The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

 

Having spent five years studying the baroque writing of Cormac McCarthy – the high register, the biblical language, the extraordinary range of allusions and references, I have come to cherish simplicity in writing. True descriptive power does not derive from language used but from emotions evoked.When an author disappears into his or her text, so that only the story remains, this is something alchemical, something wonderful. What happens is that the reader is absorbed into the narrative, lives it, picks up its resonances.

Colson Whitehead is such an author. His use of language is exceptional: he tells his story in crisp, clean language, just the facts, ma’am, and we, the readers are left numbed, not because of an overstraining for effect or impact, but because we have been forced to confront the world of another person, a world wholly different from ours, a world that is hostile and dangerous and cruel.

The narrator of The Nickel Boys is a young boy called Elwood Curtis. Elwood is very clever, very moral and very hard-working. He has ambitions and he has the drive to achieve them. Unfortunately for Elwood, he is also black, in 1950s Florida, where Jim Crow still holds sway and life for black people is impossibly tenuous.

Elwood achieves a scholarship to a good school and, curious, decides before school starts to vist this place which is going to shape his future. He accepts a lift from another young black man, but they are pulled over by the police and the car is found to be stolen. This being 1950s Florida, and Elwood being black, he is sent to reform school, his hopes for the future in tatters.

What unfolds in the reform school is horrific beyond words. Whitehead models his fictitious Nickel Academy on the real Arthur G Dozier School for Boys in the small panhandle town of Marianna in Florida. In 2012, during an archaeological excavation, dozens of unmarked graves were discovered. What emerged in the subsequent investigation was a hideous story of a brutal regime in which boys were routinely and horrifically tortured, raped and beaten, many to death. Their bodies were discarded like so much garbage.

The school only closed in 2011.

Whitehead uses this ghastly truth to fashion an extraordinary fiction. The boys of the reform school are subjected to a regime of abuse which is as unpredictable as it is horrifying. Intially, Elwood thinks if he behaves and shows himself to be diligent and conscientious he will flourish, even gain early release. His is quickly disabused of this and joins the procession of boys through the years taken in the dead of night to the “White House” for special attention. A giant industrial fan is used to drown out their screams. Those who can’t sustain the beatings are tossed into unmarked graves, never to be mentioned again.

It was William Faulkner (or at least one of his characters) who said: “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” This world-haunted view is, of course, particularly apposite for the American south as it struggles to reach a compromise with its past. Faulkner himself experienced similar struggles, most catastrophically in a drunken interview in 1956 in which he argued that the pace of desegregation needed to be slowed or they would “be back in 1860”, that is, at the start of the secessions which led to the American Civil War. More, he stated that if it came to Mississippi versus the United States, “if I have to make the same choice Robert E. Lee made then I’ll make it.” Although he quickly distanced himself from these remarks, the uncomfortable truths they contain remain. There is still a deep-rooted conservatism in the American south (and elsewhere) in which racism is not necessarily overt, but it exists all the same. More than that, it is systemic.

To go back to my one sentence paragraph earlier: “The school only closed in 2011.” Think about that. We are decades from the civil rights movement and Dr King and the long march to freedom. Desegregation has been dismantled. Civil rights have been won. Equality has been enshrined in law.

Has it really?

What this deeply unsettling novel tells us is that hidden in full view such atrocities persist. Being a young, black man is still a dangerous condition in many places. The life chances of that young, black man – and woman – can be shattered as easily today as they were in the 1960s of Elwood Curtis. Ask George Floyd. Ask Michael Brown. Ask Eric Garner. Ask Freddie Gray. Ask Sandra Bland. Go back to 1955 and ask Emmett Till. Turn on the news today and ask Jacob Blake, paralysed after being shot seven times while walking away to his car.

There are just too many to ask.

The Nickel Boys is a confession. But it is the confession of a country and a society still to understand what that confession means.

Or what to do about it.

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Not the Deaths Imagined by Anne Pettigrew

Not the Deaths Imagined by Anne Pettigrew

Beth Semple, the narrator of Anne Pettigrew’s terrific first novel the medical Tartan noir Not the Life Imagined, is back in an even better sequel, Not the Deaths Imagined. Still a GP in Glasgow, Beth becomes embroiled once more in a story of deaths and deceit and dodgy doctors. This time, though, Beth herself is in jeopardy, along with her family, and the book gallops along to a rousing and frightening climax.

As with the first novel, Not the Deaths Imagined is mostly narrated by Beth herself, and we get her highly moral, utterly decent view of a world which becomes increasingly murky. Interspersed throughout, though, are third person interludes where we are taken into the viewpoints of the other characters, particularly the dodgy ones, and this gives the novel a pleasing balance. The story unfolds and the reader is taken on the journey of good (Beth) and evil (David Goodman). We know a clash is coming and we wait nervously for it to happen. Supporting Beth along the way are a number of her friends whom we first me in Not the Life Imagined.

