Rosemary Tonks - The Bloater

Rosemary Tonks, The Bloater (The Boldley Head, 1968)

The Bloater was the third of the six Rosemary Tonks novels, coming after Emir and Opium Fogs. It isn't quite as savage and acerbic as those first two but that isn't saying much. It is just as acutely sensitive to every detail of human behaviour,

'Oh God yes. I knew his wine list routine better than my own. He'll make the same gesture for the umpteenth time while reading it - and, you know something funny? I've grown fond of that gesture while remaining irritated by it.' 

Typically for Rosemary, she's rarely attracted without being repelled at the same time. The first person narrator is called Min and we really must try not to conflate the two of them but it's not always easy. The title refers to her predatory pursuer, an imposing operatic baritone who smells. It's not an attractive title and for the most part it's not an attractive book. Had the title A Night at the Opera not already been used, that would have summarized most of what plot there is beyond the obsessive analysis of themselves and each other that the characters indulge in. But it's not a book, and Rosemary was not a writer, to compromise by presenting things in a favourable light.

The cleverness here is less in the barrage of high-octane brilliancies that come on every page in the first books and elsewhere but in the breadth and scope of the highbrow references with chapter 1 invoking Marx, Freud, Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart and Proust to set a tone that is maintained through such metaphors as Min doing her make-up,

I set to work with the furious energy of Cellini casting Persues in bronze, finishing the work to the last detail, as he did, down to the celebrated toe of the godling.

Apart from the night out to see Falstaff , the setting is the 'electronic sound workshop' which was most 'avant' at the time, a time when Pierre Boulez was a fashion. Rosemary's reliably good taste leads her to find room not only for a dismissive remark about there only being 'bad Boulez' but among the audience for the opera,

You can always tell the Wagnerians, even on a Verdi evening; both men and women seem to be plastered with blue eye-shadow; they swarm through the porticos with mad eyes, they've lived longer, have more terrible opinions, and are definitely uglier than all the rest put together.

If the plot is slight, it provides a strong enough vehicle to carry the welter burden of Rosemary's blistering insights which different readers might find jaundiced, perspicacious, hilarious or very accurate according to their sympathies. It is the sort of genius that in other disciplines - like Alex Higgins, George Best, Keats, Amy Winehouse or, some say, Rimbaud - can't sustain itself and it didn't. Those of us determined enough to seek it out, or be very kindly given the chance to see what we don't have, enter into the forbidden world she did her best to destroy later but we do it in admiration, and from fascination.

Symptoms of a 'high life', like caviar, champagne, the most expensive London hotels and gout provide a sense of a very affluent, and decadent, lifestyle but one can detect the discomfort that runs through all of Rosemary's work in the view of dogs and cats (more likely cats, I'd have thought), that,

On the whole, and again like journalists, any future is to them preferable to their present life, from which they are always escaping. 

There is no point merely observing an apparent trait in animals if you can drag journalists into it for a bit of added disdain while you're at it. And if much of her writing is as unforgiving as that, it isn't done without appropriate, sometimes gentler, touches,

there are large oblong drops of sweat on the B.'s face, like raindrops on a Daimler.

The novels all, to some extent, reach towards resolution, which one might not have expected. They offer the prospect of survival if not quite redemption. Min has a husband, although for most of the time you could be forgiven for not remembering she has, but in a coda in the last few pages, the tone changes after the B.'s grossly observed efforts to add her to his version of Don Giovanni's catalogue, and she looks towards a getaway to Rome with Billy, who might appear more of a 'soulmate'. The reader can only imagine how that might have unravelled in any sequel but I doubt if even Sebastian Faulks would want to try to add Rosemary Tonks to his pastiches. She's not as easy to do as Wodehouse or Ian Fleming.

She has to be my favourite writer, at present at least. One can be tempted into saying the most precipitous things in the heat of the moment. There are two children's books still to see which, given the most unchild-like tone of the rest of her work, would be of some interest and maybe one day I will but without going to even greater lengths to find uncollected pieces, I've gone as far as I can reasonably be expected to go. I understand there are better people than me involved in Tonks Studies. I'm only thrilled to be in on some of the action.  

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Acknowledgements. I am most grateful for having been given sight of Emir, Opium Fogs and The Bloater. They know who they are. It was everything I could think of that I wanted. Such things don't happen every day.