booklit

There is a sense of history from the opening pages of Kressmann Taylor’s Address Unknown (1938), mixing the echoes of the Great War, still vivid in its characters’ memories (”Fourteen years since the war! Did you mark the date? What a long way we have traveled, as peoples, from that bitterness!”), with their deeper personal connection. Told in letters between Jewish American, Eisenstein, and his business partner, the German Schulse, this (very) short novel spans fifteen months in the early 1930s during the Nazi machine’s rise to power.

In the first few exchanges the friends are genial, talking shop, Germany (”the breadth of intellectual freedom, the discussions, the music, the light-hearted comradeship”), and mentioning Griselle, Eistenstein’s headstrong sister and former fling of Schulse, who is traveling Europe as an actress. Liberal politics abound, then darkness descends as Eisenstein asks  (”Who is this Adolf Hitler who seems rising toward power in Germany?”)

What is initially frightening about Address Unknown is how Schulse, privileged in Germany following his economic success in America (”we employ now ten servants for the same wages of our two in the San Francisco home”) makes the rapid volte-face from declaring Hindenburg “a fine liberal whom I much admire” to a scathing attack on liberalism:

A liberal is a man who does not believe in doing anything. He is a talker about the rights of man, but just a talker. He likes to make a big noise about freedom of speech, and what is freedom of speech? Just the chance to sit firmly on the backside and say that whatever is being done by the active men is wrong. What is so futile as the liberal? I know him well because I have been one. He condemns the passive government because it makes no change. But let a powerful man arise, let an active man start to make a change, then where is your liberal? He is against it. To the liberal any change is the wrong one.

The powerful man that arises needs no introduction, and it’s not so much Hitler who features in the novel but the poison that his Fascist tenets instills in a man’s mind. From an early observational capacity Schulse describes him (”the man is like an electric shock, strong as only a great orator and a zealot can be”) but it’s soon obvious that any impartiality is slain by the sword of oratory:

As for the sterm measures that so distress you, I myself did not like them at first, but I have come to see their painful necessity. The Jewish race is a sore spot to any nation that harbors it. I have never hated the individual Jew — yourself I have always cherished as a friend, but you will know that I speak in all honesty when I say I have loved you, not because of your race but in spite of it.

Although the change in relations between the two men seems rapid, with the letters following each other as the pagination insists, its the long gaps between these in the story’s time, often months, that add to the book’s power. We are left to wonder what has been happening in these unwritten periods. How has Schulse allowed himself to secede and convince himself of the efficacy of Hitler’s regime? Have Eisenstein’s nights been sleepless as he anticipates the next reply? And what of their common bond, Griselle, travelling between Vienna and Berlin, especially when her brother notes about the letter he has sent her?

…it has been returned to me, the envelope unopened, marked only address unknown, (Adressant Unbekannt). What a darkness those words carry! How can she be unknown? It is surely a message she has come to harm.

Into its minimal pages Address Unknown packs an incredible wealth of content, describing through one man Germany’s “hysteria of deliverance” under the auspices of a doer —

The whole tide of a people’s life changes in a minute because the man of action has come. And I join him. […] I am a man because I act. Before that I am just a voice. I do not question the ends of our action. It is not necessary. I know it is good because it is so vital. Men are not drawn into bad things with so much joy and eagerness.

— and showing how words are just as much a weapon as armaments, perhaps even more so with their power to control people that will readily renounce who they truly are to follow a crazed destiny they would otherwise never consider. When Schulse talks of German destiny —

If I could show you, if I could make you see — the rebirth of this new Germany under our Gentle Leader! Not for always can the world grind a great people down in subjugation. In defeat for fourteen years we bowed our heads. We ate the bitter bread of shame and drank the thin gruel of poverty. But now we are free men. We rise in our might and hold our heads up before the nations. We purge our bloodstream of its baser elements. We go singing through our valleys with strong muscles tingling for a new work — and from the mountains ring the voices of Wodan and Thor, the old, strong gods of the German race.

