By Jane Roberts.
Bridget Penney, Licorice (Book Works, 2020)
“It’s my fucking script, after all.”
So speaks Licorice, the title character of Bridget Penney’s latest literary conception of the same name. At a few pages in, this sentence portends the style of Penney’s writing; text simultaneously both explicit and tangled, with a fondness for paragraphs as dense as coniferous forest — and if you’ve read Angela Carter’s folklore-inspired stories, you will know that these are places of great peril — with words pricking and needling into your consciousness, your subconscious, before petering out into unexpected, stark clearing
No, no full stops
The reader has to grow accustomed to a not unwelcome absence of more familiar punctuation in Licorice. The presentation on the page requires reading. Urges deep reading. Back. And forth. And again. Penney takes control from the first line and does not relinquish her hold, deftly splicing together conversational snippets, internal monologue, abstract. Invested in all of this a linguistic sorcery — an incantatory, oral quality that links us closer to her characters, leading us into the same confusion, the same enchantment. We become so embedded in the language, we are lost to an eternal interstice between: past and present; duality of character; art and artifice; fantasy and reality. All rules and boundaries cast adrift. It is in these interstices that we have scope to think, and this is indeed a novel that inspires much thought.
Forever looming in the background of Licorice, the novel, is the fragmentation of societies in present-day Britain (with increased turbulence around the progression of Brexit) and in eighteenth-century Britain. In many respects, the narrative itself is an astute demonstration of how people fail to create a narrative, how narratives can be manipulated, how narratives can be lost. Perspectives hold great significance in the novel, even if some should not necessarily be deemed as fact.
Licorice, the person, is an artist. A woman. An illegal alien. An indie film director who appears to have no real direction or agency in her own life. Even her name is not “Licorice”. Her age is a rough dimension of time: around 35-40. “Home” is neither Asia nor London, the only roots of familiarity presented are the constant unease of her status of non-belonging.
Penney takes the true role of director though as she sends, or “displaces”, Licorice — along with Pete (co-director), Angela (actress), and Roy (actor) — on location in rural Sussex in order to translate the little-known story of a local woman into an arthouse horror film. The novel teeters between various subtle — and louder — methods of outlining the trope of the outsider but arguably achieves its best stride when merging these concerns with the portrayal of women. Witches. Bogey-women. Wives. Mothers. Children. Lovers. Sluts. Objects of desire. Chattels. Never quite allowed the distinction of being their own person, of obtaining their autonomy, either in this present era or many of those gone before. Some women are forced to remain forever on the periphery of society. Yet even in revisiting these stories in artistic formats there remain complexities of representation.
And so, to the heart of the historical and cinematic narrative in the novel: Nan Kemp. An eighteenth-century young peasant woman lacking autonomy or agency, who was raped and eventually driven to exacting a tragic revenge. Nan Kemp: a young woman from the mists of history, mythologised and ostracised from orthodox narrative, branded a witch guilty of infanticide and cannibalism. Such was the fate of some women, records and historical data controlled by male ruling and consequent legacy, their narratives moulded into morality tales, the gaps of their story swept aside into insignificance with the taint of a witch’s broom. References aplenty to witchcraft and legend prevail throughout Licorice, including that of Baba Yaga — a Russian folk lore that is not without its own convolutions. In the traditional tale of Vasilisa the Beautiful, Baba Yaga might well be portrayed as a cannibal and a trickster — yet she is also maternal, a saviour figure; albeit only a saviour for some whom she encounters. Penny goes to great lengths to treat Nan Kemp’s story with similar ambivalence.
Licorice on her co-director Pete:
He would like to put in more hooks but really what you’re suggesting reduces Nan to a series of tropes sexy witch well witches have been done to death evil murderess or wronged maiden. I’m not having it too many people have already been there. Those aren’t career choices Pete just lazy fucking labels: a gross simplification of the result of a cluster of circumstances.
Authenticity is important to Licorice and, conversely, at times it isn’t. The double standard never seems to worry her, either as director or as a keeper-of-secrets. The reader will do well to bear this in mind when considering the enigmatic title character.
What is wrong with exaggerating, we all like a good story, and that’s part of what this film is about we don’t even know if anything we’re trying to show is true. Nan has no history there’s no birth or marriage or death records for her, she’s just a name with a horrible legend attached. A bogey-woman.
Perspectives dominate. To read Licorice, the novel, is to enter the Nan Kemp film Licorice, the director, is attempting to create; yet also, in laying out the mise-en-scène and recurring motifs as directed by Licorice, Penney cannot help but give the reader the sensation of watching a film of the Nan Kemp film being made, such is Penney’s own cinematic signature. The action on and off screen falls into cinematographic frames, the dialogue fluid and script-like — all accompanied by an omnipresent strain of haunting Aeolian harps. The visual and aural impact of this writing belies its own artistic format on the page. No trick is left out in either cinematic representations, manipulation of continuity and coherence, further extending into extra layers of perspective including security camera footage — real and imagined — and mobile phone recordings. All formats involving their own issues of Orwellian voyeurism, misinformation, secrets, ownership, intellectual property, and even the nature of data preservation itself.
