Start with details which take me back, which situate the novel in time and place. It was the 90s:
Mark wanted to explain to her: It's not a joke, love. This is where you begin to be catered for. Your Local Education Authority takes pains to shoehorn you from this point on; starting with this desk and this chair, horizons to suit your current size. Later there'll be free school dinners, field trips, exams, then either a student grant or a flat of your own. Sally had turned up her nose, burst into tears.
They were outside the subdued window display at Woolworth's and Mark gave a slow twirl.
Iris put the telly on. Christmas programs, Something brash on ITV, foreign cartoons on Channel Four, opera on Two, and on One a sit-com Christmas special shot abroad.
Nobody has a mobile phone, either.
Written only twenty years ago, and yet it almost feels like ancient history.
So, by this point, I've now read what feels like a reasonably representative spread of Paul Magrs's work. And they're all firsts of one kind of another: his first effort to write Doctor Who (The Scarlet Empress); his first Effie and Brenda novel (Never the Bride); and now this, his first first, if you like. His first novel, and the first of his Phoenix Court trilogy. A series which appears to be linked as much by setting as by recurring characters; the place name Phoenix Court is never mentioned in his debut, suggesting that the succeeding books came more as an afterthought - what do I do next? - rather than stemming form any fully formed plan at the outset.
But to come back to where I started, this feels very much a novel of the 90s, not just in it's details, the time in which it's set, but also in its politics, in the way it's an utterly queer book, with a climax that ends with a happy family which is constructed rather than natural.
But to back track again: the title refers to Mark, tattooed from head to toe, who - thanks to a major traffic accident involving his lover Tony - ends up married to Sam. Sam has a lover, Bob, a policeman whom she also met as another consequence of that accident in which her best friend died. When Tony, who was thought to be in prison, sending provocative letters to his former lover, kidnaps Sally - Mark and Sam's daughter - everyone's lives end up being thrown into the air to reassemble in a slightly different form form by the novel's finish.
The attitude reminds me a little of what I find in Pedro Almodovar's films. Not just the queerness. The resilience: no matter how painful the events a character goes through, ultimately they'll survive, and pick themselves up. Also involved are Sam's mother Peggy and her lover Iris Wildthyme. Iris, of course, went on to reappear in Magrs's Doctor Who work - a source of irritation to some fans from what I can gather - before spinning off into her own line of fiction. Playful and mischievous, there she's a self-conscious parody of the Doctor, described by Philip Sandifer as an archetypal fag hag. Here though she's a much more Rabelasian figure, a one time novelist who boasts of being hundreds of years old. Her age roots this very modern story in an older landscape - rural and cyclic - buried beneath our ragged modernity. Iris is not a time lord here - the model is Virginia Woolf's Orlando, explicitly referenced in the text - although she does have 'capacious' pockets, a legacy of a childhood spent reading Target novelisations, which Magrs acknowledges in his afterword to The Scarlet Empress.
Less camp, more queer. Although arguably those are related concepts? I can't claim to be an expert. But yes, as I've said already, this is a very queer book. Mark's marriage to Sally is described as a second coming out. Iris is a character who seems quite determined to transcend any boundaries she encounters, whether we believe her stories or not. There's more magic elsewhere in the narrative. Since Mark last knew him, Tony has become invisible. The magic realism feels representative of the queer lives at the novel's centre. As I understand it, Queer politics and theories appear to contain a utopian element, which can feel both inspiring as well as difficult to reconcile with ordinary lives. Here the magic, the queerness, is rooted in a very mundane North of England, and somehow things do work out. Which is just lovely.
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It was the 90s: I've said somewhere else on this blog that I've come to realise recently how the culture of the 90s was deeply pessimistic, a landscape of serial killers and child abuse and other horrors. But I'm also now coming to realise how it was also a culture marked by a self conscious hedonism, and of an opening to difference: what I've recently seen described as the 'hope of a cosmopolitan and syncretic civilisational politics'. Undoubtedly this also gave rise to a fair amount of silliness and dubious propositions or beliefs, but I'm now realising that I miss that hope. It would be nice to think there was something positive we could salvage from that decade.
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