Is This Allowed? was Willie Donaldson’s fourth novel and marked a radical departure from his previous three. While Both the Ladies and the Gentlemen, The Balloons in the Black Bag and The English Way of Doing Things were light-hearted picaresque affairs, Is This Allowed? is markedly different: it’s darker in tone and narrower in focus, but also one of his more mature and honest works.
The book is ostensibly a novel about a married middle-aged, upper-crust writer’s love affair with a prostitute, which charts their relationship from its sunny beginning to its crack cocaine-addled end. In actual fact, it’s a fictionalised account of Willie’s obsessive affair with a call girl called Melanie Szopynsky, who's disguised here as Melissa.
We begin with the unnamed narrator (clearly Willie himself; this character writes toilet books for a living and knows Dawn Upstairs) in Ibiza and awaiting the arrival of Melissa, a prostitute he’s flying out to the Balearics for a week of fun and frolics.
Despite having been warned by a mutual acquaintance that Melissa’s a ruthless whore who’ll bleed him dry, both financially and emotionally, he decides to go ahead with the liasaon, and as soon as they’re together, he begins to notice and admire her vivaciousness, sex appeal and lust for life. Indeed, the old rogue becomes so enamoured with the girl that he dubs her his Princess, a name both he thinks both affectionate and absurd.
But the experience of being with Melissa is something more than everyday love for Willie. In fact, he compares the experience of being around Melissa with that of being on drugs, and whenever he buys her cocaine in the course of the novel he experiences some form of, presumably metaphorical, contact high, which compels him to keep seeing her and chasing the thrill.
He also wastes little time in revealing some of the perversity that, according to Terence Blacker’s biography, coloured much of Willie’s life. For instance, only a couple of nights into their break, he takes her to a disco and makes her seduce a man in front of the fellow’s wife, then urges her to bring the man home in the first of many baffling sexual mind games he describes in the book.
When Melissa leaves at the end of the week to return to England, Willie can’t stop thinking about her and is overjoyed when she reveals that she’s coming back to Ibiza to see him again after only a few days apart. So pleased is he to have her back that, despite her presence ruining a business meeting he’s arranged, Willie doesn’t seem to mind.
From here the novel becomes obsessive and desperate as Willie schemes and plans ways of seeing Melissa in London or abroad behind his partner’s back, eventually ruining his relationship with her, and straining the bonds between Willie, his friends and his business associates.
As the novel nears its conclusion, Melissa falls in with a crowd of crack-smoking aristocrats who live in her block of flats and becomes an addict in a matter of weeks. She begins to break her ties with Willie, driving him almost to the point of madness, until he wins her back by beginning to smoke crack with her.
However, what should be a happy ending (albeit an unorthodox one), is foreshadowed throughout the book with fragmentary dialogues clearly taking place between Willie and Melissa after she’s gone through treatment for her cocaine addiction, which reveal that the pair are destined never to be together. Indeed, Melissa’s last lines to Willie are truly heartbreaking, and the novel ends on a sour note.
While the book is brilliantly written, full of Willie’s sparking wit and clever turns of phrase, it’s not a laugh out loud affair. There are moments –Willie convincing a friend to call him away from home to discuss a non-existent book, and his race from Barcelona to Calais with Alison and her dying mother in the car – which had me roaring with laughter, but the book is so sad and oddly perverse that it couldn’t in any way be called a merely comic novel.
But it’s one heck of a compulsive read, though. One of the press quotes on the Futura edition I own compares perusing Is This Allowed? to the experience of “read[ing] your lover’s diary,” and the candour of the prose bears this out. There is no embarrassment or concealment on display here, only honesty and raw emotion.
If you’re interested in Willie and the way his mind worked, or want to know more about his middle years, this is essential reading, but if you’re looking for another novel to have a few chuckles at, proceed with caution. Is This Allowed? is a frequently shocking work of twisted genius but, like Willie himself, it’s bound to alienate more people than it’ll fascinate…
