I started reading Niall Griffiths around seven years ago, when, still unfamiliar with the internet, I actually procured books from the well known bibliophilic retail chain known as Waterstone’s.
It was one of those 3 for £15 deals that they do every year. You know the story, you get a couple that you’re really chuffed with and then there’s the difficult 3rd choice: shall I chance an unknown author? Play it safe with an Ian McEwan or Umberto Eco - short, tight plotter, or big historical rambler?
I noticed the title first, “Sheepshagger” in brush styled graffiti day-glo orange. Okay, eye’s rolling, it’s an Irvine Welsh clone again: a Poundshop Martin Amis for the ‘underclass’. Brace yourself for the cartoon stereotypes and faux ‘Street’ slumming. Yawn.
I read the blurb on the back and noticed it was set in west Wales, and how the writing was “Steeped in the wild forces of nature” of that region.
Having been on many a caravan holiday in that area back in the 70’s, my curiosity was pricked and I thought, sod it, I’ll give it a go.
I suspected it might paint a more dramatic and dark narrative of Welsh culture than memories of my mum flashing the lights off and on in the caravan to guide my nan back from the toilet block at 1 in the morning.
Landing lights for the cognitively dispossessed.
And indeed it did.
The ‘Sheepshagger’ of the title is the uncharitable label often slapped on the indigenous population of that landscape by the wealthy English incomers, who rape the local housing stock to rent as holiday homes or weekend retreats for themselves.
The main character Ianto is an awkward, parentless, disturbed teenager, who, after finding himself homeless after his grandmothers death, sees the loss of his material home to a London Yuppie as symbolic of a much greater loss – the disappearance of his ancestral roots, his spiritual Welsh homeland, to cold, avaricious English colonialism.
Also, and most importantly, it reopens a very personal wound for Ianto, it literally becomes an unspeakable crime for him.
As the clever plot unravels we realise that Ianto’s alienation and pain is representative of a much wider abuse of Welsh culture and landscape, and Ianto’s subsequent trail of violence is perfectly intelligible (if horrific) when viewed from this context.
There’s a great twist near the end here, which is sooo Griffiths: when Ianto seeks brief sanctuary for his crimes in the home of an old Welsh crone who reminds him of his grandmother…they can’t communicate in any meaningful way because he doesn’t speak Welsh. The ultimate and final rejection.
Griffiths is like a Welsh John Burnside, he has that same poetic quality, fascination with the wounded outsiders of society, macabre twists and superbly written plots.
Griffiths though, makes the landscape itself come alive, the trees, hills, valleys, slate, stone and sea, the birds, foxes, fish and fowl are the pan-psychic manifestations and pawns of his dark God as much as the people are.
Its an obvious comparison, but I think there are more than shadows of Dylan Thomas in Griffiths work too; the organic sinewy language, the landscapes and blind force and elemental mystery of nature.
“Grits’ is a tale of a group of drifters, drunks, junkies, petty criminals and dole bandits who live out there fragile existence, raging against the machine in the seaside town of Aberystwyth (the chaotic attractor that most of Griffiths’ novels are set in or near too). Grits is Shakespearian in its multiple interlacing narratives and colourful characters, who are given there own first person narrative and perspective on a shared event, a conversation, a biography – it’s a beautiful psychological examination of how there really are two sides to every story.
Another clever device Griffiths uses is to have the same characters cropping up in different novels, sometimes as bit players, cameo’s, or subjects of anecdote. He creates a perfectly self-consistent dramatic world.
The Welsh writer often likes to use the phonetic spellings for regional accents and idioms, which can make it hard to read smoothly at first, but you soon get into it. Of course, Irvine Welsh did this too, but that’s about where any similarity begins and ends.
Irvine Welsh, the Poundshop Niall Griffiths. Yeah I like that.
“Stump” is the story of a one-armed, alcoholic Liverpudlian attempting to start a new life in Aberystwyth while living on incapacity benefit and evading a pair of bumbling gangsters. I know, its as funny and bleak as it sounds.
I’ll leave the Griffiths ‘deconstruction’ here with the words of the main character of Stump as he describes the existential torments of the square peg in the landscape of round holes - he’s been told that he’s fit enough to try a call centre job by the DHSS, despite being treated for alcoholism and missing a limb:
“I’ll probably fail the personality test anyway, unless I play daft. Them kinds of places, the interviews and tests and stuff, they’re just designed to work out whether yer dim enough for the job, cos there’s no way a work-force made up of lively imaginations would ever put up with forty hours of low-paid drudgery and tedium every friggin week
Most people, of course, are too bright for such jobs, but they get compelled into accepting them by the dreary demands of daily life, the usual financial imperatives. Which only ever results in one thing; a deep, deep, frustration. Disillusionment goin to impotence goin eventually to a terrible fuckin anger.
Peter Salt, me caseworker in the rehab clinic, on one of the rare occasions when we conversed about something other than meself an me cravings, referred to this mental state as one of ‘cognitive dissonance’, meaning the dislocation we feel with arselves when we begin to behave in ways that drastically contradict ar self-image, such as that necessary alteration of behaviour demanded by certain jobs; in the case of the call centre say, havin to talk politely to a hundred thousand disembodied voices when you’re a naturally shy or at least not particularly garrulous person. Or havin to be polite to rude fuckers when all yer really wanna do is tell them to fuck right off. Yer forced to behave completely out of character, always, an its awkward and unsettling and it jus goes on and on, along with thee unrelieved monotony of the job itself.
Its an awful fuckin state of affairs, an to counteract it, to give yerself some sort of renewed self-respect or empowerment or wharrever, yeh start to behave in petty and puerile ways; yer start stealing things from yer workplace or indulging in gossip, or participating in the persecution of a workmate, all that stuff.
The phrase ‘cognitive dissonance’ is a good one here; it suggests that yer mind doesn’t rhyme, doesn’t chime. Yer mind doesn’t rhyme cos acting in these puerile ways begins to erode the sense you have of yerself as essentially a good an decent person…and so begins an endless cycle of pettiness, triviality. A world of the immature and inconsequential from which the only real escape is to jack in yer job, walk out. Shite on thee entire fuckin thing an go straight to the humiliation of the dole.
Or die.”
Always look on the bright side of life, de dum-de dum-de dum.
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