Female Ruins
Geoff Nicholson
Gollancz pbk, 221 pgs, £9.99
Review by Gerald Houghton (1999)
Arch-fetishist (or, should you prefer, dirty old man) Geoff Nicholson's latest is of a piece with the Nicholson canon. Which is to say, you never come away from a Geoff Nicholson but that you know in whose company you've basked these last two hundred pages. Geoff Nicholson has his mark, one very little to do with language, dialogue, his characters; the sort of things to which you traditionally ascribe style. Granted there's a certain - how to say it - Englishness to the text, a knock at eccentricity's door that runs through his swelling shelf. But it's not that. Nor the fairly regular bouts of vigorous sex, although that is part of it. A big one. No, it's like I intimated initially: Geoff Nicholson writes fetish novels.
And now let us pause while we consider the weight of those words. For I do not want you to run away with the idea that these are books you would embarrassed to be caught reading on a crowded train. Banish (largely - there was the high-heel perviness of the breakthrough Footsucker) all thoughts of thigh-high leather and non-incontinence rubberware from your tiny, Channel 5-infected minds. For I mean fetish in the sense my Midland Bank Junior Oxford Dictionary defines it: "anything to which foolishly excessive respect or attention is given". Ah, see now I fair hear the scales fall from your eyes.
Geoff Nicholson, you see, writes books about things. Volkswagens, guitars, food, shopping, Errol Flynn even. His best is Bleeding London - a sort of violent Ealing comedy by way of Iain Sinclair - that is, not entirely surprisingly, about London. Books about people unreasonably, farcically, sexually obsessed with things. He wrote a book called Hunters and Collectors.
Therefore we can introduce Female Ruins as his book about...architecture. Or rather, not-architecture. Christopher Howell was "the greatest modern English architect never to build a building." People admired that in him: "a neatness, a philosophical purity". His daughter is called Kelly and is a Suffolk taxi driver. She doesn't do anything. She decorated her home and got in a magazine. Once. And then a limping American called Dexter fetches up in town and wants to hire her for the week to show him the local beauty spots. And that's all I'm going to tell; don't read the back covers of Geoff Nicholson books.
Instead:
Kelly is the ruined female promised by the title, the woman who cannot get on with her life until she has laid the ghosts of the past. A neat generalisation by way of saying that you cannot say so much about a Geoff Nicholson novel without you say too much. His devils, like those of Jonathan Carroll (a hugely inappropriate comparison, I know, but there is something very Carrollian that spits in your eye here) are in the detail. Read it, then read Bleeding London. That's the better book, but by any measure this is a very very good one.