This review first appeared online at Splice in February 2020.
Tim Etchells’ Endland opens with an introduction by Jarvis Cocker, the longtime frontman of the band Pulp. There’s something strange about the presence of a commentary by the likes of Cocker—it reads like a slap on the back for a pal at his local pub—and Cocker’s takeaway message is even stranger than the fact of his inclusion. He describes the stories in Endland as “the opposite of nostalgia,” attuned to the political-economic-cultural crisis of present-day Britain: “‘Endland’ is where we are right now,” he says. Then he recommends the collection as “a bitter medicine” that “tells it like it was & is,” but he undercuts himself when he ends with this backhanded compliment: “I respect this book—but I never want to read it again.” Having read Endland, though, I know exactly how he feels.
Endland has charted a circuitous route to publication. It contains thirty-nine stories set in a version of England in which the country’s every fault is exaggerated to the point of cataclysm. Endland is “a messy place,” as Etchells puts it in an author’s note: “at once a capitalist free-for-all, an anarchistic bedlam, a post-apocalypse retro-medieval nightmare, a central European civil war zone and some kind of twisted fairy tale housing estate in Rotherham or Doncaster.” Etchells began exploring this all-too-recognisable dystopia back in the 1990s, when he published a collection of the first eighteen stories reprinted here. After his initial publisher folded and Endland Stories: Or Bad Lives fell out of print, he continued “expanding and reinventing the precarious landscape of Endland,” and for the last fifteen years he has been writing additional “postcards from hell” upon invitation. But whose invitation? Etchells has a background as a visual artist and playwright, and most of the work he completed by invitation was commissioned for various art projects and performance pieces. It appears now in print along with the original Endland Stories and half-a-dozen new entries, although in many places it still reads like avant-garde theatre. The result is exhaustive, the “definitive Endland volume,” and, at almost four hundred pages, it’s exhausting as well: too much of a bad thing, a wasteland parched of real rewards.
To be fair, a good number of readers are unlikely to make it very far into the bulk of Endland, and Etchells wastes no time in giving them their marching orders. Here is the opening of a prefatory note, written in the narrative voice that dominates the volume:
Kings, lords, liars, goal-hangers, killers, psychics and prostitutes,
Whether or not these stories bear any relation to life as it is actual lived in Endland (sic) is not my problem and good riddance to all those what prefer to read abt truly good, lucky and nice people—you won’t like this crap at all.
Bear in mind it is not a book for idiots or time-wasters but many of them are wrote about in it. But let no one deny that it is a good laugh to hear about all the various kinds of mischief, curfews, wickedness, pixilation, indolence, rent fraud, roadblocks and general fcuking Hoopla! that went on in that place back (?) when Xmas really meant something.
All the fundamental pieces of the Endland aesthetic are right here in these few lines, all the signature elements of everything that follows: the “(sic)” after “Endland,” but not after an earlier error; the shorthand of “abt”; the syntactical misconstruction of “are wrote”; the deliberate typos and ad hoc capitalisation; the erratic punctuation and parenthetical comments; the nonsensical list items (“pixilation”) and the half-twee, half-delirious non sequitur that serves as a grace note. There are other signature elements that appear a little later on: the “©” that follows apparent neologisms, the wanton use of all-caps and “etc,” characters with names like Natalie Gorgeous and German Fokker, entire paragraphs printed in strikethrough. Still and all, those first few appear often enough as Etchells’ go-to textual tricks, the stunts that enliven his crippled syntax and stunted narratives. If they look like the sort of thing that tickles your fancy, and if your hunger for them is nigh on insatiable, you’ll probably be satisfied with the rest of the book. If not, not.
That’s not to blatantly disparage Endland. Nor is it to dismiss the whole thing out of hand. The collection has its high points. ‘Carmen by Bizet’ follows a hapless young woman into court, then into prison, after she becomes entranced by the “electronic noise of ‘night’” on the other end of her telephone. It ends with a breakdown of text that apes the breakdown of her sanity: the final sections disintegrate into one-word utterances, empty koan-like declarations, binary ones and zeroes, and a barcode. ‘The Chapter’ is a ferociously insane story that takes the form of a membership list of Endland’s Hells Angels: “Foot & Mouth, Drainpipe, Henna, Peroxide, Pointy Tits, Albatross,” and so on, unbroken, for twelve pages. It’s a gimmicky piece of prose, but it’s never dull. And there are occasional bright spots when Etchells lands a proper gag, as with a children’s toy called “MY LITTLE VOID,” and also when he makes room for fantastical elements, especially the miserable gods of Endland with names like Porridge, Hand-Job, Risotto, Herpes—and Thor. Endland can at times be funny, if in a despairing way; it elicits tortured laughter, with a wince.
