BOOK OF THE DAY: HILARY FANNINreviews The More You Ignore MeBy Jo Brand Headline Review 309pp, £12.99
THERE IS a kind of understanding in the screenwriting trade that when your script has all the tension of an ancient piece of knicker elastic you drive a metaphorical truck into the wall.
You make something happen: give your heroine mysterious paralysis, her husband an affair with a gay Egyptian pet-groomer, and her dog the power to decipher hieroglyphics, thus unlocking the cure – you get my drift. Comedian and novelist Jo Brand, in her third novel, The More You Ignore Me, has managed to take this dubious wisdom to a whole new stratosphere. By the time the stunned reader has been catapulted to the end of this 300- page read, her heroine, the young, vaguely unhappy Alice, daughter of a hazily schizophrenic mother and hippy father, has endured more life-shattering experiences than your average queen of the Nile with a suitcase of asps.
The book opens promisingly with the confident statement that, as a child, Alice had developed five separate personalities “as a response to the circumstances in which she found herself” and “as an aid to emotional survival in a family landscape that was harsh, absurd, histrionic, druggy and unpredictable”. Great, fantastic start; sadly, however, we only get to encounter one of those five promised personalities: the intuitive, sensitive, phlegmatic Alice, who endures the vagaries of living with her uncontrollable, mentally unstable mother, Gina.
Gina is a woman who, at one point, climbs naked on to the roof of their Herefordshire cottage to offer Alice’s hamster as a sacrifice to some unnamed deity in return for a romantic encounter with the local weatherman.
“The big bad monster wasn’t green and hiding under the bed, it wore tasteless floral prints, bright scarlet lipstick and sat in the kitchen saying ‘bollocks’ a lot.”
Brand is a gorgeously doleful and sharp-witted comedian and, at times, especially in the novel’s opening chapters, her pithy observations and deadpan wit win out over an essentially flimsy story. As things progress, however, and Alice moves from childhood into an adolescence overwhelmed by an obsession with the singer Morrissey, by encounters with teenage pregnancy and miscarriage, by her mother’s various incarcerations in “the bin”, by a mugging and an attempted rape, not to mention missing her first Morrissey gig because her granny keels at over at the bus stop, it all becomes overly frenetic, little more than a montage of incident piled on incident.
With depths unplumbed and characters confined to cliche (the flatulent uncles, the paternal grandmother who can right the ills of the world with a pot of tea, the skinny hippy dad with the tin of tobacco and a little corner of hash), it starts to read like a series of well-developed notes to hang on the skeleton of a more interesting book.
To be fair to Brand, this book is a lot better than some of the mind-numbingly mundane celebrity adventures in the writing trade that seem to bypass the usual criteria for publication, presumably in anticipation of the public splashing out their cash on the basis of the author’s television profile. A warp-factor-10 page-turner it may be, but ultimately there is little of any significance, either in the literary or comic vein, to steady any of these pages in one’s hand.
The More You Ignore Mecould help you while away a couple of hours on the beach this summer, but don't let its bulk incur a baggage charge.
Hilary Fannin is
Irish Times
TV critic and a playwright
