In This Block There Lives a Slag...: And Other Yorkshire Fables Book

Following the success of his remarkable first novel, Swimmer, Bill Broady's In this Block There Lives A Slag ... is an equally remarkable collection of short stories. In fact, Broady presents his readers with a series of "Bradford Fables" (to borrow the subtitle of the book), a world as whimsical as it is credible, as grotesque as it is comic. Through each of the 12 tales included here, Broady's narrators are distinctive, original, their voices taking us into the everyday mayhem of their lives with the economy and verve that is the hallmark of Broady's writing. Take "Wrestling Jacob", the fable which opens the collection with a quotation from St Paul: "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities." In this case, however, the narrator is involved in "freestyle grappling with a Swaledale ram". Jacob, "metasheep, laughing wrestler", is the hero of this peculiar but moving story set in the valleys. By contrast, "In This Block There Lives a Slag" takes us to a Bradford Council Estate, to pubs and the dole queue, to "slags" and walls daubed with grafitti. The story exemplifies the range of Broady's writing from its quasi-surreal conclusion to its bleak vision of lives lived out on the margins--a vision which comes through in his powerful description of the "slags" and their babies "thin and silent, with frightened eyes". They hated children, I'd noticed, but loved babies ... And then the creatures would begin to speak, using words they'd never taught them, asking questions they couldn't answer. Only blows would shut them up and then not even blows would make them speak again. Running through this collection, the pain of such observation is offset, sometimes even transformed, by the risk and pleasure that Broady is prepared to take in words--risk and pleasure that make him a unique voice in contemporary fiction. --Vicky LebeauRead More