But far more often it’s just a sordid book, even gleefully squalid, and reading it feels like wading through a cesspit of try-hard grunginess. In one especially disgusting story, ‘Chaikin/Twins,’ a man buys two sixteen-year-old twin sisters, “‘real virgins’ ©,” and then, when they are “‘of age’,” he torments them, psychologically and sexually. One of them he treats like a princess, complete with maidservants to answer her daily needs and desires. The other he subjects to “every kind of sexual act, perversion, demand and activity to which his mind and body were capable,” so that the girl is
repeatedly sodomised, whipped, prostituted, made to crawl naked on her belly through the house, made to suck the servants cocks, used as a table for the eating off of food, made to stand for long hour half dressed and genitals exposed in the window etc etc and all kind of things he had read about in a book or in twisted recess of his ‘mind.’
All right, then. ‘Chaikin/Twins’ is a sadistic story and its sadism unfolds in some detail. Is the detail gratuitous? I think so. It would have been fine for Etchells to withhold from listing the abuser’s acts in their particulars, given that the particulars serve no ends beyond the grotesque exaggeration that is already baked into the narrative premise. And yet there they are, together with an undercurrent of playful malevolence, as the unerring list of sexual abuse is coupled with a consistently erroneous treatment of the abuser’s identity. The man is named as “Chaikin” in the title and a few places throughout the story, but he is also “Chaken,” “Charkin,” “Cherkin,” “Chailkin,” and “Chailkan.” The feigned carelessness that leads to the misspelling of his name stands in contrast to the care with which the narrator itemises his mistreatment of the enslaved girl, and the contrast throws a shadow over the story’s moral purpose. I found it difficult to stomach, and to keep the cap on my red pen.
Perhaps this wouldn’t be such a problem if the persecution of the twins were a one-off, but young women are degraded time and time again in Endland. Although men do suffer their share of punishments—random, karmic, and societal—it’s notable that the traumas inflicted on women are frequently inflicted by men. The cumulative effect of Endland’s gendered injustices is both exhausting and infuriating, and finally enervating: I began to rage against the book as I read on, until I crossed a threshold and felt increasingly inclined just to put it down unfinished. Joanne. Charlene. Maxine. Frankie’s girl. Their lives are shitscapes of beheadings, bombings, and blowjobs. It takes either stamina or wilful desensitisation, or both, to get to ‘BureauGrotesque,’ where a man named Scarton stands by and watches a woman die in agony, right before his eyes, and ‘Long Fainting/Try Saving Again,’ where Gina, having lost her family, suffers yet more itemised torments when she takes a job in a pub “run by a cruel Ogre”:
Night after night she had to worked her fingers into bones, wipe floor w hair, sluice out toilet from flood water and rats, manage out the worst of the smack-heads and the morons, cooked bacon Snaks if needed for Ogre anytime in the fryer at 2000 degrees, kept a brite smile © on her face and generally listened to customers if they were talking to her etc keeping track of who was potentially a danger of attack, robbery, rape and worse. As each dawn approached G stood exhausted with skin stripped bare in the naked strip light of the pub bathroom, bar closed and strippers sent home, lamenting her fate and dead lookz and not much lolz left in her eyes.
No, there’s no law to say that Etchells has a moral obligation to offer his female characters redemption. Nor is he bound to dignify them in any way. But when it comes to the mistreatment of women, Endland takes two antipodal stances at the same time—the place develops an atmosphere of rampant misogyny while the narrator adopts a tone that is consistently, exhaustingly flippant—and these make the book seem as if it intends for readers to find amusement in its cartoonish degradations. I didn’t. That said, I don’t think it’s prudish of me to say these things. Really, the sources of my disenchantment with Endland aren’t ethical so much as political and aesthetic. I’m still with Jarvis Cocker: “I respect this book—but I never want to read it again.” I appreciate literary experimentation and I’m grateful to Etchells for committing himself to it, but a willingness to experiment doesn’t guarantee impressive results and in this case it leads to outright failure.
