For a while there hasn't seemed much point in reading the tabloid section of the Guardian. Many of its best writers have departed; the books section has seemed indiscriminate and inconsequential, and we are treated to endless mushy celeb profiles in which the interviewer effortlessly gives prominence to his own talents and travails. But just when one was ready finally to concede that the Independent, Daily Telegraph and Financial Times were streets ahead, along came a clarion call to loyalty. Gemma Bovery is Posy Simmonds's serial, graphic, reworking of Flaubert's Madame Bovary. After 100 daily episodes in the Guardian it is now published as a book.
It is more than ten years since Posy Simmonds ceased to produce her weekly strip for the Guardian. Readers who expected a similarly gentle poke at the mores of the metropolitan middle classes will have been startled at the cool, even cruel wind which blows off Gemma Bovery. The key characters of Simmonds's earlier work were the Webers, he a polytechnic lecturer, she an ex-nurse and occasional children's book writer. They are the ghosts of Islington past. Despite their frailties, they believed that you get back from society what you put in, and they earnestly tried to put in a good deal, worrying about sexism, racism, the environment, relationships and romance. There were other less likeable characters, to be sure-the abandoned and divorced women who are a Simmonds speciality, the clich? and alcohol-soaked Edmund Heep and his unlovely adolescent sons, the serial adulterer and ad-man Stanhope Wright. But Simmonds's astringency was more than balanced by a fond mockery. In the Webers and their friends, readers' recognition of their own foibles was accompanied by much delight and only a little guilt.
None of the kinder characters of Weber-land survives into the harsher world of Gemma Bovery except, perhaps, the figure of Charlie Bovery, Gemma's husband, ex-art school teacher, furniture restorer, a balding, be-stubbled heavy smoker and denizen of Hackney. Apart from his domicile (off the middle class map in the 1970s) Charlie might have been at home in Weber-land. But, two decades later, he is like the original Charles Bovary-an anachronistic loser, capable of love perhaps, but too laid-back, too kind, too principled even. There isn't much of a place for him in the tough 1990s milieu that Simmonds anatomises in Gemma Bovery.
So the first important shift in Simmonds's work since the Webers is that nobody pleasant holds centre-stage. Like its literary model, Gemma Bovery is peopled with horrors. For a start there is Gemma herself, shallow beyond her 30 years, riddled with competitive angst, hopping from one bandwagon to another. In conversation, Simmonds herself shows a fondness for Gemma, describing her as a survivor who, had she not met such an untimely end, would probably have upped sticks and started all over again. Perhaps because of this, Gemma is spared the painful suicide of Flaubert's heroine, dying instead in quintessential yuppie fashion, by choking on a piece of French bread. Most readers, if not her creator, will feel little sadness at her departing.
Besides Gemma, we meet the ghastly Rankins, spiritual descendants of Trish and Stanhope Wright from the earlier strip-he a divorce lawyer, she a head-hunter taking time out to produce quantities of children for the nanny to look after. With houses in Elgin Crescent and Verbier, and their Normandy manor with its faux marbre bathrooms, bateaux lits and telephone boxes by the pool, the Rankins-along with Patrick Large, restaurant critic and Gemma's ex-sit at the apex of the world to which Gemma a little half-heartedly (to give her the benefit of the doubt) aspires. And it is this world of big City money, a world which features only peripherally in her earlier work, that is the target of Simmonds's satire, although a host of other characters in France and England are drawn in, too.
In Weber-land of the 1970s, things were rarely what they seemed: it was the humour and sadness of this truth that Simmonds exposed each week. But the second shift in Simmonds's work is that in Gemma's world, appearance has become reality. What she consumes and how she displays what she consumes is what she is. The series's subtitle, "A Tale of Adultery and Soft Furnishings," might make it seem as if feeling and display are finely balanced. But is there really any doubt about what excites and defines Gemma? "I was just thinking, actually the panelling would look amazing stripped," she thinks before she and her aristocratic lover Herv? take off their clothes in the "totally stunning" and decayed chateau. Herv?'s girlfriend dumps him when he disregards her musing, "en bleu ou en rouge... and it comes in pale green too..." Wizzy Rankin comments, when her husband expresses the fear that Gemma might commit suicide, "take arsenic? She'd better bloody not-she's doing my table decorations." In this world, in the 1990s, when money and "lifestyle" have blurred the boundaries of class (which so concerned Flaubert), things define us; they and we are Simmonds's target, and her aim is sure, deadly, funny and enchanting.
Like all the best satires, of course, Gemma Bovery does not work by being simplistically censorious. Simmonds uses Flaubert to chart the distance between middle-class life now and a century ago, but she is surely attracted to him also because he is, like herself, both detached from and implicated in the world he creates. Flaubert often expressed disgust at the pettiness of his subjects' milieu, but also declared that he was Madame Bovary. Sharing Flaubert's acerbity, his ear for the mot juste and his eye for the tiniest indicators of class and status, Simmonds not only puts herself in Gemma's world (she's there, looking excessively demure and laden with bags of stuff, on page 85), but also revels in its world of goods. Her drawings are marvellous emporia of things, each one talismanic, each beautifully and lovingly drawn. Cornices, fireplaces, fabrics, Prada bags, Renault Clios, glossy mags, Dualit toasters-when it comes to the accoutrements of middle-class identity she doesn't miss a trick. Entranced by her virtuousity, we are drawn into the game. "How perfect that the soign?e Delphine has a Herv? Chapellier bag slung over her shoulder at just the right angle," we find ourselves murmuring sotto voce, and so we are forced to recognise ourselves as both subject and consumers too. Gemma Bovery will soon become one of the talismanic objects it so brilliantly satirises; it will be one of the things which defines us-and thus, surely, an object of study for the anthropologists of the future who take as their subject the 1990s metropolitan middle class.
Posy Simmonds might seem something of a one-off. Who else has perfect pitch, as it were, for both words and pictures? Although on the continent the illustrated novel is a recognised genre and, in Italy, for instance, fumetti are preferred reading for many adults, in England it hasn't much of a pedigree. But Simmonds is very English indeed, especially in her drawing. Go back to the great cartoonists of the 18th century, especially those who told stories in series, like Hogarth and Rowlandson, and you find the same interests and skills, the same very English obsession with domesticity and interiors, with animals and mise-en-sc?nes loaded with import. Like many English artists, too, Simmonds works primarily with line rather than mass-the same sinuous, humourous line which Rowlandson used to create a whole character in a few deft strokes of pen and pencil, washing in the detail afterwards. But Simmonds is much more than a cartoonist; she makes us realise that a great cartoonist can be a great artist too. I'd be more than happy to take page 25 of Gemma Bovery and hang it on my wall, especially because I am sitting in an air-conditioned apartment on the 14th floor of a 33-storey apartment block in Chicago, Illinois-and a million miles away from the scenes so lovingly depicted there.
