Parade by Rachel Cusk review – a brilliant and unsettling feat
One of the women in Rachel Cusk’s new novel confesses to an ability to shock that is “instinctive and unconscious”. This could double as a description of Cusk herself. To be controversial is second nature to her (think of the articulate effrontery of A Life’s Work, her book about motherhood, or The Last Supper, her fascinating memoir about living in Italy, which was nonetheless pulped after someone described in it sued, or Aftermath, about the breakdown of her marriage, which led to a critical mauling in the press). And yet she continues to refuse to pull even a wisp of wool over her own – or anyone else’s – eyes. Self-consciously original, inward and undeterred, she has become ever more persistently determined to write about life precisely as she finds it, and in Parade pulls off a brilliant, stark and unsettling feat.
It was with Outline (2014) that Cusk pioneered a new approach to writing, a way of grafting fiction to autobiography with a fluency that made you wonder why more novels were not written this way. And the answer to thatquestion can only be that she is a one-off, an acquired taste worth acquiring: no one else can do what she does in the way that she does it. Parade takes her experiment further: it pursues and deepens her lifelong interest in the relationship between art and life in a narrative sequence that also explores fraught alliances between men and women, the nature of gender and the complications involved in losing a parent. Each subject is approached with an intellectual intensity that suddenly struck me as being French in character (Cusk lives in Paris, which might have lent extra encouragement).
Her stories overlap, suggestive at times of a less amorous version of Schnitzler’s La Ronde, and she writes about several different artists who, whether male or female, are each referred to as “G” – no need for the soft furnishing of full names. We meet at the outset a male G who paints everything upside down – a playful idea about which she is in earnest (she doesn’t do jokes). She describes the wife’s reaction as she looks at G’s topsyturvy paintings: “The feeling of everything seeming right yet being fundamentally wrong was one she powerfully recognised: it was her condition, the condition of her sex.” Looking at the portrait her husband has painted of her, she feels diminished: “She sees the spectacle of her own unrealised life.” Cusk encourages us to consider the tyranny of representation and its scope for betrayal. And what is then frustrating but, at the same time, convincing is that the wife does not voice her objections. This is because, we are given to understand, the painting is her achievement, too – through the borrowed kudos of being the famous artist’s model/wife.
Soon after this, another woman – Cusk has now switched to writing in the first person – relates: “One morning, walking along a quiet sunny street where people sat at pavement tables drinking coffee, I was attacked by a stranger who hit me forcibly in the head. My assailant was a woman, deranged by madness or addiction, and this fact of her gender caused difficulties both in the recounting of the event afterward and in my own response to it.” When the narrator comes to, she spots her attacker looking at her from a distance, “like an artist stepping back to admire her creation”. It is hard to dismiss the thought that Cusk’s writing is like this too: speak out – stand back.
She goes on to suggest that the victim has become an exhibition piece. A crowd gathers to stare at her. We are in a foreign city we assume to be Paris: the imprecision is willed. The atmosphere is unnervingly off-kilter and the city is filled with children who seem always to be crying. There is a controlled ferocity to Cusk’s take on the women she describes. She is prepared to be critical of women (including herself) as well as to champion them. She is keenly aware of how ruinously often women incline towards self-effacement and sets us to wondering about feminine capitulations and grotesque missteps. She tells us the reason why one woman is perversely drawn to her future husband: “It was his disapproval that seduced her.”
Throughout, she is interested in showing the ways in which we all – women most of all – are performing as ourselves, our homes our stages – and believes it possible that most of us continue to behave as if we were being observed even when on our own. She is interested in the pitfalls of performances and the risks of exposure and what arises most urgently is the yearning for invisibility, which she describes as the ideal state for an artist.
It is fascinating how by noting what it is Cusk dares to broach, one keeps identifying new taboos. About love’s complicated relationship to freedom: “Often we received the confusing impression that love disliked freedom and at the same time sought to impersonate it.” On death and not feeling what you are supposed to feel: “At the news of her death we felt nothing, and understood that to have felt nothing was the greatest tragedy that could have befallen us, for its effect on us could only be to reveal greater depths and breadths of non-feeling, such that it almost seemed to cancel us out.” She also outlandishly and provocatively notes in the wake of her mother’s death: “Suddenly we could not tolerate capitalism. We found its presence in our lives, of which it had insidiously made a prison, repellent. Was our mother a function of capitalism?”
