Book review: Thirteen Ways To Kill Lulabelle Rock, by Maud Woolf

This futuristic debut novel is smart, pacy, intelligent and surprisingly moving, writes Stuart Kelly

I have always found “word of the year” stories entertaining if usually utterly inconsequential. 2023 proved only slightly different with the “word of the year” being respectively rizz, hallucinate, AI and authentic, according to Oxford, Cambridge, Collins and Merriam-Webster; not that these news items are transparent publicity exercises. Rizz, by the way, is a phonetic contraction of charisma, and not chrism as I thought, the royal anointing oil in Greek which gives us Christ, though we did have a coronation last year. But I did find the lists diverting, since they all seemed applicable to Maud Woolf’s debut novel, which shows, if little else, that it is a Zeitgeistisch book. Although another “word of the year” that is particularly appropriate here is the Swahili contender: kitawaramba, meaning “it will come back to haunt you”.

Woolf’s is very much a conceit novel, and I do not mean that as a criticism. It is concept rather than character driven, which given that the nature of character is its central interest is appropriate. It opens with Chapter Zero, and the narrator is in conversation with a spoiled actress called Lulabelle Rock, a dangerous mixture of the shrewd, the vacuous and the solipsistic. She has just made a new film, loosely based on the myth of Medea, which looks set be a failure – worse than offensive to test audiences, but boring. To redeem the situation, Lullabelle has decided on radical action. The film requires some sickly mystique to make it a cult classic. So the narrator is to assassinate the 12 clones Lullabelle has made of herself; the narrator, of course, being the 13th.

The clones are referred to as Portraits and their raison d’etre is summarised with glossy cynicism: “I made them because I’m a busy, busy girl and there are only so many hours in a day. I made them because I’m only one person and I can only do so much. I can only give the world so much”. Although this lends itself to reading the book as a satire on the erosion of life/work balance and our privacy eroding gluttony for celebrity, it is actually much more than this.

Lullabelle tells her Portrait, with remarkable honesty and self-awareness, that she doesn’t “really understand the technology. They tried to explain, but it was a very long and boring explanation. Think of it like magic”. Novels do rather tend to get bogged down in the mechanics of hypotheticals. (My advice, for what it’s worth: if you have figured out human cloning with memory retention and accelerated aging, then sell it to a biochemical company, not a publisher). The opening efficiently sets out the pitch, the aesthetic (Lullabelle drinks a Pepto-Bismol coloured cocktail, which is a neat, ironic and squeamish touch), the tone – camp, arch, quickfire – and hints at the moral question. It is perhaps more Barbieheimer than you might imagine.

It is not as if literature is unacquainted with cloning: Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Houellebecq’s Atomised, Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Weldon’s The Cloning Of Joanna May, Priest’s The Prestige, Wilhelm’s Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang, Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts, Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief, and all of those before every sci-fi series from Doctor Who to Orphan Black. Cloning “works” because it is a convenient ethical mind game.

One aspect which differentiates Woolf’s novel is that structurally it is based around Tarot cards: Chapter Zero is subtitled “The Fool”, Chapter One, “The Magician” and so on. I retained a degree of scepticism at first, especially as there are 14 chapters, when there are 22 cards in the major arcana. But this belies an important theme in the novel. Such a rigid scaffolding – so, for example, there is a car chase in “The Chariot” – might have rendered the novel somewhat formulaic. Setting up a pattern quite ostentatiously, however, allows for the possibility of taking innovative slants on the occurrence of The Lovers or The Wheel of Fortune, but also to render the deterministic nature of the pattern suspect.

This replays the nature and nurture polarity of the book. Is each copy of Lullabelle identical? Or do their functions (Party Lullabelle is almost suicidal with non-stop revelry, Digital Lullabelle is depressed by providing non-stop online “content”, Artist Lullabelle is frustrated at not finding her hidden talent given she only exists to discover what she is good at) introduce such a drift from their archetype that they are ontologically “different”? And, of course. Is the Lullabelle we first meet Original Lullabelle or a Lullabelle doing a good impersonation of her template? “Our” Lullabelle increasingly wonders if the reasons she is given for her spree represent the whole truth.

Maud Woolf

Thirteen Ways To Kill Lullabelle Rock is smart, pacy and intelligent. It is even, despite the harum-scarum murders, surprisingly moving. Most importantly, it is the opposite of po-faced. There are comic set-pieces and clever one-liners (her car provides inspirational quotes like “Be Yourself. Everyone Else Is Already Taken”). In many ways it would be an excellent series of half-hour films. Despite the rather shaky nature of the character Lullabelle’s thespian skills, it would be a Kind Hearts And Coronets challenge for an ambitious young actress.

Thirteen Ways To Kill Lulabelle Rock, by Maud Woolf, Angry Robot, £9.99