This splendid debut novel from Steven Alcock is a coming of age and coming out story woven into the hot summer and horrible happenings of the backdrop of the Yorkshire Ripper murders is far more appealing than its premise would suggest. With each chapter opening with one of the Rippers victims and a first person narrative voice filled with working class Northern grit, inflection and slang it’s a an interesting read as well as a gripping one.
‘The milkman found her. On Prince Philip Playing Fields. He crossed the dew-soaked grass toward what he took to be a bundle of clothes, but then he came across a discarded shoe, and then t’ mutilated body. her name wor Wilma McCann.’
That’s the voice of Ricky, our joyful protagonist with who we cartwheel through his early gay fumbling and life in the suffocating heat of that 70’s summer and the claustrophobic council estates that he’s living and working on. With sexual opportunity and emotional development wrestled from the smallest chance meeting. Alcock manages to be both evocative and disturbing on occasion and although the murders are a kind of hideous vivid 70’s wallpaper; all pervading, they are never centre stage, just the affects they have on people and the growing feeling of being under siege and the closing of the world against strangers, terrible speculation and freedom.
Ricky is a charming rogue and Alcock paints a vivid charming picture of this time of huge social change and nails the feeling of this time of roasting hot summers, royal jubilee, stalking terror and crates of pop. Set where the first of the Rippers victims were found in the Harehills suburb of Leeds, Alcock vividly recreates the fear and panic of the Yorkshire communities. The family connections are wonderfully funny and then take a hard tack to allow some touching sentiment and working class compassion to shine out of this book. There plenty of story here too, all told from Ricky’s relentlessly optimistic practical point of view and on occasion its bluntness shocks and jerks us into another space altogether.
Ricky’s bold assured steps out into gay life, paralleled by the changing music scene of punk, and the social disjoined politics of the far right butting up against the nascent projection of Gay Power and LGBT politics is a seriously convincing portrait of the acceptance and development of a man on the verge of change.
It’s also funny, touching and made me smile time and time again, although not Northern my own childhood mirrored Ricky’s, the pop, the dusty playing fields, the music and plastic technology, the distracted hard boiled old women and their endless, endless tea. Alcock has written that most lovely of books, a trip down memory lane for those that grew up in the 70’s and a wonderfully spot-on working class positive coming out story of the most precious kind, authentic, self-defined and rough, but veined with hope. Authenticaly British too.
It’s refreshing to read a book with a happy comfortably well-adjusted gay character who’s also working class and intelligent, likes his life and enjoys his sex. (Perhaps being riven with doubt, guilt and shame is a middle class indulgence). I enjoyed the book a lot and would recommend it for some light summer reading, it’s the prefect book to take away, interesting, evocative and funny. The Leeds dialect it’s written in may be a fun exercise for an author but it started to grind on me after a while, it didn’t develop or adapt to any gay slang and seemed a little too ‘this is 70’s northern’ on occasion, however a small criticism for a great big wonderful first book.
Out now £14.99
From all good bookshops or from the publisher’s website here: