Fuck: The Human Odyssey by Martin Rowson
Jonathan Cape, £16.99
THE book’s called Fuck. There’s no getting round it, so I may as well get it out of the way. This is not an attention grabbing title. It is the entire lexicon of Martin Rowson’s latest oeuvre. It’s the only word in it. Fuck. It’s not an encouraging start.
One very hot summer, while working as a bin man in Liverpool, I discovered a colleague sitting in an abject condition upon one of the receptacles we were employed to invert. I enquired after his health and wellbeing. “Fuck the fucker, I’m fucked,” he said.
By comparison with Martin he was expansively linguistic, employing as he did the word fuck as a verb, noun and adjective. Martin restricts himself to its use as an expletive.
Many people understand fuck to imply the activity perpetrated under a blanket by the British to breed. But as an expression it’s more, much more – as Martin illustrates in this splendid sequence of pictures. He provides a pictorial dictionary definition of what fuck can convey in a series of images that range from tight line drawings to dark surrealist images. They are pictures you can revisit, confident you’ll find a detail you missed last time, like the nipper observing Archimedes or the medieval monastic overseer. Martin has talents that make calling him a cartoonist as superficial as describing Tony Blair as a peace emissary.
The subjects Martin chooses to illustrate the various usages of fuck allow him to stomp through history, myth and legend from the big bang to the end of the planet. And who could observe either of these phenomena without coming out with the f-word? There are times when “Blimey!” or “Corks!” simply won’t do…
But, as Martin’s images explain, fuck doesn’t only express deep shock. It can, for example, convey:
- Irritation (gent poked in eye by knitting needle while observing French revolutionary guillotine).
- Good fortune (for rats as the planet pollutes and the people puke).
- Relief (Louis XIV passes courtly wind).
- Enlightenment (an apple dropping from a tree onto Isaac Newton’s nuts).
- Perplexity (chivalrous knight unhinged from his armour for the purposes of urination spotting an advancing adversary).
- Alarm (small mammal observing the dawn of the age of the dinosaur).
- Apprehension (a horse watches Napoleon’s pee freeze en route for Moscow).
- Despair (a young Athenian enduring a philosophical monologue).
- Precision (Freudian psychoanalytical session).
Truly, Martin is the great troubadour of fuck’s glorious virtuosity. His images shake, rattle and rile as he devotes himself to mischievous cynicism and amusing barbarity – the man’s singular satirical vision. And just as you are in chuckling mode, he stops you in your tracks with a harsh and joltingly powerful image. Most telling of all is the single page on which no text is written. Instead there is a naïve image of a solitary striped figure behind the wire of a concentration camp. Words cannot stretch this far: man’s inhumanity to man is way beyond even the elastic boundaries of fuck.
Chris Proctor
