Books

Review by Francis Sheppard

You will like this collection more as you go through it. The style, which at first seems dense, is in fact opaque and progressively becomes easier once you admit to yourself that you can skip nothing, that every sentence adds a new inflection in the story-telling, that the details do indeed add up. Over the course of several stories there are, of course, a series of narrators; they have in common a detached and ironic viewpoint, and a suffering heart. Each of them, along with the authorial voice, is deeply engaged with the surroundings, whether that ambience be people, or a changing economic landscape. This is strong, analytical writing, drawing on an upbringing and adulthood in a region where working-class solidarity has given place to lonely striving. The collection spans the whole century, from the factually-based 1920s drowning of three people on a frozen lake, one in rescue of the other two, to the predominance of neo-liberal politics at the close of the period.

A catalogue of grim events: there is the death of a beloved uncle; the closure of a works central to the lives of many; the internecine warfare of the Miners’ Strike that followed West Brom’s year of success; a doomed relationship between a failed writer and a successful artist, so promising but combusts to ashes as soon as they have sexual contact. And yet there is comedy. The Collector features an obsessively mistrustful housewife whose easy-going husband only wants to pursue his hobby of dinky toys. The denouement, when her suspicions are vanquished as he reveals his secret nerdy dealings, is long foreseen but enjoyable and funny. The Happy Atheist studies two people, everlastingly divided through profoundly differing beliefs, who nevertheless together create a loving home.

Contemporary history then, is the mist that engulfs the lives of these protagonists; to a man they are socialists who regret the region’s industrial collapse and see in its wake the emergence of threatening hard-right attitudes. Beauty comes occasionally, the more striking when it does, often a matter of landscape and characters who discover that here is where they want to be, for all its imperfections, and there is a nobility in being separate from it all.

In the warmth of the workshop I brushed the snow from my coat and gazed out at the blizzard. I was enchanted by the isolation.

Starkly told, these pieces deliver a power of feeling in their unsentimental telling.