Guest feature by Paul Dowswell: THE MANY-SPLENDOURED OBSCENITY OF VIZ

 

Paul Dowswell's journey from foolish youth to mithered old codger is near to its end. In between these two points he has written some books and hopes to write some more. His website can be found here.

The Inuit, famously, have over 40 words for snow. That’s nothing. Readers of Viz’s Profanisaurus, their “ever-expanding dictionary of contemporary profanity, euphemism and obscenity”, will know that the British have hundreds of words for the perineum. And there are probably just as many for assorted other nether regions and what you might be doing with them. And there are certainly scores more terms than the Bristol Stool Chart’s eight, for what might come out of your bottom.

Those who have never read it will probably regard Viz as an Olympic-standard wallow in schoolboy puerility. Well, I can’t argue with that. But it can also be very funny, and just as witty as anything the last 40 years has conjured up to amuse us. The Guardian ran a piece about Viz in 2021 and over 500 readers wrote in to share their favourite thing in it.

In its early ’90s peak it was selling almost as much as the Radio Times and TV Times. When I first started reading it in 1987, it seemed fantastically fresh. It spawned a host of short-lived imitators too, with titles such as Zit, Spit and Poot. They were equally obscene but they all lacked the spark of genuine invention and joie de vivre that Viz possessed in abundance. That’s not to say that Viz wasn’t also prone to alarming lapses of taste and judgement. But this piece is about the best things in Viz so I’m going to leave that can of worms unopened.

I could attempt to intellectualise its appeal and employ words like scatological, Rabelaisian, earthy, ribald – but in essence it was four young men who should have known better, trying to make each other laugh in a Newcastle pub with the most outrageously obscene ideas for comic strips they could think of.

Chris and Simon Donald, Simon Thorp and Graham Dury, and a rotating cast of contributors, certainly had a lot of them. And most of them were very funny. The initial idea – take the template of the Beano and the Dandy but have the characters you create doing bizarre and inappropriate things – was an instant success. The titles of the strips alone will give you the idea: ‘Buster Gonad and his unfeasibly large testicles’, ‘Sid the Sexist’, ‘The Fat Slags’, ‘Bertie Blunt, his parrot’s a c***’, ‘The Bottom Inspectors’, ‘Terry F***wit – the unintelligent cartoon character’.

More often than not, these strips were as one dimensional as their names would suggest. But occasionally, Viz would come up with something deeper and more disturbing. Victorian Dad, for example, featured a nightmarish modern-day parent with the mindset of a puritanical Victorian. He becomes sexually aroused by the sight of table legs and beats his son every day to remind him that life isn’t fair. Another character goes by the unlikely name of Fru T. Bunn. A baker by trade, Frubert Bunn, whose daughter is, of course, called Chelsea, is an extraordinarily vivid portrait of middle-aged male sexual frustration. He channels his sex drive into the creation of gingerbread sex dolls and most episodes end with him grievously injured in Beano-style bandages and Plaster of Paris.

In its heyday the writers often seemed to be vying with each other over who could scrape through the barrel and go right down to the Earth’s core. Dr Poo (Tom Baker era Dr Who searches in vain through time and space for a quiet, unoccupied lavatory where he can ‘go’.) Dr Poolittle (a Doolittle-like character suffers from constipation), Billy Bottom and his zany toilet pranks – go on, have a guess…

The similarity in style to the Beano and the Dandy even presented the characters talking directly to their audience. ‘Hello readers. Today I’m going to…’ Funniest of all, and nearest to the Beano in its lack of swearing and material of a sexual nature, was Johnny Fartpants (Tagline “There’s always a commotion going on in his trousers.”) Schoolboy Johnny even has a German pen pal called Hans Honkyhosen, who visits from time to time. On one occasion (best suspend your disbelief here...), as an April Fool prank, Johnny furtively ‘buries’ a fart in a cake mix his mother is preparing for a visit from the vicar. The fart then springs out when the vicar cuts the cake. (Of course it does…). Even if you are appalled by the subject matter I invite you to admire the sheer ‘leaping off the page’ gusto of the artwork. The episode takes a nightmarish turn when Johnny’s exasperated parents feed him quick drying cement disguised as porridge to clog up his alimentary canal and put an end to his ‘bottom pranks’.

 Viz’s fondness for mixing high art and science with low humour was also a frequent feature. One quiz tie-breaker invited readers to name their favourite noble gas. The comic strip The Bach that dogged in the night featured JS Bach taking a break from his cantatas to go dogging in a nearby forest, much to Mrs Bach’s displeasure. Max’s Plank featured the German atomic physicist Max Planck as a schoolboy, getting up to mischief with a magic plank.

