The Review of Contemporary Fiction

69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess, by Stewart Home
reviewed by Cory Weber

Stewart Home. 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess. Canongate, 2003. 182 pp. Paper: $13.00.

Literary provocateur Stewart Home marries the pulp pornography of his previous skinhead novels with fundamentally more “highbrow” attributes—literary criticism, political theory, and other avenues of philosophical discourse—to produce the style he describes affectedly as “proletarian postmodernism.” In this latest work Home has muted his characteristic prankster plagiarism, choosing instead to cue his inspiration more conventionally by way of literary influence. Ann Quin is the most evident influence guiding 69 Things, as made apparent in an opening line that recalls Quin’s opening to Berg and made blatant when narrator Anna Noon describes how her prosaic inspiration should avoid certain authors and “detour instead towards Ann Quin.” When Anna, a twenty-year-old university student in Aberdeen, Scotland, meets Alan, a book-obsessed older man, the two quickly hit it off. It is from here that the main structural pattern of the book is established: scholarly discourse—from diatribes on Fromm’s misconceptions about mechanization to acclamations of Trocchi’s literary hoaxes—followed by a whole lot of fucking. Home is clearly having fun drawing parallels between the masturbatory self-importance of theoretical discourse and the masturbatory voyeurism of reading detailed accounts of sexual intercourse. One book that Alan is obsessed with is “69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess,” in which author K. L. Callan claims to have taken the body of Princess Diana on a tour of sixty-nine of Aberdeenshire’s ancient stone circles. Attempting to test the plausibility of Callan’s claim, Alan straps a weighted-down ventriloquist’s dummy (another nod to Quin) to his back and sets out with Anna to replicate the tour. While this stone-circle expedition provides some amusing psychogeographical “facts” and adds an interesting historical framework to the discourse/sex construct, the deliberate repetitiveness could have easily grown tedious. Fortunately, Home never lets that happen—as the repetition begins to exhaust itself, the narrative fractures, and the main characters’ identities become as inverted as the numerals in the book’s title. With 69 Things Stewart Home has proven that he’s a skilled author capable of much more than pulp appropriations.