Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie review: 'a tale of toxic masculinity, pettiness and hysteria'

In Charlotte Runcie’s new novel, set during the Edinburgh Fringe, an actress takes inventive revenge on a theatre critic who sleeps with her after panning her show. Review by Stuart Kelly

If Graham Greene is correct and an author requires a splinter of ice in their heart, then a critic needs a glacier; along with a brass neck, an iron constitution, steel nerves, and possibly an acid tongue. Charlotte Runcie, an arts journalist, poet and memoirist, clearly has guts, as her debut novel, set during the Edinburgh festivals, is about critics and public criticism. There are other poachers turned gamekeepers – James Wood wrote the novels The Book Against God and more recently Upstate; Leo Robson has just published The Boys; Sam Leith’s The Coincidence Engine is underrated in my mind. It is tempting to turn the book’s grabline (“A One Star Review. A Five Star Payback”) against it and give the novel the equivalent of a beta minus, but it skewers the pointlessness of star ratings fairly well.

Charlotte Runcie | Sophie Davidson

The narrator is Sophie, a junior arts writer on a newspaper, of which “she can’t give you the name… but let’s just say it’s considered by some people to be the last remaining newspaper of decency, and by other people to be a rag of unforgivable bias”. This should be warning enough to dissuade readers from treating it as a roman-à-clef, and any comparisons to real people are indications of a generic type, not grounds for claiming defamation.

Sophie is back from maternity leave (her partner is an academic), and in some ways still emotionally adrift: her father has a new family, her mother has died of pancreatic cancer. She is sharing a flat with the paper’s star theatre critic, Alex Lyons, who is famously waspish, arrogant and charming. He looks like a greyhound, says things like “since I turned thirty, getting laid has become embarrassingly easy”, and is able to name drop Adorno, Derrida and Stanislavski as well as “deferential feminist stuff” such as Greer, Butler and the late Sarah Kane. It is maybe just me, but Stanislavski rang a little untrue and slightly old-fashioned here, and given the nature of the narrative you might have expected a nod to Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty or Vinterberg and Von Trier’s Dogme 95 or even Marina Abramović. If you need a mental shorthand, think of AA Gill or Giles Coren.

The spark of the story is Alex reviewing a dreadful one-woman show by Hayley Sinclair called “Climate Emergence-She” (kudos to Runcie for creating a title as groanworthy as much of the Fringe). Having filed his copy, he goes for a drink, meets Hayley by chance and sleeps with her, without mentioning his job. Her reaction is to change her show completely: it is now called “The Alex Lyons Experience”, details his shabbiness and (audience participation) asks for other women to share their memories of him. Alex has never made any moves on Sophie, and the pressure-cooker flat takes on different charges of protectiveness, attraction, and betrayal. Now a cause célèbre, Alex is swiftly becoming a #MeToo totem. Tragedy literally means “goat-song” and had a sacrificed scapegoat at its religious centre; but this, alas, is a comedy.

Alex is the child of famous actors, and there is much railing about his “nepo baby” status. It is not, I think, unfair to mention that Runcie is the daughter of James Runcie (author of the deft Grantchester novels), and granddaughter of the former archbishop, Robert. This is relevant because she seems too nice to exploit the story’s potential. There is a fleeting reference to Waugh’s Scoop, but the mixture of toxic masculinity, creative solipsism, bad faith, pretentiousness, pettiness and hysteria really requires different skills. Writers like Shalom Auslander, Julius Taranto or Timur Vermes have the necessary capacity of going too far and not knowing when to stop. If it were filmed, it should be in the hands of Armando Iannucci, or, better yet, Chris Morris. The other option would be to drop the comedy altogether and write something serious. Having reviewed and admired Runcie’s non-fiction book, Salt On Your Tongue, I rather think it would be a more natural fit.

There are important things to say about how to be discerning in a culture which uses the word “judgmental” as an accusation. In terms of exploitative arts culture, critics are pretty negligible, lower even than the writers. The old joke about the starlet so dumb she slept with the writer to advance her career does make a serious point about where actual power lies: with studios and producers. The “everyone’s a critic” paradigm means that the greater the number of critics, the more the gaussian curve will settle to three out of five stars. This is not whaur extremes meet, as MacDiarmid famously wanted.

Certainly moral judgements are ten a penny these days, and it’s hard to argue that Alex isn’t “a f***ing piece of shit”. Does that justify the opinions “journalists are truly the worst of humanity” and “find me a critic that isn’t an arsehole?” I will always stand up for critics having different opinions, even when I read reviews by others and wonder if they’re thick or wicked or shills. At least they’re still humans.

Bring The House Down, by Charlotte Runcie, The Borough Press, £16.99

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