— the words of the Nazi doctrine are evident, for this is a man who has lived comfortably in the United States, and never suffered the hardship of post-war Germany.

If the compact nature of Address Unknown is powerful itself for Schulse’s journey, Taylor strengthens it further by working the idea of words’ power to a wonderful twist that plays on the paranoid, censorious nature of the regime it successfully lambasts. Taylor could not have known what horrors were yet to come from Nazi aggression, but in this tale she rallies against its rise, and the results, when they arrive, are both satisfying, abrupt, and apt.

It’s called Scotland’s shame, the sectarianism that has attached itself to Scottish society and festers therein. The absorption of Ireland’s exiles in the nineteenth century saw Catholicism take steps into the country, much to the chagrin of the Protestant ‘indigènes’, and the rest, as they say, is history. Although it’s not history per se as the divide created then is still very much alive today, most prominently masquerading around within the national sport: football.

Des Dillon’s play, Singin I’m No A Billy He’s A Tim (2005) tackles sectarianism head on. Since its initial performance at the Edinburgh Festival, the play has gone on to tour both Scotland and Northern Ireland, and it was even used by the then Scottish Executive to tackle the issue of bigotry at school level. By turning the spotlight on two football fans — Tim and Billy, immediately defined by their heavy brush stroke of a name –  supporting a team on either side of the divide, Dillon creates a dialogue that explores sectarianism.

Tim, in the green and white, is a Glasgow Celtic fan., and therefore of Catholic stock. It’s not long before Billy is calling him on singing a song about the Irish revolutionary Michael Collins:

Billy: I wish you lot would shut up wi that shite.

Tim: It’s my heritage.

Billy: Yer heritage!

Tim: There’s nothin wrong wi rememberin yer heritage.

Billy: I bet ye’ve never even been in Ireland. (Beat as Tim squirms) Have ye?

Tim: I’m not tellin you where I’ve been an where I’ve not.

A beat, then:

Billy: Ye’ve never been have ye? (Tim ignores him) Answer me then.

Tim: So! What if I haven’t?

Billy: Yees’re aw the same — rattlin oan aboot a place ye’ve never been. If I had my way I’d send yees aw back to fuckin tattie land.

In the dialogue between the two, there’s underlying irony to be had with Billy (”Ma heritage goes straight as a die to Ulster.”), a Glasgow Rangers fan, and therefore Protestant. Situations in real life are, of course, more complicated, but Billy and Tim prove adequate mouthpieces through which the fallacies and the hatred that lie at the heart of the problem can be aired. History, politics, religion, and institutions are all paid a visit for their role in the sectarianism of today.

The scene is a Glasgow jail, on match day. Not just any match day, but the clash of the Old Firm: Rangers and Celtic. Both Billy and Tim, however, have landed themselves in the cells. In such a confined space, there’s little more they can do than talk and take broad swipes at each other, unleashing the vitriol as it comes pouring out, and each eager to take the upper hand. While they are able to trot out all the cliches, the moronic arguments that have seen nothing but a stalemate lasting decades, their own ignorance and naivete in getting caught up in the cycle of bigotry reveals itself, from songs sung in the name of sport –

Billy: Hello — Hello — we are the Billy boys, Hello — Hello — you’ll know us by our noise, We’re up to our knees in Fenion blood…

– through outright insulting –

 Tim: …into these (rhythm of the old Coke advert) Orange-Mason-hand-shakin-Ulster-lovin-finger-ticklin-Tim-hatin-goat-buckin-Proddy-fuckin-bastards.

As the invective becomes exhausted, it seems the only way forward is for reconciliation, and in an ideal world this is what would happen. Dillon’s play explores this ideal world, becoming one along the way, as the notions of how to solve the problems of sectarianism manifests itself within the two players. In truth it happens all too easily, but the characters do come to it via logical means.