Towards the end of the novel, in the section that describes the mother’s death, the prose changes as the earlier “I” is replaced by “we”. It gathers momentum in what becomes an exalted and excruciating confessional testament, an exploration of pain, entrapment and loss. While Cusk’s painter concentrates on painting the world upside down, Cusk keeps turning it inside out.
Parade by Rachel Cusk is published by Faber (£16.99). To support theGuardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
She is keenly aware of how ruinously often women incline towards selfeffacement
munity and forced to see things no child should witness. And Taylor-Joy is a pleasure to watch in the action sequences, which take up probably 90% of the film. Her lithe agility and cunning is a refreshing counterpoint to all the lumbering muscle and firepower. She’s tiny in comparison with most of the cast, but give her a grappling hook and a set of wheels and you genuinely believe she could best any of them.
Plaudits to the casting department are due elsewhere too, in particular to whoever decided to unleash Hemsworth on the role of Dementus. It turns out he was born to play a bad guy. Equipped with a fake nose and a dirt-crusted teddy bear, he reprises a touch of the musclebound doofus persona he brought to Thor, but couples it with a dangerous blend of sentimentality and cruelty, with a side order of boiling ambition and insanity. His petulantly muttered “I’m bored”, having just watched a key character get dragged to their death behind a motorcycle across cheese-grater desert gravel, borders on genius.
Dementus is the preening leader of a biker gang who consider themselves a force to be reckoned with in the Wasteland. It’s Dementus’s boys who abduct the young Furiosa; it’s on Dementus’s orders that her mother is tortured and murdered. And it’s Dementus who poses a real and grave threat to the way of life and the “place of abundance” that Furiosa’s people guard from the savage anarchy of the outside world. Furiosa loathes him with a passion that hardens with every passing year. If Fury Road was a chase movie powered by hope for a better future, Furiosa is a revenge flick driven by hate.
Her rage might be one of the forces that shapes the young Furiosa, but another is kindness – a curious, anomalous concept that seems out of place in this world in which most people would flamethrower your face off as soon as look at you. The kindness comes from renowned rig driver Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), who forms an alliance with Furiosa and mentors her as a driver, fighter and general badass. Of course, evil tends to be more extravagantly memorable, and decency has a way of getting shunted into the background when pretty much everyone else in the cast is trying to out-crazy each other. Still, Burke delivers solid work in a role that can’t help but feel a little underpowered.
It’s a remarkable achievement by Miller – a piece of world-building that is fully realised down to the last diseased pustule on the last burrow-dwelling maggot farmer. And the action sequences are phenomenal. There is a niggling question of whether there is much substance beneath the blitzkrieg assault of the spectacle. Your level of enjoyment will depend on whether or not you need a message with your mayhem. For my part, the mayhem suits me just fine.
In UK and Irish cinemas now
Weller seemed in his element when I saw him play at Shepherd’s Bush Empire a few weeks ago and he’s like that when I talk to him, too. Though he’ll never be completely relaxed – he’s naturally impatient and twitchy; he still smokes like it’s the last fag before his execution – right at the moment, he’s extremely content with his lot. His older kids are doing well and his younger ones are a source of joy. He has a big brood: Natt, 36, lives in LA and directs short films; singer Leah, 32, has two children, one a new-born (he shows me a sweet snap of him holding his brand new granddaughter, Kiyo Soul); Dylan, 29, works in the New York fashion industry; Jesamine, 24, is at uni, studying mental-health nursing, and Stevie, 19, is into skateboarding, and teaches it as well.
At home, there are his kids with his wife of 14 years, Hannah (they met when she was a backing singer for his 22 Dreams album). So, 12-year-old twins JP (John Paul) and Bowie, who are “chalk and cheese”. Bowie is hugely into football; JP is not, but is just “good at everything”. And Nova, seven, is “a mad creative person, eccentric, but I love it. She never gets bored, she’s always building, creating, a real character”. The younger ones are home-schooled and have lots of friends “from all walks of life, different friends from different situations”. We talk about his working-class roots and I ask what class he thinks his kids are. “I feel they’re classless, personally. They’re outside all that. As they should be. Classless and free,” he says. “Me and my missus are the same, she comes from a council estate. So they grew up having that perspective, but they don’t go through that experience. That’s the difference. Hopefully they grow up with the ethic that we have, that you have to work for things. As long as they’re not – what’s the word? – entitled.”
