Black Country by Joel Lane (Nightjar Press).

A Sort Of Review: Joel Lane’s ‘Black Country.’

 (The aim of this short ‘sort of review’ is simply to expand on a few thoughts I had on reading the following publication. There will be no spoilers divulging important plot details.)

The Book/The Author (chapbook from Nightjar Press):

Black Country yet again shows why Joel Lane is still one of the most respected, admired and  important writers working in and out of the genre today.

The Plot:

A police officer with an interest in strange cases returns to his home town to investigate a series of juvenile related crimes. Perhaps the local children are behind a spate of break-ins, but identifying the culprits proves more difficult than at first thought.

The Background:

The town is a dying industrialized relic, literally forgotten after becoming absorbed into the boundaries of neighboring regions. It’s demise, already precipitated in memory by the investigating officer, is further echoed in the few, unhappy memories he has of his parents, and the subsequent emotional fall-out. This is not a happy homecoming.

Thoughts:

Lane shows how the oft-used minefield of the literary ‘homecoming’ can be artfully rechanneled into new and surprisingly fresh directions, often wrong footing the reading while delighting them at the same time. 

The story has an honest melancholy about it, rising above the bittersweet irony one might expect. There is something far more penetrating at work in the story, coming impossibly close to realizing how people genuinely perceive their past.

(The cover of the chapbook aptly details a map with pieces missing).

The reader is never forced into the disingenuous territory of over-dramatizing the nostalgia or the hurt, but focuses with intense scrutiny on the things which connect us to the past. Perhaps people of a certain generation might identify more readily with the ‘objects’ and miscellaneous symbols of Black Country,’ but the dark magic simmering in the prose of this beautifully described narrative, surely resonates with anybody over a certain age – that age being one when we are able to reflect with perhaps cooler yet infinitely more honest appraisals of who we once were.

Joel Lane has long been one of my literary heroes. That he has remained one of the genre’s truest pioneers, a deeply intelligent writer, highly principled and highly articulate of everything going on in our world, is always reflected beautifully, honestly and believably in his work.   

Black Country, a story in which memory and the heart might prove to be the same thing, in which capturing youth and childhood and holding them up to the disintegrating light of analysis prove to be their undoing.

A sort of review. No spoilers intended.

What I Thought: Antwerp by Nicholas Royle.

In Nicholas Royle’s gloriously dark, and stylishly unpredictable ‘Antwerp,’ the world of film-making is once again brought to life with Royle’s unnerving eye for authentic detail. This time we delve into the low-budget film-making of an American auteur working in Antwerp, Belgium. As with the Director’s Cut, Royle expertly juggles the story’s narrative from the viewpoint of several, remarkably believable characters, all of whom by-pass the role of supportive props.

This novel is a delicious labyrinth of plotting and mesmerizing intensity, in which real life characters mix with fictional ones. In ‘The Director’s Cut’ the abandoned cinemas and derelict buildings of London played a significant role in themselves, those crumbling edifices ‘perhaps’ reflecting the interior worlds of the characters who stumbled through them unaware. In Antwerp, where governmental law prohibits and protects the demolition of buildings much to the delight of online enthusiasts exploring their decaying architecture, the buildings can again be said to be architectural mirrors in which the questionable sanity of the protagonist(s) vacillate ominously in directions not yet clear to us.

Antwerp is an unofficial sequel of sorts to The Director’s Cut in which we have four characters from the first novel taking centre stage. But Antwerp, while dealing with the subject of cinema - scrutinizing its effects, its history, its meaning for those who are compelled to make it, and ultimately, those who are drawn into its world – while initially moving along lines perhaps similar to the first novel, eventually makes a sudden and jarring detour through a landscape of intensely claustrophobic dereliction, in which layers of meaning are peeled away to reveal more than was previously suspected.

The book snakes its way through a minefield of complex and daring ideas. Obsession, the effects of abuse, personalities within personalities, the enduring role of art, perspective, and national identity, all of which take place in Antwerp as a series of brutal and unexplained murders plague the city.   

The elegance of Royle’s prose superbly articulates the pace of the story, conjuring up a world of half-light, of cinematic shadow, from which a contemporary noir modernity hangs threateningly above the characters.

