I became aware of Jane Gaskell while doing research into whether any Yob-lit had ever been written by women. This lead me to her 1969 book 'A Sweet, Sweet Summer' that had been re-published by Sphere in 1971, and made to look a teen Yob novel, with a cover featuring a cigarette smoking tough girl brandishing a bottle. Which makes you wonder what someone signing up for A Sweet, Sweet Summer on the basis of that cover alone, and expecting your standard James Moffatt type aggro, would have made of the avalanche of weird hippie shit that Gaskell threw at the audience with that book. A Sweet, Sweet Summer being a satirical, dystopian sci-fi novel in which UFOs take control of Britain, publicly execute Ringo Starr, and encourage political extremists...the fascists, the communists, the IRA...to run riot.
The other entry in her bibliography that jumps out
at you is 'The Shiny Narrow Grin'. A 1964 mod-era vampire novel about Terry, a
young girl who despite still attending school, is otherwise enjoying the
freedom of living away from her parents, and making the 60s scene with her
roommate Kathy. While The Shiny Narrow Grin isn't written in a diary format, it
does have the feel of a day to day account of Terry's life and her intimate,
private thoughts about her friends, parents and teachers. As well as the adventures
she gets up to with Kathy, attending parties, witnessing mod boys getting into
punch ups and causing trouble in school. What of course distinguishes The Shiny
Narrow Grin from just being a swinging sixties coming of age drama is 'The Boy'
a mysterious good looking guy that Terry meets by the side of the road at the
beginning of the book, and who turns out to be a vampire. Complicating Terry's
already complicated love life, which alternates between sleeping with Bern, a
bouncer at a coffee bar, and her on/off relationship with a mod boy called
Fishfinger. A male character name that could only have come from 1960s Britain,
likely used by Gaskell so that upon being ditched by Fishfinger, Terry can quip
"there's more Fishfingers in the sea".
I think if The Shiny Narrow Grin were a young
girl's diary, you'd find Terry's relationship with her father as equally
eyebrow raising as the fact that she is dating one of the undead. The book
opens with Terry being driven around dark country lanes by a guy called Slade,
who is speeding in his flash car, and giving Terry a thrill by accidentally
touching her knee. All of which would lead you to think he was her boyfriend,
trying to impress and get off with her, so it comes as a surprise when we
discover that Slade is actually her father. Terry does have an unconventional
relationship with her father, in that he has been absent for most of her life,
and has only come back into it recently. Therefore she tends to regard him as
an honorary member of her scene, good for getting her into the pubs and clubs
that she's too young for. He in turn seems to view her as a means to get close
to dolly birds who are young enough to be his daughter. Terry and Slade's
relationship does teeter on the unhealthy, especially when she starts becoming
jealous of his closeness to other women, including her virginal school friend
Kathy and even worse her despised school teacher Miss Sampson. However, you
suspect the jealousy there is born out of a need to be the centre of attention
to her father, after being deprived of it for so long, and a resentment at
having to share him with other women.
At risk of playing amateur psychiatrist, it seems
as if vampire figure here fulfills Terry's deep down need to be adored,
obsessed over and fought for, in a way that no other male character in the book
is prepared to do so. Certainly not her father, who becomes a source of
disillusionment, nor mod boys like Fishfinger, who might be possessive, but at
the slightest hint of relationship turbulence is happy to divert his attention
to easier dolly birds. In contrast The Boy can't live without her "I can
show you the bullet holes, you can peer into them and see my heart beating for
you" yet Terry never reciprocates that same level of emotion back to him.
Freaking out and branding him a pervert when she witnesses him drinking the
blood of a friend of hers, then blotting out the memory of him for a large
section of the book. He is needy when it comes to her, she is not when it comes
to him. Creating an ambiguity over whether she'll ultimately reject him and
continue to lead a normal life, or join him on the abnormal vampiric path.
I suppose The Shiny Narrow Grin was born out of
the frequently made observation that the Victorian and Edwardian periods had
such an influence on 60s fashion, a person from those times wouldn't have felt
out of place in 1960s London. A premise used a few years later in the TV series
Adam Adamant Lives. Indeed, Gaskell has her vampire remark "Now my clothes
are right again. Now I can mingle. They like my leather coat, my elastic-sided
boots, my fringe, my side whiskers".
