Wes Brown

Shark

176 pp., Dog Horn Publishing, £9.99.

In a recent interview, Wes Brown spoke of his commitment to “writing completely uncensored.” His debut novel, Shark, certainly seems to have been written in this way. Its pages are full of sentences that barge their way in to your head, smash the place up a bit and break the door on their way out. Sentences, in other words, that tell it like it is, however that might be. For this reason, Shark will not appeal to everyone. If you are easily offended by swearing, or recoil at the idea of frank sexual discussion, I would advise you to seek alternative literary pursuits; everyone else is invited join John Usher in the run-down boozers and worn out snooker halls of Leeds. 

A Yorkshire lad and Iraq war veteran, Usher has returned to his home city following his departure from the army. He struggles to adapt to civilian life and battles with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Uninspired by the limited employment opportunities available to him, Usher decides to earn his money as a pool shark. Brown’s novel is the story of the ups and downs of Usher’s life both at and away from the table, including his complex relationship with two women: ex-girlfriend Evelyn, now married to English Defence League member Carl, and attractive barmaid Francesca, whom he has instantly taken a liking to.  

The way that Brown writes about Burley, the district of Leeds in which the novel is set, is vivid and engaging. He states that his depiction of Leeds has “elements of the real” but is “located somewhere deep in the subconscious”. Understandably perhaps, he wishes to distance the dystopic elements of his writing from his home city, which, he says, is already at risk of being negatively stereotyped in a way that is “not truly representative”. Nevertheless, he does admit that the novel portrays some of the grittier elements of life that can be found in big cities like Leeds. His writing is undoubtedly at its best when it deals with recognisable aspects of urban Yorkshire: the long roads with “the houses all the same: chunky terraces” and the guttural Leeds accent “doht” for don’t and “yer” for you. 

Shark has some weighty themes: the after-effects of war, adultery, misogyny, racism, drug abuse, alcoholism and unemployment all feature at some point during the narrative. Brown, however, manages to keep Shark from become an ‘issues’ book. His focus is on his main character, John Usher, rather than on any particular theme. The novel is Usher, his thoughts, his feelings, his actions and his words, none of which are without their controversies. 

Usher is a deeply flawed protagonist, who is all the more interesting to read about for this reason. On the one hand we feel sympathetic towards him because of his experience of war, which haunts him like a “quiet scream that doesn’t let slip”. On the other hand, throughout the course of the novel, he is shown to have plenty of personality traits that are difficult to sympathise with, particularly his tendencies towards misogyny and racism. 

Although Carl, Usher’s friend, is clearly more vocal and holds the more extreme right-wing views, both men become involved with EDL marches. Futhermore, despite his assertions that the demonstrations are not about race but “abaht country”, Usher often talks about Black and Asian people in offensive terms. The same can be said of the way in which he refers to women, who, in summary, are bad drivers that create too much drama but have bodies that are too appealing to allow one to ignore them completely.  

Brown’s choice of protagonist is brave and could easily have backfired. He makes his choice work by giving us a precisely constructed view of Usher’s psyche. Whether we like Usher or not, we do at least understand him and appreciate his complexities. Brown is also careful not to allow us to judge his character too quickly. Usher’s use of racist language is somewhat countered by one particular passage towards the end of the novel, in which he acknowledges that all races are equal in the sense that “we’re all drifters finding our way”. In a similar way, Brown manages to balance Usher’s misogyny with moments of affection and respect towards Francesca and Evelyn. 

There is no doubt that Shark is a strong debut novel. It showcases Brown’s distinctive and beautifully economic writing style. Through his exploration of subjects such as the English Defence League, Brown establishes him as a novelist who is unafraid to write about both extremely contemporary and highly controversial topics. Kate Wilson’s comment that "[r]eading Shark is a little like getting punched in the stomach (in a good way)” is very fitting. This is a novel that pins you down and won’t let you go until you’ve reached the back cover. Nevertheless, you won’t want the experience to end. 

Lucy Williamson is a recent graduate of the School of English at the University of Leeds. She has had poetry published in the likes of Poetry and Audience and The Scribe and as well as writing reviews for The Cadaverine she also writes book reviews for an online blog Rum and Reviews: http://rumandreviews.com/. 

Phil Jourdan

In Praise of Motherhood

136 pp., Zero Books, £9.99.

