Viva Lewes Issue #152 May 2019

ON THIS MONTH: FESTIVAL
Posy Simmonds
Darke tales of Christmas
“She’s misanthropic, she’s an egotist – she’s
really not very nice at all,” Posy Simmonds
confides of the woman she’s lived alongside
for the past few years. Fortunately ‘she’ is
also fictional, the pen-and-ink protagonist
of Simmonds’ latest graphic novel Cassandra
Darke, a retelling of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol
that imagines Scrooge as a well-upholstered,
elderly London art dealer.
Where Simmonds’ previous heroines were also
inspired by literary classics – Gemma Bovery
after Flaubert and Tamara Drewe after Hardy’s
Far From The Madding Crowd – these lithe,
long-eyelashed creations have little in common
with Cassandra. “She’s not interested in how
she looks or what people think of her. In a way
she’s free – free of those things women are
supposed to be.”
The idea came to Simmonds – a veteran writer
and cartoonist of what The Guardian dubbed ‘the
middle-class muddle’ – while walking around
London at Christmas. She noted the disparity
between the opulent baubles of the chicer streets
and the betting shops and neon of the poorer
ones. “It was that idea of two Londons,” she says.
“I wanted a character to move between them
and since I was thinking of A Christmas Carol I
wanted a Scrooge.” She began sketching: “I keep
going until someone emerges who I recognise.”
It was once she replaced Cassandra’s original
beret with a trapper hat that she knew she had
found her: “I went and tried one on myself on
Oxford Street. They’re absolute hell – I felt like
a boiled owl. But it was perfect.”
The novel introduces Cassandra fresh from a
conviction for art fraud, carrying a suspended
sentence and struggling on a much-diminished
income. But her self-imposed isolation is
shattered when her lodger (a daft conceptual
artist called Nicki) leaves a suspect ‘surprise’
in her basement and Cassandra is forced out of
her rich enclave and onto the streets.
It’s a typically Simmonds sort of story, dark
and slyly satirical. Her ear for dialogue – “The
thing about mobile phones is that people are
often talking about the most extraordinary
things, sometimes very private things, at
the top of their voices.” – matched by her
wonderfully detailed drawings. She imagined
everything from the labels Cassandra would
wear (Issey Miyake) to the shade of her nail
varnish. “I didn’t go as far as what toothpaste
she uses but sometimes that can be useful.”
It has become easier to publish graphic novels,
she says, partly because they are now a genre.
“Before Gemma I didn’t know the term and
neither did my publisher, who didn’t know
quite what to call it.” It also gives her an easier
ride at dinner parties: “In the past, when I
said I was a cartoonist, people would say ‘And
what else do you do?’” But that’s never much
bothered Simmonds, who has been drawing
since childhood when she would pinch
‘banned’ copies of Punch from her parents’
bookshelves. “The Victorian ones always had
lots of dialogue beneath the pictures so I was
very influenced by that. But I just always liked
drawing, so it’s incredibly nice that I’m still
earning my living doing something I loved
when I was four.” Nione Meakin
Charleston Festival, May 25
Photo © Victor Schiferli
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