In the 1960s, the family situation in The Shiny Narrow Grin...Terry having been raised by a single mother, her estranged parents finally getting divorced, her mother being in a relationship with an unhappily married man...would have been breaking taboos and questioning societal norms, something the passing of time has rather robbed from the book. In that sense, The Shiny Narrow Grin does have a kinship with the popular kitchen sink dramas of the time, a genre Gaskell would later dabble in, most notably 1968's All Neat in Black Stockings, the only one of her books to have been filmed. The Shiny Narrow Grin also gives the Hammer horror movies of the time a hip nod of approval towards the end of the book, when Terry and an older character finally discover The Boy is a vampire, causing the older character to faint. A reaction that Terry explains to The Boy by telling him "she's not a teenager, she doesn't go to Hammer films or read horror comics" therefore is more likely to be shocked by positive proof of vampirism than a teenager would. Which I found fascinating, as someone who grew up always regarding Hammer films as being slightly old fashioned and the type of horror movies that your parents approved of you watching. Whereas when The Shiny Narrow Grin was written in 1964, Hammer must have been seen as trendy, chic viewing for younger people, and not for squares or grownups.
Given the Hammer reference, it’s surprising that Gaskell's idea of a vampire diverts from the Christopher Lee, tall, dark, older man type, instead he is a blonde, cute, pale mod youth. Gaskell anticipating the deceptively angelic looking pretty boys who turn out to be killers, that would come along a few years later in the form of Hywel Bennett in Twisted Nerve, Martin Potter in Goodbye Gemini and Shane Briant in Straight on Till Morning . Any of those three would have been well cast in a movie version of The Shiny Narrow Grin. If we continue down the rabbit hole of imaginary casting, a late 1960s period Ian Hendry would have had the right mixture of handsomeness and sleaziness to play Slade. I suppose Terry would have ended up being played by Susan George, who always pops up in those swinging London films, or failing that Jenny Agutter circa 'I Start Counting' another movie that tends to replay in your head while you read this book.
Jane Gaskell
Gaskell herself was something of a child prodigy in
literary circles, she wrote her first book 'Strange Evil' at the age of 14, and
by the end of the Sixties was considered a bona fide 'It girl' celebrity. To
the extent that she was interviewed for 'Now and Then' a major project the
broadcaster Bernard Braden embarked on in 1967, in which he filmed many of the
defining figures of the time...Sean Connery, Tom Jones, Ossie Clark, Vanessa
Redgrave...recording their thoughts on the era and where society was heading.
While this project was never completed, fortunately the majority of the footage
survives, including Gaskell's 20 minute interview, and can be seen on the BFI
player. I can understand why Gaskell herself was as much a source of public
interest as her work. Back in the Sixties, many would have expected a well educated
sounding, Tory supporting young lady to write about pussycats, waterfalls and
lonely walks along the beach. Whereas Gaskell wrote about UFOs over London, the
public execution of Ringo Starr and the fear that your boyfriend might be a
vampire. These were the real subjects that kept young girls awake at night back
then. For a book written three years before the legalization of homosexually in
England, it is also fairly enlightened, with Terry at one point commenting
"I like queers. They're so easy for girls to get on with. Even the bitchy
ones are. I even like lesbians, that most girls shudder from. There's something
so clean about the idea of sex without men". Nor does Gaskell hold back on
the type of language that the older generation would have probably considered
unbecoming for a young lady. She gets ruder in A Sweet, Sweet Summer, where she
even uses the word 'bumfluff', which I'd like to think helped that book clinch
the Somerset Maugham award for literature that year.
The Shiny Narrow Grin is a book I initially admired more from a historical perspective, but began to warm to it on reflection and found it preying on my mind allot afterwards. As a male in 2024, I'm clearly not the intended audience for this book, but I can imagine a teenage girl in 1964 would have thought the world of The Shiny Narrow Grin, and felt they'd found a book and an author that spoke the language of that generation. Admittedly, it does feel like the work of a person who was still finding her way in the world and her voice as a writer. Judging by A Sweet, Sweet Summer, and the reputation of her later books, Gaskell's work became more ambitious and fantastical as it progressed, but the occasionally clumsy and immature nature of the dialogue here feels true to the people she was writing about. Only a young person, who wasn't too removed from Terry and that scene, could write a book like The Shiny Narrow Grin.
Anyone pursuing The Shiny Narrow Grin thinking they were in for full on pulp horror, might be let down by how slight the vampire aspect is, but that can't take away from the fact that this was a pioneering effort in terms of bringing vampirism into the modern age, and doing it with more authenticity than what would come later. Which is the polite way of saying that The Shiny Narrow Grin is Dracula A.D. 1972, but written by someone who knew what they were talking about. It is unfortunate that both The Shiny Narrow Grin and A Sweet, Sweet Summer are now two of her rarest books, and command insanely high prices on the second hand market. Rumour is that the now publicity shy Gaskell is against the idea of re-prints too, meaning that you'll likely need to resort to unofficial means to read these two without driving yourself into poverty. The Shiny Narrow Grin is a time capsule with a finger on the pulse on how young girls thought about mod boys, fashion, sex, pill popping and the undead in 1964. The work of a forgotten 60s icon, who might prefer for it to remain that way.
No comments:
Post a Comment