Although the skin of the play wraps around bigotry in Scotland, the bones are far more generic, for sectarianism is an issue that affects far flung areas of the world, like the tit-for-tat between Israel and Palestine or the genocide of the Balkan conflict — all disputes that have no end in sight. Dillon’s play works on the basis that common ground needs to be found between the sparring parties and from there, mutual understanding can be fostered, goalposts set, and favourable results achieved. It’s a simplistic enough idea, and hardly revolutionary, but it works in the context of opening up dialogue on the subject.

Tim: Look — I think everybody’s a bigot. We’ve all got bigotry. Every single person’s got bigotry for somethin.

The closing stage, where a symbolic unification occurs is poignant, for gone are the bilious songs that characterised both men and their upbringing, and in comes one that represents Scotland as a whole, the bigotry driven out.

The merits of the play would be best experienced in a theatre rather than on the page, as, given the subject matter, it’s a narrative that could bring people to the theatre who would never think to otherwise. While it’s laudable that it could be used to dispell myths, quash rumours, and educate people on the sectarian divide, its downside is that the casual banter and reheated arguments, especially to those who have heard them all before, become more of a novelty than a criticism. Sectarianism is Scotland’s ‘elephant in the room’ and more literature should seek to attack it. Singin I’m No A Billy He’s A Tim opens up dialogue, and entertains in doing so.

In 1958 Chinua Achebe published Things Fall Apart, the novel that helped usher in a new wave of African literature. Until that point literature concerning African had been written by European colonials, and was rife with derogatory depictions of African people and their varied cultures. With the contributions of Camara Laye, Amos Tutuola, and Chinua Achebe, amongst others, there came a rebellion of sorts - the African novel, going against “an age-old practice: the colonization of one people’s story by another.”

African literature is the subject of Home And Exile (2001),  a gathering of three lectures Achebe gave to an audience at Harvard University in 1998. Across these he uses his podium to to discuss the effect of colonialism on African letters and the need for balance. Of particular interest are the autobiographical elements peppered throughout, which give insights into Achebe’s early life in Nigeria and the beginnings of his adult life as a writer.

Achebe starts with his own people, the Igbo. He dismisses the notion that, in numbering over ten million, they can be a tribe by dictionary definition. He finds nation fits better, acknowledging that it’s not a perfect fit. In describing the Igbo culture, a culture of stories, he finds room to open up the differences wrought by colonialism, impressing upon the reader a little tale about a meeting of animals where the chicken, instead attending to a personal matter, is voted man’s primary sacrificial animal in his absence. It’s a fitting parallel with the native in colonial African literature whereby a portrait of the continent has been drawn up by outsiders, at least as far back as 1561, when John Lok, writing of his voyage to West Africa, describes Africans as:

…a people of beastly living, without a God, lawe, religion … whose women are common for they contract no matrimonie, neither have respect to chastitie … whose inhabitants dwell in caves and dennes: for these are their houses, and the flesh of serpents their meat as writeth Plinie and Diodorus Siculus. They have no speach, but rather a grinning and chattering. There are also people without heads, having their eyes and mouths in their breasts.

Compound that with centuries of unfair writing and you get to a moment in a Nigerian school when, having read Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson, about a young Nigerian, it strikes as being superficial:

It was a landmark rebellion. Here was a whole class of young Nigerian students, among the brightest of their generation, united in their view of a book of English fiction in complete opposition to their English teacher, who was moreover backed by the authority of metropolitan critical judgment.

In talking of colonial literature, Achebe understands the treatment of African people as a way of justifying colonialism and the slave trade it produced, citing works by the likes of the aforementioned Cary, Joseph Conrad, and, especially, Elspeth Huxley. V.S. Naipaul, for whom much was made of his nastiness in Patrick French’s authorised biography earlier in the year, is also lambasted for his ignorant portrayal of Africa in A Bend In The River.

