BEN BOREK, Sissy, Norwich, Boiler House Press 2019, pp. 270, £12.99

Ben Borek’s new verse novel, Sissy, is remarkable. That’s the easiest part of this review. The difficulty comes in trying to sum up its remarkable qualities. Those who have read his earlier novel, Donjon Heights (2007), and the canto he contributed to A Modern Don Juan (2015), will already know his technical dexterity (skilfully handled Onegin stanzas in the novel, ottava rima stanzas in the latter work), and his outlandish inventive powers. These two gifts are on full display in Sissy; the six-line pentameter stanzas, with their tight rhyming pattern, seem to stimulate rather than constrain his over-brimming imagination.

The story-line is so strange that I am tempted to take the easy way out and just quote from the book’s blurb: the eponymous hero is «an anti-hero antidote to Don Juans», a «thirty-something wimp by day – surreally re-born of his long-suffering mother each morning – but […] a would-be gangsta by virtual night». Other characters include a feminist performance artist and a household of intellectual Eastern European migrants; the narrator plays a prominent part, constantly transforming himself into various guises for the purpose of spying on his characters.

            The most striking feature of the novel is the quality of the ornately descriptive verse. Here are two stanzas depicting a melodramatic encounter in a squalid London location:

Their spot is isolated, shielded, hidden

From onlookers by London Bridge itself –

A urinous and algae-dappled midden:

Above, the fulminating concrete shelf

Of roadway, and to either side blunt girders –

An ideal site for damp, alfresco murders.

The water, in a fulvous lather, belches

Around the floor of desiccated brick.

Wassily moves, with succulent slow squelches

Of brogue in mud towards a patch of slick

Untrammelled lino (chess-board printed, glistening

In fast, refracted light) then says, ‘I’m listening.’

Borek is not frugal with his adjectives, but each one is effective, making us both see («algae-dappled’ is striking, suggestive of beauty amid squalor) and hear, through alliterative onomatopoeia, the clammy squalor of this scene.

            Although the scene constantly shifts in the novel, moving around London and later to Poland and Ukraine, there is a prevailing sense of dampness. The novel begins and ends with the Thames, which, as in the passage above (from the middle of the novel), is both sinister and intriguing, somewhere between urban grime and rural charm («The river bends beneath us; mallards hide / In hollow moss-daubed buoys on starboard side»). Later, in Poland, the River Vistula is described as «A sordid Cocytus of foaming yeast», while Warsaw itself «fade[s] behind a sheet of throbbing fog - / The air is densely liquid and, on top of this, / Pollution thickens up the soup of smog.»

The hero, Sissi, as already indicated, returns nightly to the moist security of a bedchamber within his mother’s womb:

Lit languidly within, a bedside lamp

In fleshy tones illuminates the scene:

The chamber’s ceiling, varicose and damp

Reflects the glow like breathing damascene

And heaves a little, like an inverse sea

Above a bed that bobs quiescently.

Even outside the womb Sissi seems to live in a state of constant humidity: he cries «through wet veils of snot and tears» and his nose

gushes like he’s just

Pulled out a stopper. Pretty soon there’s little

That isn’t touched and glazed by this wild gust

Of liquid, semi-sinuous and thick.

The kitchen’s like a beach in nasal-slick.

At the climax of the novel, his liquefaction seems almost total: «A slick of liquid tentacles have slid / From underneath his heap like maudlin squid. » When Eastern Europeans bid goodbye to one another, they all kiss «The politic five times on soggy lips / But drunkenness ensures a lot of missing / And spittle either stains the stubbled tips / Of chins and studded noses, or it’s sent / Into the air to glaze the firmament. » These passages were unsettling enough when the novel was first published but read in a time of pandemic they become thoroughly alarming.

In this moistly fluctuating world identities are rarely steady or fixed. The narrator turns, when necessary, into an insect (able to «Pass through the damply velvet aperture» to spy on the hero in his womb-room), a gecko-cam, a cyclist, a waiter, a border-guard and an officiating priest – and, in one of the many digressive footnotes, he ponders on other possible transformations:

At times like this the elements compel me

To change like a capricious lepidoptera

And find another costume to en-shell me

In limpid new relief: one-legged doctor or

Starved, cross-eyed bigamist who trades in cartons?

Pale, pre-op acolyte of Dolly Parton’s?

(The surreal possibilities proliferate for another two equally inventive stanzas.) The hero himself is a dull office-worker by day, a ruthless «gangsta» by night (with the help of Internet games). The heroine, Magda, is a performance artist, who turns herself into Lyudmila, an on-line «Slavic Beauty», with a gloriously unsteady (and often very funny) grasp of the English language. Even the stanza-form itself wavers on the page, with whole sections being right-justified, and splendidly digressive footnotes (also in sextets) sometimes pushing the main text off the page.

            The poem, while satirising a world in which virtual reality has eroded all our certainties, also celebrates the mercurial variability of modern life. The elaborate baroque vocabulary of the poem is part of this celebration. In the first section the narrator recalls how Byron, in choosing his hero, found his choice restricted by the fact that so many of the names were «not at all adapted to my rhymes»; as Borek’s narrator puts it, Byron felt that the heroes, «despite their gallant stature, / Had rather awkward foreign nomenclature.» Instead, Borek delights in using Polish words, and even provides a lengthy footnote (in rhyming verse) instructing the reader on pronunciation. He is clearly intrigued by jarring linguistic encounters, as in the «odd conflation[s]» produced by Slavonic speakers of English. In a long footnote he reflects on a Wajda film in which John Gielgud is dubbed into Polish, producing the effect of a «frightening, unheimlich / Collision of a face with an unlikely / Timbre of vocal product». It is no surprise that Nabokov acts as a kind of presiding genius over the novel, with two lyrically sprawling footnotes devoted to him.

            It is one of the strangest narratives I have ever read, but also one of the most stimulating. If at times Borek’s imagination seems to run away with him, leaving us not only unsettled but also bemused, his striking descriptive powers, technical skills and dazzling wit make it never less than compelling. And, last but not least, it is often extremely funny. In his earlier novel Borek paid homage to «The (effervescent) Golden Gate» by Vikram Seth; this novel, though very different in narrative style and tone, deserves to reach an equally broad public. 

(Gregory Dowling)