Review by Sam Commotion
Ghost Driver, the first novel from Nell Osborne, exists in a kind of extended feverish nightmare space. Parts of the novel can certainly be described as body horror, but it’s constantly moving out to other territories – what could be described as job horror, city horror, gender horror. In particular, Osborne is drawn to the places where these distinctions collapse into each other – what does it mean when the job you hate is also part of the force reshaping the entire city you live in? What about when your employment depends on a successful performance of submission and vulnerability, and these same quantities are used to measure your success or failure as an object of desire?
Throughout the book, we are reminded of how unreliable the protagonist is, but also, importantly, of how unreliable she is viewed as being. This element of constantly shifting doubt and unease is central to the whole effect of the book, as details blink in and out of view, and very little is ever clearly or straightforwardly established. Important elements of the plot are introduced and then immediately become cloudy, contested, difficult to access.
The protagonist, Malory, seems at times to suffer from both too much and too little awareness. At some moments she seems burdened with a deep insight into herself and an exhaustive list of her flaws; at others, in place of an account of her own actions, we are simply offered an assurance that her inability to remember them clearly is understandable and to be expected.
In keeping with this general air of ambiguity and doubt, one question, introduced at the very start of the book, and revisited all the way until the end, is whether Malory can be said to have enjoyed…anything, really. What we do know, and is emphasised throughout, is that her viability, both as a (feminised) employee at work, and as a romantic partner outside it, is tied to her ability to perform fun, and that Malory, from the very beginning, is caught up with the challenge of needing to “exist for other people.” Experiences outside of “the token ghost-friend realm” seem harder to access.
A tapestry of humiliation
At various points throughout the book, we’re reminded of how this pliability is tied up with the requirements of certain areas of the job market, particularly the service industry. “One you train as a service person, if, that is, your continued survival really depends on being pleasant, likeable, easy-going, you never lose that.” Malory is threatened both in her romantic relationship by various waitresses who can more fully perform this role, and at work by the consequences of her “antisociality”.
“Slug”, an early chapter, does a good job of setting out the book’s mood – prompted to delve for traumatic memories by a therapist, Malory offers up an account of being served a cup of tea with a slug in it, and then having “driven herself to the call centre where she used to work and said ‘Hello, I’m here to make your day great!’ With the taste of boiled slug on her breath.” But, rather than explaining or resolving anything, Malory views the slug incident as just one not-particularly-memorable part in an ongoing tapestry of humiliation: “She heard herself saying things with a sense of well-practised detachment. Everyone that heard the slug story made a big deal about it, but Malory couldn’t ultimately feel too bad about swallowing a slug. There had been slugs everywhere back then. Slugs and casual misogyny and paedophilia happening literally all the time in those days.”
In keeping with the novel’s general ambiguity and murkiness, and particularly the distrust with which Malory is treated throughout, Malory’s father, who made the cup of tea, refuses to accept that the slug existed. Malory’s narration offers up the corpse as definitive proof, one of a series of attempts to gather acceptably objective evidence of her reality. The possibility that Malory’s father may have deliberately and maliciously served her the slug is mentioned but, like so much else, never confirmed or resolved.
Certain themes and images recur through the book, adding to the blurry, dreamlike atmosphere. Near the start, we are told that as a child Malory accidentally melted the face of her favourite doll, and faceless men, or men who are perceived or described as faceless, appear watching and following her again and again.
Images of descent and underworlds are another repeated motif – both when attending a physiotherapist’s appointment, and then again in the aftermath of a disastrous meeting at work, Malory is sent on lengthy descents into the earth. In a moment that comes as close to tenderness as the book is willing to offer, Malory reflects on her inability to adapt to The Institution where she works, holding on to a vision of “a different type of architecture altogether. A commune full of ghosts with bent spines, built like a warm, dry rabbit warren.” Both in her fantasies of a better life, and in her apparently-real misadventures, Malory is continually driven into the ground.
While Osborne has her predecessors and influences – it’s hard to avoid invoking Kafka, and Robert Walser is more-or-less explicitly cited at one point – she has a style and sensibility distinctively her own. A particular gift for the art of understatement, the passive-aggressive potential of a ☺ or an inappropriately cheery exclamation mark. A rare talent for drawing out the humour from moments – or a full life – of defeat and failure. Spend enough time with this book and you too can begin to internalise a sense of the Osbornesque, to see all the ways that getting dressed or ordering a sandwich can hint at all your deepest fears and greatest vices.
