Cassandra Darke by Posy Simmonds
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Scrooge of Chelsea MATTHEW STURGIS Cassandra Darke By Posy Simmonds Jonathan Cape £16.99 Oldie price £15.12 inc p&p
What a huge treat awaits the readers of this book. Indeed I find myself already envious of all of you who have that great pleasure yet before you.
Posy Simmonds’s new graphic-novel (her third, after Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe) makes one pause in awe to consider the sheer amount of wit, invention, insight, observation, skill, dedication and care that has been distilled into its 94 pages. And pause again to think how lightly it has all been done. The brilliance is always illuminating, never oppressive.
Cassandra Darke, the eponymous anti-heroine of the tale, is a stupendously selfish, greedy and ill-tempered old art dealer. We meet her first, on Piccadilly, wolfing down a box of Ladurée Macarons. This glorious monster, though she has brought disgrace down upon herself through her dishonesty, remains unabashed, unbowed and unrepentant – even if she entertains occasional thoughts of suicide. (She has convinced herself that hypothermia would be the best way out, and fondly imagines being found frozen to death in her Japanese Zen-themed back garden, another hump among the existing arrangement of rocks.)
Entrenched, following her fall from grace, in her well-appointed Chelsea terraced house, she continues to indulge herself and her spite – while working on her book about post-war British sculpture. If she has lost all her friends, she doesn’t miss them. She is not concerned to be nice. To a Yuletide beggar who asks, ‘Got any spare change?’, she replies firmly, ‘Yes, thanks.’
The story presents itself as a ‘mystery’, involving – among other elements – Cassandra’s stepdaughter, Nicki (a self-obsessed young performance artist), Nicki’s bit-of-rough boyfriend, some Bad Men, a dead girl, a fat pug, a gun and a pink glove. There are some gratifying moments of sex and violence and bad language. And the whole thing is exciting and quite as convincing as it needs to be.
But the plot, really, for all its pleasures, is secondary to the portrait of Cassandra, and to the cheerfully exact dissection of the upper-middle-class cultural world – seen through the parade of Cassandra’s life: the private views; the intimate dinner parties; the memorial services; the staff problems; the holidays in France.
The narrative is framed by the Christmases of 2016 and 2017, snow swirls across many of the pages, and perhaps the book should be taken as A Christmas Carol for our times. It is quite as satisfactory in its way as that classic. It has its moments of real pathos, and its moments of Dickensian sentimentality too. And Darke herself is certainly a worthy successor to Ebenezer Scrooge – in her awfulness, her travails and (spoiler alert!) her redemption.
All this is produced through a perfect blend of words and pictures. The pictures predominate – delicately washed line drawings, shifting from full colour to moody monochrome. The words provide both a commentary and a foil.
Simmonds has the rare ability to define character and suggest relationships through even the slightest visual detail: the condescending stoop, the lank fringe, the lowered eye or the raised eyebrow. She can build up a detailed crowd scene of Christmas shoppers on Oxford Street, each figure differentiated and fully realised; or she can convey all the slightly anxious excitement of a childhood nit treatment in a few brisk strokes of the pen.
She is a true ‘artist of modern life’ – to rank in line with such great 19th-century draughtsmen as Constantine Guys, Charles Keene and Phil May – artists in black and white who delineated their age with clear-sighted élan, and won the admiration of so-called ‘fine’ artists and ‘fine’ art-lovers alike.
And to these gifts, more have been added. Simmonds writes beautifully, too. The prose is spare and shot through with wit – sometimes her own, sometimes her characters’. Darke provides the overarching first-person narrative, against which the dialogue bubbles
can play. In the unfolding drama, only one tiny false note rang out – when Nicki, giving an account of what she and her artistic collaborator had been up to, remarks, ‘Mia and I, we would…’ I don’t think I have ever heard a ‘young person’ not use the ungrammatical ‘Me and X’ to describe any joint activity undertaken.
But all pedants and I must forgive Simmonds this small slip. In the pages of Cassandra Darke, the spirit of Christmas lives – along with much else besides. ● See page 81 – Getting Dressed