Suedehead is James Moffatt's 'Skinhead at the Top' as Joe Hawkins, the anti-hero of the previous year's Skinhead attempts to better himself in life and cross the class boundaries. Sentenced to 18 months in prison at the end of the previous book, in a plot twist designed to antagonize a right leaning readership, the released Joe manipulates the system, exploiting the generosity of a prisoner's aid society into funding him a plush flat, and even worms his way into a job at a stock broking firm. How long though will it be before Joe's real nature breaks through his new, gentrified veneer?
Suedehead is cursed with an influx of
secondary characters who turn out to be irrelevant in the grand scheme of
things, a familiar trait of Moffatt’s. Joe
clashes with his grotesque Irish landlady Mrs. Malloy, whose only purpose in
the book is to be an outlet for Moffatt's anti-Irish sentiments. After she
fulfills that purpose, she is out the door. Moffatt then relocates the action
to Soho where Joe gets an accountancy job working for rich, ruthless porn baron
John Matson, who Joe suspects is setting him up as a fall guy...only to throw this
subplot away too. A pity as Moffatt writes about Soho with a degree of authenticity,
as well as plenty of venom. Matson is an obvious facsimile of real life Soho
dirty bookshop kingpin John Mason. Moffatt even alludes to Mason's background
as a theatre carpenter as well as his nickname 'God'. Adding a 'T' to Mason's name was Moffatt’s
idea of covering his tracks. The brief,
Soho set part of Suedehead with its allusions to Police corruption and descriptions
of sweaty baldheaded men in dirty bookshops, ‘tarted up birds’ and tripping
hippies, reads like the work of a man who knew those streets well, and was
looking for an escape route.
I think the trick with Moffatt is to never care
a great deal about the secondary characters as invariably they end up being discarded...
the Moffatt world is a fickle one. However you can always rely on Moffatt to
plug away at Seagram's Hundred Pipers- the true love of the man's life- in
Moffatt books all roads lead to Seagram's Hundred Pipers.
"I like
this scotch, what brand is it" Lois asked as if the rest of the world did
not exist at that precise moment.
"Seagram's Hundred Pipers, quite new I
understand"
"Seagram’s...are they the people who make
Canadian Rye?"
The bulk of Suedehead serves not only as a
follow up to Moffatt's own work but as a speculative sequel to A Clockwork
Orange, concerned as it is with a former thug's struggle to adapt to straight
society and hold back those thoughts of rape and ultra-violence. Suedehead
though is mainly just a frustrating read that bears the hallmarks of Jim
Moffatt writing a book with no fixed idea of where he was heading. Sexual
tensions threaten to rear their ugly head between Joe and his enabler Bernice
Hale, an older woman and queen of mixed messages...flashing her thighs and
cleavage at Joe one minute, then reminding him she has a son the same age as
Joe the next. 'In the knowledge of the exquisite power her chest measurements
gave her, she basked in either glory or torment'. Don't get too used to Bernice
however, as after being lusted over in print by Moffatt she then gets ditched
from the pages of Suedehead. Only to be replaced by Marrisa Stone, an almost
identical naive do-gooder and frustrated older woman "at night she lay in
bed writhing in untold agony, wishing that a man -any man- would burst into her
room and rape her'.
Whereas Skinhead, for all its
hyper-exploitative excess, felt it had its feet grounded in reality, Suedehead
jumps the shark, years before that expression was invented. It's tough to buy
into the idea that the Joe Hawkins of the original book had the chameleon like
ability to blend in with the nobs and the toffs, going from the king of the
skinheads to a bowler hat wearing city gent. Of course Joe doesn't abstain from
his old ways entirely, earning extra money on the sly by robbing and bashing
older, gay men who pick Joe up for sex. Homosexuality is a preoccupation of
Suedehead, lending the book a few potentially revealing moments. Joe flies into
a violent rage when his sexuality is questioned by one of his pickups "are
you one of us?", and yet while Moffatt might portray Joe as a randy,
resolutely heterosexual, his relationships with women either prove to be short
lived or end violently. Curiously, when Moffatt writes about Marrisa Stone, the
main female love interest in the book, it feels as if he is describing himself.
Blacks, trade unionists, and Britain's entry into the European Union are
Marrisa's bête noires, as they were Moffatt's. Making her Moffatt's dream date, but
certainly not his creation's. Joe's relationship with the older woman ending in
flying fists and broken ribs, mirroring his dealings with older, gay men.
Towards the end of the book, Joe takes to checking out a young couple in a bar,
but bats more of an erotic eye at the guy 'He had a handsome face whereas hers
was plain and pock-marked. He had a
hairy chest peeping from under a loose, unbuttoned shirt…he wore tight Levi's
and made no attempt to conceal his overly developed manhood'. A rather
homoerotic observation for a straight, homophobic character to make, or a
straight, homophobic author to write. Was Moffatt a closet case? It's tempting
to theorize that self-loathing was behind the hatred of others that is let
loose in his books.
The vitriol aimed at gays in Moffatt's books often emanates from the perpetrator’s fears that they too might be gay, this from 1980’s Mod Rule “Joe wanted to bash the bastard. He hated queers with a virile youth's inner fear of turning into one”. While in 1972’s Skinhead Girls, the heroine is also tormented by the idea that she is gay “Her mind boiled as she ran. Was she? Wasn’t she? The heat of the hippie girl’s body against hers had been delectable". Saying that am I conning myself into casting Moffatt as a self-hating gay, due to that making him a more intriguing, sympathetic and palatable figure, rather than facing up to the idea that the man might simply have been a bigot and a bully.
While it is admirable that Moffatt didn't just
write a carbon copy of Skinhead, sadly Suedehead, along with the later Dragon
Skins, only serves as evidence that Moffatt was lost as a writer when diverting
from the Skinhead formula. Full of hateful, charmless people who can't their
act together, these characteristics unfortunately define the book as well.
Suedehead is a ball of negative energy that aimlessly bounces around for 110
pages, yet even at his messiest you instantly know when you are reading a
Moffatt. His books always have the air of...to nab a few lyrics from The
Jam..."pubs and wormwood scrubs and too many right wing meetings". Not
even standing under Niagara Falls will make you feel clean after reading a
Moffatt. His books are a ticket to the man's private hell. Before descending into that snake-pit, maybe
it is wise to follow Moffatt’s lead and down a few Seagram’s Hundred Pipers, he
advised as if the rest of the world did
not exist at that precise moment.
