Crap Holiday

 

Jenny Morrill Crap Holiday (2018)
At the risk of eclipsing a certain orange president in terms of sheer lack of self-awareness, books which began life as blog posts can be a bit of a lottery. That which might seem like the wittiest thing on Earth in the space of five minutes spent scrolling down a screen can turn into a six hour coach trip sat next to the funniest man in the marketing department once transposed to print. I couldn't get past the first ten pages of Jenny Lawson's Let's Pretend This Never Happened and it was the same with David Thorne's I'll Go Home Then; It's Warm and Has Chairs. Cold hard ink on paper plus time somehow exposes failings which might otherwise go unnoticed.

Jenny Morrill tries to avoid the pitfalls by writing something in the spirit of her genuinely wonderful World of Crap blog rather than just selotaping old jokes into a notebook, and mostly it works as a legitimate novel. I say mostly, because the arrows haven't quite lined up with the target here in so much as that the tone of the novel occasionally sits at odds with the subject, and it may be significant that the chapters are mostly short, each being about the length of a blog post - just sufficient length to get in, deliver the gag with a customary roll of the eyes, then get out again.

Melissa is a vaguely directionless young woman with a low tolerance for bullshit who passes long-suffering and caustic commentary on her work, her friends, acquaintances, flatmates, and her entire existence, and she's very, very funny, just as World of Crap is very, very funny, taking grim delight in the absurdity of the shabby and the eternally disappointing. Here she spends four days at a new age festival surrounded by fucking idiots with only a Daniel O'Donnell souvenir mug for intelligent conversation, and it's painful, and great because it's painful, but I could never quite rid myself of the feeling that Melissa simply would never have attended a new age festival, and probably would have faked her own death in order to get out of going, as she pretty much admits in the first person narrative; which leaves us with the possibility of the author having deliberately placed her character in awful situations entirely for the sake of generating sarcasm, which by extension seems a bit easy and obvious - and actually a little like sending Garry Bushell to a gay pride event because you basically know exactly what you're going to get. So while the jokes work and the new age targets are absolutely deserving, the feeling of watching them delivered by conveyor belt only to be picked off one by one somewhat undermines the integrity of Crap Holiday as a novel - as distinct from a series of amusingly withering remarks. Thus when Melissa gets her arse into gear at the end, it ends up reading like something done because that's how this sort of novel is supposed to go.

On the other hand, it is fucking funny in places, and I suspect some of the problem may be that it was written specifically as a comedy where some of it is actually quite grim and probably didn't need to worry about remaining quite so witty on every single page. At best, it reminds me oddly of Brautigan's Dreaming of Babylon - possibly because I read Dreaming of Babylon only the other week - in telling the tale of someone drifting haplessly through their own absurd existence seemingly without much say in where it's going, except that Melissa has a somewhat more dour outlook than Brautigan's private detective.

Regardless of reservations expressed above - none of which really diminish the pleasure of reading this thing - Crap Holiday is almost a great novel, and is impressive for a debut, not least as something written at a tangent to Morrill's usual semiotic deconstruction of old episodes of Rainbow or things found inside packets of seventies breakfast cereal.