Nothing brings brighter sparkles of joy to the eyes of us readers of fiction than a catalogue of other people's woes. Lovelorn Lorna Pearson, the principal character of Wendy Perriam's new novel, could hardly be more profoundly woebegone. From early orphanhood to the brink of menopause, she suffers all sorts of catastrophes and frustrations and is exposed to intimate previews of worse to come in the physical, mental and financial decline of senility, writes Patrick Skene Catling
Peter Owen, one of London's few independently idiosyncratic publishers, calls the book another of the author's "wickedly black comedies". It is much blacker than comic, so may possibly serve as an effective inoculation against tragic reality. The title is bivalent, presumably referring to Yeats's plea to tread softly on his dreams, and to the fact that Lorna must tread softly because she has a bunion.
"Bunions," Perriam points out in her very first paragraph, cause pedal "distortion, swelling, constant pain. Agony in bed at night". She goes on to provide sufficient doctorspeak to satisfy the most masochistic hypochondriac: "subluxated toes," "a transfer metatarsalgia," "planter digital neuroma". That's a lot of foot-ache. Lorna is bedevilled by irreversible surgical malpractice, and spends much of the novel hobbling about on crutches.
She has always been unlucky. When she was a small girl, her father drunkenly killed her mother and himself in a car crash. As an orphan, brought up by her Aunt Agnes, she was committed to a boarding school, where she was treated as a pariah. Her husband is a loser, addicted to alcohol and to smoking a pipe. He sells "artificial grass," like Astroturf, until doomed to bankruptcy. He cannot be relied on to sustain a satisfactory erection. Lorna's libido is greater than her sexual opportunities.
During her stay in a first-class hospital, she is too nauseous to appreciate the haute cuisine. In a third-class nursing home, the cuisine is the lowest, and the staff are negligent and rude. A friend says: "At least you got out of hospital alive - that's something, I suppose. Did you see the programme last week about medical negligence? I was utterly appalled. Nearly sixty thousand people die every year just from being in hospital."
Lorna learns the case history of one of her fellow inmates. "Some cretin of a doctor yanked out her womb when she was only twenty-nine, as a cure for depression. And when she complained about hot flushes they silenced her with years of electric shock treatment."
Unsurprisingly, forlorn Lorna is subject to nightmares, panic attacks and frequent subconscious critical heckling by an alter ego she calls "the Monster". This subversion is inadequately countered by memories of her aunt's fatuous homilies, urging her to look on the bright side. Lorna doesn't learn of her aunt's gallant self-sacrifices until she visits her on her hospice death-bed.
Perriam's description of the confusion and incontinence of old age makes Kingsley Amis's geriatric horror-comedy Ending Up seem blithely frolicsome. Tread Softly is dreary in the extreme, and yet its dreariness is anatomised so skilfully, in such relentlessly clinical detail, that it is almost sure to make most readers feel well off; indeed, curiously exhilarated.
Patrick Skene Catling is a writer and critic
Tread Softly. By Wendy Perriam. Peter Owen, 324pp. £15.99 sterling.