An effective epigraph should prepare a reader for the rest of the work, and the one for Phil Jourdan’s Praise of Motherhood does exactly that. The quotation from Paul Valéry’s Tel quel, ‘Un lapin ne nous effraie point; mais le brusque départ d’un lapin inattendu peut nous mettre en fuite,’ translates more or less as ‘One rabbit does not scare us in the slightest, but the sudden departure of an unexpected rabbit can make us flee’. It functions as a comment on the suddenness of Jourdan’s mother's death from an aneurysm: ‘But nobody had warned me. Nobody had warned anyone’. Interestingly, the section of Tel quel from which this epigraph comes goes on to observe how a person who lacks foresight is less overwhelmed and flustered by a catastrophe than someone who plans ahead. Jourdan explicitly places himself in this latter category when he writes, ‘And though I didn’t cry I kept a series of notes, tiny memories it was important not to forget, ever-ever, things to stick into the book I had already decided to write about my mother’.

This quality of deliberation appears again midway through the book, when Jourdan writes, ‘I don’t care how things actually happened. I want to rearrange it all, to make it into a streamlined, coherent narrative’. In a way, this desire underpins the project of Praise of Motherhood: memoir as an attempt to make sense of his mother Sofia’s death and her legacy. At the same time, there are novelistic techniques at work, evident in tiny details such as the way Jourdan chooses to spell his mother’s name as ‘Sophia’, but also more broadly in what Caleb J. Ross calls in his foreword a refusal to ‘allow the constraints of perspective or chronology to guide the text’.

Take, for example, Chapter Four, in which Jourdan imagines how his mother might have turned to her friend, a priest, for help in dealing with her son’s teenage struggles with psychosis. The whole chapter is utterly convincing and, were it not for the occasional reminder, a reader could well forget that a good deal of it is being imagined by Jourdan after the fact, ‘guilt-ridden and wearing [his] writer’s hat’. A similar effect occurs in Chapter Ten, where Jourdan imagines the life story of Piotr ‘Brown Bear’ Popov, based on his mother’s claim that she was once a spy, ‘the part of her [he] knew the least, the most surprising aspect of an endless woman now dead but guttering in the back of [his] mind’.

The book continues to eschew the conventional memoir narrative form, yet still persists in elaborating on the book’s portrayal of Jourdan’s mother. Chapter Eleven does this through a mixture of speeches by Jourdan’s parents, each one lopped off at both ends by ellipses, so that they form an accretion of impressions rather than a straightforward narrative thread. Chapter Twelve operates as a series of open letters by Jourdan to different groups of people who crossed his mother’s path, by turns angry (‘Go back to your stupid house with your stupid family and leave me the hell alone, leave my sister alone, and stop attending funerals to which you weren’t invited. Just go away.’) and tender (‘So dear old homeless lady, you will not die while I am around, not because I care about you, but because it’s what my mother would have wanted.’).

In its penultimate chapter, Praise of Motherhood pushes the limits of memoir even further by positing, ‘Let this all have been a lie. Let my mother be sitting here next to me; let her have been here the whole time.’ However, this alternate version of events ultimately devolves into a nightmarish vision of matricide, as his mother falls apart and has to be reassembled using duct tape, only for the rebuilt figure to repeat, ‘You killed me. You killed me. You killed me.’ Yet this grim ending is actually laying the ground for the final chapter’s redemptive opening:

No, I didn’t kill you.

If I had killed you, I would have nothing to write about. I’d already have committed every mistake, burned down every bridge, dismissed every memory I have of you as a facsimile.

[…]

You saw the good in me, as I still see the good in you.

In Ross’ forward, he writes that perhaps the book’s ‘great accomplishment is passing on the legacy of what the reader will come to know as a woman simply meant to exist beyond her own years… Jourdan invites the reader to be a member of his family, literally extending his mother’s impact to new generations and new lineages entirely’. Early on in the book, Jourdan writes, ‘Everyone, even in his profoundest hatred, loves his mother’. So whatever his stated reasons for writing Praise of Motherhood, the end result still feels like an incredible act of generosity on his part, affording the reader the privilege of briefly encountering Sofia, this woman who ‘was Love manifest’.

Ian Chung is Fiction Editor at The Cadaverine. He is an MA in English student at the University of Warwick. His work has appeared in Angelic Dynamo, Dr. Hurley's Snake-Oil Cure, Foundling Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and The Cadaverine, among others. He has a short story forthcoming in Unthology No. 3 (Unthank Books, 2012). He was nominated by Camroc Press Review for Sundress Publications' Best of the Net 2010. He reviews for The Conium Review, The Cadaverine, Sabotage Reviews and Rum & Reviews Magazine. He also edits Eunoia Review, and has joined Epicentre Magazine as Assistant Editor.