This month features Nial Griffiths, Sheepshagger, Vintage, ISBN 0099285185, £6.99 |
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Pure hawk, pure skyborne being, the completeness of its aloft existence matched only in the world over by the focus of its hunt, the concentration of its search in the sliding drizzle knitted when scaled it leapt from branch to branch and ran bipedal over a volcanic beach to bird and bird only, raptor entire. Nothing of anything other than pure hawk in its still high scour, its frozen flight. Hanging so still above the damp landscape as if on wires heaven-rooted, it is paradigm of hunt and harry, paragon of patience and plummet and rend and survive.
Daft little fucker, aye. Should know yer’s better predators than im round yer, shouldn’t he?
Bathos and pathos don’t usually work as cause and effect, but Niall Griffith’s Sheepshagger is all about descents, plummets, falls – from the sublime to the ridiculous, from stoned to sober, from Eden to Earth, from childhood to something else; and all the descents are part of a painstakingly constructed argument, an argument about one character: Ianto.
The argument is the one usually referred to as ‘Nature vs Nurture’. And Ianto is, as one character calls him, ‘The world’s best inbred backwoods feeb psycho mong’. He is also, clearly, in Niall Griffith’s eyes, an emanation of the wild Welsh landscape which fathered and fostered him.
Three narrative strands make up the novel: dialogue discussions between Ianto’s four best surviving friends, Griff, Marc, Danny and Llyr; italicized descriptions of childhood which begin ‘IANTO IS FIVE’ and count upwards through his growing years until ‘IANTO IS TEN-AND-A-HALF’; present tense prose depictions of Ianto’s escalating acts of violence.
All three strands push the Nature-Nurture argument forwards – most explicitly in the discussions, in which the friends try to work out what happened, why it happened, and what part their actions and inactions played in it.
‘I mean Ianto wasn’t born a killer. He didn’t come out of a-womb with-a urge to kill people he didn’t even know. I mean somethin must’ve happened to turn im that way, mustn’t it. An that somethin could’ve really happened to any fuckin one of us.’
(Incidentally, Griffiths is one of the best writers of dialogue you could hope to come across.)
Ianto is an epic character, more than himself, more than he could possibly know he is. He strides gangly and snivelling out of the book’s mud-mad, rock-infested, windfucked landscape like a Welsh Swamp Thing; he has suffered all the injuries and humiliations of his nation, and he has within him its deep but sudden violence of response.
I once saw a question on an English Literature exam paper which read: ‘Gerald Manley Hopkins makes of language a muscle-bound monstrosity. Discuss.’
In bringing Ianto to life, Griffiths’ language is like Hopkins’ (the description I quoted at the start could be put in parallel to Hopkins’ most famous poem, ‘The Windhover’). It also has a great deal in common with other poets, particularly those whose subjects are capitalized Childhood and Nature – William Wordsworth, Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney. Back beyond these, too, is the King James Bible, its striding rhythm, its onward pulse.
It wouldn’t be exaggerating to say that Griffiths is one of the most rhetorical writers of the last fifty years. The last time prose of such density and mythic ambition (this side of the Atlantic) was widely fashionable in literary fiction was the 1940s and 50s: William Golding, Mervyn Peake, Lawrence Durrell. Nowadays, Griffiths would have more in common with a writer seen as doing genre fiction, ‘Fantasy’, like China Mièville. All of which makes Griffith’s a very odd, brilliant, out-of-time and original writer; it also serves to make a lot of contemporary writing seem, in comparison, pallid, bloodless, dead.
Through Ianto, Griffiths constructs a powerful vision of Wales, half lank despair: ‘Tellin yew, it’s a pitiful little nation this. A fuckin boil in-a ocean. I mean, the Irish kill each other, the Scots kill emselves, an us, well, all we do is kill time while we wait for someone else to come along an do somethin for us.’ And half deranged triumph: ‘He raises himself up on his knees his arms outstretched his head bent back to the darkening sky like some sodden supplicant and desperately infatuate with he knows not what he looks up at the first stars swimming in the grey and watery dusk, which a warplane suddenly and without warning splits, and Ianto lets out a noise beneath its roar a howl sprouting out of that pain estranged from blood and bone bouncing off mountain and vast valley basin up starwards, where all Ianto has known or will know, his remarkable deeds, the testimonial of his passing, one footprint of blood like the stop of a pilgrim will be born and reborn over among those far fires emanating no felt heat and very little light which nevertheless can snuff in an eyeblink all fevered dreaming of this soil and all its partnered follies, expanding, contracting, like living lungs along with and under and indeed slave to the fickle benedictions of the foremost frantic star.’
Fuckin end of.
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