What a treat it is for a change to read a book centred on an utterly villainous character with no redeeming qualities \u2014 and it\u2019s even better that he\u2019s funny too. The Unspeakable Skipton, published in 1959, introduces us to \u201cDaniel Skipton, Englishman, resident in Bruges\u201d. Skipton is a novelist, looks like a carrion crow, and claims to be a \u201cKnight of the Most Noble Order of SS. Cyril and Methodius\u201d.<\/p>\n
He is a toad. He is toxic and terrible. \u201cShut up,\u201d he tells a shopkeeper. \u201cYou tart,\u201d he says to his landlady\u2019s daughter. \u201cFat miser,\u201d he calls the cousin (\u201cFlabby Anne\u201d) whose handouts he relies upon for income. Yes, Skipton is on his uppers. His latest novel has been rejected by his former publisher, a novel in which Skipton pillories \u201ceveryone who had ever insulted or injured him\u201d \u2014 including the publisher. \u201cTo work on this book was perhaps the greatest pleasure [he] had ever known.\u201d If all that were not a bad enough mark of his character, he even wears socks with individual toes.<\/p>\n
Skipton reads as much like a great stage or screen performance as a literary figure \u2014 there\u2019s something of Basil Fawlty<\/a> or Alan Partridge<\/a> in him and, like those men, he is often surrounded by people who are even worse than he is. Skipton needs a plan to make money, you see, and latches on to a group of English visitors to Bruges, headed by Dorothy Merlin, a verse dramatist whose plays sound even worse than Skipton\u2019s novels. \u201cI stand alone,\u201d she declaims, adding without modesty, \u201cThat does not necessarily mean that I am better than others. That would not be for me to say.\u201d<\/p>\n So Skipton sucks up to them, offering to \u201cpay my formal respects to a great woman dramatist\u201d, and seeks to freeload off them, such as taking them to a sex show that he can\u2019t afford to go to himself. But he has another scheme. He knows a bit about art, and arranges with a local antique dealer to find a gullible patsy who will pay over the odds for a junk painting if Skipton can get a cut of the profits.<\/p>\n And so the players are wound up and set off. Back and forward they go, all centring round Skipton\u2019s twin poles of desperation for money and his hatred for more or less everyone else in the world. He is driven by it: \u201cRage tore at him like the fox in the cloak and he adored its fangs.\u201d He must maintain a fa\u00e7ade of gentility and financial comfort while steering his new friends away from ever seeing his shabby rented room and \u2014 the pathetic, perfect detail \u2014 its \u201clittle line of washing\u201d. We get some sober insight into Skipton\u2019s torment too: it was not in him, we\u2019re told, to like people; \u201che did not even like, though he admired, himself\u201d.<\/p>\n As the story rolls on, there are hairpins and switchbacks, and at one point his publisher even gets a little conciliatory. \u201cWhy on earth don\u2019t you come back to England?\u201d he writes to Skipton. \u201cYou would at least get free medical services and free teeth to bite your friends with.\u201d But he is too far in now. And although the ultimate outcome is not hard to predict, the way it comes about is twisty and satisfying.<\/p>\n \u2022 Read more book reviews and interviews \u2014 and see what\u2019s top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n Skipton, we\u2019re told in a brief author\u2019s note, was inspired by Frederick Rolfe, the deeply eccentric author of the cult classic novel Hadrian the Seventh<\/a>. But there\u2019s a little of him, I suspect, in every author who is never quite satisfied with the acclaim bestowed upon them. The title echoes Saki\u2019s The Unbearable Bassington, and there\u2019s something of that book\u2019s misanthropic glee here too.<\/p>\n Pamela Hansford Johnson was the author of almost thirty novels, and had a romance in her youth with Dylan Thomas before marrying the writer CP Snow. (It was widely agreed, according to her biographer, that she was the better novelist in the marriage.)<\/p>\n The poet Stevie Smith, with typical excess, claimed that Johnson and Emily Bront\u00eb were \u201cthe two great women novelists\u201d. It would be more accurate to place her alongside other sharp, dark comic novelists of the mid-20th century: Barbara Pym, Muriel Spark, Barbara Comyns. Their work has all been widely reissued in recent years. Pamela Hansford Johnson deserves a full-blooded revival too.<\/p>\n