Andrew O'Hagan: Personality

Reviewed by GORDON McLAUCHLAN

In television's early days when Marshall McLuhan hailed the medium for creating a "global village", he didn't foresee how pernicious a village would be without human contact, with only virtual relationships.

The achievement of Andrew O'Hagan's novel Personality is that he deftly, poignantly portrays what we all know but what he helps us understand more clearly, that television deifies celebrities by dehumanising them.

Especially vulnerable are those elevated to the heights of fame while too young to know who they really are. What is most important, though, is that O'Hagan beguilingly gives us this in the context of a damn good story.

Maria Tambini's grandmother Lucia emigrated from Italy to Rothesay, on the island of Bute in Scotland, with her plodding husband Mario. Both Lucia's daughter Rosa and Maria maintain associations with other Italians in the area, and while they have become outwardly Scottish, a sense of alienation remains in the family, emphasised by the internment of both Lucia and Mario during World War II.

The women are all singers and Maria, blessed with a beautiful, powerful voice, becomes so obsessed by performance that it gradually subsumes her personality. At age 13 she becomes a star through the television programme Opportunity Knocks.

She moves to London in the care of an agent who takes over her personal and public life. Maria, separated from her family, becomes a non-person performer.

Like almost all celebrities, and especially those who achieve fame as children, she judges herself as a person by the audience response.

Letters between Maria and her schoolgirl best friend demonstrate the point. The friend tells what she's doing and what's happening, or rather what's not happening in Rothesay, while Maria's letters become shorter and entirely about herself as a performer, about her makeup, how she looks. She loosens and then abandons contact with her friends and family.

Her agent sees her as a talent and one who thrives on performing. While most of her associates are awed by her stamina and her confidence as a performer, none of them detects that she works so unrelentingly to avoid being the desperately lonely person she really is, with a low level of self-regard.

O'Hagan innovatively casts Maria's story with real-life characters: Hughie Green the compere of Opportunity Knocks, Les Dawson the comedian, Terry Wogan, Dean Martin, Liberace and other stars of past decades. Their associations - relationships is too strong a word - are tellingly of the superficial showbiz sort, lonely alienation sugared with "darlings".

Maria becomes so obsessed with herself and her appearance that it consumes her life: "Whenever she was out of her Primrose Hill bedroom she assumed people were looking at her, and even in her room alone she looked at herself, and in her bed at night she felt watched from above."

Later, she's told she doesn't smile enough and writes to her friend: " ... so I have to practise smiling in front of the mirror and some nights you do it for that long you start crying with just being tired."

Because of her age, she has to attend a showbiz school, and during a dance class she finds herself staring at the large mirror. "When she looked this closely at her own face she caught something in her eyes that made her feel it was somebody else looking. Her body was apart from her. The person with thoughts was different from the person with arms and legs, a stomach and a face."

It seems almost inevitable when she slips into anorexia. She is rescued by the love of a man she knew and liked in Rothesay. Michael Aigas falls in love with her and takes her away from it all at just the time when she comes to some sort of understanding of herself. He represents the power of ordinariness, of self-acceptance.

Personality is a riveting read. It is also a shrewd and important look at the celebrity phenomenon and the diseases it spawns. Its weakness is a rather pat ending.

Faber and Faber, $34.95