More than anything, Viz loved a pun – evidenced here in a one-off 2003 strip by relatively new boys Barry Farmer and Lee Healey, and their terrifying creation Vidal Baboon:

 One thing I quickly grew to love about Viz was their complete disregard for the bottom line (so to speak). They took enormous risks in offending both a potential readership and the advertisers that flocked to present their wares in their unexpectedly vast circulation publication. The Clown Chat Line spoof below is a perfect example of Viz having its cake and eating it too. At the time (early 1990s) the back pages of their comic, along with the UK’s downmarket tabloids, were festooned with real-life telephone sex lines, the advertising of which no doubt brought their publisher a substantial income.

 True, most of the Viz output was and remains cheerfully obscene, but they could also be admirably prescient. One long running character Timmy Timpson (appearing in Spoilt Bastard) is a hideous eight-year-old in a sailor suit whose adoring mother Cissy submits to his every whim. He has milkshake and Skittles for breakfast and habitually calls his poor mother a ‘fat old toilet’. The strip had the unsettling effect of making the reader wonder if they had ever behaved quite so appallingly, or indeed allowed their own child to do so. But one particular episode, shown below, from a 1997 edition of Viz, uncannily predicts the political landscape of 2026:

 And Viz could produce contemporary satire just as sharp as Private Eye. Here’s a strip featuring the vainglorious Luvvie Darling – a rather Daily Mail inspired caricature of those actor types – approaching a vanity publisher with his memoirs. I grew to detest vanity publishers while teaching creative writing classes and hearing stories about them from students, so there is much to relish in this depiction:

 And finally, I have to include one of Viz’s magnificent advertising spoofs, this one for a ‘Sexual Temperance Spoon’, designed to discourage unwanted amorous advances. Whoever came up with the slogan ‘The only spoon that stops stirring’ has earned my undying admiration. 

All illustrations reproduced by kind permission of Fulchester Industries/ Diamond Publishing.

Guest review by Simon Edge: SQUEEZE ME by Carl Hiaasen

 

"In normal circumstances the whole thing would be cartoonishly implausible, but the tragedy of our times is that it’s never been more believable."

Simon Edge is the author of four novels. His fifth, The End of the World is Flat, is out from Lightning Books in August

Were it not for the farcical Florida recount in the 2000 Presidential election, I might never have begun my love affair with the novels of Carl Hiaasen.

Back then, an election that hung on whether voters had successfully punched out all the cardboard from a perforated ballot, or left some of it still dangling, was the most absurd that US politics had ever got. I remember Hiaasen, interviewed on Radio 4, explaining that this might seem weird to the rest of the world, but it was normal for the nuthouse that was the Sunshine State.

He was the Miami Herald journalist who reinvented himself writing angry comedy thrillers about Florida, channelling his fury at the destruction of the Everglades into satirical tales of venality and corruption. As a rule, the crooks’ greed is only surpassed by their rampaging imbecility, and a Hiaasen hero – usually some kind of crime-busting Crocodile Dundee – is on hand to ensure the villains get a horrific comeuppance, often with the help of some of the fiercer creatures from Florida’s vanishing wilderness.

After I heard him on the radio I started binge-reading Hiaasen, and he’s an influence on some of my own dafter plots. But it’s been a while, so it was a joy to complete a personal full circle in the wake of another presidential election with a strong Florida angle.

Squeeze Me opens at a fundraising ball on the billionaire island enclave of Palm Beach, where a rich Republican widow – and fawning devotee of her near neighbour, the 45th President – goes missing. When her body turns up buried in concrete, a blameless Honduran immigrant called Diego Beltrán is arrested. The President – referred to throughout the novel by his secret-service codename the Mastodon – whips up his supporters by turning ‘No More Diegos’ into a racist campaign slogan.

The Crocodile Dundee here is a tough-but-hot ex-con wildlife handler called Angie Armstrong. Teaming up with an honest local cop and an agent on the Mastodon’s detail, she establishes that no human killed the widow. Unfortunately that won’t help Diego, whom the President and his chanting supporters require to be guilty. Angie is determined to get him released.

There’s also the ongoing problem of an infestation of man-eating Burmese pythons – the titular squeezers – in the Palm Beach area. The one-eyed eco-warrior ‘Skink’, an old Hiaasen favourite, may or may not have a hand in it.

All the maestro’s usual ingredients are here: merciless satire on ignorant, filthy-rich incomers to Florida; a parade of inept crooks and hoodlums offing each other through bovine incompetence; heroic champions of decency and justice with more sympathy for the animal and reptile population than the ever-swelling human one; and a gloriously chaotic climax in which greed, vanity and preening arrogance get their just deserts.

