Wreckage [Hardcover]

Niall Griffiths (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 3, 2005

Everything goes wrong from the start. The money's been stolen from the remote North Wales post office, but Darren's been over-enthusiastic with the lump hammer. The elderly sub-postmistress lies in a coma. When he and Alastair get back to Liverpool and try and spend the cash on a consignment of pure cocaine - and in doing so get involved with some seriously dangerous criminals - things really get out of hand, and stay that way until the story finally crashes to its grisly conclusion. Epic in its scope and its cast of characters, ambitious in linguistic and narrative range, Wreckage is Niall Griffiths' most confident, audacious novel yet. An examination of violence and the humanity it destroys, this is a book of furious pace and pacific calm that allows the reader to see both sympathy and terror in a world where everything that can possibly go wrong, does.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this follow-up to his 2005 novel Stump, Griffiths again offers a vision of Liverpool and its inhabitants, doing for the city what Joyce did for Dublin, albeit more violently. Darren and Alastair, two Liverpudlian thugs, rob a post office in a small village in Wales. Darren bludgeons the old lady postmaster within an inch of her life while Alastair weakly protests, and the pair makes off with four thousand pounds in cash. Greedy and fed up with his psychopathic partner, Alastair conscripts two younger thugs to help him steal the four thousand pounds from Darren. Of course, they take all the money for themselves, leaving both Darren and Alastair unconscious and bleeding on the wet sidewalk. When they come to, they're broke, in deep trouble with mob boss Tommy, and responsible for a crime that has drawn the attention and disgust of the entire U.K. The story is told in rotating narratives that offer the voices (in varying degrees of dialect) of nearly every character that crosses paths with Darren and Alastair, including their victims, a whore, a drunk and a pompous poet. Though the plot turns on drugs and violence, Griffith's lyrical and funny prose inoculates him against any charge that he's merely following the path that Trainspotting cut for British novelists who don't write about London.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Booklist

This intensely lyrical tale of ruined lives--some known, some suspected, and some taken utterly by surprise--in Liverpool's wrecked age charts the descent of two petty gangsters over three days as they take down their one big score from a small Welsh post office. Darren lives to drink and drug and inflict intense pain with his stolen Stanley knife (American readers will recognize it as a box cutter). Alastair is Darren's layabout follower, raised by his grandmother into a bleak and aimless future. But when Darren bashes in the head of an old postmistress despite Ally's protests, the sidekick rediscovers his conscience--with disastrous results for nearly everyone involved. Griffiths cuts through the bleakness with wry humor, crackling character studies, and achingly poetic ruminations on the tough ways of a world in which "only friction burns on your face from the speed of the passing air because that's how fast you fall." Much like Tom Tykwer did in his 1998 film Run Lola Run, Griffiths also provides snapshots of the continuing lives of minor characters, further enriching an already robust narrative. Frank Sennett
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Jonathan Cape (March 3, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 022407122X
• ISBN-13: 978-0224071222
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Lowlife Liverpool, past & present, April 2, 2007

By 

John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wreckage (Paperback)

I finished this Liverpudlian writer's fifth novel last night. 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. The best of his broken, flawed protagonists manage at least to strive towards the right, the good, and the moral center. They may not find it, however. 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.

Add to this nuanced minor characters (although a few of the couple dozen distinct narrative voices that appear in secondary roles perhaps inevitably don't totally convince and seem cardboard clichés), a take on the past century of violence in Liverpool, a glimpse at the Irish Famine that drove Tommy Maguire's forebears to Liverpool, and a lot of introspection amidst the vividly conveyed mayhem: the result is another Griffith study of lowlifes that also rises to unexpected heights in subject matter, prose style, and intelligence. With lots of invective.

4.0 out of 5 stars Betrayal!, March 8, 2007

By 

Daniel A. Scott "Just honest!" (Philippi, WV) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wreckage (Paperback)

If Guy Ritchie wrote books they would probably be a lot like this. Once you get past deciphering the language it's a fast paced, worthy read. Seems to be a gangsters holiday. I couldn't help thinking of the movie Snatch when I read it. If your into backstabbing, ruthless violence with a first person's account for it then this book is for you.