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.

Not The Life Imagined by Anne Pettigrew

 

There are portents from the outset that Not the Life Imagined, a story about a group of medical students in the 1960s and 1970s, is not going to be your classic comic tale of medical misadventures and ineptitude, with James Robertson Justice BELLOWING across every scene at the “blathering idiots” under his charge. We are told, right from the start:

When did you last see a physician or surgeon? Were they charming, knowledgeable, reassuring and trustworthy? Are you sure? I’ve known some who are not as they seem. They had other agendas. One is dead and the other awaits his fate, just like me.

It is clear, then, that there is going to be darkness in this novel. And yet it is a richly humorous story, and medical misadventures and ineptitude abound. But these escapades are not, as with Richard Gordon or the like, the point of the novel, but its backdrop. We are in a much more realistic world and, as the novel unfolds, its loosely connected moments gradually coalesce to form something darker and deeper.

Most of the novel is told through the eyes of Beth Slater, and it is Beth who provides the novel’s moral compass. She is one of a group of students who arrive at Glasgow University to study medicine in 1967, a working class girl, naive and principled. Her classmates are a diverse bunch, all of them flawed in the way every human is. Over the course of the twenty or so years encompassed by the novel these flaws are itemised and probed and, if not exactly judged, then certainly exposed to critical scrutiny. And with each moral failing, each moment of weakness, each capitulation to greed or fear or plain desperation, the characters become more human, more like us, more like a mirror in which we can see our own flaws and frailties.

Not the Life Imagined is part bildungsroman, part crime thriller, part psychological character study, part comedy, part feminist admonition, part history of the NHS. Each of the characters arrives at university hopeful and ambitious, with ideas about how their lives will unfold. Life, of course, has its own trajectory and anyone who thinks they are in control of their own destiny is closing their eyes to reality. The reality, in Not the Life Imagined, is sometimes tragic, often traumatic, frequently amusing, but always compelling.  

Wittgenstein Jr by Lars Iyer

 

In Wittgenstein Jr, Lars Iyer sets out to create an alternative Ludwig Wittgenstein, living in contemporary Cambridge and appalled, as the real Wittgenstein was, by what he sees around him, the indolence of the dons, the artificiality of academic life. Because this is contemporary, though, the artificiality has a different genesis: while it was the dons’ lack of effort the real Wittgenstein deplored, now it their constant chasing of funding, the commercialisation of academia, the loss of education as a tool to improve human society. As ever with Iyer, and with any good satire, there is a real target for the jokes and barbs and rejoinders. Modernity is a cold-blooded thing, beholden to the great god commercialism.

The eponymous Wittgenstein Jr is a philosophy lecturer at Cambridge, a man struggling with his philosophical explorations of logic and reason and their place in the real world. He is given his nickname by his students, a diverse group of undergraduates who are drinking, fornicating and tripping their way through their academic careers. They are frustrated by Wittgenstein Jr’s inability to actually teach them anything. Rather, he asks them gnomic questions without deigning (or being able) to provide answers. At one point, he tells them:

Beware clarity ... Beware the well-trodden path! But beware obscurity, too! Beware the never-trodden path! Avoid explanation ... But also avoid obfuscation. Suspect conclusions. But suspect inconclusiveness, too.

Joseph Knecht he is not.

Gradually, though, his students realise (or some of them, anyway, over the weeks the class size shrinks from 45 to 12) that he is trying to teach them something. His style may be unorthodox, he may not seem entirely in control of his faculties, but through his constant questioning he is directing them to live their lives. Philosophy is the examination of logic and reason, but it can only be experienced through reality. For this reason, Wittgenstein is a great admirer of St Augustine, who famously prayed: “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet”, before converting to Christianity and becoming a priest. This was a man who lived, and through living he learned. Joseph Knecht made flesh.

But while the students gradually come to an accommodation with their lecturer, Wittgenstein Jr struggles to live up to his own ideals. This is when the novel begins to take form and we understand it is not just a random rendering of the chaotic lives and peculiar lectures of this group of Cambridge undergrads. In particular, the narrator, Peters, begins to draw closer to Wittgenstein Jr and starts to break through the intensity that drives his sense of vocation and his dedication to the life philosophical.

Like his more recent Nietzsche andthe Burbs, Wittgenstein Jr is a strange novel, comprising short fragments, moments in the unstructured lives of the protagonists, told in non-judgmental, forthright terms. It is also very funny. The sincerity of Wittgenstein Jr’s philosophical quest is counterpointed to great comic effect by the dissoluteness of his students and we are drawn into a wonderful send-up of academic life in the twenty-first century.