Could this be the most toe curlingly terrible book ever?
As the PM’s favourite pop star pens a novel, our critic asks . ..
LITERARY London’s big news is that Morrissey (a 1980s pop singer, m’lud) has written a novel called List Of The Lost. It was published last week by Penguin. We now turn to the reviews: ‘eye-wateringly bad’, ‘bizarre, misogynistic ramble’, ‘the worst novel I have ever read’, ‘ an unpolished t*rd of a book, the stale excrement of Morrissey’s imagination’.
That last comment came from The Guardian newspaper, which has often encouraged Smiths front-man Morrissey in his occasional forays into political comment. Multi-millionaire Morrissey, who has homes in America, Italy, Switzerland and Britain, is a nihilistic Leftist. Yet the critic from the Left-leaning Guardian was insistent.
‘Do not read this book,’ he wrote, like a fireman trying to prevent citizens from entering a dangerous house. ‘Do not sully yourself with it, no matter how temptingly brief it seems. All those who shepherded it to print should hang their heads in shame.’
Oh dear. Could this novel by one of the more celebrated artistes of our era — Morrissey’s cultural influence is said by some to surpass that of The Beatles — really be so atrocious? Intrigued, I spent four hours reading the 118-page opus. You may think me a slow reader but there was a reason for the snail’s pace. Morrissey’s book is almost incomprehensible. I had to keep re-reading whole pages because I had lost his thread.
Its plot (ha!) concerns four American college boys who belong to an elite relay sprint team in the early 1970s. Their names are Ezra, Nails, Harri and Justy. ‘You’d dig hard and deep to excavate four names quite so unusual,’ says the second sentence. At this point I was gripped.
That sentence was pretty good. I liked the use of ‘excavate’ and the prospect of a short novel about sprinters was an engaging one. Morrissey himself was once a promising athlete. Perhaps he could take us into the mind of an athlete.
Alas, things soon go downhill. If we may use sporty terms, Morrissey’s novel pulls a hamstring the moment it leaves the blocks. What a pity he did not pull up rather than insisting on finishing the course.
One of the sprinters accidentally kills an abusive tramp who has been boring them (and us) for several paragraphs. A woman tells the sprinters that her baby was killed by their college’s dean and that the child was buried in woodland. They dig up this corpse and confront the dean. He, being an authority figure, gets away with it.
Morrissey, you see, has ‘issues’ with authority. He also tries to shock us with death and rotting flesh and spectacularly bad sex scenes.
ONE of the runners falls by the wayside. Another is involved in a car crash which kills the girlfriend to whom he has just made love. End of story. Or end of story so far as I could make out.
I did read the book as closely as I could but I had to keep squinting at the words as they throbbed on the page, so hard was it to concentrate on Morrissey’s ill-focused stream of consciousness.
Illogical, baffling leaps are made from the 1970s running track to rants about the Royal Family, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and abattoirs. Morrissey states that Winston Churchill had a hot pash with Ivor Novello and that the only thing the Royal Family did during that war was ‘dine lavishly in manicured splendor (sic) with their manicured teeth’.
The prose could belong to a teenager who has just swallowed his first thesaurus, or something stronger. It would be possible to rearrange the contents of a bowl of Alphabetti spaghetti into something more lucid than this book.
List Of The Lost may be its title but the ‘lost’ are likely to be his readers, wondering what on earth this loopy dope is trying to say.
The thing is polluted by adjectives and adverbs. Sentences stretch so long, they vanish in the curvature of the Earth. American spelling, split infinitives, rank grammar, underformed characters, rambling polemic, self-indulgent surrealism: these are just some of the editorial achievements. What on earth was Penguin thinking?
It really is a spectacularly dreadful offering, the whole thing deserving inclusion in Private Eye’s ‘Pseuds’ Corner’ column.
Morrissey tirelessly and tiresomely inserts rhymes and puns and alliteration and assonance in his sentences. The place where an old man is killed becomes ‘the scene of the senicide’, while the tramp’s attempt to touch someone is ‘the hobo’s grope’. Such tricks can work in a pop lyric but when presented so frequently in a novel they become maddeningly distracting.
Some biographical exposition may be necessary, lest it seem Morrissey is a harmless soul who is just trying to bring innocent pleasure to his readers. Born Stephen Patrick Morrissey in Manchester in 1959, he had several hits with The Smiths, having started in a Seventies punk band called The Nosebleeds.
The Smiths, a favourite of David Cameron among others, were known for their angst-ridden, slightly drony songs. As the man himself might say, Morrissey became the morose Mancunian maestro of miserabilism, laureate of laments, pied piper of post-punk protest.
He used his pop fame to promote vehement views not only on the Monarchy (he really does hate the Royal Family) but also vegetarianism (he refuses to let meat be served at concert halls when he is playing) and America, though he is more than happy to live in the rich U.S.
I happen not to share his political views but that alone would not be a decent reason to criticise his novel. It is perfectly possible to enjoy art with a political view opposite to one’s own. The problem with this book is that it is just so wretchedly inept. It strives for a James Joycean absurdism — but to compare Joyce’s brilliant Ulysses to List Of The Lost is to compare a Bentley to a smoking, three-wheeled Trabant.
Morrissey’s writing is Adrian Mole on magic mushrooms, verbal diarrhoea being squirted at you through an industrial hose.
Here is a sentence in which he describes the fame of his sprinting team: ‘Commentary in college newsletters repeatedly warned of this very locomotion machine whose bolt had been logged and filmed and photographed for every enviable stubby pumpkin in every corpulent Pepsicola tank town from South Succotash to the boondock boonies beyond so that they might rightfully shrink with unmerry-go-round doubt at the mighty Priorswood.’ That one took me about four goes before I worked out what he was saying.
Here comes another bucketful of raw Morrissey: ‘The dense and insensible Dean Isaac spun further black magic, with his carefully orchestrated retirement plans walloped across local newspapers, bearing witless bylines accompanying excited shots of Isaac infatuated with his own reflection as he wore his coat on his shoulders in cloak fashion and waving confidently to the world beyond the lens that made flesh and then created truth, and into which the entire universe peered back from the other side — with no voice.’
After a few pages of this stuff, your eyes develop indigestion. Your brain aches. I started to consider euthanasia.
HAVING myself just written a novel, I actually take no pleasure in rubbishing Morrissey’s novel. I understand how difficult it is to write fiction.
Morrissey has at least had the boldness to put his words between covers and maybe there should be an omerta among us first- time novelists. Anyone who has slaved over fiction knows that there are few things creatively more daunting.
But did Penguin apply its usual exacting editorial standards before publishing this book?
It reads like a barely edited first draft. As a political columnist I am sometimes sent letters by ‘green-ink’ lunatics and obsessives, some of whom think they are the next Proust. Their efforts tend to be a great deal better than Morrissey’s novel.
This tripe was almost certainly published simply because he is a pop celebrity.
My 18- year- old son worships Morrissey. He loves his songs and enjoys the little flicks of surrealism in his lyrics.
It is not hard to see why the man is a pop hero. He has a high-flown selfconfidence and adolescents happily fall for his pseudo artistry. Yet even my son, I suspect, will think this novel is ridiculous.
For all our sakes, but most particularly for his own, daft old Morrissey must be urged never again to write anything longer than a three-verse pop song.
List Of the Lost by Morrissey is published by Penguin Books at £7.99.