The novel is a political failure because it has no meaningful involvement in politics. I’m not even sure that it views politics as a site of meaningful activity. True, it pretends to an interest in politics, but only insofar as it name-checks the evils of Thatcherism, austerity, Brexit, et al: the drudgery of the dole queue, the despair of the food bank, the decrepitude of council housing. But because it glosses over the systemic poisoning of British political institutions, and dismisses nose-to-the-grindstone experiences of political disenfranchisement, and fails to imagine potential alternatives to the political status quo, its own politics are a wan concoction: a swill of reactionary positioning against the tide of events, cultural complaint without commitment to a vision of better things, and mere lip service to the burning concerns of those on the political left.
The political divestment of literary fiction isn’t necessarily a problem, in and of itself, but there’s little reward to the experience of reading if it isn’t offset by some kind of aesthetic achievement, and Endland disappoints in that respect as well. Even though it aims for something outside the norms of contemporary literature, it doesn’t aim for much outside its own prefatory note, so that the bulk of the book hits the same targets over and over again with deadening repetition. If aesthetic sophistication derives from evident control over the patterning of artistic elements—patterning via recursion, juxtaposition, alternation, and so on—then Endland is largely bereft of it. Granting the sole exception of the naming of the gods, the same elements resurface over and over again, story after story after story, with no effective deviation from Endland’s baseline ambitions, no novelty, no elaboration of effect, no meaningful relation to one another. As a result, reading the book comes to feel like a literary variant on water torture: drip… drip… drip… drip… for hundreds of pages at a stretch.
As he brings his author’s note to a close, Etchells names the four “fictional modes” he hoped to explore when he wrote Endland: “folk story, pub anecdote, parable and condensed movie plot.” Where Endland is at its best, it does indeed work in the mode of the folk story—or else in the mode of the urban legend, which is a folk story in a metropolitan setting. But parables? I don’t see many of those in the book. And condensed movie plots? Either they’re not condensed enough, as these stories exhibit few restraints on rambling self-indulgence, or they’re over-constrained, not open to the complications that allow plots to generate interest. What about the pub anecdote? That one seems to me like the best fit for Endland. Most of the stories collected here really do resemble the slurred, off-colour verbiage of some random boozer perched on a barstool. God bless you if a yarn from a person like that is your idea of a good craic. I can’t help but see such folk as pub bores: their “anecdotes” are better mumbled into a pint of bitter than preserved for posterity in the pages of a book. Respect for the effort, however sincere, doesn’t always warrant revisiting the experience.
By comparison to Endland, Luke Brown’s Theft is an almost antithetical beast. In fact, it’s dizzying to read the two books back-to-back while considering that they share a publisher. Whereas Endland is absolutely fragmented—every story, every scene, and nearly every sentence is a shard of an incomplete whole—Theft prizes swift action, stylistic polish, graceful narrative movements. Where Endland’s characters are really just caricatures, horrid and unbelievable, Theft invests in pathos and three-dimensionality; and where Endland is contorted by its own rage and despair, its bitterness and vitriol, Theft is more nuanced, more guarded, if still pessimistic, in its assessment of what ails today’s Britain. It’s also wry and knowing in its approach to the novel of socio-political commentary. Its narrator is an aficionado of nineteenth century literature, and, in a telling exchange with his flatmate, he laments his lacklustre love life in the tone of an Austen aristocrat. Although his flatmate chides him, “It’s not the nineteenth century,” he retorts: “It’s not not the nineteenth century either.” Well, then, Theft is not not a nineteenth century novel. That being so, what is it? It might best be described as a novel of the present, dressed in twentieth century aesthetics, with a hope of revitalising the disposition of nineteenth century liberalism for our febrile political moment.
