Satan Wants MeRobert Irwin
Dedalus hardback, 320 pages, £14.99
Review by David Seabrook (1999)
‘Instead of a necromantic figure, sonorous invocation,’ recalls Anthony Powell in Messengers of Day, his second volume of memoirs, ‘a big weary-looking man rose from one of the seats and held out his hand. He was quietly, almost shabbily, dressed in a dark brown suit and grey Homburg hat. When he removed the hat the unusual formation of his bald and shaven skull was revealed; so shaped as to give the impression that he was wearing a false top to his head like a clown’s.’
The Great Beast was a Victorian who could cut a figure from music hall or melodrama by turn, and for any novelist who wishes to exploit the possibilities of the Crowleyan path the trick lies in just such a juxtaposition of the funny and the ghastly. It is a trick that Robert Irwin pulls off here with his customary flair. ‘I was looking a bit sceptical, so he put Revolver on the record player and, after we had listened to the last track, he started turning the record under the needle the wrong way round – what we musicians call widdershins – and he claimed that now we could hear the voices of the other Beatles predicting Paul’s death and asking for help. I couldn’t hear this myself.’ After all, what could be more ghastly than the sixties revisited once again?
Peter Keswick, student, hippie and recreational thinker, is a member of the Black Book Lodge, a group of occultists who instruct him to keep a diary as part of his apprenticeship as a sorcerer. He undertakes a range of rituals, including lethal kissing and sodomy (a film of the event is shown backwards as a demonstration of how virgins are made) yet it is only when he locks horns with the boringly straight, ominously named Maud Boleskine courtesy of a London dating agency that his dread new world begins to make sense. By this time even his writing hand, stamped with a cabalistic sigil, has taken on a sinister life of its own, yet he manages to pen a letter to Dennis Wheatley requesting help and protection ‘for it is pretty clear from reading his books that he has had direct experience of what he is writing about.’ Wheatley duly replies, enclosing a signed photograph.
‘I saw Clara Petacci suckling a pig and, not far away, King Farouk sprawled on an alter while a stake was hammered up his anus. I saw Ruth Ellis running on the shore of a lake of fire. Suicide-trees dripped venom. Bellies exploded.’ Indeed, Satan Wants Me is Robert Irwin’s most imaginative novel so far, a tit-ripping vision of Hell that is informed by a wit as dry as the ashes we return to; a delight.
Dedalus, from their Cambridge backwater, currently boast, in Robert Irwin and David Madsen, two modern British novelists whose books may be bought with confidence and read with pleasure – and that, by my reckoning, is at least one more than any of their prize-hungry London rivals.