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Richo Reviews: Tell Me I'm Worthless, Alison Rumfitt (Cipher Press, 2021)

Three years ago, three friends broke into an abandoned house. A house haunted by fascism, a house that was fascism. What happened inside has transformed them all. Alice, a trans woman, is incessantly visited by ghosts as she drifts dissociated through a hollow life. Ila, once Alice's best friend, has become a minor celebrity among TERFs, but is uncomfortably aware of the way her new community tokenizes her Jewish and Pakistani identities. Hannah, the third of them, never came out at all. And always the House is there, waiting, looming, reassuring, threatening, promising, hating.

There are words I want to attach to the experience of reading this book. Gruelling. Harrowing. Not because it is a slog - rather, the prose flies - but because of its subject matter and, perhaps more importantly, Rumfitt's skill in manifesting an atmosphere of oppression, in inhabiting the minds and bodies of the protagonists as they exist within that atmosphere, in pushing the reader on through misery and pain. But even as effective as the prose is at evoking dread, horror, grim fascination, it also provokes exhilaration - simply that it exists. That someone can write so powerfully, so effectively; that horror can be so clear-sighted, so driving, so compelling. This book is both sharply intelligent and emotionally forceful; it is relentlessly bleak, but it is also an invocation of solidarity and togetherness against hate.

This is no straightforward moral fable of good people against big bad fascism. Instead it is a story of our vulnerability to its lure, the ways that those ideas worm their way inside us, and why we must never, ever, let them rule us. Perhaps in reflection of this complexity, the story frequently dislocates itself in time, casting back to the past, forward to futures possible or inevitable, and even flickering between possible timelines, conflicting memories and fragmented events. To be haunted is to experience the suffering of the past or the future, and the characters are haunted just as Britain is haunted by its imperial past and the monstrous future it is heading towards. Just as the marginalised people of Britain are haunted by the traumas already done and by the 'Glad Day' that the House promises is to come.

The book opens with a quotation from Guattari, describing the way that fragments of fascism lie in every aspect of life, and that fascism's strength comes when these constellations are able to align, to 'connect the social libido to the revolutionary machines of desire'. Rumfitt is an expert in observing and analysing these fragments, these fascist tendencies and potentialities, and the ways that they inhabit the lives and thoughts of the characters - and in us, the readers. The book is infused with a clear sense of the rot that permeates our society. No-one is as good as Rumfitt at diagnosing the British disease, the English sickness. She is a detective, probing and tracing connections, invoking varied concepts, works and events masterfully, always to underscore her point rather than for cheap recognition.

There's one more word I want to attach to the experience of reading this book. Necessary.



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