To be fair, beyond its references to Dickens and the Brontë sisters, there are some technical ways in which Theft is indebted to the nineteenth century novel. Foremost among these is its intricate arrangement of characters representing various social and economic strata with conflicting interests. Its narrator is Paul, a thirtysomething part-time bookseller and occasional writer. Although he now lives in London, Paul and his sister Amy are originally from Lancashire. Although, growing up, they lived in a relatively deprived part of the country, they enjoyed relatively privileged adolescences as the children of middle-class professionals. Although Paul struggles with renting a room in a city sharehouse, he and Amy, now orphans, have inherited their family home from their parents, making them property owners. Although Paul is a property owner, regional inequalities make the house an almost worthless asset for someone anchored to the south of England. And although he clearly sees both the opportunities and the misfortunes that have brought him to his current impasse—single, nearly middle-aged, not gainfully employed—Amy will have no truck with being a prisoner of fate: she is pregnant, planning a life of independence, and has built up a property portfolio as an amateur developer. All those althoughs are important. They reflect Paul’s multivalent position in a range of demographic categories: regional, generational, socio-economic. By way of this multivalence, Theft is able to construct a partial cross-section of contemporary Britain using a limited cast of characters.
Of course this cross-section expands as other characters enter the picture, although they, too, are multivalent in a way that allows Theft to keep its cast reined in. The narrative proper revolves around Paul’s relationship with an alluring young novelist named Emily. Emily has left behind her own modest background for a more opulent life with an older man, Andrew, in upscale Holland Park. Andrew is an historian and public intellectual of some renown, and it is through him that Paul meets Sophie, Andrew’s university-age daughter, together with her friend Rochi. Naturally, sexual tension abounds. Will Emily cheat on Andrew with Paul? Will Paul sleep with Sophie, betraying his friendship with Andrew? Sometimes, but surprisingly infrequently, this tension evolves into sexual activity, so that Theft reads much like a version of Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends (2016) centred around older millennials rather than undergraduates. But more abundant than its sexual escapades are the complications of its characters’ movements between demographic categories. Despite her ideological commitment to Marxism, Sophie cleaves to her haute-bourgeois entitlements. Rochi’s family’s wealth sets her apart from peers with comparable immigrant backgrounds, and Emily’s literary successes don’t relieve her of the fear that she is guilty of both class betrayal and artistic self-debasement. In the charged interactions between these few characters, Theft expands the scale of its initial demographic cross-section, enlarging a socio-economic snapshot into a panorama.
There are other ways, too, in which Theft follows the nineteenth century playbook. It is replete with Wildean wit and repartee—when Paul’s flatmate tells him, “Your problems will not be solved by a woman,” he quips: “My problematic lack of a woman would be”—and the prose in general is crisp and vivacious, a little sardonic and a little satirical. The novel also carefully calibrates the conflicts between its characters, and the conflict within each of them, to make them pulse with moral potency. What of its moral outlook? Boilerplate Guardian editorial, unsurprising for a narrator of Paul’s bent: Britain has been debased by intergenerational exploitation, as millennials have been shafted by a variety of amoral Boomers: buy-to-let landlords, beneficiaries of the gig economy, and Brexiters. While it’s true that the narrative is sparked by literal thievery, when Paul steals one of Andrew’s books from the shop he works in, the novel repeatedly gestures towards a more nebulous type of theft, an existential type. This is the intergenerational theft of prospects, of social mobility, of security, and of hope—specifically the hope that, for thirtysomething millennials like Paul, one’s remaining years needn’t all be fed to a life of precarity.
Where Theft is least impressive is in its efforts to anchor dramatisations of these concerns in real-world settings. Probably in order to avoid awkward exposition, Brown ends up relying on a sort of Zoopla shorthand to indicate characters’ relative prosperity, name-dropping London suburbs as signifiers of accumulated wealth and presumptive stability. Readers are simply expected to know what it means, socio-economically and sometimes politically, for a person to live in Clapham rather than Mayfair, or in Hackney, or to have moved into Dalston fifteen years ago; or, indeed, for Rochi to say that her family lives in Kilburn, only to have Sophie correct her by pointing out that her house isn’t really in Kilburn. And, along similar lines, Brown opts for a form of verisimilitude that sometimes looks like a collage of newspaper headlines. It’s not enough that the narrative plays out against the backdrop of the Brexit referendum of 2016, complete with references to specific events like Boris Johnson’s backing for the Leave campaign. Some characters also end up re-enacting actual lives from the daily news: Paul’s ex gives birth in her car while working as an Uber driver, emulating the Lyft driver who did the same thing, and Sophie’s travails are reminiscent of a range of tabloid stories about pseudo-celebrities. While all of these qualities make Theft very contemporary, even urgent, they also make it feel a bit over-determined, especially for a novel with a down-to-earth premise that doesn’t need to earn plausibility.
