The Death House, by Sarah Pinborough

It’s far too easy to make superficial comparisons between Sarah Pinborough’s fabulous, thought-provoking The Death House, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s fabulous, thought-provoking Never Let Me Go.  

In a near-future setting, a group of teenagers in communal  housing are cut off from the outside world, subject to adult supervision that is at once regimented and indifferent.  Our narrator, one of the teenagers, tells us about their lives and entanglements, as they struggle to deal with the horrific truth behind their apparently mundane lives.  

Well, that works equally well as a summary for both, but fundamentally misses the point of both books in doing so.  Where Never Let Me go observes identity and humanity by removing all that makes us individuals and “human” from the characters – with spare, controlled prose to match – The Death House rails against the dying of the light.  This is humanity with its back against the wall, this is identity when who you are is both a work in progress and the only thing left to you.

Toby is a teenager wrenched from his home following a routine blood test at school.  He finds himself in a communal home, alongside a number of other children and teens, all in the same boat.  After their most recent blood test, some were forcibly removed from weeping and bereft parents, some were discreetly dispatched by parents more worried about reputation than family; all are now handed into the care of a cadre of distant, uninvolved teachers and nurses, ruled over by the fearsome Matron.

Some children cry, some act out, some find god; all find their place in the pecking order (knowingly or otherwise).  Toby’s found his own coping strategy, sleeping as much of the day as he can, making the empty rooms of the house his territory at night.

Of course, there’s a reason the kids have to endure removal from home and enforced residence in a an old manor house with poor supervision – the blood tests.  Each child has been removed from society for being “defective” – a genetic condition that will lead them to an early death.  Pinborough keeps the details vague; it’s something that shows up in a blood test, at some point during childhood (if it hasn’t shown up by the time you’re 18, it’s not going to), and manifests some unpredictable time later, following the emergence of some combination of a variety of symptoms.

Toby’s carefully constructed routine crumbles around him with the arrival of a new batch of children.  Tom, at 17 the eldest in the house, and only 6 months away from his 18th birthday, immediately positions himself as alpha male.  More disruptive to Toby’s calm, however, is Clara.  Clara who also prowls the house at night, Clara who enters Toby’s dreams and fantasies, Clara who shows him a whole new perspective on life – and death.

When one nurse breaks the unspoken rules and engages some children in conversation, it’s the start of a chain of events that could only ever have one ending.  The “how” might sometimes be in doubt, but the “what” never is.

Pinborough’s exploration of the individual and communal reactions of the children and teens, as narrated by Toby, is intense and haunting, funny and heartbreaking.  So much comes back to who you are, and how – or even if – that matters in the face of an inevitability so overwhelming that most adults refuse to contemplate it.

Death, real and imagined

The first of February 2016, and it feels like we’ve already hit this year’s quota for death.  As I write this, the internet is still awash with genuine and heartfelt tributes to Terry Wogan; in the last few weeks we’ve lost David Bowie, Alan Rickman and Lemmy, among others.  And these are just the national and internationally mourned figures.  Dan Hartland writes movingly about the life and recent death of Paul Murphy, a widely respected Birmingham-based musician over at The Story And The Truth; and over on Twitter, a couple of people I follow have both recently suffered family bereavements.

Death, it seems, is everywhere right now.

Of course, in one sense, it always is.  I will confess that I am one of those insufferable people who consider death not only an essential part of the human experience, but perhaps the defining experience.  It’s not just that it’s the one thing we have in common – whether you’re among the dispossessed and excluded or among the one per cent, death is coming to you, and no amount of power, money or influence can change that.  No, it’s more than that.  Every human life is finite, and we only get the one.  If that’s not an incentive to make it count, I don’t know what is.  For me, that’s crucial to the human experience; no do-overs, no re-runs, no go-back-to-the-beginning-and-try-again.  What you don’t learn as you go, you don’t learn.  What you don’t do when you get the chance, you don’t get done.

That doesn’t, for me, mean living every day as if it’s your last.  Mainly because it’s really very unlikely to be, and pretending that actions don’t or won’t have consequences is the way of the toddler, not that of a reasonable adult.

Of course none of that rational belief (is that an oxymoron?) changes the emotional impact of losing a loved one, a respected one, or even just the way that sometimes someone else’s grief gets under your skin and pokes at your own hibernating sense of loss.

