Books
Mystery in Spiderville is one of those books which will either entrance you with its lyrical language and engross you in its surrealist universe, or else just make you feel stupid because you can't work out what the hell it was all about.
Maybe it's a bit cruel to call it "one of those books", though, when I have genuinely never read anything remotely similar. Hartley Williams is foremost a poet, and the short chapters of his debut novel could easily be seen as a selection of loosely-linked poems, with little connection between them other than the dark urban landscape and overriding sense of gloom.
The title suggests a twist on the classic film-noir detective story, and much of the imagery of Mystery in Spiderville is reminiscent of this. There are murders - a lot of them - the narrator is seen wearing a raincoat and carrying a falcon, and "Inspector Spider" occasionally peruses evidence from his "Investigations Agency". But "Spider" is not a conventional character: he does not only appear as a policeman, but also from the grave, in a Mayfair club, and as head of "Sadness Incorporated". In all of these incarnations he blatantly torments the narrator.
At some stages of the novel you are tempted to think that you've figured it out: the narrator is in the throes of madness, having murdered his loved one, and has created the character of "Spider" in order to fantasise about his inevitable apprehension. But Hartley Williams refuses to allow you this certainty, and, what is stranger, uses a chapter of the novel to justify his approach, calling for a form of literature which "disembowels you on page five". The author's narrative then becomes even more obscure, the installments even more unrelated, culminating in another dead-end. The final chapter of Mystery in Spiderville is much like the rest: deep in symbolism (Spider lying in the centre of the road failing to be mowed down by the Japanese cars he has designed - go figure), but suggesting nothing in particular and explaining even less.
There is nothing "great" about Aberystwyth Mon Amour: no "great" hero who rises from proverbial adversity to some electrifying social triumph; no profound-but-thwarted passion; no harrowing scheme of measured revenge.
What there is instead in this comic detective-cum-fantasy pastiche is parody, bathos, and a playful iconoclasm. In a novel where Raymond Chandler meets a more fun-loving Irvine Welsh and shakes him rather vigorously by the hand. Pryce has the opportunity to smash down expectation and reinvent the distinctively Welsh townscape of Aberystwyth. Pryce's world is littered with obscure private detectives searching for missing school boys, fervently gambling OAPs, philosophising Italian ice-cream men offering choc-mint ice cream with "a wafer of the absurd" and other incongruities. The effect is curiously ambiguous.
On the one hand, this Aberystwyth is totally unrecognisable, unfeasibly surreal. On the other hand, there is the sense that all that is particularly unbelievable about the secret gangster life of the Welsh coast rings a disconcerting bell of familiarity. In a Welsh seaside resort of flashing fruit machines, damp candy floss and plastic charity labradors, a Druid mafia build an equestrian statue in honour of their "Grand Wizard" Lovespoon, a local singer is famed for her rendition of that funky Welsh tune 'David of the White Rock', and a nasty dwarf climbs up his tower a la Quasi Modo. Pryce is clearly poking fun at stereotypes both real and literary, but he is also asking a question: why does the reader fail to grant Aberystwyth artistic license? What is it about the common opinion of the Welsh town that makes it as satirically funny as the "unlikely" scene of Noir fiction?
Pryce does not seem to answer this question, but revels in the absurd brand perversity he has fashioned without ever losing sight of human nastiness. Black humour and murder are always a sinisterly unpleasant combination and Pryce brilliantly exploits the provocative juxtaposition in the most flippant but gruesome schoolboy manner.
30th May 2002