Pity (2024)
Why this one?
This was an ARC from Canongate via Netgalley (many thanks!) - I was keen to read it based on the subject matter (more later) and recommendations from the likes of Douglas Stuart and Max Porter.
Andrew McMillan (1988- ; active 2015-) was born near Barnsley, South Yorkshire in the north of England. He is the son of the poet and media personality Ian McMillan. He studied at the University of Lancaster and University College London, and has thusfar been best known for his poetry. His debut collection, physical (2015), was the first collection of poems to win the Guardian First Book Award, and also won a Somerset Maugham Award. His second, playtime (2018), won the inaugural Polari Prize for LGBTQ+ Literature. He also co-edited the 2022 anthology 100 Queer Poems. Pity is his first novel, due for release via Canongate in 2024.
Thoughts, etc.
Pity is a short novel that trains its eyes on the former mining town of Barnsley, near to Sheffield in northern England. It focuses on three generations of the same family, covering the late twentieth century up to the present day (or thereabouts), and almost exclusively focusing on the men of the family. Simon is a call-centre worker by day and drag artist and OnlyFans model by night. He is in the early stages of dating Ryan, a security guard at a local shopping centre whose job involves discouraging illicit activities in the centre’s toilets. Simon’s father Alex is a somewhat mysterious figure through much of the novel, a former miner who we are initially introduced to via his first childhood encounter with pornography, he has separated from Simon’s mother in circumstances unknown both to us and Simon. Alex’s brother Brian is another former miner, participating in research workshops run by a nearby university that aim to understand and ‘get people talking’ about the town and its past. Finally, there’s the elusive, spectral presence of Alex and Brian’s father, vividly evoking the daily grind of pit life at its peak, in the buildup to a crucial turning point for the town and the industry.
Being from another former mining town almost equidistant from Sheffield to Barnsley, there was bound to be a lot of interest in this for me. I’m a couple of generations removed from miners, and have lived much of my life away from the town I grew up in, so Simon’s present-day still highlighted a very distinct perspective from my own. Barnsley (like my own hometown) is a former ‘Red Wall’ (ie staunchly Labour-voting) stronghold, part of a group of north/midlands constituencies in England that supported the Brexit vote in 2016 and turned ‘Blue’ in voting for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in 2019. Both of those occasions represented shocks of pain to the likes of me, entrenched in our ‘metropolitan elite’ bubbles (I live in London now) but still carrying with us a sense that we understood something of our roots. Pity wrestles with that fundamental challenge of understanding, and purposefully tries to avoid the trap much of the media fell into when trying to explain these decisions. Its university researchers in the ‘Fieldnotes’ sections stand in for those attempts to explain, to produce simplistic ‘narratives’ that explain the changing political landscape in the region, while largely boil down in their heads to a failure to reckon with the violent trauma around the collapse of industry (mining disasters, psychological scars, the spectre of Thatcher) and to find anything substantial with which to fill the ensuing void.
McMillan tackles this partly with the structure of the novel: it’s fragmentary, provisional and purposefully inconclusive. The book is subtitled ‘notes from a town’, further emphasizing it’s lack of claims to holding any great answers or grand narratives about the ‘state of the nation’ or the region. It also emphasizes how the novel is told from points of distance, rather than an epicentre of ‘truth’ - the outsider perspective of the academics, ‘surveillance’ sections seen from the perspective of Ryan’s security camera (he himself a sort of outsider to the central family), the ‘gossip’ of patrons and staff of the local club where much of the action takes place, and vivid descriptions of Simon’s OnlyFans content, as if seen from the perspective of his viewers (scattered around the globe). There’s a sense that the ‘truth’ of history is unveiled to an extent through the poetic, frantic, disembodied voice of the elder Brian, but as much of the rest of the novel implies this is only one voice among many, however authentic it may seem.
He also goes about dismantling the idea of simple answers via the thematic concerns of the novel. While the academics seek to understand those ‘big questions’, Pity’s central characters are more concerns with smaller questions, the stuff of everyday life in the here and now: money, family, relationships, sex, personal identity. When the younger Brian finds his voice in the final workshop, he articulates the frustration with the academics’ attempts to rake over the past in search of explanation when they just want (/need) to ‘get on with [their] lives’. Separately,. Simon’s OnlyFans and his drag career (and attempt to widen his digital audience by taking a more ‘political’ angle) could be read as elaborate ‘escape fantasies’ that are typically found in these sort of stories (cf David Storey’s Saville among many others) but Simon’s objective is more clearly focused just on surviving, supplementing his meagre call centre income.
There are also some nice moves in terms of inverting expectations in there. While we’re given hints that Alex has a ‘hidden’ side to him from the start, it did feel to me for much of the novel like we were building towards some sort of conflict between Alex and Simon based on his sexuality (or at least the public/performative nature of it) so it was a pleasant surprise to find the plot heading in a very different direction. Alex’s story is probably the subtle highlight of the novel in terms of character studies, though on the more ostentatious side Simon’s drag performance in Thatcher drag (“this turn is not a lady”) is undoubtedly the most entertaining. Both of these come together to ultimately flip the novel’s theme away from those big political questions, and towards another, that of masculinity in its many forms - from the traditional ‘community’ (work, repetition, but solidarity of purpose) of the elder Brian, to the conflicted, closeted, confused world of Alex’s generation - in which we find violent hatred (both from others and self-directed) to the potentially more optimistic (but still incredibly complex) modern, digitally-influenced culture of Simon and Ryan’s generation.
It’s a novel in which women are oddly absent, present only as background characters (the club ‘gossips’) and absent mothers (an interesting inversion of the absent father narrative, much more common I suspect). I wondered about this for a while but ultimately it allows more space (in what is after all a very short book) for the exploration of the relationship between male generations - notably in what isn’t said between them and the gaps that emerge. There are hopeful elements in there too, though - some sense that while neither the Alex/Brian generation or Simon’s have any ostensible interest in talking in the ways the academics want, there are avenues through which past trauma can be explored - the younger Brian is briefly inspired in the workshops by using poetry to come to terms with the academics’ questions, and Simon of course mobilises his drag performance in a way that engages with the past (or at least the version of it he’s picked up from his father’s generation) by exhuming Thatcher’s ghost for satirical purposes.
Pity is an incredibly thought-provoking debut novel that touches on a range of issues of huge contemporary relevance. It doesn’t seek to provide answers, but instead illuminates through poetic prose the everyday reality and humanity of a small number of ordinary people who represent nothing but themselves, and are anything but the monolithic cliches of the ‘Red Wall’ world that the media narrative tries to impose.
Score
8
A really enjoyable and hugely promising debut novel from an already established poetic talent. The pull quotes from Douglas Stuart and Max Porter felt particularly useful guides, with the novel offering both something of Stuart’s rich & authentic takes on working class masculinity and Porter’s formal innovation and sense of fragmentation.
Next up
TBC!
