Patrick Cash

.
One of the men once said he thought he could hear the coal cracking. Another man told him to stop talking draft. And beneath their feet, a mile down, money; to be counted on the surface, so they could be handed back the sleck.
.

McMillan mirrors the oppressive, close nature of the mines with modern sociological aspects. Other than the poverty and lack of opportunity the town suffers from – ‘low wages in turn attract large multinational companies to base their call centres [there]’ – queer paranoia is a significant theme. Characters worry about how they, or their associates, will be read by the external world. Ryan and Simon’s fall-out is a result of Simon’s refusal to wipe off his post-drag makeup: ‘Ryan would deny it as they argued on the way to the station, but Simon swore he saw him flinch slightly.’ Likewise, when Alex comes to see his son’s show in Sheffield, it’s on the train home that male presence makes him retreat back into himself:

.
At Chapeltown a group of young lads got on; they kept looking over at them both every time they laughed. Simon noticed one of them catch his dad’s eye, and after that his dad had seemed quieter; still himself,
but smaller maybe.
.

The struggle for expression is paralleled in Brian’s research sessions, applied to the whole town and its history, as the academics have come to research a disaster fifty years past. They ask the locals to give voice to their past, but there’s an overarching question as to how those voices will be recorded by the outsiders. As Professor of Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan, McMillan allows himself some tongue-in-cheek satire of an academic world he presumably knows well:

.
The regular, who’d sat quietly all the way through, only writing down a couple of street names and a couple of nicknames for local shops which they’d clearly rather he hadn’t, spoke up then, saying ‘You’re not local, though, so how would you understand?’
.

But it’s in the Field Notes sections, written as verbatim accounts of the researchers’ observations, where Pity occasionally trips. While they are often interesting in their own right, the academic pastiche can read like a cheat for conveying information that would be better shown: ‘The current uses of the former coalfield sites in and around the town speak as a metaphor to the psycho-geographical condition of the town as a whole.’ McMillan is knowing with these inclusions but the sections themselves can distance the reader from the more human story at Pity’s heart. Indeed, that story can sometimes feel like it’s struggling for light: the relationship between Simon and Ryan hints at a deeper emotional landscape to be explored, but the narrative curiously holds back, as if Pity at times suffers from the paranoia that stymies its characters.

Yet as a novel of the North, where the primary character is the town, the book works. Simon’s emancipatory drag performance as Margaret Thatcher marries together the political oppression of working-class communities, through the historical closing of the mines, with that of queer people: he lip syncs to the notorious Section 28. The language throughout is tightly controlled, with an occasional flair of imagery: ‘At once they are at the entrance, all the feathers like the smoke after an explosion.’ There’s an intriguing clash of globalised modern Britain – OnlyFans, Grindr, surveillance – with the ghosts that linger on the streets. A very physical and evocative portrayal of the town is built, even if a more beautiful story perhaps hides in its shadows.

Joelle Taylor’s language is anything but tightly controlled in The Night Alphabet: she’s taken all that glitters in her TS Eliot prize-winning poetry and flung it across the firmament of her first novel. Originally conceived as a collection of short stories, the narrative retains that feel, transporting the reader across time periods and geographies: spanning twentieth century Lancastrian mines, murderous incels and vigilante sex workers, and dystopian visions of warped futures. What ties the stories together is the narrator, a sixty-ish woman named Jones, in the twenty-third century visiting a 1996 vintage Hackney tattoo parlour. Jones wants to link all of her many tattoos together; as the needle travels across her skin, she tells the tale of each image.

It’s a potentially trite conceit but Taylor supercharges the format. Not only is Jones a raconteur but she reveals that these stories are ‘rememberings’ of lives she’s lived, falling through the ‘lemniscate’ of time. Her female tattooists, Cass and the teenage Small, are (understandably) sceptical at first and much of the intervening sections follow Jones’ mission to convince them – why she is so keen to achieve this is revealed by gradients.

Their gender is also important to the book’s core theme. In an antithesis to Pity, where the narrative is almost entirely devoid of female characters, The Night Alphabet is a novel about women. Or, as Small observes at the midway point, it’s about ‘things that happen to women because they’re women, that’s the crucial bit.’ Taylor also hails from the North, and The Night Alphabet’s first remembering delves down into the Lancashire coal fields of 1911. ‘To be born in mining country is to never quite be born,’ she writes. ‘We are always held in the belly of the earth.’ Like Pity, the text explores the mine’s legacy for the working-class community:

.
Brackley was one of a series of mines running out of Little Hulton, now part of Greater Manchester. You wouldn’t see the town until you tripped over it now. But back then we were all proud to be Lancastrians, hard workers, the spine.
.

