Fiction
Name one living Scottish author. Go on. Ok, how many of you said Irvine Welsh? In the last few years, his controversial tales of the underside of Glasgow have done more than anything else, with the possible exception of Mel Gibson of course, to change the popular perception of Scotland. The success of works like The Acid House and Trainspotting (apparently there is film version too) has meant that the arrival of each one of dour, brutally realistic novels has become a real literary event. Yet this is not a review of Welsh's new book, so why am I going on about him? Well, I have a sneaking suspicion that Marc Pye might just be aware of him as well.
Lollipop the debut novel from this new Glaswegian author, is a tale of drug abuse, child molestation and sectarian hatred set in modern-day Glasgow. The main characters are a pair of siblings called Shug and Evelyn. Shug is a thief, drug addict and occasional rapist who as the novel opens is about to go into a Catholics-only pub with a Rangers scarf for a bet. By contrast his sister Evelyn is married to a Catholic called Mick and they have a five year old son called Jamie. Their domestic bliss is continually shattered by Shug, partly because he has nowhere else to go, partly because he cares deeply about the 'wee man.' Due to his own past Shug is desperate to protect Jamie from harm and so when he sees the kindly lollipop man Archie being affectionate towards the young lad he feels the need to intervene. The novel examines a culture in which violence and prejudice pass from generation to generation and shows the difficulties of trying to break this pattern. Pye paints a bleak picture of Glasgow as a city locked in conflict and addicted to hatred.
The thing that instantly strikes the reader on starting this book is the language. The dialogue is all written phonetically in a modern Glaswegian accent, so you are confronted with sentences like: 'If y've goat it, y've goat it an there's fuck aw ye can dae aboot it.' Although this has been done many times before, it is still a very effective device for generating a sense of the local atmosphere. There is also a lot of slang, especially with reference to drugs, and a number of pop-culture references to make sure that the book feels completely contemporary. Some of these seem slightly forced to say the least and this reviewer could not help but wince when told that Shug ran 'looking like the mad greyhound on the cover of Blur's Parklife'.
Due to the above the book seems to have a very limited vocabulary. Of course you expect the characters to stick to the standard phrases of colloquial speech in a realist piece like this but the language remains very simple throughout. Pye seems to be happy to stick to short, basic sentences with few adjectives and a complete absence of stylistic flourishes. The writer seems desperate to force the narrative on, leaving no time for reflection or discussion. At times this approach does lead to powerful moments of understated beauty, such as Shug's thought that 'maybe the soap was in her eyes' as he hears his sister being abused, but in general you are left with nothing but pure plot.
Fortunately, the plot is a good one. The two main narratives are woven together well and tension is maintained throughout by the constant threat of a spontaneous explosion of violence. The characters' key motivations are cleverly suppressed until just before they impact on the present. However it should be stressed that beneath the outer layer of hard, brutal realism there is a core of sentimentality just waiting to seep out. For the most part Pye is admirably restrained and Shug, in particular, is always kept on a fine line between eliciting sympathy and causing repulsion. Yet the characters of Jamie and Archie, the sensitive child who feels the pain of the world and the benign old man wanting to protect the children as he has none of his own, are such standard figures of sentimentality that they seem to be uncomfortably at odds with Pye's realist approach.
Yet in the end, despite the author's best efforts, this feels more like an experimentation in genre than an attempt to describe one's own experience of a certain place and culture. Marc Pye is a Glaswegian and for all I know this book could be semi-autobiographical. It is just that, to me, this work feels like an attempt to write a 'contemporary Scottish novel', as defined by Mr Welsh. Rather than just telling one story he seems to want to tell all the stories. There are characters and incidents which seem entirely superfluous beyond giving the writer the opportunity to address yet another issue. These problems are all clearly interrelated but each one is of enough importance to merit focused, individual treatment rather than simply all being thrown in the mixer. Lollipop takes the reader to a place which has been more fully explored and better described before. It simply does not have the power or originality to step out of the shadow of Welsh.
Robert Baines
As W.B. Yeats put it: 'We only begin to live when we conceive life as a tragedy.' Likewise, Sylvia Plath only came to life in the literary world when her life was conceived as a tragedy by modern society, when she committed suicide; asphyxiating herself by putting her head in the oven of her London house, while her two children slept upstairs, and her husband, the recently deceased poet laureate Ted Hughes, was with his mistress Assia Weevil. Tragic indeed, but why do we have such a fascination with her story? A young American writer, only marginally successful in her lifetime, a writer whose literary produce is dwarfed by the subsequent writing about her. Perhaps it is because she will always remain young in her reader's mind; we iconize her in glossy print and sepia, just as James Dean and Marilyn Monroe were, and indeed are celebrated as tragic icons for the generations which followed them. The 'journals' are both a biographical and historical memoir, an intensely detailed text of Plath's life, and an account of that strange epoch which was '50's America. Plath shows all too clearly the harm that came from living a continual double life, the college girls who had sex but were forced to remain virgins in their mother's eyes, mothers who gave them books called The Case for Chastity, written by 'some noble woman' or other.
Plath's journals are earnest, yet with refreshing touches of self-deprecating satire, in reference to the therapy she is undergoing she envisages herself forever dependent on her doctor:
'Doctor, can I still go on hating my mother?' 'Of course you can, hate hate hate hate.' 'Thank you doctor. I sure do hate her.'
The anger that Plath felt about her life, 'anger jolts like a heartburn in the throat,' towards her mother, her dead father, and eventually Hughes, is shown throughout the book, albeit in a far more condensed manner than her poetry depicts. It is evident that these journals are those of a depressive, the intensity of Plath's moods shown in her creative writing, and the tone of the writing about her erratic 'day-to -day' life with Hughes.
The journals are certainly insightful and interesting, at least to the reader who is interested and searching for insight into Plath's life, yet their sheer volume makes the book suitable reading material for only the most dedicated Plath follower. It boasts that it is unabridged, that it shows Plath's 'true self' for the first time, but perhaps the journals should have been edited to encourage the uninitiated to read about Plath.
Sam Brunner
To say a book is interesting is almost as damning as saying a book is crap but, nevertheless, I shall tentatively apply the I-word to the first two novels of Edmund White. In fact, Forgetting Elena very nearly comes out on the wrong side of it and merits the description "weird" but its initial incomprehensibility actually contributes significantly to the compelling nature of the book, which means that, although it never troubles you by being enjoyable, it does keep you reading.
Whether it warrants the effort is something you will have judge for yourself. It would be a doomed attempt to summarise the plot of either book because, in the first novel, it would practically destroy any reason for reading it and, in the second, it's so amorphous as to be almost non-existent. Nocturnes for the King of Naples is, in its simplest form, a tale of homoerotic love and a rather beautiful one at that for, if anything makes these books worth reading, it is Mr White's style, a pleasant blend of the expectedly lyrical and the darkly humourous.
His observations are precise, his more poetic passages strangely moving and the atmospheres evoked highly detailed but his novels fail to inspire. I wish I could be kinder because there is much that is admirable here but, ultimately, the combination of dull, unsympathetic characters and emotional distance makes these books, if not exactly a waste of time, unmemorable.
Kyra Smith
24th May 2001