1982, Janine was published by Jonathan Cape in 1984. Jock McLeish, a middle-aged supervisor of security installations for a Scottish firm, lies alone in a hotel room in a small Scottish town. He cannot sleep. To distract himself from despair — from the failure of his marriage, his career, his country (the 1982 of the title is Thatcher’s Britain, post-Falklands) — he constructs elaborate sexual fantasies involving imaginary women, principally one called Janine.
The fantasies are explicit, obsessive, and degrading — but they are also transparently mechanisms of avoidance. As the night progresses, reality keeps breaking through: memories of his ex-wife, his domineering mother, his moment of genuine connection with a woman he was too cowardly to love. The pornographic fantasies are revealed as the negative image of the authentic desire he has been unable to express — control fantasies constructed by a man who feels entirely out of control.
The novel’s formal climax is extraordinary: McLeish attempts suicide by overdose, and the text literally breaks down — words fragment, typography disintegrates, different typefaces collide — representing the dissolution of consciousness. He survives, and the morning-after sections are written in a completely different register: clear, honest, painful. Gray demonstrates that the pornographic imagination was a symptom of a deeper refusal to face truth — and that the truth, when finally confronted, is survivable.
Collecting 1982, Janine
First edition (Jonathan Cape, London, 1984): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $75–$200
- Very good: $30–$75