http://sensitiveskinmagazine.com/mandy-charlie-and-mary-jane-an-anti-novel-review/

Mandy, Charlie and Mary Jane: A Novel by
Stewart Home (Penny Ante Editions, Los Angeles, 2013)

Who reads Stewart Home? Home will say “very few, people are cowed by the malevolent society
in which we live, they believe in its values for they have no other frame of
reference, they fear it as they can think of nothing to replace it, they cannot
question it for all questioning challenges its essence.” (It is very postmodern
to say something for another; after all they may have said it, will say it or they
may not have and never will. What is verisimilitude?). But no matter here is
Stewart Home’s novel (or 245 pages of text)

The word anti-novel is always used when a novel by Home is reviewed, talked about, considered,
analysed (and he is reviewed in erudite journals and newspapers; the London
Review of Books, the Guardian, the New Statesman to name a few, he must be
famous, egotistical notoriety is probable his second name, his not intrinsic
nature). But what is the anti-novel? It is a question that is vexing.

Is an anti-novel one which is badly written? Mandy Charlie and Mary Jane is not badly written, there are few grammatical errors
and the paragraphs are evenly spaced, there are chapters with chapter headings,
there is the odd spelling mistake but that, most likely, has to do with the
spell check being programmed to English (US) rather than English (UK, or in this
case SA).

Is an anti-novel one which follows no linear progression, has no real story, no beginning,
middle or end? Mandy Charlie and Mary Jane does progress, there is a (kind of) story (despite there being no
middle, beginning or end, one could start reading it anywhere). Charlie
Templeton, or as he is also known, John Templeton, is a lecturer in cultural
studies (cultural studies is, in these days of multiple cultures and consumer
appetites, fashionable) at a university in the Northumbrian countryside (it is
called City University, acronym CUNT, as young people want to live in a vibrant
urban setting, so it is a city in the bucolic). He has not been promoted to professor
so he is unhappy and determined to do something about it (and he is a drug
addict so his unhappiness has multiplied into a many fold manifold obsession). And
so he goes about, among other things: fucking his wife and his girlfriend,
sometimes ex, and trying to fuck anyone else that he can pick up (not a lot of
men, only women, he is gang banged by a gay rugby team but this is against his
will, but then he isn’t anyway so it all works out). There is a lot of fucking
(possible an anti-novel contains a lot of gratuitous sex) but the fucking is
not erotic (even Brett Easton Ellis, to whom Home has been fairly, or unfairly,
to Brett Easton Ellis or to Stewart Home, unsure, compared, has some, albeit
not very nice and often gruesome sex, writes erotic sex, whereas the sex in Mandy Charlie and Mary Jane is not,
there is no possibility of reading it over and over again in order to fantasise
as one ponders masturbation). Possible the anti-novel is a text that has no
appeal whatsoever. Charlie, or John, likes to fuck women who are unconscious,
he gives them knock out drops and imagines that they are dead, it is the power
that he likes rather than the act itself, domination can be quickly dealt with,
so it is quick, over in a few sentences (I
threw back the duvet, parted Mary Jane’s legs and tickled her clit with my
tongue. I pushed my tongue between the lips of her cunt to lubricate the lady
……. I used my hand to guide my prick into her hole and proceeded to hump);
proselytising to his students on, also among other things, slasher/zombie
movies (Cannibal Holocaust, Night of the Living Dead, Return of the Living Dead
III, Zombie Flesh Eaters, Day of the Dead etc.), good and bad movies, even ones
that do not exist, music, (Camel, Caravan, the Clash, Pretty Things, Ike
Turner, The Sex Pistols etc.), good and bad and some that does not exist, (Home
is well known for his musical knowledge, particularly early punk rock and the
music of the 70’s so there is a lot of this in Mandy, Charlie and Mary Jane), exhibitions, mainly  in London (Bas Jan Ader, Maya Deren, Ronald
Nameth, Jud Yul Kut), who are these artists, are they are known to a Londoner, or do they also not exist?;  how to keep well-toned
by describing in detail a variety of exercises in a gym while watching pretty
young things (they are always young, and always women, the culture is youth and
women are things); managing a university as Charlie or John becomes a part of
new management, this means lots of cuts both literally and figuratively, especially
of superfluous lecturers, so that eventually John or Charlie both teaches and manages
(he kills two birds with one stone so to speak), and of course delineates ideas
on how to attract fee paying bourgeois students; making a movie on the degenerate
and despicable way in which higher education has been maimed by a bourgeois
conservative government (read society); this includes wide angled shots of
murders, rapes and beatings; an analysis of the bombings by Islamic fundamentalists
of the London underground and a mimicking of this by Charlie; and finally, (possible
there is more but this is enough) the difficulty of obtaining a visa for hell
and how problematic it is to stay there for longer than two weeks, there is a
lot of red tape involved in getting into hell, paperwork, bribery, fake
documents (much like trying to get from the developing world to the developed
world). So there is a story, an anti-story. Really, the story is puerile, it
has no real point and if one reads the book as a story the likelihood is that
one will be disappointed.

But do not despair, for there is a lot more (more).

The writing is all about the messages that Home wants to put across, it’s part of his on-going
project of critique, a critique of, among other things (once again): the
exploitive consumerist superficial capitalist system which we take for granted
as we have no alternative, our frame of reference is the mainstream, there is
nothing outside of it, there is only subversion, the grotesque and the
destructive; the manipulation and inequality in class, race, religious and gender
systems; the obsession with a power that is so powerful/unpowerful it engulfs
us.  Home’s project for the uninformed is opaque, oblique; for the informed, it is yes, and yes.  However regardless as to whether one is informed
or uninformed the message will (possible already has) sink in. The anti-novel documentary
is a litany of phrases, abstruse and invisible lists, tired and tedious axioms,
the philosophy of music, movies, art works and performances, real and unreal,
sometimes it is difficult to tell.

So what is the message, unless one casts the book aside after the first page, but then the
message has already sunk in (literally), this reader is already the zombie that
Home describes, the living dead reading to pass the time, reading because a
good story satiates limitation, for this reader there is no message, this reader
is the message? And if one does not cast it aside, one ponders and thinks, what
one finds is that the anti-novel is an insolent challenge to everything that one
knows; a work filled with plagiarism and appropriation, it flouts a society
that cherishes the notion of individuality and originality.

Self-reflect for it is a nauseating and vile self-reflection.

Other novels by Stewart Home include: BloodRites of the Bourgeoisie (Book Works, 2010), 69 Things to do with a Dead
Princess (Canongate, 2002), Tainted Love (Virgin Books, 2005), Memphis
Underground (Snowbooks, 2007)