Save Livejournal Month, Day 6: Prize

Image by Emma Logie

Origami birds covered one of the walls of the Free Word Centre’s lecture theatre.

The judges stood on stage, calling us one by one to receive a copy of the anthology Impossible Things and a congratulatory plaque. We smiled at hired photographers.

The poet Lemn Sissay hosted the evening with support from writer Maggie Gee. We were disarmed. One finalist, Brummie Tina Freeth, had studied in university with an old friend of mine from Hong Kong. One poet confided to me that they had been drinking since 11am.

Tall ones like myself stood at the back for the group photo.

Yes, It's Really Strange: a review of Morrissey's "List of the Lost"

List of the Lost by Morrissey

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’m fairly certain that in January, when creative writing students across the land return to their courses after the holiday break, they’ll be greeted by a copy of Morrissey’s List of the Lost on their desks and a new course tutorial: What To Avoid In Fiction 101.

For someone who doesn’t know Morrissey at all, List of the Lost is indeed the worst novel ever written. Unfocused, nonsensical, odd, disjointed, sexist, ageist, sizeist, you-name-it. It’s hard to follow its meandering sentences, lack of paragraphs and chapters. Verb tenses change wildly, often in the same sentence, and punctuation is used badly. Plus, it’s too slim for any substantial development of its characters – four jocks in 1970s Boston who accidentally kill a hobo and are cursed thereafter. Then there’s the now infamous sex scene towards the end, almost definitely guaranteeing Morrissey a win of this year’s Bad Sex Award.

Morrissey isn’t some literary dilettante though. Before he became famous with his 80s band The Smiths, he wrote two chap books on his heroes the New York Dolls and James Dean. Then, through his lyrics, he gathered a hoard of followers – people who were moved by his aesthetic, his position on vegetarianism, his non-conformity, or even just his humour. Many re-discovered Oscar Wilde through him as well as other writers like Shelagh Delaney and Alan Bennett. More recently, in his Autobiography, he named James Baldwin as a hero (who he also name drops in List of the Lost.) To many, Morrissey was the quintessential bookish musician. In 1998, he received the Ivor Novello Lifetime Achievement Award for his song writing. (Ivor Novello also crops up in the novel, in a bizarre passage where it’s suggested he had an affair with Winston Churchill.) For some time now, cultural theorists have poured over Morrissey’s writings and argued his importance for British culture.

Which makes the existence of List of the Lost all the more bizarre. Suggestions that Morrissey was trying to emulate James Joyce are wide off the mark: List of the Lost is a poor hybrid of Elizabeth Smart’s prose poem By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept and the experimental cut & paste stuff from Beat writers like William S. Burroughs. It’s such a preposterous read that at times it feels like a big joke, an unrestrained fantasy. The sad fact, though, is that the annoying narrator that keeps interrupting the narrative shares many of Morrissey’s own views on animal rights, Tories and so forth. Very quickly, the novel sticks out as a bitter, self-hating outpouring from Morrissey’s own heart, cursed by the lack of a good editor to give it some shape and soul.

Morrissey and Penguin’s decision to unleash this monster on the world shows admirable chutzpah. There are some great, funny lines in there – typical Morrissey – that almost outweigh the clumsy ones. It’s such a shame though what a misfire it is. It has some intriguing elements and barmy moments; it could have been a classic for queer literature.

There are three potential fates for List of the Lost: it will either be forgotten, get turned into the literary equivalent of the film Showgirls, or replace Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford (of the famous line “It was a dark and stormy night”) as a benchmark for bad writing.

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