Stewart Home

“Some of us aren't meant to belong. Some of us have to turn the world upside down and shake the hell out of it until we make our own place in it.” British author Stewart Home undoubtedly recognized the truth in this Elizabeth Lowell quote since, after all, Stewart vowed never to work another day in his life following three months as a factory worker at age sixteen.

My aim is to expand my literary horizons in 2018. To this end I'll be reading and reviewing a number of books published in the 80s and 90s by High Risk Books/Serpent's Tail. Here's what one reviewer had to say about Slow Death: "This is the kind of book that gives mindless violence and sexual degradation a bad name." Whoa! Immediately makes it to number one on my list.

Show Death, among his fifteen published anti-novels listed on Stewart Home’s website – and that’s anti-novel as in refusing to be part of or have anything to do with banal or traditional or conventional "novels.”

Slow Death, published as part of the High Risk Books/Serpent’s Tail list to takes its place among the transgressive, edgy American prose of William Burroughs and Kathy Acker. If you are among the fans of either Burroughs or Acker, you are primed for Slow Death.

Slow Death pinballs back and forth between skinheads lead by boot boy John Hodges aka Johnny Aggro on one side and members of the hip contemporary London art scene on this other. Just so happens Johnny’s crash pad on the twenty-third floor of a post-war blighted building overlooking Chrisp Steet Market is separated by the thinnest of walls from the studio of two Andy Warhol wannabes, a man and a women who like to be called Aesthetics and Resistance.

This quick shift of focus – skinheads to art scene, art scene to skinheads – kicks Stewart Home’s anti-novel into high gear. Did I say kick? Many are the hairy creeps and Marxist bozos who have their teeth and ribs kicked in by boot boy’s boots. Serves them right for attending a hippie concert or hawking their subversive newspapers on street corners.

Slow Death makes for fast reading. None of that Irvine Welsh mauling of the English language into regional or local dialect. Every single sentence is clear and crisp. No need to consult a dictionary; no being slowed down by ornamental, flowery prose - Stewart Home wrote to be read at a brisk pace.

Oodles and oodles of explicit sex and extreme violence but all of it the Dell comic book variety. One scene has Johnny jumping out an upper story window to swoop down on five brawny Marxists, beat their faces to bloody pulps, breaks ribs with his boots. I could easily see a one-word balloon in each of the comic book frames: Whack! Wham! Smash! Pow!

As readers we stand back at a good distance to take it all in: the characters have no depth to speak of or endearing qualities or even a past they are obliged to deal with. Nor do their actions, even when destructive or lethal to the max, have any real consequences. And when it comes to messy stuff like parents or teachers, brothers or sisters, spouses or babies – completely nonexistent. Who needs trash like that when you are a sexually charged skinhead or genius artist on the rise to fame?

All the disgusting skinhead sex and violence is hardly restricted to lower class blokes. Even an educated professional gets in on the action. One of the main characters, thirty-year-old respected physician Dr. Maria Walker seeks out Johnny to satisfy her animal desires, an unending hunger for sadistic, grungy debasement.

One of the funniest bits of Slow Death is communist art critic Jock Graham turning Christian fundamentalist. “Graham drew strength from his newly discovered faith in the Christian religion and thus fortified, set out on a mission to save the world from evil conspirators.” According to our new crusader for Christ, the prime evil conspirators are those demonic artists displaying their art and flaunting their Satanic ideas under the banner of Neoism in order to destroy civilization.

Slow Death satirizes the whole contemporary London art scene as one big con job comprised of no-talent glory hounds using esoteric theories to justify their production of sheer rubbish. Artists, gallery owners, financial backers, art collectors - all set bleeding from the barbs of Stewart Home’s caustic lampoons.

What are we to make of Slow Death? My sense is those months as a sensitive teenager forced into grimy, grungy factory work made its impression on the author. As art historian Ananda Coomarasway observed: “Industry without art is brutality.” If factory work is brutalizing and dehumanizing, where do we turn to see work that is the free flowering of the greatest and most inspiring of human activity? Why, the work of artists. But what if it turns out artists lack the skill or inclination to create art worthy of serious engagement and only produce crap? We then can say: Art without art is brutality. An entire culture of degradation without end. No wonder there is such an easy crossover between skinhead Johnny and the art world.… (mere)