"Only here, only now" by Tom Newlands

A girl grows up in the squalor of an impoverished town, surrounded by drug addicts and petty criminals. Is there any hope that she can escape?

Cora Mowat is a feisty 14-year-old lassie with ADHD, growing up with her wheelchair-bound mother in 1994 Muircross, an impoverished (and fictional) town in Fife, Scotland, a place she describes in chapter one thus: “It was a manky wee hellhole set out by itself on a lump of coast the shape of the chicken nugget, surrounded by pylons and filled with moonhowlers and old folk and seagulls the size of ironing boards that shat over everything. Chaos and fighting and shite in your fringe, that was Muircross. ... The town looked like a handful of grey gravel chucked up the coast.” (Ch 1)

Right from the start you can hear Cora's distinctive voice and enjoy her unique and eloquent observations of her world. She is a damsel in distress, surrounded by peril. The dangers include getting pregnant, male violence, falling foul of alcohol abuse or drug addiction or a gangster boyfriend, being bullied for being different, getting sucked into a life of petty crime, or just giving up hope. Her only chance seems to be her mum's shoplifting boyfriend.

There's plenty of action in the plot ranging from a hilarious date with a Goth boyfriend whose car is attacked by burgers and shakes outside a fast food restaurant to the terrifying fate of the lad trapped in a phonebox with an ignited box of fireworks. Conflict abounds. There's menace and there's tragedy, there's dancing and there's death. She seems drawn to the damaged and the bullied, like the rollerblading girl at school whom nobody likes. And when she has a chance, Cora is an expert in self-sabotage. All the time I was hoping and praying she'd make it and fearing and expecting she wouldn't. This kept me turning the pages all the way to the end.

Cora is a fabulous character, a first person narrator growing up before our eyes. The peripheral characters are mostly complex and interesting. The stereotype, I suppose, is that kids from these backgrounds grow up damaged and there were certainly some who descended into personal hells. But of course poor people are normal people and despite their circumstances they could be kind and generous, and clever and thoughtful, and honest and decent. These characters are visceral and real. 

One of the characters is Cora's environment. Poverty abounds. Jacket potatoes with oven chips is a healthy meal, noodles in a chicken flavoured sauce is commoner fare. Gunner's signature dish is spaghetti with a sauce made from a can of chicken soup, milk and water with scrunched up crisps toasted under the grill for a topping. When she is given a decent pair of trainers she knows they must have been stolen. Everything in her world has a price and mostly it is too expensive for her. And the streets are litter-strewn, the community facilities are vandalised, and the seaside is a rubbish dump. 

The theme is hope despite this background of post-industrial urban decay. These characters might be weeds in a wilderness but most of them are struggling towards the light. 

This is realism in the tradition of Zola: his Germinal is set among the downtrodden and impoverished inhabitants of a coal mining village. The closest recent novel with which it bears comparison is, I think,  Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart. 

Selected quotes:

• “Round here you lived in your town and then you died in your town.” (Ch 1)
• “He was a gangly-looking thing, head like a conker, hair shaved off, nose like a witch from a crap cartoon. just the one eye.” (Ch 2)
• “Round here the options for lassies like me were school or a wean, shelf-stacking or shoplifting, gin on the Shreddies or tongue in the socket.” (Ch 4)
• “Auntie Janine used to say that even wasps wouldn't land on my mam's cooking.” (Ch 4)
• “The smudgy blue evening sky made me feel so calm.” (Ch 7)
• “Most of all I hated the future - anything could happen there.” (Ch 8)
• “All adults ever did was tell you bad news or lies or make you eat things at a certain speed.” (Ch 12)
• “He laughed. ‘Been to the zoo once and think you're a tiger.’” (Ch 15)
• “Music was predictable and it gave me a wee bit control over my surroundings. You could rewind and replay.” (Ch 26)
• “It's like your bones have been crying out for light since the day you were born. Then heroin pulls you inside out.” (Ch 27)
• “Imagine you're a sexy wee delicate plant breaking through the first time. You could be growing anywhere in the world, and you twiddle your petally head round for a look and realise you're stuck for life growing in a crack in the tarmac in Whiteinch. Peeping out of the bit where the wires off a phone box go underground.” (Ch 30)
• “Kira had been right, there does come a point where you have to accept who you are and start living.” (Ch 33)
• “You feel useless through almost every second of school and now you're going out into the adult world with the tomato sauce moustache praying that people won't see the wee fraud you are. Some days you can't remember what’s in your own pockets, you can't hold a conversation without interrupting or humming Wet Wet Wet songs to yourself and you've never once been on time. Now the future you want depends on people thinking you're normal.” (Ch 33) Imposter syndrome before an interview!
• “Shame was just a cheap badly fitting neon ski jacket with a broken zip that you had to go around wearing forever, making you a flat-chested hunchback, reminding you of the past.” (Ch 36)