Although she’s not named, Buchi Emecheta, also gets a notable mention: not for her portrayal of Africa, but for going in the opposite direction. Having moved to London to pursue her writing career, she is quoted on the subject of African fiction and the dilution of her Africanness. (”After reading the first page you tell yourself you are plodding. But when you are reading the same thing written by an English person who lives here you find you are enjoying it because the language is so academic, so perfect.”) This notion of going in the opposite directon echoes an account opening the book of Achebe’s first ride in a car, in which he was seated so as to watch the road behind. It’s something he returns to in the third lecture, given that he, like Emecheta, no longer lives in Nigeria:

People have sometimes asked me if I have thought of writing a novel about America since I have now been living here for some years. My answer has always been “No, I don’t think so.” Actually, living in America for some years is not the only reason for writing a novel on it. Kafka wrote such a novel without leaving Prague. No, my reason is that America has enough novelists writing about her, and Nigeria too few.

Achebe’s focus now, unlike the child looking back, is squarely on the road ahead for Africa and its literature, noting his anxiety over “what remains to be done, in Africa and in the world at large”. From his podium he calls for writers to remain at home and write about it, to post their manuscripts rather than go overseas and risk dilution. Only with the right people contributing their own stories can literature find the necessary balance be made that will lead to a universal civilisation.

On literature he calls for a fair appraisal of writers’ work, comparing Dylan Thomas’ review of Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard to Huxley’s, wherein Thomas praises it for its language, Huxley uses the opportunity to take a broad swipe at African art (”It is possessed by spirits and the spirits are malign.”) Regardless of unfair treatments, Achebe notes that to read them:

…is the strongest vote of confidence we can give our writers and their work - to put them on notice that we will go to their offering for wholesome pleasure and insight, and not a rehash of old stereotypes which gained currency long ago in the slave trade and poisoned, perhaps forever, the wellsprings of our common humanity.

That Achebe covers so much ground in just over a hundred pages shows a highly concentrated approach to African literature. Those seeking a true autobiography will not find it here, given that it only touches on his early years, but what it does provide is an interesting insight into Achebe’s mind, with him pointing out the little details that have made him the influential writer that he is today, home and away.

Linda Grant comes to this year’s Booker longlist following on from her longlisting for this year’s Orange Prize, an accolade she won in 2000 with her second novel, When I Lived In Modern Times. Her third novel, Still Here, flirted with the Booker back in 2002, but never made it to the shortlist. The Clothes On Their Backs (2008), her fourth novel, might yet see her take one step further to the Booker, especially in a year where, judging by the discussions on the Booker site, the field seems average.

Although Grant’s family history is lodged in a distant Russian-Polish background, The Clothes On Their Backs imagines a Jewish Hungarian one.  And the Hungarian connection is here in force, with poet and translator Georges Szirtes appearing three times over: in the dedication, the acknowledgements, and an epigraph. Call it a three piece suit, which is fitting as The Clothes On Their Backs is a novel all about clothes and what it means to wear them.

The clothes you wear are a metamorphosis. They change you from the outside in. We are all trapped with these thick calves or pendulous breasts, our sunken chests, our dropping jowls. A million imperfections mar us. …So the most you can do is put on a new dress, a different tie. We are forever turning into someone else, and should never forget that someone else is always looking.

Putting on a new dress is Vivian Kovacs, the English born child of Hungarian immigrants. When she was growing up there was a wardrobe full of hand-me-down clothes in her parents’ house. Now, thinking back, there are no family photographs showing she ever wore them. (”As far as I knew, no evidence existed that I was ever a child.”) Denying Vivien a record of her past isn’t all they are guilty of - they deny her their past too.

Because my parents never answered any questions about the past - that’s finished, it’s over and done with, here you are in England, that other place has nothing to do with you, stop bothering your head with this rubbish, no, no, no - I learned to stop asking, and eventually I forgot all about wanting to ask. Suddenly, a treasure chest had opened out and spilled all these precious objects.

