I was aware of Molly
Parkin’s appearances on game shows and in documentaries, where she’d always cut
a larger-than-life figure; a true bohemian, sporting feathered gowns and
turbans and elaborate eye make-up. She was someone fabulous from an earlier era
who was still around and painting outrageously garish canvases in her eighties:
still out there, still making a splash. I was half-aware that, back in the day,
she had published a string of racy novels. Now, at last, I’ve read her first
one, from 1974, ‘Love All’ and I’ve discovered that it’s a delightful, outré
number… a kind of cross between Abfab and Collette.
Our
heroine is Myopia: a divorcee and mother in a fancy Hampstead home in the early
1970s. She’s a woman who feels the need to please everyone, and so falls
instantly for the blandishments and cajolings of all the men whose orbit she
falls into. What a terrible bunch she knocks about with! They’re all alcoholics
or immensely rich, impotent fatties, or emotionally-stunted MPs or her own
batshit crazy father…! Your heart can’t help going out a little to the poor
woman and the way she lurches drunkenly through her days, swigging brandy,
whisky and red wine, stumbling
from one afternoon encounter to the next…
In
many ways it’s deliciously decadent, and you can’t help seeing Myopia as more
liberated and in-control than she claims to be. She dances rings around these
fellas, and she’s having a splendid time – especially when she waltzes off to
Paris for the weekend with her new gay pal, to star in a photo shoot for his
ex’s new collection of designer frocks.
There’s
something intrinsically silly about all the wish-fulfilment and fantasy and the
coincidences at play in this novel. Everyone who turns up is either an
ex-lesbian lover or a red hot brand new paramour who can’t wait to introduce
her to a sexual practice she hasn’t tried out before. But the contrivances and
the daftness don’t really matter. We’re in a fantasy world whizzed up from the
relics of 1974: from Biba and David Hockney’s ghostly portraits of Celia; of
David Bowie dressed as a pirate in red dungarees during his Diamond Dogs
period…
This is the erotic bildungsroman that
the era of glam rock thoroughly deserves, and I was glad to encounter it all
these years later. Myopia really is a heroine of her time – she’s the working
class girl from the seaside café suddenly pitched into this very sophisticated
world of fashionistas and decadent drifters. Hers is a time when this kind of
social mobility was taken for granted, and anyone, from any background, might
wander into the high-life like Myopia does…
Molly
Parkin’s sense of humour lifts this book up, I think. There are lots of novels
about dreary narcissists having the time of their lives. This never gets dull
and it never feels earnest. It’s someone writing with great panache, and with a
tongue firmly in their cheek. ‘We
lay on the bed, Jean and me, naked, covered in boys. There must have been seven
of them, three on her, three on me, and Sergio, that was his name I remember,
he was odd man out. Scrabbling around for any bit of bare flash he could find…’
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