AA Gill's animal desires

Bad taste in Sap Rising

More than halfway through Sap Rising, AA Gill’s brazenly disgusting debut novel from 1996, two men in a restaurant fight over a woman’s affections. Tony, the crazier of the two, decides that a test of primal masculinity is in order. ‘Did you think she’d go for a little effete spiv like you?’ he says, unzipping his fly and revealing his ‘great cock’ to the dining room. Charles, the closest thing the novel has to a character with an interior life, knows he can’t compete. ‘Look at this alpha male,’ he thinks, ‘she’s his, you fool.’

This wouldn’t rank in the novel’s top five most ridiculous moments. It might even be based on a real event: legend has it that Marco Pierre White once whipped out and brandished his manhood in front of a pair of diners in his own restaurant. But it does highlight both Gill’s pornographic mindset and his tenuous grasp on male psychology. And, yes, female psychology, too: the woman goes home with Tony (before boomeranging back to Charles a bit later).

Gill’s initial foray into fiction – he published his second (and final) novel, Starcrossed, in 1999 – was punished by critics. Nicholas Lezard wrote that Gill’s obsession with sex ‘merits some kind of professional inquiry’. My paperback edition is branded with warnings: ‘Do not buy this book’ (Guardian); ‘Frightful pile of garbage’ (New Statesman); ‘Extremely badly written, hideously and unamusingly obscene’ (AN Wilson). Other design choices help to give the book a lurid sex-shop vibe: on the cover Gill’s name is stamped in hot pink against a lime green background, with an illustration, by the author himself, of a knife-shaped dog, narrow and serrated, holding a bra in its mouth. No one involved in the production of this book was trying to convey literary ambition or virtue.

‘Journalism is success, writing books is achievement,’ Gill told Lynn Barber in 2000. That doesn’t quite explain Sap Rising, which is less valuable, less of an achievement, than his best journalism. It is, perhaps, an achievement of nerve. If nothing else it stands as a monument to a decadent time in publishing, when advances were lavish and plentiful, and to be a novelist was to attract a certain incontestable prestige which could not be earned through writing about restaurants and television.

The rickety partition between journalists and novelists has always been easily kicked aside, but from the mid-1990s to mid-2000s any hack with a photo next to their byline was trying their luck. Many of these novels are out of print and unremembered. Jay Rayner’s The Marble Kiss, Jane Moore’s Fourplay, James Delingpole’s Fish Show, Rod Liddle’s Love Will Destroy Everything, Amanda Platell’s Scandal, Richard Littlejohn’s To Hell in a Handcart, Giles Coren’s Winkler. Among them were a couple of mega-sellers that you can still find in your local Oxfam bookshop: Tony Parsons’s Man and Boy and Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It.

Fellow journalists had plenty of reasons to hate Sap Rising before they even read it. Gill was unusually talented, a true stylist who didn’t start writing until his 30s, after a long spell of alcoholism and a fruitless go at being an artist. Not only did Gill skip the requisite stages on his way to broadsheet supremacy, he was paid more than pretty much everyone else. His critical and commercial failure would have been sweet ambrosia to his competition – until they realised that on Sunday, as always, there would arrive another few thousand words astringent enough to cut through the schadenfreude.

And so 25 years later Sap Rising is a curiosity, a half-forgotten embarrassment. When Gill died in 2016, the obituaries skated over his fiction. The Times Register mentioned in passing that he had written ‘several novels that received terrible reviews’ – the minor inaccuracy is telling: two novels or several? Does it matter? They are beside the point.

Sap Rising is a disaster, but it’s such a multifarious disaster that it becomes interesting, like Plan 9 from Outer Space, or the Spider-Man musical. Its opening sentences set the tone: ‘If you were a pigeon you could fuck forty times a day. It is something to be borne in mind when you are filling out the form for reincarnation.’ This is a novel about sex – inescapably so – but it also aspires to be about the ageless natural world, the English soul, deep time. Not your typical left-handed jeu d'esprit.

Most of the characters live around Buchan Gardens, a prosperous area of London that ‘isn’t really anywhere’. Angel, an ‘old-fashioned gardener’, spends much of his day doing old-fashioned gardener things, such as ‘wanking into seed packets and eating earth.’ Lord Vernon is a gay, Welsh Tory and ‘quite probably the most easily and remorselessly mocked adult male outside sheltered accommodation.’ Unfortunately for Vernon, no one despises him more than his own author. Vernon doesn’t walk, he ‘minces’ or ‘mimsily gallop[s]’. When he experiences ‘buttock-clenching envy’ – itself a godforsaken cliché – Gill makes sure we get the joke: ‘buttock clenching was not something he practised often.’

Charles is a jobless, wealthy aesthete with modestly sized but ‘sensationally elegant genitalia’. Bryony is an older woman who uses extravagantly foul language (all the words you can think of, including that one – and, yes, that one, too). Mona is an actress from Hollywood’s golden age who dies after about 80 pages. In the novel’s most notorious scene, her pet dog has sex with her corpse (I’ll get to this).