The treasure chest is Vivien’s uncle, Sándor, a refugee from the Hungarian revolution who has set himself up as a slum landlord, based on Peter Rachman. Back in 1977, when she knew him, Sándor paid her to write up his memoirs, as he talked about growing up in Hungary, and the horrors faced there, the likes of which not even her father had experienced. In these recollections, her uncle deflects any responsibility to himself arguing that his actions, regardless of their immorality, were necessary. That he can face up to his actions and move on them puts him in direct opposition to Vivien’s father:

My father was terrified of change. When change was in the air anything could happen, and he already suffered from an anxiety: that any small disturbance in his circumstances would bring everything down - the flat, the wife, the job, the new daughter, London itself, then England, and he would slide down the map of the world, back to Hungary, clinging on uselessly, ridiculously, with his fingers clutching the smooth, rolling surface of the globe.

Something that could bring down everything down are events in 1977. Having escaped to England to escape fascism, the rise of the National Front provides worrying echoes of home. The uniformed goons that patrol the streets further add to the novel’s exploration of what clothes mean to the person wearing them. But, all extraneous characters aside, the novel’s main focus is the relationships between the members of the Kovacs family, and these are without doubt the most interesting parts of The Clothes On Their Back.

Sadly, Grant adds other touches to Vivien’s life - all verging on the ridiculous; all pertaining to equally doomed relationships - that detract from the story’s potential. Plus, while the flavour of her immigrants’ speech is speckled with the occasional grasp for a word, sometimes the words in their mouth come across feeling strained:

‘Vivien, I feel I am in that programme Perry Mason and you are the lawyer and I am the accused. What do you call it, cross-examination. I wish you would stop.’

But cross-examination may just be what The Clothes On Their Backs needs. The first chapter offers up many discussion points that don’t become clear until the book has unravelled its events and themes. Then, a passing mention of the London bombings, hints again at clothes and the pigeonholing of people in the interests of persecution. It’s a wardrobe of words made all the more interesting for the skeletons in its closet, although the experience for its narrator, recounted thirty years on, comes across as little more than second hand.

My previous experience of Nadine Gordimer was with last year’s Booker longlisted Get A Life. That book, to me, was so full of stunted sentences, lacked narrative focus, and was excruciatingly boring that it’s a wonder I would want to read another. But, sometimes, to get the measure of a difficult author (and being a Nobel laureate is usually a good marker of being one) you have to go back to previous works when the style was not so prevalent. With July’s People I don’t think I went far enough back as there were still many of the stylistic tics I hadn’t enjoyed in Get A Life, but this novel was a better and more coherent read.

July’s People is set after the Soweto Uprising in a South Africa where the situation has become anarchic, with white people being forced from their homes, sometimes killed. The Smales family, Bam, Maureen, and their three children believe themselves “lucky to be alive” when they escape to rural South Africa and stay in a mud hut as guest of their servant, July.

It is here, away from the city, that the Smales come to realise the difference between the white and black people of South Africa, for where they are all about the money, the poor have different needs:

She saw how when she or Bam, who were completely dependent on these people, had nothing but bits of paper to give them, not even clothes - so prized by the poor - to spare, they secreted the paper money in tied rags and strange crumpled pouches about their persons. They were able to make the connection between the abstract and the concrete.

July’s People shows the descent of the Smales family as they try to make what they can of their life amongst the poor black community. While July remains servile to them, the gulf between white and black people is slowly dissolved to the point where it is the white family who is found to be helpless while the black people are resourceful to the last. In a life where everyday necessities such as toilet paper, sanitary towels, and groceries become luxuries, the Smales make an effort to understand their new environment but ultimately remain trapped, never quite knowing how to get out.

Mercifully, the prose in this novel is much easier to read than Get A Life (and, I presume, later Gordimers). And while the dialogue can still throw you sideways for a moment, it’s quite easy to regain the thread. Stylistically, rather than use quotes, Gordimer has opted for dashes opening and closing speech. During periods of extended interaction between characters it can be a tad unwieldy, but is ultimately readable. There is also the occasional fragmented sentence but nothing untoward that really hampers the text.

