Master Cameron, Master Johnson and Mr Hunt

(A review of Bill Coles' Dave Cameron's Schooldays )

by N Quentin Woolf

Who’d have thought there’d be a market for a book about David Cameron’s boyhood backside? Bill Coles, apparently alert to such opportunities, has rattled off eighty thousand words on the subject, and called the result Dave Cameron’s Schooldays.

[Wait a second, this will never do. Let’s try again.]

Bill Coles, looking for a subject for his next book, thought of David Cameron’s arse, and duly knocked one out.

[Yes, that’s more like it. Or perhaps:]

Dear old Bill has identified the gap in the market that is the PM’s derriere, and, rising to the occasion, has advanced towards that hole with every intention of filling it.

[…You get the picture.]

Dave Cameron’s Schooldays is schoolboy humour done post-puberty by someone with twenty-two years of writing experience and an axe to grind. Ostensibly a tale of how Cameron’s time at Eton proved formative of his political career, it’s really an excuse to pull down the trousers of both Cameron and Boris Johnson (present, in fictive form, throughout), and look at their cocks. Yes, I do mean that literally. Sex oozes out of every page, as from a used preservatif; each chapter seems to address a new sexual practise, whether S and M (chapter one), paedophile advances (two), blow-jobs (three), porn (four), etc. In chapter six, our hero gets to ogle a girl’s breasts while the girl masturbates another boy; in eight, a group of older boys pulls down his trousers and pants and administer a group caning. And on and on we go. By contriving to call the house-group to which Cameron belongs the ‘F-Tits’, Coles ensures that the word ‘tits’ can appear on virtually every page of the book.

When sex isn’t actually taking place (and by God, everyone’s reaction to everything in this book is either to get an erection or sexually humiliate someone else), sex is used as the main mode of description. I select at random: Of his first attraction to a girl, the protagonist says ‘Fallen in love? I’d almost shot my load’. When receiving punishment: ‘The bullet, six slim inches of ecstasy… I quivered at the thought of how many boys’ mouths had slipped round the blunt round tip of the silver bullet, their lips peeled back in a perfect orgasm of agony’. Even Cameron’s manner of speech is served up as ‘Do you have to speak like you’ve got a hot cucumber stuffed up your backside?’

My first serious problem with this book is that it involves spending two hundred and fifty pages fetishising the cocks and bottoms of school-age boys. It is no coincidence, I think, that the cover shows both a schoolboy’s backside and a boy with his head thrust into another boy’s groin. This sets the level nicely for the text inside. In spite of most of the characters being minors, from the opening image (a description of the protagonist’s arse) to the penultimate chapter (a ménage a trois worthy of Benny Hill), the novel’s central concern is sex, both thematically and in terms of plot and character development. There are different ways to handle sex; here the sexual misadventures of the central character are reminiscent of a de Sade novel: humiliation follows humiliation, and as the naïve protagonist is schooled in the vices of others, the lessons leave their mark. The boy is caned a number of times in the novel, necessitating repeated medical attention to his arse – those caning him having taken care to break the skin. In a warehouse, a gang of punks strips the schoolboy to his underpants, ties him up and then repeatedly electrocutes him through his nipples with a car battery, causing him to get an erection. His Nanny punches him with knuckledusters, knocking some of his teeth out. The tip of his nose is cut off by someone cracking a whip. Another character lashes him with a riding crop. He wets himself time after time, vomits on himself and is repeatedly approached by other characters who expect him to suck their cocks. Two hundred and fifty pages of this is quite an endurance test, unless you happen to find it (a) funny, or (b) a turn-on.

