PUSSY
'And I saw a beast rise up out of the sea....'
Dear subscribers one and all,
Now would seem to be a good time to look again at a novel I began writing five minutes after learning that Hillary Clinton had lost the 2016 American Election. It was the dead of night in the United Kingdom when the result was declared. I had been sleeping uneasily, fearing such a result, and woke in a quicksilver terror. It was as though an evil figure had taken residence at the bottom of the bed. I woke my wife. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘No, she said. ‘Yes,’ I said.
In one form or another this was to be a conversation we would go on having for another four years. And now we are about to start having it again. No. Yes.
I don’t expect everybody to feel about the result as I did. The great lesson of the seven years that have elapsed since then is that we must make imaginative space for views that strike us as outlandish. Every heart has its secrets and every intelligence its own way of looking at the world. For me, though, one thing was clear: I had to get that evil figure off my bed, out of the house, out of my head, by writing so fast that my words would have the beating of him. Naive of me. Words win many a battle against evil, but what if this little devil was word-proof? Word-proof but also - if this isn’t a contradiction - illusory. He would be gone, if I didn’t hurry, the winner of this bizarre, implausible election laughed out of power before he had the time to exercise it. I finished the fable in six weeks. It was in the shops six weeks after that.
Not the American shops, I have to say. No American publisher would touch it. Why? I am not the one to ask. The title probably had something to do with it, even though it does no more than reference a word that had cropped up often in Trump’s campaign. One American chat show interviewed me but covered up three of the title’s five letters. P***Y - a test hardly beyond even the world’s worst Wordler.
It might of course have been that American publishers, even those I’d published with previously, simply didn’t think P***Y good enough - a judgement every writer must sometimes accede to however much it hurts. But I gave it little credence at the time and preferred to believe the real problem was American intolerance of English irony when it was turned on them. As proof of this I cite an occurrence at the Hay-on-Wye literary Festival later that year. Bernie Sanders was speaking. Performer to performer, I collared him as we came out of the writers’ tent together, he flanked by bodyguards. I showed him Pussy. . .