A man whimpers like a dog as he orgasms watching two men have sex with his wife. A woman’s pubic hair is so matted that it cuts up her shit like chips. A character’s accent is written out painstakingly phonetically. We can only be in one place. A Niall Griffiths novel.
Except we could be in many more. Such has been Griffiths’s totemic influence on Welsh literature in English since his literary debut over twenty years ago that many aspects of this distinctive style have been transmuted into an aesthetic pervasive across much contemporary Welsh fiction. (Further, indeed, thinking of the vogue for Celtic noir crime dramas on S4C.)
His latest novel, Broken Ghost, revolves around the sighting of a spectral figure in the night by three individuals, variously intoxicated and high, and then follows their activities in and around Aberystwyth and elsewhere as the effect of this epiphany continues to bear upon their lives and views. Meanwhile, in post-Brexit referendum Britain, the story of the spectre goes viral and becomes a flashpoint for political and social tensions.
Except nothing changes for Emma, Adam and Cowley – not really. They carry on navigating a generic post-industrial neoliberal Wales of housing association flats, cancelled buses and neglected public infrastructure, slurping pints, snorting snot and swearing at each other.
One conclusion to draw from this is that the symbolic, metaphysical and transcendental experiences of our lives – be they personal or political – rarely change the material conditions under which we live and that in many ways we retain little serious control over the course and meaning of our lives whilst our governments neglect us. Certainly Griffiths’ novel seems to be ruminating, through its characters, on this point. What, it is therefore natural to ask, can a novel do, having made this reasonable diagnosis? My answer would be that it can advocate, it can reveal alternate political realities, and it can search for the emergent, guttering moments of hope that puncture our lives. And this is where Broken Ghost falls down.
The failure of the spectre in the night to act as a transcendental signifier – a symbol to bring meaning and cohere a fractured society – speaks to the wider failure in Griffiths’ novel of understanding where real hope is situated. It is not in the personal epiphany translated to the natural or political (the doomed anti-Brexit rave/protest/happening that the viral story of the spectre inspires) but in those things that are closer, more interpersonal and local. In the community that the world of Griffiths’ novel so lacks. Characters here exist in constellations but none cohere enough to demonstrate anything like community.
But it is pointless to deny the continuing survival and importance of community structures even as the industries around which they formed fade into memory. Instead, in the absence of any acknowledgement of these structures, the writer’s characterisation falls into an invocation of social positions and references to current affairs that at times can feel a little lazy, like in the instance of the ‘pro-EU/anti-austerity rally in the town’ (two political positions that are by no means easy bedfellows) where a woman ‘was standing next to a trolley full of cans for the food bank’.
Some characters tend to speak like imaginary working-class people monologuing over a pint (indeed, this is where a disproportionate number of conversations in the novel take place). It is unclear whether the specificities of accent and dialect with which Griffiths imbues their voices are there to produce a sense of affinity or, as will be the case for many readers (particularly those outside of Wales), a spectacle of difference. It’s not inherently liberatory to have every facet of your accent and dialect noted down pseudo-phonetically for the world’s readers to revel in its strangeness.
This remains a problem throughout the novel. The seasick transitions from dialect to balanced, poetic narration later on reads much more like free indirect discourse and feels therefore much more like ventriloquy than handing the microphone to an unheard people. Get him to complain that ‘it’s privatisation. This is what happens. Fuckin Brexit n all’ whilst you observe ‘through the grey-streaked windows, the ruckles at the fringes of the central plain’. It is one way to represent class position, but it seems an impoverished way of trying to project any richness of interiority of the people and lives you wish to describe – of the hopes, fears and dreams with which we all live.
The central thesis Griffiths aims to demonstrate is certainly true: the post-industrial malaise and the post-Brexit malaise are one and the same. This is one long crisis of community and of the soul. But that doesn’t describe the totality of human experience – and this is as much a literary flaw as a political one. Griffiths is, whether it is a style one likes or not, a master of tone, deployment and timing and the novel reflects this. But the characters, whilst unerringly accurate as characters – that is, as types – lack the depth that the blend of hope and despair we all feel, and their complex interplay, brings.
Societies, arguably, are like the magical figure in the sky upon which the novel fixates. You see what you want to see. There are many different lenses through which a writer living in Wales can choose to see this country, and it is their choice which they deploy as the dominant mode of their fiction. There are limitations to every perspective but there are responsibilities too in choosing how to render the lives of ordinary people and how to give them voice. In the instance of Broken Ghost, it falls wide of the mark. In the face of difficult times, intractable suffering and remorseless, reckless political leadership, all with a voice and a platform are faced with a choice of whether to narrate and hold their hands up in defeat to this context, or to work within it, against it, to tease out narratives that might give us the building blocks – the resources, as Raymond Williams called them – for hope. ‘Take away the heroin and the hard-ons return after a while,’ narrates a Job Centre clerk. Take away the bravado and sincerity returns – after a while.
● Merlin Gable is Culture Editor of the welsh agenda.
PULL QUOTES
The post-industrial malaise and the post-Brexit malaise are one and the same. This is one long crisis of community and of the soul
There are limitations to every perspective but there are responsibilities too in choosing how to render the lives of ordinary people and how to give them voice