Rosalind Belben's novel Is Beauty Good, originally published in 1989 and now reissued by Sheffield indie press And Other Stories, is an eccentric, polyphonic work that defies conventional narrative. The book comprises 30 vignettes, some just a single page, the longest running to nine, divided into three sections: The Insatiable Wheel, Peacock Island, and The Great White Worm.
A Guided Dream
Dreams and dreaming are fertile concerns for Belben, whose fourth book, Dreaming of Dead People, was published in 1979. In Is Beauty Good, she captures the slippery state between dreaming and waking, a hypnagogic edgeland. The chapter Exile begins: “I fall awake and think, I want to go home. But there is no home.” The narrator, likely a woman, “a grizzled, cropped person”, is lost in mountains, unsure of their location, and longs to disappear into marshlands.
Belben never lets the reader rest. The narrator stares at “a pink and blue angel” in the plaster of the wall, slipping in and out of sleep with “suffering glimpses”. This is the lure of Belben's hypnagogia, the dizzying space into which she writes.
Obsessions and Oddities
The vignettes, with titles like Peeing for Cynthia, Deaf Eggs, and Hands, tell weird tales that loop into each other with nods to earlier characters and locations. What holds them together are Belben's obsessions with the loss of the natural world, human folly, and challenging the idea of beauty, as the title makes plain.
Belben defies convention by denying the certainty of interrogation in the title, excluding letters from some words – “you're nevr up to much once you've been gassd” – and ending the chapter Raining Down Dung mid-sentence. Her writing is the literary equivalent of free jazz, uncompromising and exhilarating in its commitment to her singular spirit.
Harsh Observation and Hilarious Detail
The book touches on dying, deafness, desolation, depression, dogs, deckchairs, ducks, horses, fish, frogs, swans, bees, “brackn”, brain cells, bad teeth, beetroot, bodily excretions, elephants, litter, gardens, graters, colanders, streams, dreams, and doubts. Excruciating commentary on the ordeal of being a woman – “how, she thought, do I get out of being a woman, it is repugnant” – surfaces repeatedly, often with slightly cruel humour.
In Daffodils, the narrator ponders planting daffodils on the grave of someone he has poisoned. The victim cooked them with potatoes and ate with a friend, “the woman that wears purple cardigans, two at a time”. Belben layers hilarious detail with harsh observation: “The old girl has woes,” she writes, “women tend to have woes and dwell on them, they bear grudges like apple blossom.” She adds: “Women have woes because men come along and by leaving daffodil bulbs in the vegetable rack dare them to be so stupid.”
Is Beauty Good dares readers not to be so stupid. Belben refuses to censor her imagination, protecting no one from her experience of life in all its ugliness and glory. The novel is published by And Other Stories (£14.99).
