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Posy Simmons
‘Her representation of London is picturesque but entirely unsentimental – as is her portrayal of old age.’ Posy Simmons. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian
‘Her representation of London is picturesque but entirely unsentimental – as is her portrayal of old age.’ Posy Simmons. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Posy Simmonds: ‘Women in books aren’t allowed to be total rotters’

This article is more than 5 years old

The graphic novelist talks about drawing a modern world of art fraud, non-doms and sexting for her latest graphic novel: Cassandra Darke

If the ghost of Christmas past were to pay a visit to Posy Simmonds’s north London home, it might witness a surreal scene: a petite, neat woman in her early 70s kicking a cushion around the hall. For it was thus that, at some point in the four years it has taken to produce her latest graphic novel, she worked out how to draw the murder of a small dog in a London street by a vengeful thug.

“I was having quite a lot of trouble with this particular frame,” she explains. “There’s a long mirror in the hall which I sometimes use when I’m not sure how to draw something. It’s about getting the right weight. So I kicked a cushion to see what happened, and discovered that you go up on your toe to get leverage.”

The dog is a black pug called Corker who has a cameo role in Simmonds’s eagerly awaited Cassandra Darke – a loose reworking of Charles Dickens’s novella A Christmas Carol, which casts an elderly female art dealer as Dickens’s muttering male misanthropist.

Finding herself in difficulty after some art market skulduggery, Cassandra offers her basement flat to a young woman who has compromised herself with a petty crook for a hen party dare. It’s not long before menacing calls start being misdirected to Cassandra’s mobile phone – and, as Simmonds’s many devoted fans would hope and expect, it gets worse.

Hailed as the laureate of middle-class muddle, the author-illustrator has been delighting readers with her exquisitely drawn comic strips and novels since the 1970s, when she began to lampoon the Guardian-reading bourgeoisie in a long-running comic strip that grew into Mrs Weber’s Diary. She followed it with a series sending up “the literary life” and two more inspired by classic novels, all of which were serialised in the Guardian before being published in book form. Gemma Bovery (1999) recast Flaubert’s adulterer as a flighty English expat living in a Normandy village with her dull furniture restorer husband. Tamara Drewe (2007) relocated Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd to a modern West Country writers’ retreat. Both books were made into films (the latter adapted by Stephen Frears) starring Gemma Arterton.

Self-obsessed and mean... Cassandra Darke by Posy Simmonds. Illustration: Posy Simmonds

These tales of betrayal and hypocrisy pale by comparison with the blackness of Cassandra Darke. “I start in notebooks and was drawing a character who I thought might run an art gallery. I’ve always thought that, with rare exceptions like Mrs Danvers [from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca], women really aren’t allowed to be total rotters,” she says. “There certainly aren’t many like Scrooge, who are permitted to be self-obsessed and mean and not sorry for themselves – who are comfortable in their aloofness from life in the way that he is.”

Cassandra has spent a long time in gestation, delayed by a bad bout of pneumonia and a disastrous damp problem in Simmonds’s basement studio, which had reduced much of her collection of vintage Vogues to papier-mache by the time she realised what was happening. Period magazines and shopping catalogues play an important part in her research, she explains, illustrating her point with a 1976 Grattan home-shopping directory in which one of the models just happens to be a young brunette Joanna Lumley.

Her sketchbooks escaped with “some curly pages and a little foxing”. The most recent of them show the evolution of Cassandra from a well-upholstered granny to an obese, bespectacled grouch who stomps, effing and blinding, through a London that twinkles with commercialised seasonal jollity. Simmonds’s jewel-sharp illustrations bring the same precisely calculated heft to a West End street scene or a burger and chips as they do to the unfortunate Corker.

She still does all her drawing by hand, but technological advances mean that instead of pasting scraps of text on to pictures, her husband – the graphic designer Richard Hollis – can scan them into a computer for her, which has made it much easier to create her trademark collages of word and image. Electronic communication, meanwhile, delights her with its plotting possibilities: “In the old days, letters would fall into the wrong hands, but it had to be rather constructed, whereas sending an email or a text to the wrong person is so easy.”

She confesses to having frequently been one step behind her characters. Tamara Drewe had a computer before her creator did, “and I’m quite new to mobile phones, so I have to ask my grandsons what to do”. What she does with them, however, is up-to-the-minute in a gleefully anarchic way. Not to put too fine a point on it (which Simmonds, disarmingly, never does), Cassandra finds herself confronted with that most modern of social media abuses: a “dick pic”. “I’ve never received one myself, I have to say, but you know they exist so you ask young people about it.”

Serialised in the Guardian … Tamara Drewe (2010), starring Gemma Arterton.
Photograph: BBC Films/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

Research for Tamara Drewe included learning from teenagers in rural bus shelters about the terrible boredom of country life. For Cassandra Darke, it involved many hours loitering with her sketchbook in an area of London very different from the one where she has spent most of her adult life. In Mayfair, where Cassandra lives, the money tends to be either older or newer, and she was struck by how abandoned many of the houses appeared to be. “The shops and main streets are busy but all those little squares seem to be uninhabited. There are so many dark windows at night. I suppose they’re all foreign-owned, or belong to people who spend most of their time in the country,” she muses.

Her representation of it all is picturesque but unsentimental – as is her portrayal of old age. “I’m bad at living with people. I have no interest in domesticity or children. I am solitary, a natural spinster, answerable to no one, a burden to no one,” harrumphs Cassandra, who far prefers a night in alone with some caviar and port to the “monstrous turkey dinners” she sees on TV. As for poor Corker, Simmonds is well aware that violence to animals can seem more of an affront in fiction than that inflicted on humans, but is unrepentant. “My brother’s not going to be pleased, because he had a black pug,” she says, cheerfully. “But I’ve warned him that something awful is going to happen.”

See Posy Simmonds in conversation at The Guardian Live on 5 December. Cassandra Darke is published by Jonathan Cape on 1 November. To order a copy for £14.61 (RRP £16.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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