6.
Of course, these first six books of Phonogram present the reader with a thoroughly feminist cautionary tale, in which Dave Kohl begins his redemption by declaring the callous nature of his sins against women without ever realising how utterly he's damning himself by doing so. He truly is, as Mr Gillen has him announce;
"not a man ... (but) a mutation, a genetic dead-end .... a monster with a tumour hanging between its thighs ..... a white man in a clitoris palace ... such a cock"
Kohl imagines that he's speaking there with an amusing degree of self-awareness and irony rather than ignorance and uncaring, and in that, he's a deftly-sketched cartoon representation of the tits-out-for-the-boys, lad's-mag extrapolation of Britpop which the mass media of Loaded and the Fleet Street gutters brought to such public prominence. For Kohl believes, as so many of the period allowed themselves to, that the very fact of recognising something of his own sexism while expressing it with an unreconstructed sense of joyful irresponsibility somehow renders the whole business less abhorrent, somehow alchemically transforms, with the addition of irony to bigotry, cruelty into raucous good humour.
If the holy trinity of Damon, Jarvis and the Janus-head of Liam/Noel were saving British pop through an apparent rejection of both foreign and contemporary influences, so the thinking seemed to be in some quarters, then a stripping away of what was labelled political correctness and agit-prop might reveal a truly British sense of humour, all suspender-belts and naughty seaside postcards, all supposedly traditional and harmless fun.
But simply knowing that a thought is cruel and an act is oppressive, and then guffawing while the thought is expressed and the act committed, doesn't make either fair or tolerable, no matter how much end-of-the-pier, last-house-of-the night gagsterism is spewed out to make the sexism seem amusingly self-aware and transgressively daring. And the fact that Dave is so very conscious of how his behaviour could be seen by kinder and more decent folks doesn't mean, as if it ever could, that that behaviour is somehow now redeemed by his own laddish self-knowledge. It's the strangest aspect of nineties laddism, that boys and men might feel that the fact of their advancing along the evolutionary scale far enough to learn the nature of their insensitivity, and far worse, might of itself excuse their perpetuation of oafish behaviour. As if men had such low expectations of themselves that the mere fact of their simply grasping why women might disapprove of them could earn their massed ranks enough credibility points to excuse business continuing as unpleasantly as usual.
Dave Kohl's gradual and painful and piecemeal conversion to a practically-grounded, theory-free brand of feminism, of humanism, is, mercifully and quite to the credit of Mr Gillen and Mr McKelvie, a gradual and incomplete one quite unmarked by sudden heavenly transformations of the spirit. Britannia is certainly rescued from further oppression by being reminded by Dave that her first incarnation had been as a goddess who "didn't care what anyone thought", who could be a "girl with the best record collection and a killer fringe" without conforming to anybloke's definition of what a woman ought to be, which marks the intensification of his shuffling towards a more kindly state of mind. And yet Dave still refers to the "Mod-Goddess of Britpop" as a "girl". Ah, that word "girl", that insensitive and status-diminishing pronoun that can mark out even a goddess as a supposed child, a slip that shows us how Dave's reconstruction is as yet ongoing. Similarly, when the ghost of Beth's past is freed through Dave encouraging her to define her own strange existence rather than "waiting for a man whose main characteristic is his absence ... ", his suggestion that Beth's shade "follows" Richey into another plane of existence is as linguistically insensitive as his compassion isn't, for Dave could have rather suggested she pursue her own destiny rather than following that of Richey Manic's. But Dave's sentiment is feminist, even if his language lags behind the caring good sense of his newly compassionate heart.
If "Rue Britannia" is a hero's journey, then the way that Dave Kohl begins to earn his passage into adulthood is by learning to respect women as his equals, and to treat them accordingly, regardless of who they are or what advantage they may or may not offer to him.
7.
I do realise that the whole matter of gender in "Rue Britannia" is so straight-forward a business that my discussing it is on a par with a wanna-be film critic highlighting the fact that Star Wars has really big spaceships in it. I know that I'm not mentioning anything that isn't incredibly obvious, that hasn't been artfully established years ago in the text and sub-text by Phonogram's laudable creators. After all, the double-pun of "Rue" in the tale's title, of "regret" and of a woman's name, sets the story's tone and meaning before the cover is ever turned. I know there's no need to discuss in any measure of detail at all the meaning of the curse that curdles Kohl's stomach, or the fact that Dave travels to rescue Beth's shade from her half-life despite having already escaped the threat of the goddess, or the bloke-dominated dreamscape of the memory-kingdom of Britpop. "Phonogram: Rue Britannia" does all of that for itself. Yet, in an era often so strangely characterised by an almost complete insensitivity to feminism, and to the fundamental rights and simple respectful human kindnesses that it represents, "Rue Britannia" and its gentle and inclusive heart feels well worth the celebrating.
For if there's a heart that isn't warmed by Beth's love for her husband in what seems evidently to be a marriage of equals, and by her ability to inform her tenderness towards him with "Motorcycle Emptiness", a nihilistic declaration of utter despair transformed by fondness and time and experience, and Dave's good actions, into an expression of the romanticism that so obviously underlies it, well, it's probably a heart that's had a long, long day.
To be concluded, where we may very well touch upon, amongst other things, Mr McKelvie's finely judged design sense and love of form, and the question of whether Dave has merely adopted chivalry rather than feminism;
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