Books

Review by Francis Sheppard

A short story collection, though more a series of pieces at times interlinked, scarcely a paragraph-break between them, though distinct, and each with its own title and each a tough urban creation. Stories they most certainly are, not necessarily following a linear progression. Often they proceed tangentially, as life does, as our thoughts and recollections do. Puzzled at the conclusion of the first in the compilation, I realised I had to read it not as a novel where ‘setting’ can provide a platform for future understanding, but more as a poem. Here there are few hand-holds. There are no existing markers for the reader.

I was then keen to get at the meaning. Each piece presents an experience, painful yet recognisable, delivered without either comment or passion, by either involved participant or self-effaced onlooker. The prose is unselfconscious, and elliptical to the point of requiring study. These are authentic, sometimes humble voices offering the reader a ‘slice of life’ – their own life, owning what is shameful, disregarding their courage in following it through. Sometimes there is little movement; all you get is the towering and tragic background. At other points a full story is told, as when a young woman, suddenly without income and sole carer for a young child, seeks the help of an estranged father in learning to box. Or the cycle of revenge between men who train with heavy – very heavy – weights.

We are taken to a landscape of chip-shops, bakeries, gyms, car parks, flats, maisonettes and yards for rent. This is a Black Country world in the main, though one has a sense of the big city beyond, a play of less pity, if possible. I could picture the estate beyond Cakemore Road; other place-names had a familiar ring, while the titles of institutions suffered subtle manipulation. Mansell and Booth … Marsh and Baxter, that great champion of the local meat-processing industry?

From this community, such a range of characters. Dean-Richards’ imagination is such that the details of the imagined lives follow naturally on. Then there is his grasp of the contemporary. Money & Blood is a trip into present-day reality.