Review: The Last Days of Johnny North

There's nought so queer as folk.



In 'Crumbs', one of David Swann's stories from this collection for Elastic Press, a man on a train overhears the chatter of a group of travellers and says: "They shouldn't talk about things they don't know anything about." Swann doesn't. In these 28 tales, he takes us on a journey through a terrain his is not only familiar with, but clearly has an affection for. From the drizzly streets of the North of England, weather that 'makes people morbid', to the closed mills and derelict factories ("That cow Thatcher"), Swann takes in the smells of houses (innards, cooking fat, tinned salmon), the superstitions (The Gabriel Ratchets, The Boggart Hole), the small-town epiphanies, the language ("like talking to a badger.. a medieval badger") and makes the parochial universal. The result: rich and rewarding stories about loss, love and friendships.

The tales oscillate between the countryside and the city: "A man in the town yearns for peace. Up here in the hills, we dream of noise." There are stories that will genuinely break your heart, 'A Harbour in the Hills' for example. That said, there are plenty of them in which Swann crosses the boundary from realism into fantasy, and writes with a biting humour, bucking the 'grim-up-north' cliche and sketching a strange League of Gentlemen brand of small-town life. In 'The Trees on Earth, the Trees in Space' the kids are convinced their neighbours have been possessed by aliens, invasions of the body-snatchers except under the guise of snooker legend Ray Reardon, and invent names for sci-fi films not yet made. In 'Voodoo Address Book' a man gradually shrinks after being erased from an address book, then almost disappears. Even some of the titles are familiar and will raise a chuckle; 'In the Country of Daft Pink Things', a nod to Paul Auster and 'The Only Fruit' to Jeanette Winterson (Swann is from the same 'weird arse town' and lived on the same street as her).

Despite Swann's keen sense of a dark humour, there's no shirking from the bigger issues. Racism is tackled head-on in 'The Maker's Name' , which sees twelve year-old Saleem lovingly nurture his cricket bat, only to have it taken off him and chucked in a pond on his sporting debut by a gang of local thugs. His sense of belonging and his dreams of scoring a century are punctured, his brother's hopes of the bat returning like in the story of King Arthur vanquished: "Remember that day when they came out of the long grass - those boys who beat us up and threw away our gear? King Arthur is their story. Their story, not ours, Mohammed."

Swann trades the sounds, streets and smells of The North for different territory entirely in 'The Privilege of Rain', a non-fiction piece recounting time spent as a writer-in-residence in a prison: "jails are factories of fantasy, where the lathes spark with anecdotes, jokes, tall stories, lies, denials. Prisons are a good place to send a writer. But nobody except the writer wants to be there." If the world doesn't see the prisoner as a bad man, it cannot function. Swann, rather than being judgemental, asks no questions, but instead shows with a keen and humane eye how life carries on, how the things you take for granted, the little things like the drizzle back home, should never be unappreciated:

"Once, near Christmas, I escorted a prisoner between wings.

"It's years," he said, studying the stars, "since I was outside in night air."

Another time, a prisoner laughed at my umbrella. "Don't you know how lucky you are?" he asked.

He told me about the time it rained, when they tried to pull him in from the yard: "Screws to the left and right, tugging and pulling. But it was the first rain in a long time. Summer rain. The rain that smells of streets. So I stood my ground. I opened my mouth and tipped back my head. The raindrops tasted of soot and earth. I wanted to be wet. It was a long time since I'd had that."

As one in-mate says to Swann, "Fiction? Fiction's a lie. Have you come to teach us how to lie?" As lies go, these are impressive, and one of my favourite stories in this collection, the pitch-perfect, 50-word 'The Scar', a triumph.

[ST]

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The Last Days of Johnny North by David Swann
Elastic Press
290 Pages