So where does the imagined death come into all this pretentious intellectualising I’m doing?  Well, I like crime fiction.  Lots of it, all different kinds, in books and TV and films.  I grew up on Agatha Christie, where – as I once heard it described – lots of people get killed but almost no-one gets hurt, and since then I’ve worked my way through the brutal, the funny, the historical, the bloody and (occasionally) the banal.  One question that gets asked a lot (eg, at almost every crime writing festival I’ve been to in the last five or six years, in various forms) is whether crime fiction readers are a bit fucked up.  Of course, it’s never phrased like that.  It’s euphemised as “is crime fiction becoming too violent?” or handwringing about why publishers put photos of dead women on the covers of crime novels (even when the books don’t have any dead women in them), and a particular fixation with the apparently distressing and confounding idea that women in particular like reading unflinching accounts of brutal murder.  But regardless of how it’s dressed up, it all tends to come across as, well, exactly as I put it before – that crime readers must be a bit fucked up.

I’m endlessly surprised when it’s suggested that reasonably intelligent people must or are likely to be unable to tell fiction from reality.  Quite apart from the breathtaking arrogance implicit in such a suggestion, it’s demonstrably untrue.  And yet, the suggestion is implicit in the questioning of why oh why do people (especially women) read about murder, about death?

Leaving aside the distinctly dodgy gender politics of some of the discussions, I find it baffling that the question gets asked so often.  Is it really that puzzling that people turn to fiction to process an overwhelming experience?  Or a feared, potential experience?  Is it surprising that readers to turn to crime fiction – where some semblance of order is usually brought to the chaos – as a means of reassurance?  I’m not convinced that crime fiction readers are any more (or less) fucked up than horror fiction aficionados or people who enjoy roller coasters.  We seek out safe experiences as a means of understanding, processing and dealing with the fact that life is full of unsafe experiences – right up to and including death, and what may happen just before.

A bereavement can be devastating.  Grief is an involuntary reaction, not a choice (whatever the attention-seekers on the internet try to claim).  Fiction may or may not help us process in the abstract, but it doesn’t change the experience in real life.  Bowie’s death was a surprise and it hurt, Rickman’s death was a shock – and twenty years on, I still miss my Dad.

Hangmen

I had originally assumed that the theatres would be closed on New Year’s Day, but I was very happy to find out I was wrong when we found ourselves at something of a lose end on the day in question.  A bit of googling revealed that not only were performances on that evening, but there were still a few seats available at Hangmen, a play I’d been hoping to see since it debuted at the Royal Court.  Since then it’s been getting rave reviews, and transferred to the Wyndham’s Theatre, which is handily placed right next to Leicester Square tube station, so we popped into to buy a couple of tickets on the day (using the incredibly useful TheatreMonkey site as seating guide).

The play opens in 1961, with a fairly intense scene – the hanging of a man loudly and vociferously protesting his innocence.  We meet the hangmen, Harry (David Morrissey) – aggressive and pompous and known, much to his chagrin, as the second best hangman in England – and Syd (Andy Nyman), his somewhat submissive, cowed, assistant.  This opening scene sets the tone for the rest of the play; challenging, intense, and undercut with dark humour.  The line “I’m being hung by nincompoops!” cuts through some particularly gruelling action, but the insistence by Syd that the correct term is “hanged” gets a slightly more comfortable laugh.

The action then moves forward two years, to the day that hanging is finally abolished, and relocates to the pub run by Harry, now retired.  There’s a local reporter trying to get a quote or an interview from bullish Harry, and a small crowd of regulars who appear to be Harry’s endlessly adoring audience (even when he’s being a complete arse, which is most of the time).  After the intense opening, the pub scenes felt a bit like waiting for the sword of Damocles to fall – and it starts to descend before too long.  A stranger (Johnny Flynn) – long hair, grating London accent, chippy attitude – comes in, introduces himself as Mooney, and sets about getting under Harry’s skin.  He’s quite clever with it, somehow managing to be obnoxious without doing anything that’s outright offensive.

It’s difficult to say much more about the plot without giving away spoilers.  I will say that there’s a lot of unanswered questions by the end, about the initial hanging, who Mooney is, and what exactly links the two.  But overall it’s a satisfyingly dark story that takes a very human, and period-appropriate approach to the subject of capital punishment.

