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| REVIEWS | BY JANE WRIGHT |
 Michael Arditti on his chaise lounge |
Good Clean Fun by Michael Arditti Maia, £8.99 IT’S been a tough few years for Michael Arditti. His last novel, Easter, about homosexuality, hypocrisy and the Anglican church, sparked a furore when it was published four years ago. Despite critical acclaim, and support from austere fellow novelist Muriel Spark and some nuns, the devout churchgoer says: “I was reviled for it. Sermons were preached against the book and there was lots of nasty stuff on the internet.” Soon afterwards, he was rushed to hospital, then marooned for months up three flights of stairs in his Primrose Hill flat, after superbugs gnawed away lumbar discs at the base of his spine. Now he can no longer take a bath or carry shopping and only gets comfortable to talk by lying back almost horizontally on a faded pink chaise lounge. And the cause of all this misery? Nothing more risky than eating a piece of unpasteurised cheese. He remains philosophical. “I’ve seen lots of people die young of Aids. And I suffered from severe depression in my 20s, which I was lucky to survive. So I’m not bitter now, just resigned.” Nevertheless, after all this, you can see why he might have felt the need to let his hair down. The result is a book of short stories with the uplifting title Good Clean Fun. The novelist says: “Short stories can be very liberating: small canvases of individuals with just one story to tell. “And, with 12 stories to choose from, if you as a reader don’t like the hazelnut, you can try the coffee cream.” However, Arditti maintains there is also a satisfying unity about the collection: “All the stories look obliquely at gay lives, although frequently from a different and unusual perspective, not of the gay people themselves, but others connected with them.” So there’s the 60-year-old wife in The Pillar of Strength, the star-struck shop assistant in Visiting Hour and Arditti’s own favourite, the nine-year-old boy in Uncle Brian, where he revelled in the challenge of getting the narrative voice right. But the story which gives its title to the collection focuses on an old-fashioned camp comedian from a previous era. Arditti teases: “I won’t say who it’s based on, but you’ve probably guessed. Well, the only way this character can obtain legitimacy is by making himself a joke. But this is dangerous. “As a public persona, it’s important for him to tell the truth.” He admits the title Good, Clean Fun is thus heavy with irony as a summary of some gay lives, while insisting: “There is wit in there to leaven the bleakness.” Some of the stories are equally far from clean. Virtual Love, for example, contains a graphic description of rape. Arditti comments: “Some are a bit racier. But Virtual Love is a very moral story, about how the internet is not just dangerous for children, but for adults too. It gives you a feeling of control over people, which can spell danger for how you then begin to interact with the real world. It’s about the gap between fantasy and reality, when fantasy is inevitably more attractive.” After three novels with gay protagonists, and now Good Clean Fun, he insists he is writing, not just for gays, but for everyone: “This is not gay fiction, it’s fiction about gay people. I’m very pleased I’m not ghettoised in bookshops, and that all my work is on the general shelves. A lot of universal human emotions – love, loneliness, relationships with parents, going to prison – can be more acute for people not in the mainstream. “Their experiences can throw light on those of other people.” As a gay Anglican, Arditti’s struggles with the Christian beliefs he says he has “never not held” appear a case in point. How much harder it must be to follow a faith, when swathes of your fellow believers want to exclude you. However, Arditti has found a spiritual abode at St Mark’s Church in Primrose Hill, just a few doors down from his home of nearly 20 years in Regent’s Park Road. He says: “St Mark’s is extremely accepting of me and many more gay people. Gays and lesbians have as much to give to and get from the church as anyone else. “Of course what the Bible says matters. “But it’s only a spiritual guide. Yet evangelical Christians spout it like it was the Thoughts of Chairman Mao.” The cash-strapped Church of England’s caution in not alienating its rich evangelical wing, which is strongly opposed to gays, is all to do with money, adds Arditti. He is more upset by what he sees as a failure of leadership from the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, after Canon Jeffrey John was last year persuaded to stand down from being named the first openly gay (if non-practising) bishop in the Church of England. The novelist says: “I hoped Rowan Williams would take a stand. I’m disappointed he feels more of a politician than a prophet.” But writing Easter seems to have purged Arditti’s immediate need to explore these issues in fiction. A new novel, Unity, written at the same time as he was completing Good Clean Fun and due to be published in spring 2005, has no main characters who are homosexual. Instead, he says: “I wanted to explore the nature of evil. In my lifetime, that means the Holocaust.” So the book examines British aristocrat Unity Mitford’s friendship with Adolf Hitler “very experimentally”, from the perspective of a director making a film about it in 1977. Through this device, Arditti can parallel his theme with the activities of German left-wing terrorists the Baader-Meinhof gang, who in that year murdered leading industrialist – and alleged former Nazi – Hans-Martin Schleyer. Arditti says: “They put their own cause above human life, which is the same as fascism.” Michael Arditti now only eats cheese in plastic wrappers. In his fiction too, he says: “It’s time to move on.” |
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