But where Theft shines brightest is precisely where Endland goes dark: in its openness to equivocation, to representing “how it was & is” without pretending to have any real answers about why things are the way they are or, for that matter, how to respond to them. Paul encapsulates this openness when he breaks his first-person narration for a moment, perhaps to address the reader directly or else to address the culture at large. As his colleague, Leo, latches onto him and embarks on a monologue, he has this to say:
I’m a sponge for this sort of oration; men and women are always explaining things to me. [Leo is] saying something about Israel. I know I’ll agree with him, but not enough for his liking. He is so certain about everything. You’re all so certain.
Who, exactly, is implicated in that “you”? It includes, at minimum, all the other characters in the novel. Andrew makes waves as a metropolitan Remain campaigner who flatly disregards any reasons that regional voters might have for using the Brexit referendum to upset the status quo. Sophie lectures Paul on gender dynamics in working-class communities, righteously dismissing his anecdotes about growing up in one of those communities. Amy buys, renovates, and flips properties without any misgivings about the ethics of her behaviour, or its broader socio-economic impact, even as her brother bears the brunt of the housing affordability crisis. Nobody seems to slow down long enough to truly consider whether or not they’re doing the right thing at any given moment, or to consider whether they even have any idea what the right thing might be. Everyone steamrolls their way through the world, determining a direction to move in and then charging ahead at full speed. None of them allow themselves what is, for Paul, the only honest response to the conditions of the culture we live in: confusion, from which there follows ambivalence—or, again, multivalence—about any possibility of commitment to any course of action.
This situation plays out in interesting ways in Theft. They’re interesting because they’re uncommon, and also because they’re uncharacteristically hopeful for a book that otherwise flirts with hopelessness. The situation looks something like this. Ours is an age of political atomisation, and among the misshapen outgrowths of this atomisation are the certainties of our culture—certainties about who people are and how they behave. To dig deeper: there exists a wealth of socio-economic data which can calculate the probabilities of various demographic political leanings—data that is disseminated, in part, via the cultural reach of social media algorithms—and yet these probabilities lead us astray in daily life. People employ demographic generalisations drawn from data sets to make judgments of others in face-to-face interactions, but because the data is not totalising, and in any case can only calculate probabilities, any individual person is bound to evade one or another data point.
The scene of Paul’s first encounter with Sophie offers a stark illustration of this problem. Paul intrudes on a private political discussion between Sophie and Rochi. When Sophie brings Paul into the conversation and presses him on the subject of “male on female violence being statistically high in poor communities,” she implicitly judges him a misogynist because he is a man from a poor community. When he replies to her with individual case studies rather than broad statistical measures, sharing stories about the lives of other men he knew during his boyhood up north, she berates him for not clearly particularising the circumstances and for trying to present “an exception for everything”—in other words, for offering flesh-and-blood outliers to statistically-supported demographic probabilities. But human lives, as lived, are always statistical exceptions in some measure, on some score. It would be an exceptionally rare individual who actualises every probability from every demographic category into which they might be placed. Yet we can’t see this if we go about our days relying primarily on data to inform our raw impressions of other people—not least because, in doing so, each of us risks limiting our own horizon of possibilities.
Paul senses this last limitation, and repeatedly points to it. Sometimes he points to it in jest, for self-deprecation: he jokes that, once evicted from his sharehouse, he’ll have no choice but to “[m]arry a sensible woman from the Home Counties,” and, when pressed on where he’ll find her, he says, “There’s this thing called Guardian Soulmates?” Underneath his joviality, though, there is real concern about how closely his individual trajectory might track his demographic probabilities, simply because he can’t conceive of alternative ways to be:
I have always worried that I am destined to become my father. I am like him a white male from the north of England, small town, moribund, working class-cum-middle class, with books on the shelves, schooled in low aspiration in lessons and high aspiration at home, a reader, an autodidact, a would-be escapee.
