Everyone loves a dirty book, but Wetlands (Fourth Estate, £7.99, 25th June) is filthy; filthy in the original, smelly sense of the word.
Since its hardback release in the UK earlier this year (not to forget its previous international success), excitement about this debut novel by young, hip German MTV presenter Charlotte Roche has spread like an infection.
Its paperback cover is scrawled with the reviews that the hardback attracted back in January: “Got a strong stomach?” asks London Lite.
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Wetlands is narrated in the first person by ballsy, highly sexual, troubled child-of-divorce, 18-year-old Helen, who is convalescing after receiving a eye-watering, bloody wound to her ass-hole. The novel relates her experiences in hospital, as well as reflecting on Helen’s sexuality and dysfunctional home life. If you are looking for an exquisitely written, complex narrative, look elsewhere because Wetlands suffers from a blue movie-style weakness of plot. Yet, what it lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in shock. This book is not for the faint of heart.
Roche has commented that she wrote Wetlands as a reaction against an advert she saw attempting to flog “feminine wash”. Objecting to the idea that vaginas should not be allowed to smell like vaginas, Roche wanted to show that the female body has not only the potential to be sexy, but also to smell and, well, to shit. Confined to a hospital bed due to an accidental self-mutilation caused by shaving her ass-hole, the book’s heroine wages a personal rebellion against the “hygiene police”.
War isn’t pretty and Helen’s taboo-breaking behaviour sure ain’t either – to the point where I actually had to intermittently put the book down and shudder. There’s an insightful passage in the novel, in which Helen talks about how it’s easy for a gal to ignore what goes on between her own legs – to only see her vagina from above, as it were. Well, this book takes a good, long look. More than this, it – at times comically, at times outright revoltingly – explores all of the intricate details of the protagonist’s relationship with her whole body and all of its blood, spots, smells, smegma and slimes.
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Roche
Yet, in spite of – or rather because of – all of this messiness, Roche has declared that she wanted Wetlands to be erotic and, undoubtedly, the novel has been primarily marketed as a book about sex.
However, disappointingly, the talk about sex is often curiously cold and flat. Helen’s sexuality appears less driven by real desire and more by a rampant sense of curiosity. Her odd, repeated boast about her sexual exploits, “I’m proud of that” sounds weirdly childish – yet joyless.
Perhaps this flatness could have something to do with the fact that the novel has been translated from the German by a man (Tim Mohr, staff editor at Playboy magazine of all people…). Maybe, also, it’s partly because the discourse of sex (specifically the language relating to female anatomy that Mohr employs, with its exhausted lexis of asses pussies and tits) has become contaminated – like Helen’s festering hospital room – with an association with sexism and the sex industry that it cannot but sound slightly hackneyed.
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In any case, Wetlands is more about the protagonist’s intimate relationship with her own body, than with anyone else’s. If nothing else, it urges a generation of women who have been taught to mask, sculpt, scalpel and shave their bodies into an image of perfection to engage with its fabulously filthy reality.