The added zing here comes with the Trump connection. The President and First Lady are not just an off-stage presence but central characters: he with monstrously rolling gut, a daily regime of laxatives and a dependence on erectile treatments; she with granite indifference to everything but her hunky secret-service lover.

A good deal of the plot takes place in Casa Bellicosa, a thinly disguised Mar-a-Lago, which is the scene of an unforgettable set-piece showdown featuring super-sized pythons tripping on acid and a malfunctioning tanning bed. It’s Hiaasen at his absurd, grotesque best.

In normal circumstances the whole thing would be cartoonishly implausible, but the tragedy of our times is that it’s never been more believable. If we’ve learned nothing else from the past few years, we can at least all agree that the best satire is documentary.

On that score, Hiaasen and Trump are a match made in heaven.


Squeeze Me is published by Sphere

Guest review by C J Driver: ITALIAN LIFE by Tim Parks

 

"I wondered, as I read on, often amused by the wit and sometimes horrified by the satire, just how Italian readers would react. Accurate depiction? Wild exaggeration?"

Jonty Driver has kept himself busy in lockdown working with a local firm, Artwrite of Rye, to produce four booklets of his poems, some illustrated by himself, and a card, The Slave-Bell at Doornhoek, a poem and a painting. The booklets are: Image & Image, some old photographs & a dozen unrhymed sonnets; The Journey Back; The Chinese Poems, 1979-2020; and A Winter’s Day at Westonbirt & other poems. All are available from Artwrite. See more on Jonty's website.

Because I had enjoyed Tim Parks’s Italian Neighbours (1992) and An Italian Education (1996), when I saw Italian Life advertised I wanted to read that too. I am under a marital embargo to buy no more books unless I get rid of a similar number to the Amnesty bookshop, so I had to read it on my wife’s Kindle. I found the book so entertaining, sometimes savagely satirical, often wise, I read it in only a couple of days; but of course now I can’t rely on my usual habit of paging back to find names and stunning quotations. I’ve never been able to rely too much on memory and have needed slips of paper posted at the relevant pages. There is I know some way of highlighting passages when one reads a Kindle, but every time I have tried that I’ve lost my place.

Italian Life is, I think, best described as a novel, and one might narrow that definition down to a “campus novel”, though I suspect it could well come into that increasingly common category, a memoir purporting to be a novel. Tim Parks obviously knows about Italian universities, as he taught at one in Milan from 1993-2019. One of the two central characters is called James, a middle-aged English expatriate teaching in a northern Italian university; the other is Valeria, a post-graduate working on a doctoral thesis. Around them are family and friends, and above them some monsters, especially the Vice Chancellor of the university, Rector Ottone, and his sycophantic side-kick, Professoressa Modesto.

The book is about much more than campus politics: the discussions of Italian clannishness, which might be called just as easily tribalism, the contrast of north and south, the cross-referencing to classics of Italian literature, the details of Italian food and drink, the details of family loyalties and obligations, all more than justify the title: this is genuinely Italian LIFE, not just Italian higher education. I wondered, as I read on, often amused by the wit and sometimes horrified by the satire, just how Italian readers would react. Accurate depiction? Wild exaggeration?

What I hadn’t realised, until I did a bit more research on Tim Parks’ literary career, was just how much he had written other than the three books mentioned here. My next step is going to be to read more by him. I don’t think I’ll bother with the books about football; I’ve always preferred the eccentric bounce of the rugby ball to the predictable flight of the soccer ball - but the book about Italian railways looks interesting, and then there are novels galore. The question is: can I somehow get around the wife’s embargo without giving away too many of the books I want to keep?

Italian Life is published by Harvill Secker.

See also Jonty Driver's post on A Book of Friends: in honour of J M Coetaee on his 80th birthday

Guest review by Graeme Fife: WHAT A CARVE UP! by Jonathan Coe

"This exceptional novel is funny, shocking, merciless. But there is great tenderness in it, too ... "

Graeme Fife has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is now a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography and works of history. Great Cycling Climbs, which brings together his books on the French Alps, is published by Thames and Hudson. He says, 'I urge everyone to buy from their independent bookshop, if they're lucky enough - as I am - to have one nearby. If not, by any means possible to counter the sprawl of the online consumer graball.'

Some reflections on satire.