In fact, July’s People has much enjoyable writing. When Maureen, our window on the world, isn’t philosophising, there come a series of descriptions that evoke the difficulty of trying to live a normal life in a world outside your comfort zone, and of how natural that world is:

They made love, wrestling together with deep resonance coming to each through the other’s body, in the presence of their children breathing close around them and the nightly intimacy of cockroaches, crickets and mice feeling-out the darkness of the hut; of the sleeping settlement; of the bush.

Gordimer also takes time in the novel to find stylistic flourishes, such as the initial car journey when the Smales flee their lives - a piece of writing that wonderfully captures the bumpy journey off road and the angst of the ordeal as a whole:

People in delirium rise and sink, rise and sink, in and out of lucidity. The swaying, shuddering, thudding, flinging stops, and the furniture of life falls into place. The vehicle was the fever. Chattering metal and raving dance of loose bolts in the smell of the childrens’ car-sick. She rose from it for gradually longer and longer intervals. At first what fell into place was what was vanished, the past.

My reading of July’s People was very much like that car journey. There were moments where I found my mind drifting as I read it, not taking much in, but, as I warmed to the prose style, I found myself finding more and more of it followable. Those lapses, however, may have lost the novel’s full effect for me but it’s certainly piqued my interest for some more of Gordimer’s work, for it’s a great mix of gritty reality and symbol all wrapped up in a style of her own making.

The Deportees and Other Stories, began life, as Roddy Doyle notes in the foreword, as a series of fragmented short stories written for Metro Eireann, Ireland’s multicultural newspaper. Restricted to chapters of eight hundred words, the short stories here all focus on the different aspects of a modern Ireland, one where multiculturalism is the focus. The Deportees and Other Stories is Doyle’s first collection of short stories to see print. And with humour throughout, they are trademark Doyle.

There are eight in total, of varying length. They tackle, amongst other things, issues of friendship, exclusion, inclusion, prejudice, racism, and respect. Sometimes it doesn’t quite work and, as Doyle says in his introduction, he knows there are loose ends so we can’t really go into the collection expecting well crafted stores. But sometimes he gets it right. And this, as most characters herein would say, is grand.

The first tale, Guess Who’s Coming To The Dinner, follows Larry Linnane, a man who prides himself on how his daughters can have open sexual conversations around him. But when one brings a black man home to the table, Larry is forced to face up to the fact that he may be a racist, and Doyle captures his ignorance well and in hilarious circumstances. Even more hilarious is 57% Irish in which, after a phone call, Ray Brady further develops a test he has made that measures how Irish a person is - based on reactions to things like Riverdance, Irish porn, and Robbie Keane’s goal in the 2002 World Cup:

The idea - the thesis - had come to Ray in the minutes, three years before, just after Robbie Keane had actually scored that goal and Ray had hugged and kissed maybe fifteen people in the pub, and he’d found himself in the arms of a big lad from Poland. And he’d wondered. Why was this guy hugging Ray? Kissing his forehead. Punching the air. Throwing his head back and singing.

Aside from all the comedy, there’s a horror story (albeit, still funny in places) in the shape of The Pram, in which a Polish au pair decides to scare the older sisters of her young charge with a fairy tale, one for which their young minds are too practical for, leading to amusing questions about the nature of the story’s baddie, but ultimately ending in tragedy.

The main attraction is The Deportees, not only because it is the title story and lengthiest among the collection, but because it revisits the character of Jimmy Rabbitte, the man responsible for putting together The Commitments. In the years that have passed, Ireland has changed a great deal, but thankfully Jimmy hasn’t, even if he is a bit older:

Jimmy Rabbitte knew his music. He knew his stuff alright. Jimmy was slagging Moby before most people had started liking him. He once heard two kids on the DART talking about Leftfield, and he was able to lean over and tell them they were talking through their holes and know that he was absolutely right. Jimmy knew that Radiohead’s last album was so bad that it was cool to defend it - but he didn’t. Not Jimmy. It was too important for fashion.

