Book review: Corey Fah Does Social Mobility by Isabel Waidner

By Simon Demetriou

The title of Isabel Waidner’s fourth novel refers to the name of the talk show that her eponymous narrator is offered after they play their part in the sudden and mysterious end of the hugely popular St Orton Gets To The Bottom Of It, in which a man who turns out to probably be Joe Orton having escaped his 1967 murder by virtue of a worm-hole beneath the floorboards, interviews guests who claim to have had experiences relating to červí díra (that’s worm holes in Czech, and the only way to which they’re referred in the novel – never translated). Once Corey Fah, in conjunction with a time-travelling half-deer-half-spider by the name of Bambi Pavok (from pavouk, the Czech for spider), who Fah meets when they fail to get their hands on the neon-beige semi-autonomous flying trophy that Fah is meant to collect for having won The Award for the Fictionalisation of Social Evils, cuts off Orton’s escape from 1967, Fah and Bambi Pavok are offered a chance at TV stardom. Which doesn’t work out.

Confused? I would assume so. The chances of you enjoying Corey Fah Does Social Mobility are likely to directly correlate with the nature of your confusion right now. If you wish you’d never read the opening paragraph of this review, you’re likely to find the novel quite frustrating. If you really want to find out how maybe-Joe-Orton, deer/spider hybrids, worm holes, literary awards and absurdly titled TV talk shows might link together, you’ll have a good time with Waidner’s brilliantly weird novel.

Even if you want to punch me for my first paragraph, there are still good reasons to read the book. Waidner engages wittily, often uproariously, with so many of the tragic absurdities of 2024 that the reader ends up not knowing which of their laughter, bewilderment, or frustration is more in keeping with a world which, for all its emphatic fictionality, is very obviously our world, now.

Take Bambi Pavok. He’s from the same Forest as Bambi. His mum got murdered too. Only nobody cares since Bambi Pavok combines signifiers of cuteness and terror, is impure, has something to hide, and consequently is ‘othered from the beginning’. Corey Fah, non-binary and working class, fails to claim their trophy because nobody explains how; it is assumed that ‘a winner would know how to collect’. Fah doesn’t. So what does that make them? Can society’s losers ever win? Or are the only winners those that capitalise on the weakness of others, like the butcher who also sells stationery and guns, or the stag who grinds up his fellow deer to sell as burgers? These questions matter; Waidner’s weirdness is vital in every sense of the word.