by A. R Darland
It’s a tale as simple as its title. Two men meet somewhere in the region of Merthyr Tydfil, they work in an independent DIY shop together, and share a single room upstairs. They love each other for a bit, they fall out for a bit, they patch stuff up. As an elevator pitch I wonder how Shapland managed it. But oh sweet God of syntax, it comes alive in the telling:
“Sooner shoot their sons than father men like that, meting out disgrace in everlasting fire. Sinners, sodomites, unnatural and debased. Papers shout of abominations, a disease, a cancer, a terror, a time bomb, a plague, of men like that swirling in the cesspit of their own making.”
Our protagonists’ names are M and B. Just that. It’s a thoughtful touch, the sense that secrecy and erasure run so deep they linger to this day, that these identities still need protecting. Most of the activity takes place within the confines of the shop or the room above it, a constriction which suffocates, as the hostility of the outside society forces M and B to act like mere acquaintances in moments of high emotion. The novella works hard to bring this to the fore, the psychic disjunction of maintaining two separate lives in tandem. Much of the action is left unsaid, a decision which helps to juxtapose the intimacy of the upstairs room with the cool detachment the coworkers display in the public.
Early versions of certain chapters have appeared in anthologies as short stories, and this self-contained quality still runs through the work, with chapters finding their own thematic focus whilst subtly nudging the action along, as if by accident. Whole paragraphs read like prose poems; condensed, concise, an awareness of minutiae and the linguistic facility to render it lyrical:
“Scent is intense, almost visible. It wraps, tugs, makes them aware of the grit and slick of the world, the salt of a lick and the sweat and spill of pleasure.”
Days pass by in such sentences, and it’s through this melding of action into a montage of sensations that the novella’s poetry shines.
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