February 2021: Geography

Books read this month: Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay (Jeff Young, Little Toller Books, 2020); should we fall behind (Sharon Duggal, Bluemoose, 2020).

I’ve walked a lot during the various lockdowns. When 2020 stopped being what we thought it was going to be, I started going for a walk around Liverpool. It was similar to a reaction to grief: you’re mourning what you thought life was going to be, so you’re forced to do something else while you’re preoccupied. I’ve walked from Penny Lane to Bramley Moore, Wavertree Garden Suburb to Woolton Village, Calderstones to Cressington, Greenbank to Otterspool, Smithdown to Sefton, Old Swan to Liverpool 8, England to Everton and back again. Always back again.

Jeff Young has been there and back to see how far it is a thousand times. A writer, broadcaster and senior lecturer at LJMU, his writing reflects from the mountain so all souls can feel it. ‘Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay’ is profusely preoccupied with all kinds: grief, nostalgia, beauty, anger, regret, architecture, books, Liverpool City Council and walking. That’s quite the list for a first book, but Young’s prose is perpetual motion personified and the threads of this sinking summation are tied together by memory. Whose memory isn’t important, as ‘Ghost Town’ pulls off the masterful trick of being about your life at the same time as being a deeply personal memoir. And it is a memoir… sure; there’s ghost stories, Franz Kafka, Jayne Casey and Alex Young have walk-on parts and the haunted lullabies of Elsie Barmaid (Evertonians of a certain vintage will recognise her from The Winslow on Goodison Road in Liverpool) take a starring role, but these tales - tall, imagined or otherwise - are as real as the Lidl on Lime Street much lamented by the author. The truth? That’s trickier. This is Jeff Young’s truth and he’s telling it for his sister, Val. His grandparents. The displaced and desperate souls that haunt Everton Brow. The whore who helped out Thomas De Quincey. The long lost fathers and families who inspired James Hanley’s 1935 novel ‘The Furys’. He’s telling it for posterity. All flags turn to rags over time and nothing is forever, but when stories venture through your slipstream and the wine of internal lives alter the colour of your thoughts, feelings last longer than facts.

‘Ghost Town’ will leave you with a sense of something and you don’t have to be from Liverpool to feel it. It’ll help, of course, but this is a riveting read relying on a reader’s ability to project and reject at the same time whilst reading with eyes wide shut. It’s an affecting book and I haven’t had a walk since without carrying Young’s vexed vernacular around in my mind’s eye. The chapter about ‘Kes’ rises up when spotting ragamuffins kicking a football in Kirkdale, anxieties appear when a gang of lads loitering around a car look up and remind me of the author’s awesome tale of the angry and alcoholic bully at his first place of work and peering into reflections on a canal places pictures of new town greenspace fading to brown just like the will of the cast-aside communities who tread it in the pages of this book.

“Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don’t there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little. That is to say, you must think of them for a while, a good while, every day several times a day, until they sink forever in the mud.” Samuel Beckett wrote that. “Where did you go? And why are you not here?” Jeff Young wrote that.

Walking, memories and the happenstance of geography play a big part in the fiction I’ve read this month, too. Fiction brings out the snob in me: it has to be from the very top table. Art, by its very application, is obviously subjective, but I tell myself I only have time for stories that stand-out. Daft, really, as I must have read one hundred books besotted with where the bass amp is at a Bob Dylan recording session, but there you go. ‘should we fall behind’ (the lower case is vital) tells its deft story walking around an unnamed town in the south of England - it was Hackney in my subconscious - and traces its arc with regret. An elegy in many ways, the characters who inhabit this in-but-somehow-not-of the present novel are wonderfully woven together by author Sharon Duggal (‘The Handsworth Revolution’, 2016). With chapters burning as bright as shooting stars, the book’s pace is brisk and titling said chapters with the name of the person highlighted is inspired. There’s a lot to take in, but the writing is a masterful lesson in economy, precision and Duggal tells tight tales. The stories of Jimmy Noone, Shifnal Road, Rayya and Satish and little Tuli soon become part of your day and walking in their second-hand clothes becomes second nature.

‘should we fall behind’ is about people who exist in the blind eye of society’s plain sight and family, friendships, fears and those heavy people who can help us to, or stop us from, falling through the normal net are all present and correctly represented. Reading stories of such wonderfully realised characters in such short and sharp shocks as presented here left me breathless every day, as the narrative left a sinking feeling of what could come next. Glimpses of hope are few and far between, but the book paints bleak houses in primary colours (“Jimmy Noone drifted, alone in a cold subway, falling away with the day as it faded to shadow. He dreamt of balloons: sky-blue, bought by his father to mark his third birthday.”) and never fails in tempting you to stay awake late at night for one more chapter. There’s an older couple, a younger couple, a single mum and her daughter, a homeless lad, a grieving widower and the ghosts they all carry with them revolving around a couple of houses, terraced streets, a furniture shop and an abandoned car. We reminisce in Greece, Tilak Nagar and up here in the north of England, while watching the wheels of those who have splash the cheap and faded cloth of those who haven’t. Redemption? It depends how you define it. The book doesn’t start all over again at its end, but it starts a walk back home.

It's always back home again, isn't it? Have a great month and let me know what you’re reading. And… authors! Publishers! Agents! Get in touch… Al x