Heading South
By Luke Bitmead and Catherine Richards
Heading South is the product of a collaboration between Catherine Richards and the late Luke Bitmead. The authors met online via the BBC Writers Forum and decided to attempt a jointly authored novel.
Two strands of narrative run concurrently through Heading South presenting the same story chronologically from two different perspectives. The interesting challenge to the authors was to convincingly write the narrative of someone of the opposite sex. Strangely, given that he was created by Richards, Nick –Heading South’s male main character – bears some striking similarities to the central male character in Bitmead’s debut novel White Summer. Both are slightly stereotypical – certainly to my eyes – representations of feckless boys finally verging on adulthood as they reach their late twenties and starting to cast around for direction. However, Richards does succeed in sketching a sufficiently subtle character to avoid verging on a caricature. At the outset, Nick has been unceremoniously dumped by the woman he planned to marry, and a radical overhaul of his life in his hometown of Sheffield sees him embarking on the eponymous move south to work with a childhood friend in an idyllic Gloucestershire setting. Cassie, Bitmead’s creation, is a twenty-something artist living in the Cotswolds with a frankly unhealthly obsession with the A A Milne’s Winnie the Pooh stories. Her menagerie of pets are named after characters from the books, and her contrived dippy behaviour grates fairly fast. Cassie’s career as an artist is somewhat thwarted by her commissions focussing on animal portraiture – presumably to continue the animal theme.
Despite these hindrances Bitmead and Richards skilfully weave together a sweet recounting of two slightly displaced people meeting and falling in love. However, the path of true love never did run smooth and so there are some obligatory obstacles to cross. Andrew, a foppish admirer of Cassie’s, is presented as the early solution to her stagnant love life but doesn’t quite fit the bill, and the nascent romance between Cassie and Nick is initially threatened by the return of Nick’s calculating and manipulative ex-girlfriend.
Bitmead’s attempts to authentically write a female character fall short with Cassie but he is vindicated by the much more poignant portrayal of her best friend Jilly, a woman juggling marriage, motherhood, work and the betrayal of an affair. In this respect, Heading South is reminiscent of sit-com writing, in which the more interesting characters are invariably the more plausible and complex sidekicks.
Luke Bitmead tragically died prior to the publication of this book – and without ever actually meeting Catherine Richards – aged just 34. It is a great loss and it would have been interesting to see how this writing partnership would have developed given the fullness of time. Legend Press, £7.99Review by Helen Griffiths
The Vertigo of Late Modernity
 By Jock Young
The latest release from local sociology superstar, Professor Jock Young, kicks off with what might be a manifesto: ‘to build a transformative politics which tackles problems of economic injustice and builds and cherishes a society of genuine diversity’.
The follow-up to The Exclusive Society, which in part led to his recent five-year New York tour, confirms his stature not only as an elder statesman in his field, but one still with radical and challenging ideas.
We’re talking social inclusion policy (and its failings); we’re talking about the poor (perhaps they’re needed to be poor, but maybe not where they are, unless providing ‘invisible’ childcare, cleaning, domestic services – the globalised reinvention, or articulation, of serfdom); we’re talking change rather than tradition – we’re not talking about ’authenticity’ and resultant cultural and community stasis. We’re talking about post-binarism and de-reification. Sounds hard?
Well, this is not easy, by any means. Being academic, it’s riddled with internal reference (that kind of ‘as we’ve seen / as I’ve demonstrated’ stuff that makes you go: ‘What?’/‘Where?’). He digs into his roots – Durkheim, of course, and, remarkably these days, Marx (‘The worker feels only outside of work, and during work he is outside himself’ – cue mix of Gang of Four’s ’At Home He Feels Like A Tourist’). But still it rocks.
There are some great riffs and wonderful samples (my fave: ‘the power of topology masks the topology of power’) and, like an Old School rapper, dissing of many of his peers, while bigging-up others. But we have some serious beats, here, and a very serious argument about status, wealth and identity – and, above all, class.
And about where we all (poor or otherwise) are today: disoriented, disassociated, disgruntled, discombobulated and, as Jock would have it (‘as I’ve said previously’) de-reified (a tricky term, here, overturning normative notions of alienation).
Indeed, by the time one reaches the end – where we spin through the problematics of asylum seekers and immigration; the cults of both celebrity and suicide bombers; the riotous responses of people to thwarted raised expectations – the dizziness of Jock’s thesis threatens to spiral as out of control as his subject (which is our vertigo, of course).
And the conclusion? Well, it’s the question of greater equality for all, innit? Age old, natch. However, this work places Jock at, if not above, the heights reached by the likes of Henri Lefebvre (The Critique of Everyday Life), Raoul Vaneigem (The Transformation of Everyday Life) and, as an equally peerless example of late-career puissance, Bob Dylan’s Modern Times.
Sage, £21.99
Review by Richard Boon |
