I think I might have just read the best book I have read for years, a book that I threw in the bin on page seven because of its grotesque dive into a murky ocean of abominable gorging, but fished it out because I knew this book had something different. I’m glad of that, writes Michael Holland.
Simon Rumley’s The Wobble Club tells the story of Gill and Brolly, two 40stone+ people who love each other dearly. Their love for each other is one that most people could only dream about, but this romance is as equally horrific as it is hilarious. Not, though, a horror that makes you check the doors and windows, no, because this horror is happening just along the street and to others. Or is it?
The horror hits when you recognise the signs of food addiction within yourself; the horror is the book becoming a mirror that you don’t want to look into but you can’t stop yourself. Which is how I came to be rescuing The Wobble Club from the trash.
On the other side of the darkness is the hilarity, but this is funny stuff you shouldn’t be laughing at because when you realise you’re laughing at someone else’s misery you then want to cry for your own.
If you don’t recognise yourself you will recognise others. And if you live in South East London you will know the pubs and streets in the book, or similar streets where a chicken or burger shop sizzles under neon lights every few yards; where a glut of fast food outlets has affected the health of the nation.
Almost every paragraph deserves to be read out loud. The words shock, they soothe, they suck you in to their oleaginous world of a junk food diet and spit you out into a rain-sodden gutter in SE17.
The Wobble Club all takes place within a two-mile radius of the Elephant & Castle with the author virtually bringing the place alive with an excess of eyebrow-raising similes: ‘ominous sentiments gnaw like ravens in a quagmire of corpses’; colleagues ‘huddled like a sports team for terminally unfit turnips and did its best not to flinch at Gill’s breath, which smelled like a sweet factory worker’s vomit’… Big knickers in a drawer are likened to ‘dying stingrays’. Egregious phrases that demand you read them again and read them to others to see if they are as shocking to them as they are to you.
There are shower scenes, bedroom scenes, and pub scenes, but not one of them fits into what we expect from those tried and tested favourites. Every chapter provides another surprise, another shock, another section that has to be reread to make sure you got it right. Some characters are introduced and discarded within a page or two. You hope that the nice ones return.
This is a first novel but follows on from a very successful and award-winning film-making career where Rumley became known for, let’s say, being an outsider who worked unconventionally. He has written and directed several films that deal with the darker side of humanity, films where you can never predict what is coming next. He analyses people and their relationships, probing the unseen and unspoken minutiae of their lives. He makes films about lives disintegrating with little respite from the unremitting misery.
Rumley creates a feeling of unease when there should be none; he doesn’t want you to get comfortable but when you do a mind-altering shock is sure to follow.
Just as there is a Rumley way to make films, I predict that, if there is a second book, we will see a Rumley style of writing.
I’ve not been able to eat a Cadbury’s Wispa since reading The Wobble Club… If you know, you know.
This novel about a morbidly obese South London couple and what happens when one goes on a diet but the other refuses is out on 26th October, published by Whitefox Publishing. £10.99
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