Under the Hammer, by Samantha Dooey-Miles review: 'sketchily drawn'
The landlord-killing thirtysomething at the centre of this new novel from Samantha Dooey-Miles could have done with some more convincing character development, writes David Robinson
“All landlords are bastards.” That’s the first sentence in Samantha Dooey-Miles’s debut novel, which according to its publisher, “is as if Muriel Spark had written the TV series Dexter”. On the next page her protagonist, Jemma, uses the c-word about them, “because profiteering from the human right to adequate housing automatically makes you a scumbag.”
So far, so unSparkian: stylistically, a sledgehammer not a stiletto. But what about the Dexter comparison? Jemma, after all, wants to rid the world of landlords just as Dexter wanted to rid the world of bad people. But Dexter knew he was a psychopath, whereas Jemma thinks she’s a normal 32-year-old recently unemployed receptionist living in Hamilton.
There’s no one moment when Jemma decides to wipe out landlords. The rage always seems to have been in her. Like Tam O’Shanter’s wife, she nurses her wrath to keep it warm - in her case by devotedly watching a low-budget property show on TV. So when she does start killing, there’s no crescendo, no moral jeopardy: she will pack that hammer into her holdall as casually as packing clothes for the gym.
Another example is when, having run over a landlady out walking with her three-year-old daughter in Rutherglen, she drives off without a backward glance. Back in the office (an estate agency: an odd choice for someone who hates landlords) she fills out a property report, covers for her boss, makes a coffee and chats to her non-binary boyfriend (“I hear the saliva in their mouth move as their lips part”). Not much guilt, in other words. No thought about a three-year-old girl growing up motherless. So maybe Jemma really is a psychopath after all.
Except we know she’s not. If anything, Jemma is too normal for the novel’s own good, telling us precisely how she does multiplication sums, the extent to which she likes or dislikes a sausage roll, or the details of her shower shaving routine. And if she is sketchily drawn, the other characters barely exist. Here, for example, she introduces both her ex and her best friend: “He and Amara had never formed much of a relationship, mainly because she found his belief that he could save the world with a perfectly prepared recycling bin and an online presence dedicated to shaming people who didn’t care as much as him tedious.”
On the page, that’s an ugly sentence. The word “tedious” is so far away from the verb that it almost hurts to read. On the stage, maybe as a Fringe show, maybe a short monologue, it might be a different matter. In fact, when you look at all the topics Dooey-Miles trots through in this satire - the state of the housing market and the impossibility of buying anything if you’re much younger than a pensioner; the weirdness of Jemma’s boss’s businessspeak; relying on OnlyFans foot fetishists for income (as Jemma does while unemployed); even, come to that, mocking the green pretensions of Jemma’s ex - separately, all of these could work as comic riffs.
That is certainly true of the scripted inserts from Fixer Uppers Go Under the Hammer, the TV show Jemma loves to hate but which offer a welcome relief from her interior monologue. Here, for once, she doesn’t need to exaggerate to make her point about landlord avarice and the banality of the contestants’ dreams or the inanities of the presenters (“a cupboard is always a handy thing to have”). Sometimes even in satire, less really is more.
A novel, though, demands far more than this. It asks for more than detail overload or manic plot twists. It asks that actions leave some sort of trace behind on their perpetrator, lest even murder should become boringly repetitive. Above all, it asks for character, fleshed out and changeable, as Jemma’s too seldom is.
Under the Hammer, by Samantha Dooey-Miles, Verve Books, £10.99
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