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 There is a dark romantic ethic underlying The Blue Mask – deriving partly from Genet, perhaps partly from D'Annunzio – a belief that meaning is to be found in the shadows and at the margin. The Blue Mask has considerable strengths.
Reviewed by Paul Kane
The Blue Mask
By Joel Lane
Serpent’s Tail, June 2003, pb
ISBN: 1852426888
I’d hazard a guess that The Blue Mask, Joel Lane’s second novel – which could be described as an everyday story of personal growth through disfigurement and perversion - is not going to be to everyone’s taste. Nonetheless, The Blue Mask is an ambitious and rewarding piece of work and although (at least in my view) uneven in places, these narrative blips are far outweighed by the novel’s considerable strengths, not the least of which is an abiding seriousness.
The novel is set in the late 1990s and opens in the month prior to the general election that saw New Labour’s coming to power and the ascent of Tony Blair - Britain’s gift to the world – to No. 10 Downing Street. Neil, New Labour supporter-*****-apologist and professional student, is writing a Ph.D on fascist ideology. He has been researching it for three years, and it is still uncompleted. His partner Matthew reflects:
“Anyone else would have chosen an explanation and then tried to justify it. That was what politics was all about. But being Neil, he couldn’t.”
Neil and Matthew live together in apparent domestic bliss; they seem to have a pretty solid relationship. Yet at a post-election party to celebrate Labour’s victory, Matthew has sex with an old flame. On the following day Neil and Matthew argue about this. Neil, distraught, leaves the house that they share with others and picks up a young man in a pub. The two go down by the canal for sex. There, the boy cuts Neil’s face with a broken bottle, twisting and peeling back the skin, severing the boundary between himself and his world. The boy carries out this act of violence because he wants to make Neil “see”. See what? There are a couple of clues in the novel.
One clue is given on an occasion when Anne, Neil’s former girlfriend, complains about the corporate culture at her place of work, and the insistence that everyone appear to be happy. Neil reads her something from Adorno:
“It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces.”
(Adorno is a significant presence in the novel, along with Genet; Neil reads The Authoritarian Personality on the eve of the election, trying not to think of Tony Blair.)
Another clue occurs during a conversation between Neil and Sean, a friend and SWP (Socialist Workers Party) member. Sean is acting in Nights of Insult, a play Neil has written. He criticises the tenor of the play: “You can’t rise above class by ignoring it you know.” Neil replies:
“I’m not trying to rise above it … I’m trying to say something about domination … I’m trying to suggest that relations of power can be subverted, played with. Exposed as social constructs. And ultimately, changed.”
Recognition, exposure, change. Beauty, disfigurement, growth. The act of violence that adds injury to insult has as its purpose the shedding of Neil’s comfortable illusions.
There is a dark romantic ethic underlying The Blue Mask – deriving partly from Genet, perhaps partly from D'Annunzio – a belief that meaning is to be found in the shadows and at the margin. The Blue Mask has considerable strengths. First off, the novel paints an accurate portrait of late 1990s and contemporary Britain - people and places both - or at least, a portrait that I recognise. Lane is good at describing student life, as it’s lived in shared houses along tree-lined streets. He is also good at depicting - I could say Birmingham, since the novel is set in Birmingham - but instead I’ll say: a certain kind of British city, the city with an industrial past. Birmingham is such a city, so too are Manchester and Leeds. Such cities have their canals and railway bridges and wasteland, their areas of redevelopment, their gay village and cruising ground; along with those insular pockets in which the homeless and the fallen subsist. Lane captures perfectly how such cities feel at night. (“Cars scraped the darkness”, he writes at one point.). There is a temptation in a novel of suspense to sacrifice character for plot; Lane never succumbs to this. There are good strong characters in the novel: not only Neil, Matthew and Anne – the principals - but the minor characters too. For example, a gay man takes his liaison with Neil no further because it “called for a level of tenderness he was no longer capable of.” There is a convincing depiction of the minutiae of a gay relationship, a relationship in flux.
Although this is a dark novel, the darkness isn’t unremitting; it’s leavened with wit. When Neil talks about his experience with heroin, Vince – his supplier and an aging hippy - calls the drug “…a new method of birth control. You take it, and it’s like you were never born.” The décor of a SM club is described as being “like the set of a Roger Corman film. All you needed was Vincent Price screaming She’s alive, I tell you!”
There were some shortcomings to the novel. First, as an author Lane sometimes distributes his perceptions (or the same perceptions) among too many characters, or sometimes the wrong character. Matthew, who’s basically a dull domestic sow, has some interesting thoughts on Genet. Does he deserve them? Willetts, the police officer who investigates the attack on Neil, is initially painted as being a bit of a dullard – and then later in novel he reflects on Neil’s scars “as a second face, a dangerous alter ego”.
Second, I’m unsure whether Neil would buy into the New Labour line (or have much time for the SWP, come to that) quite as much as he does. I mean, who did? Weren’t New Labour always seen as the Tories in new guise? (To be fair, Lane describes the election night very well. In particular, he hits upon the most significant aspect of that night: the near-universal joy at seeing the Tories booted out at last.) Third, some of the references and ideas – to Chomsky, say - seem like add-ons and are not fully integrated within novel.
Overall though, I liked The Blue Mask and I like Lane’s ambition and seriousness. The Blue Mask is a dark novel, a novel of ideas that melds the personal and the political in an intense and compelling way.
For more information visit: The Blue Mask
About the reviewer:Paul Kane works in community education, and web design & development. He can be contacted at ludic@europe.com
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