As a small side note: Antwerp uses one of the characters from The Director’s Cut to re-examine past actions not given full scope in the first book. If this sounds a little mystifying, somewhat vague, it’s because I’m afraid the slightest clue might reveal important plot developments.  But, personally, I was delighted that such odd actions as demonstrated at the start of The Director’s Cut, were now fully explored to such startling and disturbing effect in Antwerp.

Nicholas Royle’s Antwerp is every inch the achievement that The Director’s Cut is. I would even go so far as to say that its ending is possibly one of the most demonstrative examples in which  readers’ expectation are well and truly confounded.    

I would recommend this book for just about anybody. It’s one of the few novels I’ve read in recent years that defies genre expectation, occupying its own literary, and commercial genre. A wonderfully, thought provoking novel by one of  most original and talented writers out there.   

The Director's Cut by Nicholas Royle

A Sort of Review of Nicholas Royle’s ‘The Director’s Cut.’

(The aim of this review is not to divulge major plot points or to even give a comprehensive overview of the novel, but is an attempt to try to communicate some of the feelings and thoughts I had on reading the novel).

(1) Cinema, perspective, plot.

Nicholas Royle’s ‘The Director’s Cut’ is seemingly rooted in the familiar traditions of the thriller novel with cinema as its most prominent and eye-catching backdrop. The story unfolds within a framework of interconnecting viewpoints, a series of subtle, multiple narratives.

Four film students make an experimental film of a man committing suicide. This terrible event transforms the apparent conventions of the novel into one in which psychologically much is left to the reader to decide, regardless of how much emotional and interior story we are supposedly given. Years later the police find the body of the suicide, and the much older protagonists are now forced to confront more than just their guilt.

Part of the delight of this novel is how Royle refuses to centralize his narrative with one character. It’s a risky technique, yet Royle does what very few other writers can, relating the story within the relative physical narrowness of just three hundred pages.

(2) Location

London and train stations (derelict or operative), not to mention the ordinary streets of flats and shops and pubs that make up the teeming metropolis, become a topography of reference points to cinema, imagined or real. But this is London as lived in, one in which its  movements are felt like tides of gradually accelerating fatality, the plot entwined about the bland objects and relics of London now, and London ‘then.’

Old abandoned cinemas, train stations, depots, derelict buildings, attain a sense of architectural importance to the story that changes their day to day significance into something far more mysterious. There are layers to these buildings as there are to the story, which doesn’t just stop with the physical aspects of mortar or brickwork or even their demolition.

Royle has taken London at its most recognizable and injected it with a skewed perspective. It’s London, but perhaps not the one we wish to admit to.

(3) Characters

Paradoxically Royle creates four protagonists who are understandable in their motivations, actions, and lack of actions, and despite their flaws, or perhaps because of them, generates contradictory feelings towards them.

Most importantly it’s being able to recognize these so called opposing forces of emotional disparate qualities which gives the characters the impetus to do what they do, and to allow us to believe that ‘real people in the real world’ would also develop and evolve towards such questionable, yet almost inevitable conclusions.

 (4) The Novel

The Director’s Cut is a thriller, but not one in which traditionalism of genre is allowed to play out the way commercial Hollywood might envision. It succeeds in bending and deviating expected routes of plot for a heavier sense of character, undoing them and somehow resolving them along the way. The old adage that nothing is what it seems, is doubly enforced here, but not at the expense of the importance of the story. 

The Director’s Cut was first published in 2000. I read it this year. I expect people will still be reading it many more years to come.

                                                                              ***

Upcoming ‘sort of reviews’:

Next week I will be reviewing Antwerp, an unofficial sequel of sorts to The Director’s Cut. There will also be a short mini-interview with Nicholas Royle about the novels.

I’ll also be talking about Joel Lane’s marvelous chapbook ‘Black Country.’

The week after I will be doing an overview of two of the best crime writers out there, Paul D Brazill and Julia Madeleine.

Thanks for reading.

Mountains Of Smoke Reviewed by Paul D Brazill

Mountains Of Smoke reviewed by 'the noir Bukowski' Paul D Brazill

Mountains Of Smoke by Frank Duffy

Mountains Of Smoke by Frank Duffy. Published by Sideshow Press.

Frank Duffy Showcase by Steve Jensen

Writer Steve Jensen's Frank Duffy Showcase

Julia Madeleine reviews The Signal Block

Noir writer Julia Madeleine reviews The Signal Block & Other Stories