Grant Morrison – innovator in the field of graphic novels, playwright, cultural disruptor and the author of Supergods, an idiosyncratic study of superhero archetypes – has at last turned to the novel, with a bitter, ageing drag queen as the central character. That’s a surprise in itself. Morrison’s masterly comic series of the 1990s, The Invisibles, featured S&M revolutionaries setting out to break consensus reality while exploring the fractal nature of time. Aren’t drag queens a bit mainstream now?
Luci LaBang is no small-town drag act; formerly a member of an avant-garde performance troupe, she’s a familiar face from TV, a sexual pioneer fondly hailed on the bus by the youth of Gasglow (Morrison’s thinly disguised, hyperreal Glasgow). She’s now in her 40s, and no one is harsher than Luci on the theme of her faded looks and withered sexual allure. She’s reduced to playing Widow Twankey in an arty, postmodern panto entitled The Phantom of the Pantomime. Its cast includes a pop princess and a scabrous comedian, and the show’s extensive rehearsal period is given an equally lengthy treatment in glittering, empurpled prose. Luci’s garrulous narration is the literary equivalent of the drag queen’s overdone slap; it’s piled on mercilessly, and all you can do is go with it.
A (possibly) haunted theatre and a cursed production are campily familiar ingredients. Ruminations on the theme of mirrors and doubles ensue with the arrival of beautiful twentysomething Luda. When the pop starlet playing Aladdin has an onstage accident, Luda seems the perfect replacement. After Luci follows Luda into the loos to listen to her “youthful, exuberant piss sluicing the porcelain”, and analyses the “spray trajectory”, she makes a delightful calculation. “There are some things you just can’t hide,” Luci observes with a thrill of desire.
Luda has heard of Luci’s prowess as an occult practitioner, and begs to be taught the secrets of “the Glamour”. A mix of shamanism, acting class and makeup tutorial, the Glamour is a mysterious process involving “sleight of mind in concrete reality”: a disordering of the senses via sex, drugs and ritual (though the pouting Luda expects magical powers and the ability to become invisible). They hurtle on a headlong journey through the city’s seamy side, culminating in a nightmare vision of the underpinning of reality, an evil map in the basement of a sex club: “This other Gasglow was a mirage town hung suspended over the original’s dour steeples and fateful chimneys, a grotesque, awe-inducing shadow cast on the boiling fog-rolls of the aether.” Unfortunately, they’re both too high or deranged to fathom much of it.
It can be hard for the reader, too, drunk on this hallucinatory prose, to figure out what exactly is going on in this … thriller? Horror story? Gay romance? At times Luci’s heavily mascaraed account of the beleaguered production and her tormented relationship with her young avatar seems to be addressed to a courtroom, with coy asides and sly references to her own prolixity. Filthy, funny phrases slow the plot to a trickle but it’s hard to be harsh when it’s all so much fun. With a final flourish, Morrison banishes the illusion; the smoke clears and the mirrors empty. The Glamour turns out to be fiction itself: “that which is known to be false but felt to be true!”
“She’s behind you,” goes the panto cry; but of course, there’s nobody there.
• Luda by Grant Morrison is published by Europa Editions (£15.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
