The Hyena

According to the publisher’s website, The Hyena is ‘a surrealist alternate history’. ‘Surrealist’, I’m happy to accept, although really it’s more of a meta-commentary upon that avant-garde movement. But ‘alternate history’? Now there’s the rub. Just what kind of ‘alternate history’ is The Hyena, and why has it found its home at a fledgling genre publisher? Because these are the kinds of collateral question provoked by David Quantick’s engaging yet curious novel. 

For those in the know, Quantick is a bit of a phenomenon and he’s hardly had a straightforward career. Dubbed a music journalist, Quantick began by writing scathingly comic reviews at the NME in the 1980s with fellow scribe Steven Wells. The pair gravitated towards an upstart Radio 4 comedy show On the Hour (this being the era when comedy was ‘the new rock ‘n’ roll’). Since then, Quantick has written for the great and the good – Armando Iannucci, Chris Morris, Harry Hill, French and Saunders – pocketing an Emmy along the way. He’s also developed an idiosyncratic sideline as a genre fiction writer, straddling sci-fi comedies (Sparks), thrillers (The Mule) and visceral horror (Ricky’s Hand). A prime candidate, then, to help kick-start Jendia Gammon and Gareth L. Powell’s new venture with its ‘mission to champion and celebrate human creativity’ with ‘original and powerful stories from … a wide array of genres.’

And yet The Hyena is a very strange novel with which to meet that mission statement, being both inside and outside of genre simultaneously; its liminality a symptom of the story it tells. It is, in my view, Quantick’s best novel, not only because of its unresolved negotiation with genre, but also because it is his most personal; the intimacy of self-expression demanding a form that cannot slip comfortably into any single generic expectation. The angularity of the novel – its at-two-ness with genre – articulates the grasp for something that might be called a ‘voice’. 

So, what is The Hyena? First and foremost, it is a gift as the (at first) unnamed narrator says, ‘I am going to give you something: the story of my life.’ The gift though, for ethnographic surrealists such as Marcel Mauss, was more than just a transaction: it was the sacrificing of something most valuable, as in the Native American practice of potlatch, to secure a social bond between the giver and the receiver. To give you my story for my life, for something viable and enduring, is to sacrifice what is most intimate and personal in the hope of a new social dispensation. It is that desire which underwrites Deborah Parkinson’s strange testimony. 

Deborah (or ‘Débo’) is the daughter of a pub landlord – shades perhaps of James Joyce’s father – who grows up in Devonport, part of what would become the City of Plymouth in 1928, and where in the 1960s Quantick himself grew up with his adopted parents. Deborah develops a love of the coastline – that threshold where sea and land converge – and maritime history. Maybe it’s that mix of watery spaces and romantic grandeur that inspires her childhood paintings of ‘skeleton soldiers’, winged nurses, and teachers with three mouths. Or maybe her surrealist imagination just appears fully-formed. 

For Deborah is a working-class mirror-image of Leonora Carrington, the now-fêted female artist and writer who fell (figuratively) in love with the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936, and then fell (literally) in love with Max Ernst in 1937, her senior by twenty-six years. Carrington’s story, of how she scandalised her upper-middle class family; survived incarceration in a Spanish mental asylum; and found fame in Mexico City, has been recounted in both her cousin Joanna Moorhead’s biography and Bryan and Mary Talbot’s graphic novel Armed with Madness (2023). Little-known outside of Mexico in her day, Carrington’s work is now conspicuous and can sell upwards of $30 million.  

Both Deborah’s name and the eponymous hyena allude to Carrington’s most famous tale, ‘The Debutante’ (1937), whilst other details from Carrington’s mythology, such as the recurring motif of submarines, are scrambled by Quantick into Deborah’s life-story. But his point is that, although Deborah avoids the worst of Carrington’s hardships, she also has none of her privileges. How in this world – the same world occupied by Carrington, Ernst, Dalí, Breton, Picasso, etc. who, in Deborah’s inversion of the known story of surrealism, become just part of the scenery – can a working-class surrealist survive, let alone become known? The point is she can’t. 

