I
finished this Liverpudlian writer's fifth novel
last night. It's rare that I can name a contemporary
writer (five years younger than me, depressingly)
whose complete works I have read-- unless that
author's written a book or two. Fiction from recent
authors, especially.
What
I like about Griffiths is his mixture of the demotic,
full of invective, overdetermined (admittedly
a great lit crit adjective), and often futile
ravings at the injustice of it all. He blends
into this a rather somber, measured, omniscient
voice that to me hints of the kenning, the sermon,
the treatise, and the meditation. This register's
notably more erudite, often tossing in meteorological
or geological terms amidst finely crafted reflections
on mortality, history, and individuals who even
in post-Thatcher, now-New Labour Britain, at its
Cymric fringe and the corridor past Wrexham to
Rhyl and points southerly in the Principality
(although I reject this term as a proper anti-monarchist
who doubtless romanticizes an equally brutal counter-
resistance among the speakers of Celtic languages
who are called for convenience if inaccurately
the Celtic race) manage to strive towards the
right, the good, and the moral center. How Griffiths
does this within fiction that if opened randomly
appears to have been transcribed by some recording
angel from a tape recording at a pub, a rave,
a football match's aftermath, or the scene of
a crime all with the liberal use of limited phrases,
is masterful.
My
wife as I was reading 'Wreckage' asked me about
the book and author. I said that while he's inevitably
compared to Irvine Welsh, Griffiths is his own
man, who uses the surface of a caper to delve
into deeper depictions of youthful apathy, bitter
inarticulation, and frustrated glimpses of the
beautiful and the orderly beneath the carnage
his characters leave in their frenzied wakes.
Well, at least the Welsh and caper tags. She then
noticed what I did not. Trainspotting's author's
blurb on the bottom of the front cover. I then
noticed on the back the Daily Telegraph's blurb:
'In the foreground is a caper story; in the background,
a poetically expressed, apocalyptic history of
Liverpool.' So, I was intuitively in line with
my fellow critics and literati.
This
book picks up where the caper of the previous
'Stump' collapsed, with hapless Alastair and raging
Darren back from a failed hit in Aberystwyth--
whose town-and-gown, tourist vs. scholar, student
vs. everyone else milieux earn vivid illustration--
their failure itself hinged on a marvelous sort
of shaggy-dog anecdote that I cannot give away.
The pair witlessly and suddenly decide to rob
the post office in the village of Cilcain. (Hmm--
symbolic name?) Darren coshes the old postmistress,
and absconds with the loot before Emrys, her hurrying
husband, can get off a shot from his gun in defense.
Their Scouse accents are heard hooting, their
Morris Minor 1000 gains attention for a moment,
and soon their crime's on the news for their gangland
boss Tommy Maguire to hear about and put two-and-literally
another bumbling two, Robbo and Steve, together
with the subversive robbers Darren & Alastair.
Complications ensue as the four thousand pounds
stolen make its successive stealers think they
can rule the world of Lime Street, with blow and
broads enticing their fevered, puny visions of
utter wealth and eternal power derived from this
rucksack of banknotes.
A
sample of his style early on, pg. 8. A description
of the postmistress: 'THUNK, that hammer went
as it struck skull. THUNK. And no noise made as
the old woman fell except for a dry rustle of
starched apron and old skin similarly bereft of
moisture because of the years spent behind that
counter franking envelopes and shuffling papers
until the body becomes a parchment itself. And
then the world's rude reward: attack and blackness,
and the body brought to earth with one THUNK and
crisp rustle as if its station has consumed it
whole, the obliteration of one office never- altering.'
You can see the cadences. Implosive violence amidst
a flow of contemplation.
What
I admire in Griffiths is his control of his characters'
own voices along with the grand narrative omnisciently
intespersed. His first novel, 'Grits', floated
in and out of half- a- dozen Welsh and blow-ins
scattered about near the rocky coasts in the raves
of the early 90s. He can share the feelings of
altered states brought on by drink and all sorts
of drugs powerfully-- at least to a gullible near
-teetoller (when it comes to pills, thrills, and
bellyaches) who admits he is technically a boomer
but could've been the child of one if she was
soon getting it on, as being born the early 60s
hardly means I was burning draft card, moratorially
marching or getting high with a little help from
my friends during the Summer of Love. I hate it
when the media lump anyone 1946-64 into the same
demographic. Gen X and Y and whatever's now don't
have such a generous inclusion into their disaffected
slacker, wired, and/or endlessly retrorevivalling
ranks.
Back
to Griffiths. Ironically, our five-year age difference
may account for his deft ability to plumb the
down and outs of his native West Britain. His
combination of learning and lager in 'Wreckage'
bursts into a self-penned self-critique, or a
parody of the same given the wretched verse declaimed
by a Poet of the New Sensitivity, one Andrew Boswell,
in the pub the Egg that Alastair-- on the tiles
at an earlier pub and now feeling it-- stumbles
into desperate for the loo. Boswell fumes at the
perceived lack of respect. Later from the shellsuited
ne'er do well we learn that he wanted to wait
politely, but had to interrupt to heed nature's
call and succumbed. The Poet feels infringed upon.
He places Alastair, however, in a surprising niche
that's news to me.
