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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
High art in low places,
By
This review is from: Stump: A Novel (Paperback)
As you can see from the SIP's gathered by Amazon's computers, this book abounds in a certain expletive. Yet Griffiths never stoops to shock. As graphic in their imagery, events, and language as his fictions have been, this Liverpool-born, Welsh residing writer means to scrape off the grime and get to the humanity--or its frequent lack--beneath the crustiness that coats many of his drug-addled protagonists and antagonists in nearly equal spoonfuls, bongloads, lager gulps, or needle pricks.
In my Amazon review of his previous novel, "Kelly+Victor," I wondered how long Griffiths could sustain his chosen milieu; the current Welsh-cum-Liverpudlian down-and-out, dole-and-drug addicted generation. Well, the epic with more than a handful of concurrent narrators, "Grits," introduced his realm, if rather too lengthy a look at its denizens, who threatened to blur into not a willing victims' worth of a lost weekend but seemingly half-a-decade's staggering drama of binges, withdrawals, and scams. The comedown after the raves of unfortunately titled "Cool Cymru" followed in Sheepshagger, whose Ianto is now anonymously referred to as practically a rural (not urban?) legend by Darren and Alastair, the two young men who drive the plot and a car into Wales from Liverpool to intimidate an ex-Scouser as a "favor" for the two lads' drug kingpin. Griffiths whips back from Darren & Alastair to their target nimbly in alternating chapters, and the climactic moment paid off superbly, although the resolution of one of the two narrative strands seems so open-ended I'd have, if it was a movie, felt a sequel was necessary. The only drawback of an otherwise compactly conveyed, linear, macabrely entertaining, and exciting narrative is that Griffiths keeps alluding to other incidents that you're not sure happened in "Grits" or "Sheepshagger," given the complexity and mass of detail in his previous novels covering literally, symbolically, and spiritually the same bleak landscapes. He may intend his novels to play off one another tangentially, as did Faulkner in his fictional county, but it is difficult (in the cases of both authors) to follow at times. Dialect usages, like the Welsh, go generally unexplained, and as this is "natural" for the speakers, I applaud Griffiths for forcing us into his characters' reality. Yet it does make it more challenging, and the alienation we feel as a result transforms his panoramas into even more foreign locales. Wonderfully if aggravatingly subversive, this novel, as with the previous two, shows Griffiths tightening his fictional control over his denizens, and he continues to improve as a writer by this compression of stark, raw, poetic Old-English and medievally-influenced language with equally raw observations in our beaten-down, insult-laden, vernacular. The diminishment of our modern dreams and capabilities Griffiths shows well by our decision to keep our verbal expression as minimal as our imagination, and the costs of this to such as Darren & Alastair.
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