A bar in Liverpool, January 2nd 2000: Kelly and Victor, both coming down from the recent global party, meet, and some time later that night they are in her bed. The story of Kelly and Victor progresses, through two mirror-image narratives—a story of the growth and spiralling intensity of a sexual obsession, traced to its inevitable, devastating conclusion. Set against a backdrop of urban despair, spiritual absence and a world swamped with pornography, this is a novel about yearning for union, for purity, and for magic and mystery in a world that denies them all.
Kelly + Victor
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Editorial Reviews
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Praise for Grits:
"An astonishing feat -- a work which both challenges and re-affirms the power of the novel". -- Irvine Welsh
"An astonishing feat -- a work which both challenges and re-affirms the power of the novel". -- Irvine Welsh
From the Publisher
A bar in Liverpool, January 2nd 2000: Victor meets Kelly. Later that night, he’s in her bed. They both think it’s the best sex they’ve ever had. So the story of Kelly + Victor progresses, through two mirror–image narratives: a story of growth and the spiraling intensity of a sexual obsession, traced to its inevitable, devastating conclusion. Set against a backdrop of urban despair and a world swamped with pornography, this is a novel about longing—for union, for purity, for magic and mystery in a world that denies them all. Niall Griffiths has been widely hailed as one of the best young writers in Britain; he is the author of Grits and Sheepshagger, which Publishers Weekly called “amazing… a chilling portrait nearly mythological in its intensity.”
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not my kind of book,
By Vanessa Wu (London) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Kelly + Victor (Jonathan Cape Original) (Paperback)
I'm not sure if this is hardcore trashy BDSM masquerading as literary fiction or literary fiction masquerading as hardcore trashy BDSM.
I like the way Niall Griffiths writes but I think I preferred him in Sheepshagger. I found the violence in Kelly and Victor a bit hard to understand. By the way, Sheepshagger, is not pornographic at all. And nor is Stump. In case you were wondering. But Kelly and Victor quite possibly is. I don't know. It's not my kind of porn so I can't tell.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Journey into the depths of the flesh in search of a soul,
By
This review is from: Kelly + Victor (Paperback)
In his first novel, Grits, Niall Griffiths wandered in and out of a half-dozen poetically and graphically rendered narrative voices in telling tales of 90s-era rave culture and those who roamed its depths in Wales and the Liverpool corridor north. His second novel, Sheepshagger, narrowed the variety of voices, cut the complexity of the storyline, and focused on three characters. I enjoyed both novels and admired Griffith's poignant reflections on Welsh identity within a dismal, franchised, homogenised, and largely charmless and soulless cultural wasteland. The author's humanism contends in his characters and the omniscient, erudite stance it often takes to set off better the profanity-laced, inarticulate, but powerfully telegraphed streams- of- consciousness within his characters.
Here, in Kelly & Victor, Liverpool-- the author's hometown-- is the setting more than Wales. K & V tell their side of the story, Victor first and then the second half by Kelly relates their sordid, violent, drugged, narcotic-heavy, and lower middle class strivings in a Britain that seems not to care much as it goes swiftly down the capitalist millennial drain. It's more sexualized than his previous two novels but not erotic so much as detailed and precise. Griffiths handles convincingly the minds and souls of characters stuck in dead-end McJobs, who turn to superficial solace in pubs and flats, and who represent the future of England's fitful dreaming a generation after punk's anger gave way to hedonistic ennui. While among his five novels, the later ones being the paired Stump and Wreckage that also focus on Wales and especially Liverpool again, Kelly & Victor is the one I think of less often in comparison, this is not to diminish its accomplishment. I did find Kelly's telling of the story marginally less effective than Victor's, but Griffiths tends to enter the male more than the female mind for his narrative, so this extended foray into the feminine psyche is, while not perfect, quite brave. By this halfway point (as of 2007) in his work, Griffiths has found his groove and moves the storyline along vividly and never fails to convince you that he can enter the spirits of a generation that represents the indifference on the surface and the anguish beneath the acquired public face of detachment that reveals, in controlled prose that bursts out and also slow boils, the torments beneath the skin. He is far more than, and this is not to diminish Irvine Welsh's own talent, a Trainspotting imitator; I sense this endless comparison for Griffiths may be limiting Griffith's rise to a higher level of recognition that I argue he deserves. This novel, not for the squeamish or easily offended, delves into the sado-masochistic undertow of an already tempestuous relationship between these two young people. The problem of lust, for the body and the control that sex gives us over another person, is more to the forefront; other novels of his focus on the boozy, woozy, shifts into passivity or ultra-violence. They are not absent here, surely, but the relationship and the limits to two characters paired makes this a deeper entry into the problem of desire, passion, and satiation. If you can take its honest brutality, and learn to read closely for the compassion that emerges between the often raw lines of prose, you will find evidence again that Griffiths, despite an initial resemblance to genre thrillers, has inside a far more educated, capably sophisticated, and talented control of his story skills. He is one of the most nimble, emerging authors that I can think of not only in Britain but in the English language writing solid, accomplished, worthwhile fiction today.
3.0 out of 5 stars
Lust, lager, loneliness in Liverpool,
By
This review is from: Kelly and Victor (Paperback)
A couple of characters from Griffith's previous epic of Welsh druggies circa 1995, Grits, appear in cameos in this Liverpudlian narrative. Its relative compression--about 40% less than Grits and with two main characters rather than eight or so. The fact that they both speak the same dialect also helps the pace and depth of this novel. As the millennium strikes popularily in 2000 (if not calendarically), Victor finds himself immediately taken, in more ways than one, by Kelly. We find out first his side of the story, then hers. Details from her narrative fill in gaps left from his perspective, and the result gives what for readers of Griffiths other fiction are again visits to the DSS, gripes about the consumerist lifestyle, and ennui interspersed with not so much chemical but hormonal charges.
This shift from hundreds of pages of drug-fueled states of consciousness to a couple of a hundred focused more upon sex does move the plot along more quickly and less sullenly than that of Grits. As with the earlier novel, poignant moments are few but effectively rendered against a harsh, noisy, and brutal city landscape. The two cathedrals of Liverpool tower over the characters symbolically and literally as Kelly and Victor scramble to keep their footing in an increasingly tense relationship with one another and with their surroundings. After reading Sheepshagger, Grits, and Kelly + Victor, I'm still left curious if Griffiths can convey other milieux as effectively as he can that of these often intelligent but determinedly scamming and disenfranchised young. I must admit that given pages of effectively captured but numbingly cumulative monologue and dialogue--with their scrounging and complaining about the injustice of it all--his characters are only too eager to keep living off of the welfare paid them by others caught up in their own mundane, if often less chemically sustained, drab jobs. Certainly his characters find enough income to keep their alcohol and pharmaceutical intake steady. This distance, then, from his often articulate but stubbornly willful layabouts does diminish this reader's sympathy for their plight. Perhaps this is part of Griffith's more subtle message, but I suspect that he considers himself a voice for the voluntarily proleteriat rather than their humanist critic. While I empathize with many of his characters' ideological rants more often than not, their repeated refusal to act upon their raised consciousness makes for a frustrating encounter with so many partially educated but stubbornly lazy sods. I look forward to reading whatever Griffith produces about British youth today, but I also urge that he'd hone his critique a bit more sharply against the multiple causes for anomie today among its drowsy and shifty malingerers.
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