There is a list somewhere of secondary-school English teachers with my name waiting to be added. If my father’s hadn’t been there already, if I hadn’t seen two graves filled, that’s exactly where I would be, and my life might have been all the better for it.
But Paul isn’t a teacher, and doesn’t become one. Nor does Rochi necessarily hold her demographically probable opinions on trickle-down economics. Nor does Emily exhibit the class condescension suggested by her current socio-economic status, especially in matters of sex. Nor does Tony, an acquaintance of Paul’s, accept any part of the identity he might be expected to hold as an underprivileged black man from northeast London. As Paul learns from Tony’s brother, Tony has begun populating his Facebook page with
videos about the problem with Islam and feminists and Jeremy Corbyn and the Guardian. He was all in favour of Brexit, and Donald Trump’s election campaign, and this was regarded by some people as such a strange look for a black man that he was frequently accused online of being a white supremacist, hiding behind the profile photo of a black man.
Tony’s beliefs are sincerely held, if inculcated by propaganda, and the more he is expected to conform to his own demographic probabilities, the more determined he is to escape them. Whatever one may think of his individuality, he is an individual and he will not be contained in a data set or reduced to data points.
So what happens when one resists, or even shakes off, the habit of orienting oneself toward others using the expedient crutch of data? Theft doesn’t answer that question, but it enacts one possibility as Paul—embodying radical uncertainty—watches the received narratives of our culture dissipate.
One of these narratives holds that people, especially millennials, can be nice without being acquiescent to their own disadvantage. Although Paul initially affects an air of niceness, and appears to have done so for a long time, he comes to see that his conciliatory attitude and his wit are, at best, coping mechanisms for his loss of hope, and, at worst, fig leaves for his inability to assert his own self-worth: “I had maintained a positive attitude for the last ten years and it had kept me afloat,” he says. “But no longer. I could feel myself shifting to a new way of seeing things”—a more sceptical way, with more empowered effects.
At the same time, another narrative holds that Paul’s interests are inextricably, irresolvably at odds with those of the generations above him, and he also breaks with the absolutism of this notion. “By we I refer to [the booksellers’] customers, our milieu, not to me and my friends,” he says, distinguishing himself from an upwardly mobile clientele whose members support the Remain campaign because they benefit economically from the cheap labour of EU migrants. But then, he admits, he and his friends “do not feel the distance we probably should from our wealthier associates. … We secretly hope that we are down-at-heel members of the same group; we suspect our interests are aligned; we may become like them one day. We. Me. Who am I kidding?” But, despite their economic incompatibility, the popular successes of the Leave campaign end up uniting these divided parties and, importantly, they lead Paul to cast his lot with his generational adversaries: “Though tense, the atmosphere in the shop has even become a bit happier than usual. People are animated. They sense the approach of something they won’t like; it’s exciting.” Because there are no convincing answers readily available to any problem in everyday life, there is no single-value position to be taken on any given issue. Everything, for Paul, is a half-measure, and taking half-measures is the most authentic, most humble way to be.
In a roundabout way, then, Theft wants to present a vision of civic commonality for the twenty-first century. This would be a commonality defined not by the menacing presence of a mutual enemy, but by the day-to-day, person-to-person, face-to-face negation of the zero-sum divisions that our culture supposes are encoded in demographic data, and by a sloughing off of the prefab identities that data sets would confer on each of us. The positing of this strain of civic commonality—which must be worked upon, laboured over, nurtured in the fine grains of momentary social experiences—is what makes Theft finally so different to Endland. The roots of each book are tangled in the soil of similar cultural concerns, concerns about the elite exploitation and degradation of the politically disenfranchised, but while Endland accepts the status quo wholesale and exacerbates the worst of it, Theft encourages us to acknowledge it, all the better to lift our gaze and look beyond it in our daily doings. Brown’s novel doesn’t simply make a plea for greater humanity in civic life, for more civil interactions at street level; it also lives its humanity—it is temperamentally humane—in its efforts to rescue human vulnerabilities from the moral certitude we swim in. If it is less aesthetically experimental than Endland, it is also not so beholden to the tyranny of an absolutist political outlook. It’s more open and more free—more at ease with its own being, so as to offer its readers the liberty of responding to it provisionally, or partially, or even contradictorily, true to the multivalent state from which it speaks.