'Maybe
he's one of those Scum Novelists researching his
next Vomit Novel. Every year one comes out, some
anti- intellectual spewing, some proudly plebeian
vitriol or bile that everyone seems to need or
make a fuss over and they're all the same. exulting
in filth and inverted snobbery. I bet that's what
he's doing in the toilets, making notes for his
next Vomit Novel. That's all they are, just pages
of exploitative nastiness; lacking in any kind
of sensitivity or compassion and all written in
the same grubby little voice. Oh, authentic depiction,
they say! The voice of the common man? It all
lacks vision, it lacks commitment, it lacks ...
artistry. And still they go on as if it's still
the year of Trainspotting and not the tired twenty-first
century, as if they don't realise that people
are tired of them by now, all this sordid concern
with the one voice and the one time. Society doesn't
need the Vomit Novel. It never did.' (pp. 130-131)
In
'Grits', the half- a- dozen voices were all effective,
but the novel at over four hundred densely plotted,
overlapping, slang-laden, and often phonetically
challenging prose made for a challenging read.
The reward was earned for the reader, but it was
a lot to take on-- Griffiths like a musician on
his first album in his own novelistic début
poured in "nastiness" and "compassion"
but the former for its graphically described scenes
may have understandably garnered attention. His
second work, half its size, cut half the voices.
Its narrative arc, tossing in molestation proved
a bit disappointing as this plot device for a
character's motivation, as in the Canadian film
'The Sweet Hereafter' out around the same time,
was not essential. 'Sheepshagger' did not need
this additional layer of revelation as it already
had delivered an efficiently created, sharply
defined, and satirically inflected sense of the
clash between the Welsh and the English today.
The natural beauties contrasted with artificial
strip-malled, franchised, mercury-lit modern concrete
that took over Wales as anywhere near a motorway
in the last century gain by juxtaposition. Griffiths
embeds in his characters a social critique, an
indictment of our current indifference to the
fragility of our surroundings that natives ironically
often diminish while visitors praise it unendingly.
You see why both sides feel the way they do, no
small achievement.
Of
Irish and Welsh descent, as his name denotes,
Griffiths often sidles into the past century that
saw such devastation inflicted upon the Welsh
in the invasion of their homeland. Here (although
countering the blurb quoted earlier I would not
say that Liverpool's history per se occupies as
large a role in 'Wreckage'), Griffiths broadens
his scope. He recreates the history of violence
born by the ancestors of his main characters--
as well as the victims of Darren's dozens of earlier
beatings, nurses, patients, thugs, feckless progenitors,
and many of the suffering... with cameos by such
as Passenger, Alky, a wartime barrage balloon,
and the meteorologically faithful Drizzle. The
spilling over from the other side of the sea of
recent drug wars among 'Coggies' in Belfast's
loyalist gangs shadow the end of this novel--
there seems room left for a third installment
in this evocation of Liverpool low-life. One of
the two titular protagonists of his third novel,
'Kelly + Victor', resurfaces if only in two asides,
one by an extra here and an anecdote by a cabbie
working for Maguire. An appealing, and effective
quality to Griffith's fictional realm is the passing
entry and exit, if only recollected, of a character
in another novel. It reminds me of the construction
of Krystof Kieslowski's nuanced journey into similar
moral terrain, in his ten-part film dramatizing--
as cleverly as in Griffith's books-- the temptations
disavowed and the aspirations codified by the
Ten Commandments as 'Dekalog'. For Polish filmmaker
or Welsh- Irish- Liverpudlian writer, our times
offer as many scenarios for the battle between
good and evil as biblical tales do. In 'Wreckage',
the ethical vacuum of our new century has been
created by earlier generations, who also sucked
the life out of each other in a city and country
no less unforgiving of frailty.
Griffith's
narrative as it enters its second half shifts
in time, and moments begin to be repeated as seen
by different people. This again adds to the verisimilitude.
Not all progresses linearly. The whole unpredictability
of life's coincidences and outrages provides a
realistic novel that nonetheless elevates its
tone and subject above the level of injury, anguish,
and reverie. Yet, it does not condescend to those
on the lower rungs, no more than it romanticizes
the actions of those who punish, assault, and
plunder. Griffiths enters memorably those often
overlooked in capers: those marred for a lifetime
after the big score in body and mind by thoughtless
reflexes of anger or meticulously planned cruelty.
Griffiths
ponders his hometown in two world wars and the
1981 riots, and in a strikingly sketched passage,
the ancestors of Tommy Maguire during the Famine
who sought refuge across the Irish Sea. We unearth
after this section the roots of the Maguire hanging
tree. As the years unfold, the victims and the
tormentors do not always stay the same. 'Innocent
perpetrators' of the ultraviolence? Nature vs.
nurture? This conundrum requires an open-minded
interpretation. The moral center may not be present,
but it's absence tears apart those in our own
frantic capitalist thrashings. Why and how those
who hit and those who are hit switch to the opposite
team, by choice or by forced trade, becomes the
lesson of 'Wreckage'.
Alastair's
grandmother had worked in a hospital in both world
wars caring for the maimed. This drove her into
seclusion long before the Alzheimer's disease
is shattering her identity. Bits of her familial
Welsh swirl amid English words in her brain, and
silently she peers out at this battered offspring
of a daughter equally savaged by the men who rule
by beating and preening. The complications that
turn a young criminal into a more believable figure
emerge as he takes the hand of his 'nan'."
He 'feels it just tepid with what wanes within
it and the skin like the fibre of his tracksuit,
somewhat satiny, unmoist. Feels the faint pulse
in it as a separate life more animate is ensnared
there, a smaller yet mightier animal kicking to
be free with the final scrap of its strength.'
(p. 159) The kick inside: this is what Griffiths
studies no less than his precisely phrased outbursts
among a couple of dozen voices animated by their
mortal moments of hate and passion and confusion.
