This egotistical man should stick to writing songs
From its toe-curling sex scenes to bumpersticker sentences, Morrissey’s debut novel is a lazily imagined, nonsensical mess
Morrissey: List of the Lost Penguin, 118pp, £7.99, eBook £4.31
★ ★★★★
Steven Patrick Morrissey, known mostly by his surname and as the former lead singer of The Smiths, is a good writer. Although he has grabbed the headlines for years with his self-aggrandising rants about everything from vegetarianism to Margaret Thatcher, last-minute gig cancellations and ambiguous statements about his sexuality, the 56-year-old musician is still rightly hailed as a gifted lyricist, the man who crafted some of the most enduring indie songs of the Eighties and beyond: How Soon Is Now, This Charming Man, There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.
After releasing his autobiography in 2014 to a warm critical reception, yesterday Morrissey published his first novel, List of the Lost. His Autobiography was such an outrageously unapologetic exercise in egotism that it turned out to be something of a joy. The prose was turgid but unmistakably Morrissey-ish in its grand style, while his humour tempered the narcissism. As a result, hopes for his debut novel were high. But they have been dashed. List of the Lost is terrible and, at only 118 pages, still feels overlong. Readers are already sharing their horror online. The response to the excruciating sex scenes was initially so universal that “Morrissey” began trending on Twitter. Has there ever been a less sexy moment in literature than Morrissey describing “the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation” as it “smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone”? The judges for this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award must surely have their winner.
But what struck me is how little these atrocious sex scenes stand out. The rest of the novel is just as overwrought, just as nonsensical, just as poorly conceived, awkwardly expressed and lazily imagined.
The plot relates the story of Ezra, Harri, Nails and Justy, four track stars on the relay team at a college in Boston in Seventies America, a setting not unlike Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. One night, while the group are in the woods, Ezra accidentally kills an old man who comes at them, ranting, from out of the bushes. After this, there is a curse placed on the boys.
Morrissey is incapable of describing his four main characters in simple terms. He refers to them variously as “our Priorswood tetrad”, “our hounds”, “our speed merchants”, “our heroes” and similar. Yet these four “speed merchants” are indistinguishable from one another, so it’s impossible to care about the terrible events that befall them. What’s more, none speaks like a young American athlete. They all speak like Morrissey, and blurt out sentences such as: “My body is decorative art! I delight in my own magnificence!”
Some sentences are incomprehensible: “In servitude is the watcher, asking of the do-er that he assumes all aspects of the watcher’s desire”; others read like a school swot’s Valentine’s Day card (“Electrons from me need electrons from you in order to become electrons”), or trite car bumper stickers (“Whoever put the pain in painting had also put the fun in funeral”).
It is similarly unclear why Morrissey chose to write about relay running in the Seventies. He was a keen runner once but there is little insight into the sport. What we do get are tirades about Morrissey’s favourite bugbears: slaughterhouses; Margaret Thatcher; Winston Churchill; women (“the lust of the woman is at first childlike and desperate”); and a fascination with close-up descriptions of male relationships and any physical intimacy they share. From the first page to last, List of the
Lost is monstrously overwritten. People don’t just “say” things, they “affirm” them, “shoot” them, or “rocket back”. Its sentences overflow with such flowery alliteration that it is impossible for the book to build a mood or a sense of place, while the metaphors are mixed beyond all comprehension.
Morrissey recently announced that the final performances of his current solo tour will be his last in the UK. This fuelled speculation that he is about to retire as a singer-songwriter for good, to focus on the written word. Let’s hope he reconsiders.