One day Jimmy gets the urge to start a new band and this time white Irish need not apply. He puts ads in the paper, picking his new collective from the immigrant population via such criteria as whether they can play and if they like The Corrs. If not, they’re in. And when the band’s first gig comes together it all falls apart, but thankfully, in the spirit of the Barrytown Trilogy, it leaves Jimmy on an optimistic note.

Of the other other stories, I found them less effective. In New Boy, where a black child attends a new school in Ireland, there were shades of Richard Yates’ Doctor Jack-o’-Lantern and the narration of Black Hoodie, a story about prejudices, felt too laboured, the youthful ‘like’ being overused. Home To Harlem deals with a Irishman struggling, since he is black, to find his Irishness, and I Understand rounds off the stories based on the idea of immigrant exploitation.

Although I found The Deportees to be a hit and miss collection, I couldn’t help laughing throughout. Doyle’s prose - or moreso his dialogue, since that makes up most of his prose - is just funny. Even when the story isn’t going so well, there’s never a dull moment. It would be interesting to see other short stories that Doyle has written, ones without the word restriction of Metro Eireann and tackling other subjects. But for now, The Deportees and Other Stories is a good a slice of bite-size Doyle but not ultimately filling.

Since the early nineties, it seems Warwick Collins’ writing career has gone largely unnoticed: most of his novels are out of print and Google returns scant information on him. Last year I read a favourable review of his 1997 novel, Gents, on Asylum and, now that The Friday Project has republished it, I decided it was about time I paid a visit.

Ez Murphy, to support his family, has started a new job in an underground London toilet owned by the local council. His colleagues, like himself, are West Indian men: Jason, a Rastafarian, and manager, Reynolds. It all starts well, Ez filling buckets with disinfectant and swinging his mop back and forth over the toilet’s floors, happy scrubbing away until he spots two men exit the same cubicle “curiously like a magic trick - two rabbits from the same hat”.

It seems these toilets are renowned in this area for the practice known as cottaging and the many complaints received forces the council, represented by Mrs Steerhouse, to demand that the three cleaners do something about it otherwise the toilets will have to close. And, as they come up with methods to purge the men they nickname “reptiles” the problem comes back to bite them, forcing a Catch-22 situation.

While the bulk of Gents is set within the limited milieu of a public toilet, Collins’ descriptions are varied enough to ensure they have enough personality of their own without being claustrophobic, whether it be their “flowing, bouncy light” or the sounds within:

It was possible to tell from the sound alone which cubicle had opened or closed. The doors of the seventeen cubicles were like a musical scale. Each hollow space they enclosed had a different frequency. The flushing of the cistern in cubicle three had a different sound from cubicle eleven. Sometimes he could tell the mass or weight of the individual occupying a cubicle by the shape of slight sounds within enclosed space, the click of a belt buckle, the slide of trousers, the sigh of peace.

And it’s not just the toilet that has a personality. The main trio are exceptionally well drawn, most of their character shining out through Collins’ ear for the West Indian voice, capturing the rhythm without slipping into caricature:

“Jason!”

Reynolds returned and leaned back against the table. He smiled, then seemed content to subside into patois again. “Him no dog - like cat, man. Call, him come in own time.

Each of the three has their own take on the casual sex happening in the toilets. While Ez is bewildered by it, Jason believes it’s the sin of “Whitey”, the white man, and Reynolds is more practical in just wanting to stamp it out. Thus Collins uses the men to tackle the subject of prejudice, with sidelines into religion, family, and careers. And he does it with a layer of humour spread over the lightest of prose.

At 172 widely spaced pages, Gents is a novel that is perfect for reading over a single sitting. So enjoyable is it, that its chapters fly by, but its true strength is in its subtlety - it gets its ideas across without shouting, and does so in style. That it went out of print is a shame; that it’s back in print is certainly more than a public convenience.