Then there’s Lily Ng, a Vietnamese cleaner who would rather seduce her employer than fulfil her job description. The passages involving Lily are so bad, so heartbreakingly stupid, that I don’t want to reproduce them here. It is enough to say that she is pelted with every racist stereotype you can imagine and, to my mind, represents the nadir of Gill’s writing – worse than the Wales skirmish, the Mary Beard aggro, the baboon blow-up.

A plot synopsis would be futile. The characters bump into each other to no real effect or purpose, like driverless dodgems. The novel exists as an overflow pipe for Gill’s worst tendencies, the flights of lunacy that his editors at the Sunday Times or Vanity Fair would never tolerate. 'I built up this sort of well of unwritten sex,’ he told Barber in 2000. ‘I would play endless jokes with the subs, trying to get rude bits in – I invented a restaurant called the Pork Trombone – but they always took it out.’

Free of the impeccable judgement and good taste of newspaper editors, Gill serves up his filthiest daydreams. The dog-fucks-corpse set piece goes on for roughly eight paragraphs and is described with a mix of relish and disgust. There’s a Freudian (I mean Lucian) eye for human flesh at its most unattractive. The dead body of Mona suggests ‘a pose from a cheap porn mag. Her sex and buttocks gapped and sagged, pathetically obscene now they were beyond shame.’ What’s more, she is being straddled by a ‘large smooth-coated Alsatian’. The witnesses look on in dazed astonishment, until they can’t: ‘There are animals and animal desires man simply cannot outface.’ All very solemn, but not without bursts of ornate toilet humour:

The dog’s thin, sticky pink cock wagged obscenely, blindly probing the corpse’s backside… His flanks heaved and his legs convulsed and twitched as spasms of salt, sweet, hot DNA sinfully leapt a million years of natural selection and avidly squirmed into the decaying uterus.

Leave it to Angel the old-fashioned gardener to explain things: ‘What you saw was the final parting of two devoted lovers.’

What is the point of this? The overwrought, manhandled prose is not wholly comic. Gill is flailing for higher significance, sweating out every adjective (‘I couldn’t tell you what an adjective is,’ he once claimed) while relying on sub-Viz gags when he needs to catch his breath. But the word choices are telling: obscene, shame, obscenely, sinfully. This is a purge, an exorcism, a perverse rebellion against success.

Elsewhere, bad taste of a different kind abounds. A church congregant rocks in his chair ‘like an autistic child at a disco.’ Tony’s gargantuan member is compared to ‘a sub-normal child’ which ‘lolled and dribbled and bumped into things.’ None of this is surprising from a restaurant critic who once compared a tough steak to ‘fat-slag thigh’, but if you're going to risk free-standing jokes in a novel, they shouldn't be anything less than hilarious. ‘He performed cunnilingus like a peckish raccoon eating stewed prunes.’ This is sound over sense, and it’s not funny enough. ‘Vernon sucked like a child trying to unblock a milk-shake straw.’ Beware of evoking childhood in close proximity to a blowjob. Other excesses are innocuous but clumsy. A chauffeur leaps to open a door ‘like a Butlin’s magician with a big finale.’ Who, in this milieu, would have ever visited a Butlin’s resort?

In 1999 Gill directed a pornographic film called Hot House Tales, starring Ron Jeremy, and in 2012 GQ published an excerpt from the script. It, too, features a Vietnamese woman called Lily – or ‘Lilly’. ‘So jo you wan blow job?’ goes some of her dialogue. ‘Fuckie? Our [sic] you do me like a lil' boy?’  It is worth noting that on this occasion Gill might have actually toned down the filth. Even a porn actress would quail at reading Sap Rising’s ripest lines. But maybe he was on to something; if tyro novelists (and poets, and playwrights) could be encouraged to turn to porn, instead of clogging up the arteries of approved culture, they might find a more welcoming outlet for their creative ideals.

‘I like it that my work is ephemeral, that it will be on the bottom of the parrot’s cage tomorrow,’ said Gill in 2015. Fortunately much of his non-fiction is still available in book form. He planned to write more novels after Starcrossed but they never materialised – maybe there was some kind of friendly intervention (‘Adrian, please, for the sake of the children’) or his publishers finally tapped out. His best journalism, especially his travel features, collected in AA Gill is Away and AA Gill is Further Away, are full of brilliant, merciless observations. It is a delight to be carried round in his head, seeing through his eyes, roaming the streets of, say, Monaco, among the ‘trailer-trash aristocracy’. Fiction is different – you make the world, you don’t merely describe it, and while dreaming up characters only to tear them down is a victimless crime, it’s also squalid, enervating.

Near the end of Sap Rising we are introduced to a gang of archaeologists who are dredging up the central garden in the hope of finding ancient, preserved poo. It could be just another strange detour, another chance to turn the reader’s stomach. Or maybe Gill wants to communicate something more profound than coprophilia. He stops the novel in its tracks to allow a shit collector his elemental, excremental sermon:

There is nothing in the world as expressive, as honest, as open, as informative as shit… What’s jewellery and ornaments? Lies, snobbery and artifice. What are buildings, temples and houses? Merely the shells and hubris. Coins, treasure? Just money. No, this is the stuff of humanity; this is life’s rich tapestry.