The Dark Part of Me
Belinda Burns Atlantic Books, 297pp, £9.99
ISBN 1843545004
It's never a good sign when a novel is so full of bonking that the author runs out of ways to describe The Deed. Belinda Burns, who is a graduate of Bath Spa's MA programme in creative writing and recipient of the PFD literary agency's prize for the best novel to result from that year's course, exhausts the sex thesaurus fairly quickly in her first book, but not for want of trying.
It's fair to say that Burns's narrator, Rosie, a teenage Brisbane native sick of her plasticky home town, has a bit of a one-track mind. Two tracks, at most, if you include her marrow- deep contempt for her alcoholic dad and flaky, obsessive-compulsive mum. Mainly it's Rosie's overwhelming urge to "root" - Aussie slang for copulation - that propels her through life. If she's not poking around her own nether regions, using whatever she's got to hand as an aid to frottic joy, she's dreaming of someone else doing it for her: preferably Scott, a sweaty berk in the mould of every young male character that has ever featured in Neighbours or Home and Away.
Aptly, her desire to root is a symptom of her desire to be rooted, in the existential sense. She appears, like Scott and her friends - the experienced hedonist Trish and nouveau-riche siblings Hollie and Danny - to lack a centre: each of them is one giant id, a widening gyre of selfishness, self-gratification and self-unawareness. The only way that Rosie's peers can contribute to her life, it seems, is by using their bodies, and not their minds or hearts. She craves Scott's sex, Trish's speedy drugs, Hollie and Danny's unsettlingly tactile relationship, but not their love or wisdom.
Then again, that's probably because they don't seem to have much of either to spare. They are, literally, very sad people. They may be heading towards adulthood, but with little relish and certainly without a sense of their own value, in their own lives or in those of others. It's all pretty grim: every euphoric moment is purely physical, induced either by drugs or by loveless orgasm. They lack the kernel of "mind" - the part of themselves that is social and lives for meaningful emotional engagement with others - that makes life worth the struggle.
Burns, you begin to deduce, doesn't have a lot of time for Brizzie "burbia" or the shell-like half-lives of those she left behind. This is where the problem of the book lies. In trying to tell a joyless tale through the eyes of its protagonists, Burns has made the story itself about as enjoyable as eating dry bran flakes. Sure, it's as saucy as anything you'll find on a shelf you can reach without the use of a stepladder, but the overall effect is coarse and empty rather than unnerving. When Rosie tries to emulate the tawdry moves of a stripper in her bedroom mirror, it's like reading an obstetrician's case notes. Every lustful encounter with Scott is accompanied by a miniature anatomy lesson.
You're left wondering quite what the intention of Burns's incessant sex-mongering is meant to be. It's certainly not comic: we're reminded very forcefully at every turn that sex is HOT, SWEATY, DIRTY and that it HURTS. OK, then; but isn't it also fun? Rosie's mother's late-blooming relationship with the hapless Randy has the potential to lighten the mood, but the only image it conjures up is the off-putting one of Harold Bishop trying to get it on with Helen Daniels - not a pretty sight.
For all Burns's attempts to lampoon the materialistic and history-denying lives of the Australian lower middle class, she never quite hits the target. Unfortunately for a first novel that is intended to represent the best of its kind, the writing simply isn't good enough. You wouldn't expect a literary novel to remind you constantly of a knocked-off soap episode, but it does. It has characters that say "Just go", to which the reply is "Fine" and a slammed door (which probably falls off its hinges just out of shot). It has more implausible sub-plots than a telenovela. Simply, it just never quite convinces.
Lynsey Hanley's book about the history of the council estate, "Estates: an intimate history", will be published by Granta next year
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