When we first meet Grace Allcock, she's prone and anaesthetised, about to get a nose-job. The scene is nearly unreadable, the unflinching prose keeping us alive to what "before" and "after" photographs would have us forget; this is a violent procedure, partly conducted with a hammer.
Grace believes the operation will perfect her, and that from perfection springs fame. She's right, and the novel follows her path towards D-list notoriety via a "leaked" video of her being raped by two footballers. One of the most memorable horrors is the fact that her agent, a comically odious man who, when he isn't pouring vodka down Grace's throat, is waxing lyrical on the "vision of Max Clifford", arranged for her to meet these men. He called it "harvest time".
Grace's rags-to-riches (except she never sees much money) trajectory is cut against the story of Kurt. Kurt met Grace, a long time ago he was the caretaker at her primary school. Kurt leads a solitary existence, spent reflecting on the mystical transience of life and succumbing to lonely, obsessive jaunts in the online "porniverse". Yet it is in his sections of the book that the narrative's poetry lies. Regarding a toad in the school playing fields, Kurt thinks: "Animal of a darkness forever unreachable, your defence in your repellence is nothing but that. You are not beautiful but you are a thing upon which our notions of beauty reside." He may as well be talking about the novel itself.
The two stories converge when Kurt's school decides it needs a celebrity to open its new swimming pool. Grace, out of favour with the press, needing to refresh her image and project a new "innocence", agrees to do the job. What follows is a troubling, if not redemptive, act of violence: a doomedto-fail attempt at transformation.
The novel is not solely a satire on celebrity culture and the poverty of aspiration in the Big Brother generation. It engages fretfully with Christian themes and imagery. Celebrity becomes intricately connected with resurrection. Death is everywhere. In one of the few occasions when it grants its central character a credible inner life, Grace remembers the Boxing Day tsunami, "the bloated floating bodies drifting past like aubergines". She obsessively surfs memorial sites on the internet. When she and her boyfriend take a walk, they end up in a graveyard, reading names on headstones and wondering what the dead have left behind.
The unhealed wounds of women, after breast enhancements, are reminiscent of the spear-wound of Christ. Twelve paparazzi keep a vigil outside Grace's home. Flesh is transfigured into a living sacrifice; celebrity is what you get when you achieve bodily perfection; and fame is a way to live forever.
Still, the ire of the book is lavished primarily on female characters. Katie Price, Jade Goody, Jodie Marsh and Taylor Raine are recreated as objects of satire. Kurt, a disturbed and disturbing character, is never less than real because the narrative grants him the complex contradictory inner life and history denied to Grace (he is addicted to ever-more-extreme pornography as well as to Toy Story; he is a gentle and compassionate father, forbidden access to his daughter).
The novel's rage propels Grace towards an overtly symbolic ending involving betrayal, blood and a baptism, of sorts. Grace may be a stand-in for Christ but she is also a cipher: never fully characterised and as much a sacrifice to the novel's theme.
Griffiths's language is lyrical, brutal and startling; it requires and deserves a robust reader. At times, this fury risks shading into a monotone: cosmetic surgery, extreme pornography and natural disasters caused by climate change are described with equal force. Yet this frantic even-handedness is meaningful: in the world Griffiths creates, the ageing and decay of individuals, of a society and of a planet are laid against each other in a portrait of hopelessness and helplessness.
Jenn Ashworth's latest novel is The Friday Gospels (Sceptre).