The acidulous Roman poet Juvenal, a satirist of ferocious bile, no great smiler, described the subject matter of his work as a farrago of all human activity – wishes, fears, anger, pleasures, joys – and the Latin word satura, meaning a hodge podge stew, seems to have some radical links with satire itself. Jonathan Swift spoke of the driving force of his own satire as saeva indignatio, savage, as in wild beast, indignation as in rage at the unworthy. Imagine the satirist’s tools as medical instruments: the scalpel of intelligence, the lancet of insight, the defibrillating pads of indignation and the saline drip of laughter, denounced by the tyrant King John – ‘that idiot, laughter…a passion hateful to my purposes’. O, how the swaggering, dimwit bully hates to be scoffed at. (White House: copy.)

To this design of scrutiny, the investigation of human corruption, enter Jonathan Coe, a writer of formidable skill, brio and intelligence. This exceptional novel is funny, shocking, merciless. But there is great tenderness in it, too, a tenderness expressed in the lives of certain of the characters who are unwittingly caught up in the main action of the story which centres on the activities, sinister and deeply immoral, of the members of two generations of the Winshaw family. Landed not-quite toffs, rich, unprincipled, influential and without a single Brownie point for decency among them.

You know, by now, that it is never my policy to outline the plot or substance of the narrative of a book. No spoilers. Simply, this is a glorious treat. The Winshaws form a gallery of grotesques, in the best tradition of all blistering satire from Aristophanes on. Coe holds nothing back in his dissection of grubby motive, calculating greed, shallow flamboyance, cynical exploitation, misuse and abuse of those whom they might call necessary victims of their manipulation, and if this begins to sound rather too bitter, be assured, the aloe of Coe’s fury is most adroitly sweetened with a generous frosting of riotous humour. It’s almost beyond me to restrain myself from quoting a particular example of that humour which packed such a jolt, a full volley of outrageous self-absorption, in one of the Winshaw nasties. No, you must find it yourself and enjoy the delicious moment, the shattered glass, as it were.

It’s not often that a novelist cites such an extended list of books – of reference and description – in the acknowledgements, but it’s very clear from the text itself, that Coe has carried out meticulous research into various areas which demand a high level of precision in the matter of the narrative and in the cruel detail of what is being perpetrated by the villains on whom the focus rests. The sale of arms, the corruption of the food chain, the lies, falsehoods and blatant contradictions of popular journalism, the contamination of morals, an undercurrent of mystery about the death of one of the Winshaw sons, all overlaid with the bilious sheen of hypocrisy, the ruthless profiteering…

The title comes from a film whose storyline frames the plot of the novel. It’s a trope of a connection but one with which Coe plays a mischievous game of hide and seek. Secret doors, labyrinthine subterranean passages, mirroring the devious miscreance of the family, in a Gothic pile stuck on a windswept moorland in Yorkshire, a decrepit butler who’s served the family for years, his crumbling physique pointing up their moral decadence, and an ageing maiden aunt, who may not be as daft as the family claim her to be, banged up in an institution by a malevolent brother.

Into the picture come innocents drawn in for various reasons, hapless, but not stupid, participants in the drama that clutches at them with grasping and fraudulent purpose, reckless criminality cocooned in the PPE of privilege and money, but insulated by their innocence. If the villainy doesn’t quite brush off them, it doesn’t cling and their very contrasting humdrum existence stands as a relieving foil to the dark antics of their would-be tormentors. It’s part of Coe’s deft brilliance that he avoids all sentimentality, that his characterisation is considered, rounded, truthful. Grotesques, I say, yes, but all entirely credible, if written large, as satire must always be to deliver the full force of dismay. Can people be so depraved? Is it really true that fortunes are made out of the misery of many by a grasping few? Do tyrants actually think along the lines of never missing the opportunity presented by a disaster? Is lapis lazulis blue?

Coe’s novel is a cracking story, a novel of great humanity, a perfect exemplar of the true satirist’s propulsion: saeva indignatio.

What a Carve Up! is published by Penguin.

More reviews by Graeme Fife:

A Telling of Stones by Neil Rackham
West of Sunset by Stuart O'Nan
Adolfo Kaminsky: a Forger's Life by Sarah Kaminsky
Uncle Silas by Sheridan Le Fanu
Beside the Ocean of Time by George Mackay Brown
Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Guest post by Rhiannon Lassiter: THE REFRIGERATOR MONOLOGUES by Catherynne M. Valente

"As a high concept novel with an idea that sold me instantly, it completely delivers."

Rhiannon Lassiter is an author of science fiction, fantasy, contemporary, magical realism and psychodrama novels for juniors, middle grade and young adults. Her first novel, Hex, was accepted for publication when she was nineteen years old.

