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<%-- Page Title--%> Book Review <%-- End Page Title--%>

<%-- Volume Number --%> Vol 1 Num 126 <%-- End Volume Number --%>

October 10, 2003

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On the Light Side of Dark

 

ALI SMITH enjoys Bad Attitudes, a pairing of two gothic novellas by Agnes Owens that share the themes of cause and effect


Bad Attitudes
By Agnes Owens
180pp, Bloomsbury, £11.99

FRom her first novel, Gentlemen of the West (1984), to her most recent, For the Love of Willie (1998), Agnes Owens's hallmarks have been a frank irony, a deadpan gothic quality and a down-to-earth insistence on the surreality of most people's normality.

Her latest book is a pairing of two novellas; in the first and longer of the two, Bad Attitudes, the most sympathetic and understanding character, a social worker who knows that all his clients are "normal - it's their lives that aren't", is soon killed off with an iron bar in an empty building, the shell of a former family home.

Bad Attitudes begins atmospherically with the return visit of Peter Dawson, "a skinnily built boy of 15", to his old home, now condemned. "Peter stood staring up at the window half expecting to see curtains and a geranium plant, but there was only a jagged black hole where the glass had been." His dog paws the floorboards as if something unpleasant is under them. Peter's family has recently moved; only one seedy old tenant is still in residence and a family of tinks has moved into the building opposite. The nosy old lady who lives under the Dawsons' new flat tells the council she wants them out. The Dawson family is always at each other's throats. The mother, Rita, is bullied into paying a local councillor sexual favours to buy herself any escape. The dog soon bites the dust. There's disappearance, and murder.

Beyond its almost jovial grand-guignol, Bad Attitudes is a simple parable of harsh hospitalities and home-truths. Its polarised characters are stacked (and stack themselves) against each other in a network of small lies and selfishness. The mother tells the son that "if he went through his da's pockets to get the pay envelope she wouldn't say anything about him not being at school". Another son hears that his mother has left: "Depression seeped all over Jim. If this was true it meant he would have to make his own food and do his own washing." Bad Attitudes does exactly what it says on the tin; it exposes attitudes, which lead directly to the bad.

Where Bad Attitudes is heavy on the fevered darkness, the second novella, Jen's Party, is a beauty of a vignette: genuinely funny, light where Bad Attitudes was dark (though the dark is never very far away). Jen is 13 and thinks she's "thin, plain and has no personality". She lives with Maude, her thin, plain mother. Belle, her aunt, has come to lodge with them, all embarrassing affectionate gestures and "bold painted face". Though Maude sees her now as a "ruin with her fat legs spread-eagled and showing off heavily veined thighs", Belle is more than just a seasoned and skilful shoplifter who brings home tins from the supermarket and stolen bottles of cheap perfume; she's a glorious celebration herself, a streak of life, a treacherous too-gaudy light in a world where parties are unthinkable, and she decides on the spur of the moment that Jen, who has no friends, will have a party to celebrate being 14.

Jen is horrified at the thought and so is her mother, for whom "the fact that her daughter was always mulling around the house with a discontented expression" is quite normal. In its spikily happy ending, Owens stuns her readers, as usual, with her good, blunt-weaponed clarity. Jen's Party is the Hyde to Bad Attitudes's Jekyll in this pair of stories twinned by their shared themes of cause and effect, inherited bad behaviour, and the ways we use lies and fictions to keep others in the dark or to throw light on their darkness.

Ali Smith's most recent book is The Whole Story and Other Stories (Hamish Hamilton).

This review was first published in the Guardian.

         

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