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