Daisy's Reviews > The Fermata

I was going to open this review by saying that its not a book to be read in public when I checked myself. Would I be ok if I was seen reading a Jo Nesbo book, Corman McCarthy or Brett Eastern Ellis? Of course but why? Why should I not feel deviant and ashamed of reading about murder yet harmless sex (and before anyone bleats on about the consent issue in the book it is harmless in the truest sense as no one is harmed). Why should I not want it to be known that I’m reading about a guy exposing a woman’s breast but ok with someone knowing that I’m reading about a guy exposing someone’s intestines with a sharpened credit card?

This dichotomy is not purely theoretical, it’s a legitimate question with real world consequences. I write this review in the week that in the US a school principal has lost her job after pupils in her school were shown an image of MIchelangelo’s David while in another school 3 children and 3 adults lost their lives to a school shooter. Lets all marvel at the American mores that sees penises as more dangerous than pistols.

So I’m admitting to reading a book about a guy who can freeze time and uses it to strip and reclothe women.

Wherever you choose to read the book it would seem that it is not without controversy. Firstly, I’d like to say that I have little time for people who claim they enjoyed it when they first read it and now in the wake of #MeToo they have re-evaluated it. Either the behaviour is wrong or its not, and your opinion should not be based on the current fashionable movement. Secondly – it’s a book, it is fiction. The guy cannot actually stop time, the women do not exist so why its ok to have a fictitious woman murdered but not have her pubes looked at, maybe someone can tell me. There is also the third issue of those newly outraged having overlooked or forgotten the nuances of the book. Arno is acutely aware that what he is doing is wrong, he says it explicitly, he admits his girlfriend left him over him even imagining doing it and he makes up the most ridiculously silly justifications for his deviance – along the lines of the A&E patients who happened to trip and fall in such a way that a random lightbulb that was inexplicably on the floor ended up in their rectum. At one point he even suggests that,

Nobody else should be entitled to take off women’s clothes at will, at the snap of a finger or the flip of a switch, but I think I should be, because, for one thing, my curiosity has more love and tolerance in it than other men’s does.

Outrageous yet when you read it and read what other men he asks say they’d do with the same power its hard to say his opinion is completely delusional.

Mainly it is funny. Arno is funny. His obsession with breasts and nakedness is more gauche than anything, and in many instances you can hear the Sid James laugh as a soundtrack. He is like a teenager with his attempts to shock, his leaving dirty messages in books, his writing of the dirtiest scenarios he can contemplate – which depressingly are really very tame in comparison to even mainstream porn of today. He is a man in arrested development, in his 30s, temping, a half finished masters (or phd can’t remember which), living alone and lacking in self-esteem. In moving life Baker makes him seem quite pathetic, the women have the ascendancy over him. Take this scene which is very funny and shows how the woman humours him and he completely misjudges the encounter,

I fanned the coals so strenuously and rapidly with the Arts section of the Globe that my balls started flapping backward and forward in exactly the same rhythm as my arms. It was a unique experience, to be able to feel those cocktail onions to-ing and fro-ing with such gusto. I stopped to get my breath and as the flames grew looked up at the woman standing near me… and I said to her in an amazed voice, “My balls are actually flapping. It’s a new experience.” She nodded sideways, smiling, and sipped her drink; she didn’t seem to mind my telling her that. I fanned the coals some more and then we talked briefly of barbecue starter-coils. “But you seem to like flapping, “ she said. “I wouldn’t want to deprive you of that.” God, how I treasure those little flirtatious moments.

Cocktail onions had me laughing out loud.

He is also a pervert who wants to convince us he is not but his attempts just prove the contrary. Take this example where he describes using an impromptu sex aid made from half an avocado (seed still in) and an electric toothbrush and concludes by suggesting this is less outre than his frozen time fondlings,

“I record this here in passing so I won’t seem, with all of my somewhat aberrant sneaking and skulking in the Cleft, totally devoid of more typical sexual instincts.”

And therein lies (sorry going to have to do it) the rub. Most people would rather see someone they found attractive naked than get friendly with a buzzing, bristled avocado which begs the question is he aberrant or just an opportunist?

There was also something refreshing in reading about a man who genuinely loves women. He loves women of all ages of all shapes and in a time when the famously left leaning, pro feminist newspaper the Guardian went all John Ruskin and told a woman that she should wax her pubes off because her younger boyfriend would be disgusted by pubic hair, he is not phased by women au naturel. They are also everyday women in baggy sweaters, in glasses with run-of-the-mill jobs women who have not spent a fortune to look like a Kardashian, and despite the decades of feminism this is a rare case of normal women being seen as sexually alluring. And for all of Arno’s self love, he is a man with love to give and he spends the book searching for it, often the frozen activities are compensation for his fear of rejection by these women. When he achieves love, things change.

This book is a celebration of sex but sex as a fun, slightly silly activity that preoccupies a lot of people a large amount of the time. It is also a literary book. Baker writes long, beautiful sentences, I think one stretched to half a page the entirety of said page being a description of lying on a beach towel. His command of language is masterly and the book is full of plays on words and puns and literary references.

Many years ago I read a book called Once More, With Feeling: How we tried to make the greatest porn film ever where Victoria Coren set out to make a porn film that had a good storyline and held the viewers interest between the sex scenes. I think if she’d had filmed this book she would have succeeded.