It was only after I started this novel about an acerbic and soon-to-be reviled theater critic — which its publisher had discouraged me from reading — when I learned that the book is set in Edinburgh, Scotland during the fringe festival, which is where I happen to be headed next week; my first visit to the world’s biggest arts festival.
“Bring the House Down” (Doubleday, 297 pages) is largely a knowing and funny read – until it’s not – with the added advantage for me of serving as a kind of preview of both the festival and the city.
I doubt, though, that what author Charlotte Runcie has written will be greeted with unalloyed delight by Forever Edinburgh, the tourist bureau. On page two, right after introducing us to Alex Lyons, the critic who will drive the plot, the narrator tells us Alex only knows Edinburgh in August (the month the annual festival takes place), and, “like most annual festival visitors,” doesn’t see the city as a real place. Then the narrator, whose name is Sophie, offers us examples of what the real Edinburgh is like — “stripped back to its gorgeous Enlightenment bones of dark wet stone tenements in the quiet, endless winters…. the glass-fronted hotels for the rich rising above lines of addicts queuing for methadone in Leith Walk.”
As Alex walks along the still-crowded streets late at night, “a rat matched his pace along North Bridge, hunting in the night’s street rubbish that spilled across the pavement.”
After those first few bracing pages, the impression of what Sophie calls this “mad gothic city” softens, or at least complicates. There is eventually an inviting scene in the National Museum of Scotland, and a vivid reference to another landmark: “Sunshine cut through the drizzle and hit Edinburgh Castle on its great rock above me with such sharpness that I stopped and stared at it, amazed at how it warmed the city into colour.” (yes, a British writer.) All along, the author casually inserts throwaway descriptions, often delicious, that invest the book with a convincing sense of place.
Alex and Sophie are colleagues on an unnamed London newspaper who have been sent to Edinburgh for three weeks to cover the festival, and are staying together in the enormous, run-down flat that their paper is renting for them. Alex is walking alongside the rat after having seen a solo show by a first-time fringer named Hayley Sinclair; he’s already written and filed a review that trashes it, attempting wit at her expense. (After ten minutes of seeing her show about the climate emergency, “you’ll be begging for the world to end much sooner than scheduled.”) Having finished work for the night, Alex goes into a bar – where he runs into Hayley Sinclair…and they go home together. He knows who she is, of course, but doesn’t tell her who he is. The review won’t be published until the morning. That’s when Hayley reads it, in front of Sophie, and discovers that the man who wrote it just shared his bed with her
The next day, Hayley has completely revamped her show. It is no longer called “Climate Emergence-She.” It is now “The Alex Lyons Experience.” She reads his review out loud, burns it, testifies to his horrible behavior and solicits testimony from other women about how he treated them. The show becomes the hit of the festival; it expands, includes guests from Alex’s coolly Lotharian past. It explodes with a #MeToo and media energy far beyond the walls of the dank basement where Hayley’s show takes place
Over the course of the novel, we learn a lot more about Alex, the son of a famous actress, Dame Judith, with much speculation as to whether his chosen profession was born from resentment of hers.
But we learn most about Sophie, who’s going through things; her mother recently died, she’s not sure about her husband, or about her friendship with Alex (why is she defending him? Why is she drawn to him?) all of which seems to belong to a different book. But she seems most uncertain about her work; she is a “junior culture writer” who mostly covers art exhibits, but also writes obits, until the brouhaha over Alex, when he is demoted and she is promoted to write theater reviews. At one point, she writes:
“The problem with being a critic is that eventually you realize you aren’t saying anything anymore. You’re just an idiot responsible for filling a space in the paper with words, the only point of which is to be printed next to some advertising. And reviews are often just advertising too. Critics pretend that isn’t true, but it is.”
This cynical view seems shared by the author herself, who was a critic, but is now apparently no longer one – apparent not just from the biography on the book’s jacket (“Charlotte Runcie was most recently The Daily Telegraph’s radio critic and senior arts columnist.”), but from the attitude in the book, which reflects a kind of exhaustion not just with theater criticism but with theater. Runcie doesn’t have Sophie say this explicitly, but a friend and former editor of Sophie’s does: “The festival ends but theater never stops. There are always more. The show doesn’t just go on. It goes on and on and on.”
There is little defense of theater or theater criticism in the book; Alex talks about maintaining standards, but his insistence on giving almost every show one star out of five, and lashing out brutally in his reviews, suggest both a streak of sadism and an unconscious admission of defeat, both of which make him hard to side with.
(There is, by the way, much talk about the number of stars in a review. I don’t normally use stars; not many New York City critics do.)
A real counterargument was put forth yesterday by Richard Brody in the New Yorker magazine, in response to the recent shakeup at the New York Times arts desk. ( In Defense of the Traditional Review. “Far from being a journalistic relic, as suggested by recent developments at the New York Times, arts criticism is inherently progressive, keeping art honest and pointing toward its future.”) Indeed, Brody says the precise opposite of Sophie/Runcie, seeing reviews as “consumer protection,” quoting Pauline Kael that without critics “there’s nothing between the public and the advertisers”
Still, I’m glad I checked “Bring the House Down” out of the library when it became available, after the publisher denied my request for a digital review copy (digital = not a costly hard copy), because “we limit the number of reviewers who access our books prior to publication.” (I mention this because maybe Hayley has the right approach?) I hope to come across the kind of shows that Sophie was assigned to review – like the solo artist who “invited ticketholders to lick his face”; and The Chill Pope, “a modern confession booth…The Chill Pope will absolve you of your sins, because there are no sins in Chillicism.” I’ll be looking for the “vegan bagel place.” I already signed up for several shows at Summerhall after reading:
“Summerhall was a venue right in the middle of Edinburgh, a sprawling converted university complex with a grand stone entrance built in the 19th century as a warren of lecture theatres, offices and meeting rooms. Its fabric, in a state of terminal decay and romantic artsy crumble, was covered over for the festival with a veneer of colourful posters, bunting, flags, and paintings. The annual festival media party was organized by one of the Scottish arts magazines held for enough years in a row that it had gained a feeling of heritage, even if it was mostly just an excuse for journalists and performers to get drunk together. The magazine that started it wasn’t even printed anymore. It only existed online.”
