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The Review - BOOKS
 
From Pointless Park to Karl Marx Square

Why are the middle-class such a worried lot? Peter Gruner finds out from Alexei Sayle

The Weeping Women Hotel
by Alexei Sayle
Sceptre, £12.99

THERE’S an evocative scene in Alexei Sayle’s new book when one of the main characters, Harriet, goes to a gym called Muscle Bitch where there are “demented women running on treadmills with crazed expressions”.

Somehow in The Weeping Women Hotel everyone is running, desperate to keep up with appearances, or with their more successful and wealthy or wise neighbours and friends.
Sayle says that as well as being a comedy, his novel takes on some serious issues. He delights in pricking middle-class pretensions, like the elevation of gardeners to “tree surgeons”.
“These days everyone gets a standing ovation for something,” he says.
His own background is distinctly left-wing – his parents were dyed-in-the-wool communists. And in the book, in the best traditions of the social commentator, he is as keen to take humorous pot shots at all levels of society. There are sly political digs. He mentions that “Marxists are taking over the magazine Puppetry Today” – an oblique reference to the huge perceived influence of the former magazine Marxism Today, which appeared at a time of fears about communist infiltration in the media.
The novel weaves an unpredictable and darkly humorous tale set in north London, around the rigidly landscaped ‘Pointless Park’, where over-priced gastropubs, gyms and focaccia-eaters are colonising former working class areas. Local shops close down to be reopened as a ‘f***ing Starbucks”.
Bloomsbury resident Sayle is strongly opposed to the loss of small shops, but he urges action rather than moaning and mourning.
He tells me: “People are right to be concerned, but it is up to them to support the small businesses. A Bagel Factory opened in Lambs Conduit Street – and closed down through lack of support.”
His novel deftly captures the female voice, particularly in his portrayal of Harriet, mousy and overweight, who keeps a tally of her friends’ phone calls and is petrified of offending anybody.
Helen is her beautiful, over-achieving sister, and Toby is Helen’s peculiar husband, a charity worker for the Penrith Fairground Disaster Fund, whose main purpose is to “avoid giving any money to anybody involved in any way in the great Penrith Fairground Disaster”.
Sayle’s wicked humour takes a sideswipe at middle-class preoccupations. Enjoyable dinner-party talk with Harriet’s sister’s circle of friends centres around “furious anger about speed cameras, parking fines and getting clamped” (when they are feeling calm), or mini-breaks and holidays, when something might be threatening their protective bubble. Decidedly “fat and ugly”, and keen to turn her life around, Harriet hires a personal trainer – Patrick – who leads Harriet in deranged (and rather vicious) martial arts classes, which involve hurling herself from trees and being kicked in the shins.
Harriet isn’t completely convinced about Patrick’s cult-like discipline. However, the exercise certainly seems to have an effect, and Harriet is slowly transformed from “pot-bellied and lumpy” into a confident stunning beauty.
Sayle mixes the mundane normalities of life with the unexpected, and downright absurd. His eccentric characters are instantly recognisable.
Even Harriet’s sensible sister has her own peculiarities, in the form of her inner voice of confirming righteousness, Julio Spuciek – Argentinean political prisoner and puppeteer, whom she consults on every major decision in her life and is a constant reassurance that she’s doing the right thing.
The novel both challenges and confirms stereotypes, holding up a mirror to north London society, and showing the cracks. In short, witty sentences or hilarious situations, Sayle manages to address many topical issues, including class, immigration and the changing face of Britain – new town and tarmacked – which is personified by Pointless Park with its blank walls and metal fencing.
This is all very far from the world of Harriet’s childhood ‘up north’ when parks were parks, bandstands and all. Sayle asserts that: “Those into whose charge fell the open spaces during the 1960s were having none of that malarkey – they couldn’t quite explain to you how a bandstand could be oppressive of racial minorities while simultaneously putting down women, they just knew that it somehow did.”
Harriet’s physical and spiritual journey in the novel is often strange and surreal. She befriends her Namibian gangster neighbours, who used to dump rubbish on her porch, and of whom she was once terrified.
The ringleader of this gang, a Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro, turns out to be a rather insightful man, and Harriet enjoys the company of him and his group, finding that they are not bound by ‘parking tickets, planning regulations and refraining from putting your rubbish out until after 8.30 at night’.
Through another male character, Sayle shows a certain sympathy for women. “It occurs to me you all worry too much, all you women… you know when I am in the newsagents I look at the men’s magazines and there’s hundreds of them about their many hobbies – trains, guns, cars, sailing, Asian women with enormous breasts. But then I look at the women’s magazines and I see every one of them is to do with self-improvement, a constant striving to make yourselves one hundred per cent perfect. Lose weight, get fitter, speak Chinese, knit this, weave that.”
Sayle’s writing style is sharply witty and his characters imaginative and offbeat, making this a rich, funny and endlessly inventive novel.
Speaking about his desolate creation, Pointless Park, Sayle says even this is not without its beauty.
In the novel, he brings the park alive with a multi-cultural food fete organised by Columbian immigrants and the Communist Party. Perhaps this feeling is born of his admitted affection for some of north London’s more apparently unappealing edifices, such as Wood Green Shopping City, of which he says: “It does have a certain monumental style to it. You can find a sort of beauty in the most unlikely places.”
Talking about life imitating art, Sayle expresses an interest in the quirky proposal to celebrate Marx’s local connections – he was buried in Highgate cemetery and lived in Kentish Town – by renaming Archway Mall, Karl Marx Square.
The proposal for a themed walk to the cemetery and a museum received such displeasure from the Tories in the House of Commons that they put down an Early Day Motion suggesting it would be an insult to the millions who died under communism.
Sayle says: “Marx was a remarkable philosopher – a man of ideas – but obviously things didn’t go quite according to plan. He did a lot of his most creative work in London. But we should distinguish Marx from those who came after him and claimed to represent his ideas.”
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