The Girl Who Was Going to Die
Glyn Maxwell Jonathan Cape, 352pp, £12.99
For authors slogging away on £4,000 a year, it must be galling that last year, Crystal, the novel by the glamour girl Jordan, outsold the entire Booker shortlist. Perhaps it was contemplation of this that drove Glyn Maxwell to pen The Girl Who Was Going to Die, an attempt at satire on celebrity culture.
Susan Mantle, the novel’s heroine, becomes an unwilling star of reality TV. When a television crew films her crying – after a clairvoyant has told her that she is going to die – she is misinterpreted as mourning the blown-up number-one superstar of the day, Thomas Byrne. Susan’s image – “beautiful but crying” – is flashed across the world, propelling her into the media maelstrom.
If Maxwell wishes to challenge the corrosive effects of celebrity, he has chosen an odd format with which to do so, as his stylistic gimmicks only distract. Opting to write the entire novel in dialogue – littering it with symbols marking chapters, voices in italics, asterisks to mark breaks, hashes to note answerphones – jars on the brain like TV static. His fussiness is without finesse, merely funking up an average potboiler. When satires work they skim close to the surface and knife the reader by wrenching off the skin unexpectedly. But this is indulgent fare. Maxwell must get closer to the bone.
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