David Goodman is a doctor in another practice in Glasgow, one with which Beth’s practice has a reciprocal agreement for out of hours cover. It is during one of these occurrences that Beth is asked to sign a “Part Two” form for a recently deceased patient, permitting the body to be released for cremation. Beth, unable to honestly say she can agree the cause of death, refuses to sign. This honest, dutiful act sets in train the frightening events of the novel.

Goodman, it becomes clear, is a multiple killer, bumping off his more elderly or vulnerable patients having first ensured their wills have been changed to include him. Nothing much, not more than £5000 or a painting each time. Not enough to draw attention. Enough to be lucrative. Besides, there is the thrill of the act, which never diminishes.

Goodman is clearly insane, and it is notoriously difficult to write such characters effectively. Either they are too normal and the reader can’t buy into it, or the writer tends to ham things up so much the character ends up like Chief Inspector Dreyfuss in the Pink Panther films, driven to raging madness by Clouseau and his incompetence. Anne Pettigrew avoids these extremes and in the process she creates a deliciously monstrous villain.

It is obvious from reading the novel that the author was a GP herself. Her familiarity with medicine and general practice gives an air of authenticity and credibility to the drama that unfolds, so that you can implicitly believe what you are reading. Not the Deaths Imagined rattles along pleasingly and the reader is drawn into Beth’s increasingly frightening world, willing the deaths imagined not to include her or hers. In a dramatic climax, the answer to that hangs in the balance...

King Crow by Michael Stewart

King Crow - a review by Rob McInroy

Paul Cooper, a lonely, insular schoolboy from Salford, should probably be taken into care. His mother, a depressive, can barely cope with motherhood. She goes out with her girlfriend and leaves her son to sort his own tea of pizza and lagers. His father has disappeared, thrown out of the house years ago. His sister has left home. All he has is birds, which he learns about assiduously, even obsessively from a Field Guide to British Birds, itemising how many he has seen in the wild. 186, 187, 188. The one he wants to see more than anything is the raven. Ravens are outsiders, too, living their own way, carrion-feeders for the most part, solitary. Paul would decry the anthropomorphism in this observation, but the raven is the bird-world encapsulation of Paul’s own nature. Not that he knows this.

King Crow is a remarkable novel. in many ways. With the lonely boy and his love of birds there is an inevitable link to Barry Hines’s Kes, despite the Pennine barrier between the two novels’ settings. I am also greatly reminded of Daniel Shand’s Fallow, another road novel in which, from the outset, violence is inevitable (although it should be noted that King Crow predates Fallow). I think, though, the novel it most reminds me of is Patrick McGrath’s Spider, although if you haven’t read Spider I would urge you not to Google to find the reason why before you read King Crow because doing so would deliver a huge spoiler, and that would be a great shame, because Michael Stewart makes an excellent job of the sleight of hand which lies at the heart of this novel.

Recently moved to a new school and friendless, Paul becomes fascinated by a fellow pupil, Ashley, who seems to Paul to be everything he isn’t. Confident, brash even, handsome, tough, he is someone Paul can look up to. An unusual friendship develops in even more unusual circumstances, the consequence of which is that the two boys find themselves on the run, pursued by a criminal from whom they have stolen a bag of drugs. The novel thus becomes a road novel, but like none you’ve ever read before.

For starters, they decide they will go to Cumbria, in search of Paul’s beloved raven and tramp the hills in search of birds. They meet up with Becky, middle-class, a raver on the look-out for adventure. In Cumbria and meet a hermit. From there things spiral...

Interwoven throughout are Paul’s meticulous explorations of different birds. These are beautifully written. Stewart is a fine writer about nature, in the manner of Jon McGregor or Melissa Harrison. Thus, as well as being a road novel, it’s also a piece of natural history. You will learn fascinating details along the way – there is no such bird as a seagull, for example – but the writing is so good it never seems didactic. Rather, Michael Stewart uses these digressions into natural history to explore the character of Paul. Brett Easton Ellis did the same thing with the music criticism interludes in American Psycho, and Stewart’s handling of what is a genuine technical challenge is impressive indeed.

The novel grows ever darker and ever darker until you reach a point where you read a sentence and stop and think: what? And you read the sentence again and think: what? And the story shifts again, taking you with it, spinning into a future and reflecting on a past which seem equally unknowable.

I’ve compared Michael Stewart to quite a number of different authors in this review, and done so deliberately, because there are echoes of each of those in his prose. But while he may share attributes with these writers, he synthesises them into something entirely unique.