Several key omissions add to the feeling that this is a dirty fantasy. First, Coles skirts the problem of actually depicting a minor having sexual relations – about halfway through the book the author seems suddenly to remember the device of unreliable narration, and after a fellow boarder has offered his penis to Cameron (by no means the first character to do so), we are given a big narratorial wink and told that, naturally, nothing happened, despite what everyone says to the contrary. Later we learn from other characters that Cameron is supposedly shagging at least one of the older boys, too. Given that the book is delivered as a first-person account, it raises the question of why the narrator would deny something but provide plenty of intradiagetic suggestions that he’s lying. More importantly, it compromises the integrity of the character, who is apparently happy to discuss all manner of debased deeds, but not the one that might earn the author a letter from Schillings. Staying with the theme of omission, for some reason in spite of all this sado-masochistic stuff the text comes over all coy where ‘the F-word’ and ‘the C-word’ are concerned – it describes them as such. Heaven forbid that anything sexually explicit should get into this book, I suppose. Similarly, when a punk shouts something offensive, it is ‘an unprintable word’. Elsewhere, when looking at a girl who is over the age of consent, the protagonist looks at her ‘boobs’, whereas when attempting to photograph a younger girl naked through her bedroom window, he admires ‘her lissom profile’.

It is this precise calculation of language that constitutes the commonality between bad bonkbusters (where elevated euphemism makes basic bodily functions absurd) and the salivation of newspaper society or gossip pages when the underage daughters of celebrities are on the town (where euphemism pretends to conceal lechery, meanwhile signposting it). It’s the mark of a writer writing at the edge, not of acceptability, but of his own moral comfort zone. I’d argue that this book would have been more successful had Coles actually grasped the nettle. Whilst the violence is graphic, and the implications (e.g. of underage sex) thuddingly obvious, the sex itself remains a sort of generalised sauciness, always concealed by bedclothes or tables or window-ledges. If sex is so important to the main character’s development – and we’re repeatedly assured it is – why draw a veil over the deed itself? It can’t possibly be prudishness, given the other content. No, of course not: it’s because there’s no artistic case that validates it (for comparison, think of, say, Lolita) and because the author knows that he’s pushed the idea about as far as he can before it becomes merely abusive, and perhaps worse.

The carrot of the book, as advertised in so many words in the first chapter, is that we’ll get to find out what it was about Dave’s time at Eton that was to turn him into a Tory (and, in all likelihood, the next Prime Minister as well – the vantage point of both narrator and author being the moment before the start of the 2010 general election). Unless one has some personal stake in the matter, it’s not easy to get excited about this as a central question. The misjudgement on this matter is compounded as the narrator wrong-foots his narratee after every episode in the book – ‘no, that’s not what made me become a Tory’, etc, which irritates rather than intrigues. Only in the last nine pages do we get the answer to the dull question of political inclination; when it comes, the revelation makes sense only if one is prepared to carry out some psychological join-the-dots on the mindmap of the main character, drawing not only lines but also a few extra dots to make the thing make sense.

If not the central conflict, then for what are we reading this book? The figures in the book are vivid caricatures. There are only three characters: Cameron (who, somewhat implausibly, describes himself as an amorphous blancmange of a man), and spends most of the novel doing things ‘dismally’ and being used as a fag; a queeny house-master antagonist; and a version of Boris Johnson made so wonderfully repulsive and sexually debauched that the author only dares identify him by his initials, for fear of litigation, presumably. Perhaps as a consequence, BJ is by far the most arresting figure in the story, with great presence and charisma. Coles has a flare for rhythms of speech and (usually) for dialogue, and is a gifted mimic, making each of the main characters very tangible through the language in which they speak and think. The rest of the figures in the book are single-characteristic devices at most. No-one but Cameron develops throughout this romp; his transformation from wet-behind-the-ears newcomer via various sexual ordeals to swashbuckler is well-paced and plausible within the world of the novel. Some character elements, such as his delusion that every female he sees is in love with him, do not vary throughout the text, but are done gently enough to add comic value and give some depth to the character. Others, such as his penchant for being abused, his ineptness, his self-importance, his inability to hold his drink and his fascination with sex, are heavy-handed. If Coles considers Cameron anything better than contemptible, he’s got an odd way of showing it.

The book is a spoof-memoir-cum-romp-com; trouble is, it’s not funny fucking – and vice versa. (Acknowledgements, Dorothy Parker). The only times the sex gives comic value is during such hackneyed farce scenes as a voyeur watching a couple having sex, only to see them be joined by the voyeur’s own lover; or that other old chestnut: nearly falling out of a tree whilst peering into some girl’s bedroom. (A chestnut tree, then. Hm. Perhaps I should take my own advice and leave the comedy to someone who knows what they’re doing.)

