In a nutshell, Jock lies on a cheap but clean hotel bed in the Scots town of Selkirk or Peebles. He is not sure, probably Peebles. Observing him lying there on his hotel bed alone, his opening soliloquy sounds weary and resigned, interspersed with the faintest of humour - humour that’s so ironic that it gives off only the slightest hint of a pulse.

This is a good room. It could be Belgium, the U.S.A., Russia perhaps, Australia certainly, any land where a room can have wallpaper, carpet and curtains patterned with three different sorts of flower….But there is no bible. All American hotel bedrooms have bibles so I am definitely not in the States. A pity. I hate feeling limited. I could be hundreds of men just now, a commercial traveler in wool and tweed, a farmer, an auctioneer, a tourist, one of those lecturers who appear in obscure halls to tell six middle-aged housewives and a retired police sergeant about the Impact of Van Gogh upon the Spotted Thrush during the last days of Pompeii. It does not matter how I earn my bread. The topic has ceased to sicken me, I don’t think about it.

Jock also distractedly interrupts his own fantasies with interjection, comment and quick flashes of memory, and you begin to get tiny glimpses of who he was earlier:

But Janine is not (here come the clothes) happy with the white silk shirt shaped by the way it hangs from her etcetera I mean BREASTS, silk shirt not quite reaching the thick harness-leather belt which is not holding up the miniskirt but hangs in the loops round the waistband of the white suede miniskirt supported by her hips and unbuttoned as high as the top of the black fishnet stockings whose mesh is wide enough to insert three fingers I HATED clothes when I was young. My mother made me wear far too many of them, mostly jackets and coats.

I love her like this and wish I could prolong the fantasy of possessing her without putting her into increasingly complicated and perverse positions. I wish I could excite myself with memories of real lovemaking…But my past is a pit full of regrets. My few nice memories of love with real women conjure up remorse and rage at what I have lost…

Most pornography fails by not being dramatic enough. There are too few characters. The author has only one sort of climax in mind, and reaches it early, and can only offer more of the same with variations which never excite as much again.

Sadistic? It would be if de sade were not so disappointing. He gives much the same masturbatory climax on every tenth page and fills the space between with a lot of pretentious excuses about nature being ruthless and cruel so why should we not be…you need ideas to be cruel and only men have ideas…

The truth is we are a nation of arselickers, though we disguise it with surfaces: a surface of generous openhanded manliness, a surface of dour practical integrity, a surface of futile maudlin defiance like when we break goalposts and windows after football matches on foreign soil and commit suicide on Hogmanay by leaping from fountains in Trafalgar Square. Which is why, when England allowed us a referendum on the subject, I voted for Scottish self-government…it would be a luxury to blame ourselves for the mess we are in instead of the bloody old Westminster parliament.

You see his early years as an adolescent, the awkwardness of relationship with his mother and stiff affection for his father, quiet and capable, but in the end a weak and broken man, while the only other male role model he had was in the form of the ‘mad Hislop’ – a teacher/disciplinarian who also broke in the end. You see the very beginning of his sexual repression. He candidly talks about his ill treatment and emotional abuse of his first lover, the innocent hapless Denny and moves on from her to his first marriage to the cold manipulative Helen. This is set against backdrops of college student life, the boho scene of an experimental theatre company during the Edinburgh Festival and later, in a bourgeois milieu as a materially successful middle manager for a security systems company.

Gray portrays Jock in this section as a young man slowly coming of sexually independent age. It’s deceptively simple - the memories that he chooses to reveal are absolutely crucial to what happens next. By the time Jock (and the reader) has arrived at the emotional crossroads wherein he has booked himself a room in a cheap but clean, and modern hotel, and in an alcoholic, mildly psychotic state, has decided to do himself in, it all makes complete sense. While you may abhor the act of suicide and cringe from it, Jock has so thoroughly and intelligently explained himself and who he is, that you understand completely and would be hard pressed to stop him and argue him out of it.

This book also grabs the reader on a surface level in the appearance of the text. Gray, as a visual artist, plays with the fonts and typography – enlarging it, making it smaller, upside down at times and in the margins. It hits the reader on a visceral level, especially during Jock’s psychosis, where the typography is all over the place so not only does the reader intellectually comprehend this from the text but also sees that the printed words themselves have become psychotic.

No discussion of ‘1982, Janine’ would be complete without addressing the elaborately described and scripted sexual fantasy scenes. While learning more about Jock’s character, I found myself responding to those, too – one would have to be dead or in a coma not to react at all. It is truly an interactive book that fully engages the reader. Gray is such a genius with description that only he can convince the reader that a certain sound is sexy – in one of the fantasy scenes, Janine is about to walk into a room in heels, seductively, with men watching her and there is a voice offstage directing her:

A voice cries, “Come on in , Miss Crystal, show us how you can walk” Heart thudding, eyes narrowed to slits against the glare she walks slowly toward the light thinking, ‘Act calm’….She hears two unfastened studs of her skirt click with each step she takes. “That’s a sexy sound,” the voice says, and giggles.

This is a very political book – Gray wrote a short political treatise in 1992 called ‘Why Scots Should Rule Scotland’ and in ‘1982, Janine’, there seems to be almost a first draft or prototype of his political philosophy, delivered through Jock’s character. It’s also fearlessly political in its unflinching examination of relations and power balance between countries (Scotland/England), class and gender. Jock is ultimately not a pornographer so much as a sexually repressed male who finds solace in the imagined encounters when the real thing is far too frightening. And forever, I shall think of the effect of two unfastened studs on a woman’s skirt clicking when she walks as one of the most seductive sounds in the world.

Marc Goldin currently lives in Chicago, with three cats, each one more long-haired than the last. Interests have ranged from medieval monasticism to discontinued stations on the London Underground – literary likes too diverse (some would say schizo) to list here although the last several years have been witness to an intimacy with Scottish and Irish literature. American Southern and Beat era lit also account for some of the ‘missing years’. Music tastes run the gamut from Cuban Danzon to Ska (all three waves but having a specific attachment to the second, two-tone period) to the Tuvan throat singers. Has written book reviews for a now defunct Irish literature site and has several short stories in various stages of development. Mad for black and white photography and aspires to someday have a complete collection of photos documenting every close in the Grassmarket area of Edinburgh. Works in the IT dept. of a French company in the current political climate. In football, supports Chelsea, Hibs, and for the sake of employment security, Marseille.

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.