There are parallels in how Taylor and McMillan conceptualise the coal itself; the mine whispers in both novels and both employ linguistic repetition. However, Taylor’s particular interest is the inequity of gender. After a father dies of the black lung, his widow and two daughters are left impoverished, prohibited by law from working the pit as women. The elder daughter, Winnifred, 13, dons her father’s kit to pass as a boy. ‘She walks taller as a man,’ observes her mother as Winnifred goes to the cage. It’s a neat illustration of the male desire to delimit the boundaries of women’s lives:

.
The law about forbidding girls underground is relatively new, in the scheme of the long life of the mine. Mam said there was a time men and women worked beside one another but someone didn’t like it so that were that. All it takes is a tilt of the top hat to change the world.
.

Mam says that though they think they are saving us, the fairer sex, what they really did was make it more difficult for each family to eat. This desire remains protean-like through the ages, sometimes blatant, sometimes insidious, and informs each of Jones’ rememberings, particularly with respect to rapacious male sexuality. The subsequent story follows a victim of sex trafficking and how she draws the night alphabet across her abusers’ backs. In this manner, she communicates with other captive girls and soon they’re passing ‘small symbols, new names, dates of birth, or ages’, even maps. The strand of magical realism amid the trauma recalls Gabriel García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, or the more recent stories of Carmen Maria Machado, and reappears throughout the rememberings: later, an incel finds he has become pregnant and the world’s women start to disappear.

An outstanding characteristic of The Night Alphabet is the luxurious, almost decadent, indulgence in language. The description is often wrapped in rich metaphor, from the weather – ‘a refugee sun that struggled to convince the clouds to let it in’ – to women of the future remembering the bodies they once had: ‘our wombs wandered, calling to each other in the dusk.’ The storytelling itself parallels with the more fantastical content, recounting events in evocative and ambiguous images: ‘A wound appears in the air, the body slowly growing around it… One gunshot in the centre of a girl and the whole town falls in after her.’ It’s an almost Joycean (the name of Jones’ father is Finnegan) glory in words that’s refreshing in the current literary landscape.

Anyone familiar with Taylor’s poetry, especially Cunto, will find a similar rhythm and queerness to the text: ‘We wrong faces, we butch elders, traditionally inked nautical stars on our inner wrists, wore them beneath watches, knowing they would always guide us home.’ It’s only occasionally that the fabulously wrought language stands in the way of the stories themselves. In a remembering about a gang of vigilante prostitutes, the acceleration of pace demands a less poetic tone. As a consequence, the metaphors make themselves more obvious to the reader. In part this is because the story holds a cinematic quality, with many high octane events happening in a short sequence of text, referenced by one of the characters themselves: ‘a fucking rape, a fucking fire, a fucking drug bust, a fucking acid attack, what the fuck next?’

But the quibble is rare in an impressive novel. Not only does Taylor display a voluminous range of imagination but there are moments that are very moving. In one of the most poignant stories, a woman’s wife fades from her life: ‘I was still holding her long after she had disappeared.’ A wealth of learning is integrated into the text, from the poetry of Anna Swir to Schrödinger, and a section on how incels fear they’ll never be released from the ‘grip around [their] necks’ of their mothers’ genitalia at birth, brings to mind the theories of Simone de Beauvoir. Writing is clearly a form of resistance for Taylor and she’s not afraid to dip into galvanising direct address:

.
Go on then, you wrong girls. Go on, you glorious mistakes. Push your faces into forbidden places, ask the wrong questions at the right time, be the girl leaving the dinner table early, the wife who is not yet ready for bed. Revolution is the smallest of things. A ‘no’ when a ‘yes’ is expected, a step slightly off a path into the thickness of the forest.
.

The sad afterthought, though, is that the resistance never ends. Men are the enemy throughout and in each of Taylor’s futures there’s no sense that the structure of patriarchy might change: no scope for a reconciliation between genders, or that any men might grow, understand or try to work with women to unlearn the bonds of oppression. The one hope lies in the solidarity of women. Perhaps in the culture of misogyny that Taylor portrays, with its sex trafficking, domestic violence, rape and murder, these are the only futures that feel realistic: an eternal fight for autonomy. In much the same way that Pity centres on the lives of modern men, The Night Alphabet is a witness to identity, and both novels are reflective of our polarised times.
.
.
.

Patrick Cash holds a Masters in Creative Writing from Oxford and spent three months as writer-in-residence at Shakespeare & Company, Paris. He’s had two plays published by Bloomsbury and written for Vice, Dazed and Attitude. His writing has been selected for the BBC Drama Room and The London Library’s Emerging Writers Programme 22/23. He’s currently working on a short story collection, Nightlife.

---

To discover more content exclusive to our print and digital editions, subscribe here to receive a copy of The London Magazine to your door every two months, while also enjoying full access to our extensive digital archive of essays, literary journalism, fiction and poetry.