Weller himself is far from entitled. “I’m so lucky to be able to do what I do.” He enjoys his time with his family. He loves his job. You could say he’s reached his mellow stage, except he expresses his contentment in an entirely unmellow manner. “If the universe took me tomorrow,” he says, “which hopefully it won’t, but if it did, I couldn’t really fucking complain.” He’s found that not drinking for 14 years has really helped; not just because of the lack of hangovers, but because it’s made him “discard all the crap” he once thought was part of his personality. “A lot of the demons I thought were there just disappeared once I stopped drinking. So perhaps they were all in that bottle. All imagined. A little safety blanket.”
His anger hasn’t evaporated completely. At his gig, I noticed he had a Palestinian flag on display, though he made no mention of it during the performance. When I bring it up, he’s more than happy to talk. “Am I against genocides and ethnic cleansing? Yes, I am, funnily enough,” he says. “I can’t understand why more people aren’t up in arms about what’s going on. We should be ashamed of ourselves, I think. One minute you’re supplying bullets and bombs and guns, and then you’re sending over food. How does that work?”
He’s still pretty fired up about the state of the UK, too. I mention a few politicians – Keir Starmer, Rishi Sunak, even Nigel Farage – have been spotted in old-school Adidas Samba and Gazelle trainers. “Were they wearing them with a suit?” he asks. (Starmer wasn’t; Farage was; Sunak was in suit trousers and a white shirt.) “That’s not right, is it? But anyway, fuck all the people you mentioned. Mugs, all of them.” He liked Corbyn, but isn’t too fussed about Starmer. He can’t see much difference between the parties: “You can either vote for Rishi Sunak’s Tory party, or you can vote for Keir Starmer’s Tory party.” He probably won’t vote at all, though he does like “Angela something, the one who’s a normal working-class mum.” Angela Rayner? “Yeah, that’s her.”
“The corruptness and cronyism, and the lies and deceit of most of those politicians…” he says. “They’re supposed to be your betters, your leaders. But they’ve been selling off the periphery of the NHS for years and let it fall into disrepair, and it’s going to get eaten away and eaten away until it’s off their hands, and it’s all privatised. And that’s one of our crown jewels, the NHS. It’s supposed to be ours, we all pay for it. It’s a total piss-take… People are getting to that point where they think, “You’ve just got to do it for yourself.” Whether that’s a revolution or not, I don’t know.”
What gives him hope, outside his family, is music, of course. He’s still hugely engaged with it, and talks to me about Liam Bailey, Vegyn, Summer Pearl, Yussef Dayes, Ezra Collective. He went to see Soft Launch recently. “I was right at the back. The crowd were all like, way, way younger than me, but it was great. There was a genuine excitement. I haven’t seen that for a long time. Even some girls sort of screaming a little bit. I was like, ‘That’s fucking brilliant.’”
Soft Launch are supposedly part of a new Britpop scene, I say, and we discuss 90s music. He preferred the 90s, generally, to the 80s, when he felt he didn’t fit in so well. “Hair was big, shoulder pads, success, everything was massive. A decade of excess.” Plus, he found himself, as he puts it, on the wrong side of the glass – in the production room with the buttons and switches, rather than in the live room with the instruments, playing. But in the early 90s, he says, “the music was more interesting. I got turned on to so much music at that time as well. I dropped all my blinkers, a real education.” He went to the Fez, in Paddington, to Giles Peterson’s night, he remembers, and to Dingwalls to hear Norman Jay.
And the fashion suited him more, of course. Idly, I wonder if he’s ever bought any clothes that turned out to look bad. I assume not, but he insists he has.
“I’m attracted by colours, right? My favourite colour is red, but it doesn’t really work because it’s hard to wear,” he says. “But sometimes I’ll walk into a shop and there’s a red jumper or something and I think, ‘I’ve got to have that.’ I’ve bought loads of rubbish.”
What’s the worst thing you’ve bought?
“I bought this mesh T-shirt, a sort of string thing, but black. I thought it was really cool, right? I saw Steve Marriott wear a white one, so I thought it was mod, but it wasn’t. I put it on, and Hannah and the kids were like, ‘What the fuck is that?’”
Even you would find it hard to carry off a string vest, I say.
“I’m trying to be a bit more selective in my old age. But I keep getting attracted to the bright colours!”
Paul Weller’s latest album, 66, is out now on Polydor Records (paulweller.com)
• This article was amended on 26 May 2024 because an earlier version mistakenly gave the Jam’s Rick Buckler’s surname as Waller.