Uncommon readings: Duncan Fallowell

Published on Friday 1 January 2010 17:52

I BECAME curious about Duncan Fallowell from my visits to the Madame Arcati blog – an irreverent site specialising in gossip about the media. Fallowell's name cropped up often, so in 2008, when his travel book about New Zealand, Going as Far As I Can, was published, I wangled an interview for this paper. (See snipurl.com/fallowell)

Going As Far As I Can outraged some New Zealanders for what they saw as Fallowell's negative portrayal of them and their country. He has criticisms but to think he despised the place and its people is to get it wildly wrong. In the book he describes hitting an emotional bad patch, and in person explained that anyone misreading his negativity as pertaining to New Zealand as a whole badly missed the mark.

Fallowell was the first rock columnist for the Spectator, and worked on punk magazines and with the avant-garde group Can. He wrote a biography of April Ashley and travel books about Russia and Sicily.

I managed to snaffle a copy of his 1994 collection of interviews, Twentieth Century Characters, a collection of insightful encounters with people as diverse as Andy Warhol and John Betjeman. A revealing piece about Arnold Schwarzenneger sticks in my memory, in which he readily admitted to drug use.

Fallowell gave me his third novel, A History of Facelifting, which I devoured giggling non-stop. The book has been described as "a classic of English eccentricity", while another reviewer said: "There are many other reasons to commend this … But the knowingly-deployed (Ronald] Firbankian zest, wit and love of the improbable are good starting points." The Sunday Times called it: "Witty, wicked … this extraordinary marriage of super-refined aestheticism and ballsy, carefree-cum-frenetic jumpy showing off somehow manages to work."

As I wrote on Amazon.co.uk: "Fallowell's prose is elegant and witty, it's profound and profane and it will make you laugh out loud at the author's clear-eyed vision of a dystopic oh-so-English countryside inhabited by renegades, rous, and outright nutters. The names alone will inspire tears of mirth, starting with the village itself, Milking Magna, and culminating in the Cardinal Du Lally Berzerque. (If you're not laughing yet, check your pulse.) A History of Facelifting is like an episode of Midsomer Murders – on acid. I cannot recommend it highly enough."