shops close
down to be reopened as a ‘f***ing Starbucks”.
Bloomsbury resident Sayle is strongly opposed to the loss of
small shops, but he urges action rather than moaning and mourning.
He tells me: “People are right to be concerned, but it
is up to them to support the small businesses. A Bagel Factory
opened in Lambs Conduit Street – and closed down through
lack of support.”
His novel deftly captures the female voice, particularly in
his portrayal of Harriet, mousy and overweight, who keeps a
tally of her friends’ phone calls and is petrified of offending
anybody.
Helen is her beautiful, over-achieving sister, and Toby is Helen’s
peculiar husband, a charity worker for the Penrith Fairground
Disaster Fund, whose main purpose is to “avoid giving any
money to anybody involved in any way in the great Penrith Fairground
Disaster”.
Sayle’s wicked humour takes a sideswipe at middle-class
preoccupations. Enjoyable dinner-party talk with Harriet’s
sister’s circle of friends centres around “furious
anger about speed cameras, parking fines and getting clamped”
(when they are feeling calm), or mini-breaks and holidays, when
something might be threatening their protective bubble. Decidedly
“fat and ugly”, and keen to turn her life around,
Harriet hires a personal trainer – Patrick – who leads
Harriet in deranged (and rather vicious) martial arts classes,
which involve hurling herself from trees and being kicked in
the shins.
Harriet isn’t completely convinced about Patrick’s
cult-like discipline. However, the exercise certainly seems
to have an effect, and Harriet is slowly transformed from “pot-bellied
and lumpy” into a confident stunning beauty.
Sayle mixes the mundane normalities of life with the unexpected,
and downright absurd. His eccentric characters are instantly
recognisable.
Even Harriet’s sensible sister has her own peculiarities,
in the form of her inner voice of confirming righteousness,
Julio Spuciek – Argentinean political prisoner and puppeteer,
whom she consults on every major decision in her life and is
a constant reassurance that she’s doing the right thing.
The novel both challenges and confirms stereotypes, holding
up a mirror to north London society, and showing the cracks.
In short, witty sentences or hilarious situations, Sayle manages
to address many topical issues, including class, immigration
and the changing face of Britain – new town and tarmacked
– which is personified by Pointless Park with its blank
walls and metal fencing.
This is all very far from the world of Harriet’s childhood
‘up north’ when parks were parks, bandstands and all.
Sayle asserts that: “Those into whose charge fell the open
spaces during the 1960s were having none of that malarkey –
they couldn’t quite explain to you how a bandstand could
be oppressive of racial minorities while simultaneously putting
down women, they just knew that it somehow did.”
Harriet’s physical and spiritual journey in the novel is
often strange and surreal. She befriends her Namibian gangster
neighbours, who used to dump rubbish on her porch, and of whom
she was once terrified.
The ringleader of this gang, a Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro,
turns out to be a rather insightful man, and Harriet enjoys
the company of him and his group, finding that they are not
bound by ‘parking tickets, planning regulations and refraining
from putting your rubbish out until after 8.30 at night’.
Through another male character, Sayle shows a certain sympathy
for women. “It occurs to me you all worry too much, all
you women… you know when I am in the newsagents I look
at the men’s magazines and there’s hundreds of them
about their many hobbies – trains, guns, cars, sailing,
Asian women with enormous breasts. But then I look at the women’s
magazines and I see every one of them is to do with self-improvement,
a constant striving to make yourselves one hundred per cent
perfect. Lose weight, get fitter, speak Chinese, knit this,
weave that.”
Sayle’s writing style is sharply witty and his characters
imaginative and offbeat, making this a rich, funny and endlessly
inventive novel.
Speaking about his desolate creation, Pointless Park, Sayle
says even this is not without its beauty.
In the novel, he brings the park alive with a multi-cultural
food fete organised by Columbian immigrants and the Communist
Party. Perhaps this feeling is born of his admitted affection
for some of north London’s more apparently unappealing
edifices, such as Wood Green Shopping City, of which he says:
“It does have a certain monumental style to it. You can
find a sort of beauty in the most unlikely places.”
Talking about life imitating art, Sayle expresses an interest
in the quirky proposal to celebrate Marx’s local connections
– he was buried in Highgate cemetery and lived in Kentish
Town – by renaming Archway Mall, Karl Marx Square.
The proposal for a themed walk to the cemetery and a museum
received such displeasure from the Tories in the House of Commons
that they put down an Early Day Motion suggesting it would be
an insult to the millions who died under communism.
Sayle says: “Marx was a remarkable philosopher – a
man of ideas – but obviously things didn’t go quite
according to plan. He did a lot of his most creative work in
London. But we should distinguish Marx from those who came after
him and claimed to represent his ideas.” |
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