Rhiannon’s favourite authors include Ursula LeGuin, Margaret Mahy and Octavia Butler. Her own novels explore themes of identity, change and transition. Her ambition is to be the first writer-in-residence on the Moon.

I like high concept fiction. A lot of my time is spent searching for the Big Idea that has enough in it to sustain me for an entire novel. That’s true of me as a writer and as a reader. So I was immediately drawn to Catherynne M. Valente’s The Refrigerator Monologues, a title that clearly references a concept crossover that is so brilliant it’s incredible it hasn’t been done before.

The Vagina Monologues was an episodic play written by Eve Ensler in 1996, twenty year ago. It was groundbreaking work focusing on women, sexuality and violence. 'Fridging' is a concept with an even longer history but the term was popularised in 1999 by Gail Simone though her website Women In Refrigerators, which compiled a list of female characters in comic books who were killed off as a plot device. 

Valente herself is an award-winning author, a recipient of the Tiptree award for The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden and the Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book for The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. She’s been on my list of authors to explore for some time but this was the first book of hers I’ve read.

It took me some time to get hold of a copy because it was published in the US first and there is no electronic edition, perhaps because the paperback format makes significant use of illustrations by comic book artist Annie Wu.

As a high concept novel with an idea that sold me instantly, it completely delivers. It launches the reader into an invented superhero universe, one with its own original superheroes, super villains and everyone in between. Page Embry, the narrator of the first section is dead “the deadest girl in Deadtown” who lives – or rather doesn’t – in a pocket dimension, a suburban hell, with all the conveniences of modern unlife. She is the President of the Hell Hath Club, a coffee-klatsch of women scorned. During the course of the book, these six women tell their stories, with intermissions for Page to introduce them and enjoy some soul music at the Lethe Café.

The writing is snappy and savage. These women had lives, hopes and dreams, before their stories came abruptly to an end when a villain put a full stop to them. The men they loved were superheroes, and these women’s deaths have served to motivate their next big plot action or their need for revenge. But the women themselves have been forgotten, or were never considered that important, bit part players in a bigger story.

It must have been a huge piece of work to - as Valente mentions in the acknowledgements - “(create) an entire superhero universe to make a point” and yet it’s done with considerable wit and elegance. The reader’s knowledge of this invented universe is largely assumed by the narrators, and it is at once original and recognisable. Characters like Grimdark, a Batmanesque figure, Proessor Yes who is Headmistress of St Ovidius’s School for Wayward Children, or The Arachnochancellor are completely believable creations. The world they inhabit is a superhero universe that hangs together or doesn’t with the right combination of techno babble and magical effects.

The individual chapters work well as monologues, neatly encapsulating the stories of these women: tragically comedic, well paced, mixing foreshadowing and self- reflection. I did wonder if the individual voices were sufficiently differentiated. If you pick up the book at a random page can you tell if it’s wayward child Julia Ash or conceptual artist Daisy Green speaking? And unfortunately, I mostly couldn’t. I think it’s a weakness in the book, although it may be that Valente was going for this precise effect: six women, speaking with one voice. But it’s not a very diverse cast; self-described as “mostly very beautiful and very well read and very angry” but also predominantly white and middle class. I think Valente could have gone further here to give us a richer palette of voices.

The chapter I think is most different is the one from the point of view of wise-cracking Pauline “Polly” Ketch, a villainous sidekick with more than one Bad Daddy. Her section stands out for her sparky villainy although she’s probably the most deluded of the characters, the one who believes her lover and murderer will return for her and bring her back to life. Spoiler, he doesn’t.

That brings me to my other criticism of the book, which again is feature of the authorial intention. There is no redemption arc for these women. They have been variously dead-ended or flatlined, destined to spend eternity in clothes picked out by relatives for them to wear in their coffins. Their monologues and their conversations all concern a world which they won’t be returning to. And although they have created a small semblance of a live for themselves with drinks and music and friendship, their stories have nowhere to go, their monologues end where they began, in Deadtown.

It has to be this way because that’s the big idea of the book. Women in superhero stories are typically foils to men, used and abused to further a male plot of action and violence. We are told from the beginning that Page can’t change. But it makes for a depressing read, despite the wit and sparkle. You want the women to rise up and start again, to see them re-enter the fascinating universe Valente has created. But they can’t and don’t and the book would be weaker if they could. It’s frustrating.

I’m glad to have read this book and I will look for more from Valente who I sense is an author coming into her own superpowers.  I recommend it highly. But I’m not sure how much it would stand the test of a re-read. It does what it says on the tin and it does it well and with flair. If I was left wanting a little bit more, perhaps that’s a sign that I need to read more of her work.