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English novel leaves pedestrian behind True Brit
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Published: March 30, 2008
SATURDAY'S CHILD. By Ray Banks. Harcourt. 320 pages. $25.
American fiction is a fortress. It's tall. It's square. And it's massive. It has a style, a rhythm and a sense of proportion unlike any other fiction in the world. American audiences drive this market; publishers and movie producers take pains to predict what will turn the tidy profit. As a result, we consume a fiction diet that is second to none in the world. But we also end up with a fairly predictable menu; meat and potatoes, with maybe a bit of salad on the side. We Americans demand a tidy, predictable format. The beginning is only so long. The middle must have certain elements. And the final scenes tie up all loose ends and typically finish with the villains vanquished and the good guys victorious. Politically correct. Aseptic . And true to form. So what happens when an author from across the pond makes such a splash that the American market wants a piece of the action? Toss your meat and potatoes to the dog, and set your table for some fresh black pudding, you're going to a side of England you may not know exists.
About Saturday's Child, what can I say? Raw, edgy, vulgar, addictive, and for this itinerant Yank, a superb and infectious break from status-quo noir. Ray Banks, an up-and-coming Scottish author, has hit a nerve with this, his second novel, a total-immersion injection into the seedy side of northern England, where his protagonist, Cal Innes, volleys the narrative with hooligan Mo Tiernan. Which one is the good guy? Neither, but if you had to choose, Mo would be your choice for the lower, meaner of these two scumbags. OK, Cal really isn't all that bad most of the time, but I had to describe him darkly to be true to his character and to be true to the tone of the tome.
Banks' writing has a momentum all its own, and based upon what I see in his novel and on his Web site, I am confident that he would not hesitate to describe Cal the same way Mo does. But I must forgo quoting Mo for the simple reason that once my editor here at the Journal is finished deleting every expletive and profanity, we'll be left with a set of quotation marks containing nothing more than, "Cal is a ... " -- which is to say there is no love lost between Cal and Mo. Case in point: Since Mo's underworld-kingpin father has chosen Cal for a task that Mo believes falls within his skill set, Mo would like nothing more than to see Cal beaten to a pulp and dumped in a ditch. Lucky for Cal, Mo is about as adept with his supposed skill set as he is deluded about his efficacy as a gangster.
True to hardboiled detective noir, Banks uses ample dialect in Saturday's Child, sometimes leaving us Yanks to deduce the gist of things from context -- but rather than detracting by proving difficult to decipher, as is so often the case in British cinema, it spices the experience with flavor, since, as readers, we're free to ponder the colloquialisms and not continue till we're satisfied we've captured the meaning. Which brings us back to the contrast between American fiction and the rest; political correctness aside, Banks does not hesitate to call a poof a poof, and a daft cow is so much more than a batty bovine.
Amid the pills, the pot, the beer and the liquor, we are voyeurs through the English countryside as Cal sets out to find a card dealer who, as it happens, is "a scally wanker who's done a runner with ten grand of casino cash from a proper dive, but nowt will grass up the gadgie, not even in the bog." And as is so often the case in a good book, things are never as they seem. Cal's investigation turns up the fact that money is not all the dealer has made off with, and since Mo has a personal stake in making sure that not-so-little detail remains hidden from his father, we're dealt an added motive for Mo's delirious dash to put an end to Cal's efforts.
So if you're intrigued enough to buy the book, I fancy you'll turn off the telly and I'll stop me gum flappage so you can learn some real English from the motherland. Open the book, pour yourself a stiff one or grab a cuppa, sup up, and prepare to read sommat gob-smacking, nowt like you're accustomed to in America.
■ Steven Beach is a writer who lives in Lawsonville.
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