Deborah’s tale is a picaresque, and like another satirical figure who drops out of their class position (Paul Pennyfeather in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall [1928]), she bobs along on the surface of her times. On the verge of being expelled from senior school, Deborah encounters the would-be surrealist Victor Vardy and becomes an artist’s model. In a fictional analogue to the story of Lee Miller, Deborah moves from model to art student. At college she encounters Herbert Read’s Surrealism (1936), the collection of essays and reproductions that followed the exhibition at the New Burlington Gallery, and – less likely – Hope Mirrlees’s collage poem, ‘Paris’ (1920). (Although published by the Hogarth Press, ‘Paris’ was only issued in a limited edition of 175 copies; Mirrlees refused to reprint it until the 1970s; and it had largely been forgotten by the time Deborah would have read it. Still, its inclusion means that Quantick can offer a riotous pastiche, in honour of his adopted Plymouth, in the novel’s appendices.) Blackmailing a local fisherman, and disguising herself as a boy, Deborah makes her way to France. 

Eventually arriving in Paris, Deborah gets a job as a waitress and blags her way, with the aid of an American journalist, into the outer rings of the surrealist circle. She strikes up an uneasy relationship with Frida Kahlo, the latter acutely aware that she is only tolerated by the surrealists as a form of imported exotica. As Deborah spends more time in their company, the animals who inhabit her pictures become manifest, and she is haunted by a mysterious male figure. His identity is exposed as Marius Savernake, a would-be artist for whom Deborah paints several artworks which are exhibited under his name. As the fall of Paris looms, so the surrealist circle is scattered, initially in Deborah’s case to Mexico before she returns home to England and post-war domesticity, where her fleeting life as a surrealist is forgotten. Only many years later does a chance encounter revive these memories and the truth of Deborah’s relationship to Savernake is finally revealed. 

So, is this story an ‘alternate history’? Not by any definition that characterises any of the classic texts within that sub-genre: the ‘what if?’ or counter-factual premise that generates a turning-point in the known history and a new counter-narrative, whether that be the Confederacy winning the US Civil War in Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee (1952), numerous tales of Hitler winning World War Two such as Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), or the Black Death eradicating Western civilisation in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt (2002). Nothing that occurs in Deborah’s narrative alters the known story of surrealism, although we gain insight into the class, gender and racial inequalities that embedded its apparent counter-culturalism. Deborah’s own trajectory only changes at the very end because – not unlike the protagonist of Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (1974) – she is liberated by old age. 

Instead, what we have here is a piece of apocrypha, a non-canonical text that lurks within the official history, a convolute: a twisted document inserted crossways into the known record. The surrealists loved apocrypha: it chimed with the dream-logic of their paintings; the unconscious desires released by the juxtaposition of collage and readymade; the random discoveries to be made on the byways of Paris. As much as Quantick satirises the hypocrisy of the surrealists, so he also utilises their techniques: a détournement or re-routing of surrealist methodology which indicates that The Hyena is not just about surrealism; it is surreal. 

What the novel reminds me most of is the composer Jennifer Walshe’s apocryphal history of the Irish avant-garde Aisteach, in particular her fabrication of ‘the Guinness Dadaists’, a group of workers who in their spare time in the 1920s made sound poetry, assemblages and private happenings. All nonsense, of course, but no more nonsensical than believing in the known history as the only history. Deborah Parkinson’s story, her gift to her imagined reader, is not so much an alternate history as an interleaved history, inserted into the interstices of what passes for the official record. Quantick’s novel similarly inserts itself into genre slant-ways yet tells a truth familiar to readers of feminist sf: this is how the dispossessed has always survived, ‘in the chinks of your world-machine’, and this is how they always will.