Glen James Brown’s first novel is named after a long-gone thriving industrial Middlesbrough. Over five decades, we meet residents of the fictional Burn Council Estate and witness the closure of the area’s coal and steel mills as the estate is fought over and eventually carved up by a housing association.
Clearly a labour of love, this hugely ambitious debut weaves not only six narratives but multiple timelines, narrative voices and forms. In a lesser writer’s hands, this might have felt overworked, but here the estate becomes a character in its own right. Lives overlap, and yet each experience and interaction within that setting is unique.
A woman writes intimate letters to a stranger while dying of cancer. Her husband, the estate hard man, finds ever more inventive methods of violence to use against those he perceives to have slighted him. Their son, a lonely, bibliophile wrestling fanatic, tries to find out the truth about his father. A boy who is bisexual discovers transcendence in acid house and taking ecstasy, until that solace is brutally denied him. Decades later, his sister, grappling with her own addiction, closes her hairdressing salon as the estate is emptied, knocked down and rebuilt around her. A Teddy Boy mobile librarian is plagued by secrets. The ticking time bomb of one man’s loneliness and guilt is told through interview transcripts and diary entries.
At the heart of all this is Una Cruickshank, the daughter of mentally ill parents who leaves the estate to become a feted artist, and Peg Powler, her muse, a mythological siren-like creature who travels through the ruined plumbing of the estate to search for her weakened prey.
If this sounds bleak, it is far from it. By keeping compassion, wry observation and tar-black humour at the centre of these interwoven stories, Brown has created a fascinating, absorbing world. When the literary depiction of working-class communities is often reduced to a lazy shorthand of grit and misery, this unflinching, clear-eyed and overall deeply human depiction of an estate’s glory days and its eventual decline is nothing short of a triumph.
• Kerry Hudson’s Lowborn will be published in May. Ironopolis by Glen James Brown is published by Parthian (RRP £9.99). To order a copy for £8.79 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