Whatever fantastical or wily elements present in the composition of Licorice, Penney establishes an authoritative and graphic portrayal of the countryside around the Kingston area of Sussex. Even the weather is used to good effect; the predictable Britishness of it (rain, for the most part) admirably sets the eerie atmosphere of the slow proceedings leading up to the explosion of action at nucleus of the novel when the characters endure a sudden burst of light and heat — a hard epiphany that causes the pace of events to spiral out of control. Deeper into the landscape though, the depictions of rural economy and farming, both historical and modern, are well-informed.
“There is a huge slippage between how the landscape would have looked back then and how it is now…”
The reader is presented with multiple considerations of the location: the advance of global farming endangering more indigenous agricultural practices (e.g. the takeover of oil seed rape and other such crops, the decline of bee population); the oil seed rape and its effects on the landscape almost mirroring the devastation of Nan Kemp; the increase of rural second home ownership and development; and although at points Penney diverts into almost hymnic, elevated paean addresses to the countryside, both the urban and the rural environments in the novel are firmly tribalistic, dangerous. Life burns and eats up these people wherever they are — there is no escape.
The gradual, cyclical dynamism of atmosphere in the novel is very much prevailed over by the manifestations of windmills that cross over the time periods. On occasion the greater detailing of the workings of the windmills perhaps add a derailment from the plot, albeit an informative one. A further interruption must be added here to acknowledge some fine humour from Penney regarding the couple from town who renovate a windmill into a functionless façade and parody of its predecessor — just one of many darkly sublime and witty observations. The ideology of the windmill grinds away, even if the reality is static zoetrope: power generating, pumping forth a rotational energy; communicating a language some of our ancestors would understand more than letters of the alphabet; symbolic of life, self-sufficiency, and perseverance in a harsh environment. This rhythm extends to the relationships. A free ebb and flow of natural, consensual desire — and denials of desire — amongst the film crew of present day in comparison to the brutality of Nan’s rape. Even in the present, however, control is an illusion. “Ultraviolence” pervades throughout — blood and suffering pouring out from these women, their bodies vessels of pain. Injustice bleeds out in all senses. The abuse that Angela experiences culminating in a double betrayal from Licorice; artistic betrayal and also a betrayal of the ties of sisterhood.
“Bloody emotional rapist that’s what you are you bitch fucking vampire abuser you’d steal my soul if you could to put it in your film”
A poignant use of full stop here as the first half of the novel closes, marking the nail in the coffin for the film shoot. The reader comes to realise that there is as little film footage in this project as there is any factual knowledge about Nan Kemp’s life; and beyond this, the lack of detail about Licorice’s own life. An archaic tale about the disappearance of a family of refugees that features earlier in the novel becomes imbued with more poignancy when compared with the later exploration of Licorice’s own background and status. Refugee. Alien. Passport-less. Destitute. Woman.
“People can be scared of anything.”
These labels that can inspire unwarranted fear, hatred, or indeed complete disregard all combine in Licorice’s own existence as it morphs from reality into one of myth, like the refugees. People confined not just to inhabit the various interstices that life throws up, but confined to become the interstice itself where even a birth name becomes forgotten. These interstices that are starkly imprisoning and divergent from the liberating interstice experienced by the reader when engaging with the art of this novel.
“What kind of monsters are we?”
The true, visceral horror at the heart of Licorice, the novel, sets in. We know what kind of monsters. We do not need a qualifier. We are monsters. We are all monsters. We do not need to be planted into rural wilderness to engage our feral nature. We do not even need to watch the full length of a horror film in order to grasp the severity of how far we are capable of falling from grace into monsterdom.
Indeed, it is not so much the fall from normative mores and civilised attitude that engages or surprises a viewer of a film such as Midsommar, but simply the timeframe. The speed at which we revert to our monstrous identities casting off our disguises, those labels that society sees fit to mete out.
Indeed although a novel of relative brevity, Penney packs a potency into Licorice — passages of fierce clarity that extend far beyond their original context. Here, one such example pertaining to English horror films cannot fail to remind the reader of certain ominous mood displayed in certain quarters of a country at political, social, and pecuniary odds:
English horror roots itself in the land, celebrating its muck and grooving on the old ultraviolence. People cling dumbly to traditions because they are things they’ve always done not because there’s anything good about them. No one makes any attempt to understand why they act the way they act the way they do. They look on anything new, anyone from outside, with fear and suspicion. Any ‘different’ element entering an English horror film has to be consumed before it can threaten their ‘way of life’. With a subset where it’s necessary to consume the stranger in order for that way of life to carry on.
Penney casts a spell, an articulation of our heritage and our present, with many a nod to the cinematic pedigree of our isle; and despite the outlook for the future not appearing any less grim, there is a single statement in Licorice that I defy any person — whatever labels any society has bestowed upon them — not to find hopeful. Use it as a daily incantation.
“It’s my fucking script…”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jane Roberts is a freelance writer living in South Shropshire, UK. Her work has been published in a variety of international publications, including Valley Press’s High Spirits: A Round of Drinking Stories (Best Anthology, Saboteur Awards 2019). Upcoming fiction featured in Under the Radar Magazine (Issue 27, Nine Arches Press), 100 Voices for 100 Years (Unbound), and The Emma Press. @JaneEHRoberts
