Death of a Ladies' Man - Alan Bissett

Maybe it’s the title or the back-cover blurb, but the impression you might have of Death of a Ladies’ Man is that of a lot of laddish humour, smooth patter and pickup lines and plenty of explicit sex scenes, with the protagonist getting his come-uppance at the end. You’d be right to think that, but you also couldn’t be more wrong. There’s a lot more going on in Bissett’s powerfully compelling novel than that.

It’s not that the book has any great narrative storyline - the main character is a 30 year-old teacher who lives with his mother after a painful divorce, but has started recently dating one of his colleagues at the school, a more mature 41 year-old woman. Charlie however just can’t help himself when it comes to women - he’s worked out all the tricks a long time ago, knows what he wants and knows how to get it. Could his ladies man reputation prevent him from a more mature and loving relationship - or is that even what he really wants?

Plot-wise there’s nothing here to get too excited about, but the strength of Death of a Ladies’ Man rather is in the writing. It’s simply dazzling. Perhaps too dazzling for some, with long risky string-of-consciousness passages, and messing about with typefaces and font sizes generally isn’t a good idea. It’s what’s behind these experiments that counts however and, although in some respects the book is just an updating of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Bissett makes it relevant and purposeful, placing it within the context of the environment of our society, questioning the attitudes and morals of the world we live in today - getting to grips with what women want as well as men.

Contrary to what you would expect then, there’s no lazy characterisation in Death of a Ladies’ Man. Bissett cuts through autonomic behaviour, social conformity, the laws of attraction, the art of seduction and gets to the human qualities underneath. Can we beat the programming or is there a high price to pay? Bissett’s book likewise goes further than most, is occasionally shocking and explicit, sounds like it has been ripped up painfully from the soul of the writer, but it’s a risk that more than pays off.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Protos Experiment - Simon Clark

Image
Despite having limited experience in the field of cinema, Simon Clark's idea for The Protos Experiment seemed a natural for it to be developed as a film script. That ambition has come to fruition with the movie directed by Laurence and Brian Avenet-Bradley premiering at Cannes this year. Although not yet on general release, Clark's own novelisation appears to retain much of that cinematic quality, but also some novelistic originality and ambition. Ironically, for something that has such a strong visual presence, the novel opens with a scene in a room of near complete darkness where, after convincing himself that he is not dead and opening his eyes, a man discovers that he is in some kind of chamber divided by plastic sheets (always a worrying sign) where a number of other people who can't see each other are chained up. John discovers that he himself is chained to a deranged monster of a man who is going to kill them all. It's a bold and compelling way to start the nove...
Read more

Blood Crazy: Aten Present (Blood Crazy: Book 3) - Simon Clark

Image
In the spirit of Nick Aten, the protagonist from the first Blood Crazy book who is back again for the third (and final?) installment of the series and isn't afraid to make a pun, mix a metaphor or state the obvious, Blood Crazy: Aten Present starts out in an explosive fashion as Nick meets up with Jack Ranzic from Book Two: Aten in Absentia . It's an appropriate way for the leads of the first two books to meet up and Nick's forthrightness and down-to-earth qualities are appreciated, but otherwise neither of the two young survivors of the crisis that has overwhelmed the planet are in a better place by the time they unite in the third book in the series. Well, the Creosotes weren't going to disappear overnight, were they? Creosotes is the name that the groups of young survivors have given to adults over age of 19 who three years ago all turned overnight into shambling bloodthirsty monsters. It's a constant struggle for survival and despite some theories about the na...
Read more

Blood Crazy: Aten in Absentia (Blood Crazy: Book 2) - Simon Clark

Image
At the end of Blood Crazy we were left with the grim acceptance that the situation the world had been plunged into was irresolvable. With the adult population having been altered in a way that would drive them to tear their own children apart, everything had changed and the world wasn't ever going back to the way it was. Without giving away any spoilers, while some interesting theories were proposed to explain what had happened to trigger this apocalyptic situation overnight, it still meant that it would be up to small communities of survivors to rebuild society and find a way of defending themselves from the ever present threat of the “Creosotes”. That doesn't mean that there aren't more stories to tell and new revelations to be told, but it has taken almost 30 years for Simon Clark to get a sequel in print. It's a long time for some fans of the original novel (recently republished by Darkness Visible), but by the end of Blood Crazy: Aten in Absentia , I'm sure fa...
Read more