I’ve mentioned the humour.  I wouldn’t go quite so far as the review quoted outside the theatre and describe it as “riotously funny”, and I don’t think I’d call it a comedy either, but it is very funny in places, albeit funny in a very dark way.  Hangmen’s written by Martin McDonagh, who also wrote In Bruges; the two share a similarly stylised dialogue, and the humour is often unexpected.  And dark.  Did I mention dark?

Hangmen runs through until at least 5th March, and there’s an NT Live performance on the 3rd March.  Highly recommended, if you get the chance.

The Dying Place, by Luca Veste

Like many others, I do like a good crime novel as a holiday read.  Recently I read The Dying Place, Luca Veste’s second novel.  Like his first (excellent) book Dead Gone, it features DI Murphy and DS Rossi, investigating murder in Liverpool.

A teenager is found dead, placed on the steps of a church, having apparently been tortured before being killed.   The lad is known as a troublemaker and petty criminal to local coppers, so there’s an immediate tension between the usual response to a murder victim, and the reaction to this one.

That tension is played out throughout the book.  Veste tells the story from multiple points of view – police, perpetrators, victims – and the usual boundaries between victims and perpetrators are blurred at best, sometimes non-existent.

Murphy and Rossi deal with a dearth of leads, unsympathetic colleagues, office politics and personal issues; all the time the reader is aware of the full horror of the story that’s unfolding in the background.

Where Veste really excels is focusing on the motivations of all involved.  If Dead Gone was driven by psychology, The Dying Place is an exploration of the sociology of a community that finds itself – or at least perceives itself – to be divided.  The divide is generational, but also class-driven, and as two worlds that refuse to acknowledge or understand each other collide the result is violent, bloody and horrifying.  But the book is also focussed on how a group reacts when it perceives itself to be threatened, how the actions of the group can be more extreme than any one member might have considered, and how one person can bring a group with them from pub-based grumbling to all-too-real psychopathy.

It’s a cracking read, and right now only £2.49 on Kindle, which makes it an absolute bargain too!

Peter Pan Goes Wrong

A few weeks ago I was casting around for something to do on New Year’s Eve.  A big night out at an organised event doesn’t appeal, and I wasn’t sure I could face another New Year’s Eve night of snack food and Jools.  Proving that just occasionally marketing emails can be useful, I got a timely mail from a theatre ticket company reminding me that Mischief Theatre‘s “not a pantomime”, Peter Pan Goes Wrong, is playing in the West End.  A couple of years ago we were lucky enough to see their riotously funny The Play That Goes Wrong at the Trafalgar Studios, so this looked like a good bet – I wasn’t disappointed.

The premise is simple: the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society, on the back of their previous success The Murder At Haversham Manor (aka, The Play That Goes Wrong), now bring you their “Christmas vignette”, Peter Pan.  As the name of the play suggests, things go wrong.  Actually, pretty much everything goes wrong.  Props are missing or collapse, actors forget their lines, lights fuse, there are flying mishaps, and more than a few injuries.  The fourth wall is broken time and again, and the audience’s insistence on some traditional panto participation leads to Captain Hook having a glorious Fawltyesque meltdown.  To be fair, repeatedly yelling “it’s not a pantomime!” at a gleefully feisty audience is only ever going to produce one result.

It’s true that some of the jokes are a little overdone; some of the “accidental” audio goes on a bit long, some of the physical jokes are repeated a few times too often.  But overall, this is a fantastic performance that relies on a great cast, excellent timing, and excellent technical stage management.  It’s unsurprising (but good to see) the stage managers getting a curtain call.

Mischief Theatre have a new play coming; A Comedy About A Bank Robbery, playing at the Criterion Theatre from March 31st – I can’t wait.

Peter Pan Goes Wrong is on at the Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue until the end of January – if you get the chance, do go see it.

More in hope than expectation

I don’t really do New Year’s resolutions these days, but the turn of the year has coincided with a change to a less stressful, less insanely busy job, leaving me with a bit more headspace, a bit more breathing space.  So it seems like a good time to aim for some better habits.  For me, that means taking a bit more time to indulge in the things I enjoy, like reading crime fiction, going to the theatre, and writing.

So this blog is hopefully going to give me a chance to write about some of that stuff, plus anything else that springs to mind.

For those that don’t know me, I am, as the bio says, a middle-aged woman with a thing for red shoes.  I’m frequently angry and I swear a lot, but I try to cut other peoples’ artistic endeavours some slack, because at least they’re out there doing something.

I can’t guarantee this blog will live beyond my initial burst of enthusiasm, but let’s see how we get on, shall we?