David Caute — The Women’s Hour [1991]

 

I am easy to please when satire is served. My first author-crush was the mordantly inventive Will Self, whose novels How the Dead Live and Great Apes were among formative explorations into the realm of the Swiftian (before Swift himself, read a few years later), so I feel somewhat equipped to pronounce on whether a work of satire wields the scalpel to effect. This novel from former New Statesman literary editor, Oxford and Harvard emeritus professor, and leftist critic David Caute (still alive and working on criticism alone), wields the scalpel and then some. The Women’s Hour is “about the nature of caricature and how to deconstruct it”, and features a range of caricatures, among them the libidinous Media Studies professor Sidney Pyke, humourless lesbian feminist Bess Hooper, and calculating careerist mistress Chantel Poynter. The plot posits the notion that Pyke, fond of feeling up female students and colleagues, has raped tenure-seeking feminist academic Hooper in the campus pool during the women’s hour, and explores the on- and off-campus consequences of this allegation with unflinching bluntness. The novel’s narrator, although “siding” with Sidney at times as “hero”, is open for subtle mockery of each of the personae featured, with plenty of hilarity to be found for those willing to indulge in the novel’s un-PC scattershot satire. Pyke is a counterculture rebel, present at the ‘68 riots, and whose liberal anti-authoritarian cool makes him an on-campus mascot and irritant; Samantha Newman is his wife, a veteran TV host and sex-fond feminist working on a book Nature or Nurture about her ailing marriage; Chantal Poynter is Pyke’s present mistress, seeking to oust Newman from her eleven million viewers by penning an exposé into the Pyke rape case. Among the other characters include wheedling Scottish publisher Iain Davidson, German publishing magnate and former Nazi Hans-Deitrich Swindler, and Middle Eastern magnate Al Sabah Al Masri Al Fatah. This pot pourri of caricatures, each of whom Caute has no doubt encountered in their real life incarnates (for people are caricatures), make for a sparkling cast of self-interested dopes, and Caute’s funniest set-piece is the university’s rape enquiry, where top-notch fun is had at the expense of the hallowed dons and their establishment attitudes (male and female), which even in 2015, one can imagine still plague many so-called free-thinking campi. The level of observation and sly satire on show in this impish and hilarious novel is impressive, and punches with the best novels in the formidable British satirical canon. 

Editions: Hardback, 1991, Paladin. 

Paperback, 1993, Flamingo. 

Bibliography: 

Novels: 

At Fever Pitch, 1959, Deutsch. 

Comrade Jacob, 1961, Deutsch. 

The Decline of the West, 1966, Deutsch. 

The Occupation, 1971, Deustch. 

The K-Factor, 1983, Joseph. 

News From Nowhere, 1986, Hamilton. 

Veronica or, The Two Nations, 1989, Hamilton. 

The Women’s Hour, 1991, Paladin. 

Dr. Orwell and Mr. Blair, 1994, Weidenfeld and Nicolson.