August 2024; 392 pages

A brilliant bildungsroman with a post-industrial decay realism setting.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair

A classic of proletarian literature, this book was the first best-seller of an author who repeatedly used fiction for social crusades; much later he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Jurgis emigrates from Lithuania with his family and the family of his bride-to-be near the start of the 1900s. They seek work in the meat-packing district of Chicago and are easy prey to the robber-baron capitalist practices of the time. Those who are lucky enough to find employment (including underage children) are forced to work in appalling conditions, for little better than zero-hours contracts. They are repeatedly cheated by mortgage brokers. Every sickness is a calamity, there being no health insurance and no sick pay. Misery after misery is inflicted upon them. Hunger, starvation, illness and death attend them Just when you think that things might be looking up a little, another hammer blow knocks them down. 

Visceral in both senses of the word. If you want misery fiction, this is it. I naively expected that the book would pivot at the half-way mark when Jurgis goes to jail but there is still plenty of misery yet to come.

The style is mostly hyper-realism with lots of objective reportage (the author worked for seven weeks undercover in the meat-processing industry). The final section of the book becomes a socialist tract. There are moments of Victorian melodrama ("she lay cold and still - she was gone - she was gone!"; Ch 19). In some ways it is in the tradition of Dickens's early novels such as Oliver Twist which exposed workhouses and Nicholas Nickleby which exposed private schools but this book is much harder-hitting and has correspondingly less romantic story-line.

It reminded me in many ways of The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, a much less hard-hitting (and much lighter) but still fundamentally socialist contemporary novel set in the building trade in England.

Love and Mr Lewisham by H G Wells also has socialist ideas put into the mouth of one of the characters. 

The Jungle was instrumental in causing the public outcry that let to acts protecting consumers from dodgy food products.

It does, however, contain anti-Semitic and racist remarks; its casual assumption of racist attitudes is typical of its time.

Selected quotes:

• "His notes are never true, and his fiddle buzzes on the low ones and squeaks and scratches on the high" (Ch 1)
• "She had a feeling that she was getting something for nothing ... she was getting the better of a world that was getting the better of her in so many other ways." (Ch 1)
• "There have been known to be philosophers and plain men who swore by Malthus in the books and would, nevertheless, subscribe to a relief fund in time of famine." (Ch 5)
• "In Russia one thought of the government as an affliction like the lightning and the hail." (Ch 9)
• "'Duck, little brother, duck,' the wise old peasants would whisper; 'everything passes away'." (Ch 9)
• "Human beings writhed and fought and fell upon each other like wolves in a pit ... and humanity was festering and stewing and wallowing in its own corruption." (Ch 17)
• "She was standing upon the brink of the pit of hell and throwing in snow balls to lower the temperature." (Ch 21)
• "So he went on, tearing up all the flowers from the garden of his soul, and setting his heel upon them." (Ch 22)
• "Men at the death-grapple with the demon powers of hunger and cold!" (Ch 23)
• "It was like breakers upon a beach; there was new water, but the wave looked just the same." (Ch 25)
• "There is one kind of prison where the man is behind the bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside." (Ch 27)
• "When people are starving ... and they have anything with a price, they ought to sell it." (Ch 27)
• "Marriage and prostitution were two sides of one shield, the predatory man's exploitation of the sex pleasure. The difference between them was a difference of class. If a woman had money she might dictate her own terms: equality, a life contract, and the legitimacy - that is the property rights - of her children. If she had no money ... she sold herself for an existence." (Ch 31)

Hugely realistic, full of squalor and misery. Jack London called it the "Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage slavery". Bertolt Brecht later wrote a play in which Saint Joan was transported to the Chicago stockyards.

February 2023; 410 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God