Rachel Trezise’s Sixteen Shades of Crazy is set in a small Welsh valley village, Aberalaw, where three very different women find themselves attracted to an English drugdealer. The three women, Ellie, Siân and Rhiannon, are the girlfriends of a local punk band, the Boobs and after an eighteen month narcotic drought, Johnny provides not only chemicals for the women but intrigue, mystery and the chance of escape.
Ellie is the most sympathetic of the three, she’s educated, sensitive and has resigned herself to dull factory work after her dream of coasting on the wave of what she thought would be the Boobs inevitable successes seems less and less likely. She’s intelligent, aware of the limitations of her surroundings and her self, and how there is an irreperable difference between those around her and what she desires for herself. Her boyfriend, Andy, is intent on planning their upcoming nuptials according to his family traditions, but Ellie is hesitant, realizing that expressing a reluctance to marry and procreate would be akin to blasphemy in the eyes of her friends and his family. For her Johnny is alluring because he seems to offer a escape from the banal future, he engages with her on issues that she is passionate about. Her sights are set beyond Aberalaw, a fact the others – content with the rituals of their insular village life – appear to resent. It is frustrating, at the beginning, that Ellie seems to think her only escape is through Andy’s band, when clearly he doesn’t want to escape the familial tradition and domestic simplicity. Her relationship with Johnny is based on false hopes based on Johnny’s knowledge built on soundbites – he knows enough to get these women interested enough to sleep with him, but there is no need for him to know anything beyond that because once that’s done, well, he really has no need for them.
She never overlooked an opportunity to remind Ellie where she was, because she knew Ellie wanted to be elsewhere, beneath the skyscrapers of New York. Rhiannon had resigned herself to a monotonous existence inthe Welsh gutter and no one else was allowed to look up at the stars.
Siân, as a main character, is unfairly underused; she comes across as merely a supporting player for the endless conflict between Ellie and Rhiannon but her story is just as heartbreaking as theirs. Siân is the image of familial perfection, she has the happy children and the tidy home, but with a clueless husband and working two jobs, a deeper malaise lies beneath her life. Siân’s inner life isn’t as explored as Ellie or Rhiannon’s, but her attraction to Johnny is mainly for his product. He can provide the pills she desires to blunt the motherly instinct she cannot otherwise escape. Her ending is tragic, set in motion by the cruel trickery of Rhiannon.
Rhiannon, nearing forty, is grotesque in her excess: physically, her large body is made comedic by oversized silicon breasts, her attitude, her blunt, rude and abrasive way of speaking, her unsubtle cruelty to others. Sex is her weapon, as attack and defence. Her contempt for beauty (Siân) or intelligence (Ellie) isn’t so much borne of jealousy, she just can’t see their use when her flesh is all she needs to seduce, to get her own way. Rhiannon is pure viciousness, made more disturbing by outbursts of violence that demand she is the focus of all attention. Her attraction to Johnny is one of conquest, having what the others want, and having it before them. It is Rhiannon that ends up with Johnny post-drug bust, but the others have moved on – Ellie to New York, Siân in death – and I wonder whether her supposed victory is soured by the lack of willing competition. There are some brief comments on Rhiannon’s mixed heritage – her father was black, her mother white – but other than inspiring a number of distasteful remarks from minor characters, this doesn’t seem to really go anywhere, I’m uncertain how her race matters here.
The women in Sixteen Shades of Crazy are all desperate, and only a stranger can offer them the opportunity to evolve. The constant tension of casual violence and endless boredom of the working class village remains somewhat in the background, I would have loved more reflection into how the surroundings and culture worked to trap these three women in the first place. However, Sixteen Shades of Crazy is primarily a character driven novel and Trezise creates a rich interior life for these suffocated women – especially with Ellie and Rhiannon – that makes their plights difficult to ignore.
2010, book review, fiction, May 2010, Rachel Trezise, Sixteen Shades of Crazy