My misapprehension that it was a comedy was, I think, the key reason I didn’t enjoy this book. In fact it operates more like slash fiction, stylised to remind one of Flashman or Tom Brown. (Slash fiction, for the uninitiated, is gay porn featuring established fictional characters, typically ones who already have some relationship with each other – Holmes and Watson, say, or Kirk and Spock.) The major strategic blunder is to try to write in this form while being unable, for fear of the legal consequences, to write about the characters actually having sex. The closest we get is BJ saying ‘Come on then, young David, tonight’s your lucky night. Ready to get your chops round my cock?’ which, half a page later, turns out to be an hilarious joke.

This approach to things rules out any Carry On-style innuendo (some of which was promised in an early chapter, but is quickly abandoned in favour of gratuitousness). It’s a shame. As someone raised on a diet of Two Ronnies, Round the Horne and Are You Being Served, I’d have thought a slathering of double-entendre might well have raised the level of the piece, as well as being appropriate to the time in which it is set. As it is, we get scenes like Ted Heath, at a dinner party, being passed a note saying ‘he [a schoolboy] wants to suck your cock’. Or, later, after a burly six-foot prostitute (whom we’ve already worked out is a man) has given oral sex to a group of boys, ‘she’ takes of her wig to reveal a crew-cut. ‘I don’t think she’s a woman’, advises a character, helpfully, thus knocking any residual humour left in the scene.

Other moments of hilarity include the Mike Hunt joke, in which a hapless victim is sent to ask for a person of that name, little realising what they’re saying. I groaned when I saw that one hove into view. One has the impression of a writer trawling through the depths of their experience for anything, anything that might pass muster as a joke. Now, as it happens, at the age of thirteen I was introduced to the execrable frat-house comedy Porkie’s (1982), to which this book owes much, and I remember the joke appearing there – the jocks getting a barmaid to ask the patrons of a bar ‘Has anyone seen Mike Hunt?’ Coles thinks it such a roaring good joke, he uses it twice: once to further the plot; then, in an aside, he has Cameron mention that he once got a waitress at Browns to wander around asking whether anyone – well, you get the idea, I’m sure.

Despite the serious flaws in this book and the fact that I, subjectively, don’t go for its theme, style or alleged sense of humour, and have deep misgivings about slash fiction about schoolboys, however famous they might have become as adults, there’s no doubting Bill Coles’ skill with words. The book is fluid and assured, and the variety of vocabulary is impressive – one has the sense that Coles spends much time in the company of words, and that the relationship is a happy one. Although the problem of the central conflict remains, the pace is snappy and the short chapters keep things rattling along, as do the dynamic, positive sentences, full of strong verbs. I’m not at all sure about Coles’ habit of switching to the present tenses whenever a scene gets heated – in one short exchange the tenses switched at least five times, back and forth like an onanist on a wet weekend, giving the impression of problems at the proofing stage.

This is symptomatic of a greater ill. Unfortunately, overall, one gets the impression that this book was a rush job: a third novel pitched on the basis of the title and the final scene and banged out over a few weeks, with a general election coming up and a slight personal connection to exploit. Looking at Coles’ other titles, which look less flippant in tone, I feel confident that this is probably a misfire of sorts – the man can write. The Well-Tempered Clavier, in particular, has garnered a lot of praise, and Coles has made some bold, even admirable artistic decisions with regards to that – you can read about them at www.wcoles.com. What seems to have knocked the legs out from under Dave Cameron’s Schooldays is a couple of major structural problems, at least one of them inherent in the topicality of the subject. Perhaps there was insufficient time before the election began and the book’s sales window opened to go back and draft the problems out.

If regular mentions of genitalia, bodily fluids and wanking is what you look for in your literature, this book will not disappoint; it may prove of interest too if you’re so cross about the Big Society that you’d like to read about Call Me Dave being physically, psychologically, sexually and emotionally destroyed as a child. Other motives for reading about little boys’ ‘delicate little botties’ certainly suggest themselves, but I won’t go into them here. After all, I wouldn’t want to say something rude. SLQ.

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N Quentin Woolf

SLQ Resident Reviewer

www.nquentinwoolf.com