Man Booker Prize 2002

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Still Here
Linda Grant

James Heartfield

Pushing fifty, Liverpool-Jewish, Guardian columnist Linda Grant, interviewed in her own paper about her third novel Still Here insisted that the pushing fifty, Liverpool-Jewish Guardian-writing heroine Alix Rebick is not meant to be autobiographical. But this is transparently a fantasy re-working of the author's life.

Told from her own point of view, Alix's talents as a thinker and lover are thwarted by others' mediocre inability to recognise them. Alix blames her undergraduate students for ignorance (where any teacher knows their ignorance is why there are teachers). She blames the 'sexual revolution' for leaving her alone in her late forties. She blames woolly-minded liberals for not understanding her insights into human evil - a failing they share with this reader.

Grant's other person perspective, American-Israeli investor Joseph Shields is not really a character, but a pool for Narcissa Rebick to reflect in: 'She really was amazing', he gushes, 'I'd never met anyone like her, what a tough babe'. Such day-dreams are not for the printed page.

Like a dodgy CV for a suspicious employer, too much of Alix Rebick's life does not ring true. The LSE did not offer a Masters in Criminology in the seventies (the subject did not break free from sociology till the eighties) and does not offer an MA to this day, but an MSc. Nobody ever got hounded out of academia for down-marking a student who praised Myra Hindley, nor would have. There are no secret skin-cream formulas outside Laboratoire Garnier to make the family fortune.

Rebick's quaint belief that all forward movement in the world is located in the America her immigrant forebears never reached would have been a good theme - but that her creator plainly shares it wholeheartedly. Grant gives us a plot cliché of the American entrepreneur come to save the run-down European city - and the tough local interlocutor as heroine - that belongs to the era of the Marshall plan, and not to that of Liverpool's current bid for European city of culture status. Liverpool's decline, lazily invoked as a metaphor for ageing was due to the falling influence of the Atlantic trade to British business, its renovation to European, not least Irish, prosperity.

Compared to Beryl Bainbridge's, Alan Bleasdale's, or even Carla Lane's, Grant's Liverpool seems as authentic as the potted history in a city council brochure. And despite her many references to Liverpool's Jewish community, which gave us such fantastic gargoyles as George Melly and Edwina Currie, the Rebicks are modishly un-Jewish Jews: they have little time for family or home, are surprisingly unemotional, marry out, have no observance you would notice, and identify with a secular, political Israel, not a religion.

Alix Rebick's older woman sexual frustration has a gruesome fascination, though you cannot help feel that she just wants to be loved, more than fucked (forgive me for following Grant's turn of phrase). Alix's difficulties remind me of homosexual pioneer Quentin Crisp's dilemma that he could not love a man who would be so unmanly as to love him. Grant/Rebick announces herself as unattractive, but her descriptions dwell so lasciviously on her body that the reader does not believe that Grant thinks so, even if Rebick does. But both know that Joseph Shields cannot find her physically attractive, and hope instead that he will admire her for her wit and intellect. But Alix has none of the love of knowledge of an academic, or mental rigour of a true moralist, only the corn-pone opinions of the newspaper columnist Grant.

James Heartfield is author of The 'Death of the Subject' Explained, available at GBP11.00, plus GBP1.00 p&p from Publications, audacity.org, 8 College Close, Hackney, London, E9 6ER. Make cheques payable to 'Audacity Ltd'