Before the Fire by Sarah Butler is out today in paperback on picador
This is a book of emotional austerity. About the gaps and spaces of late adolescence. “a boy who is almost but not quite a man” It is the mastery of Butler’s prose which elevates the tribulations of a north Manchester “NEET” and paints his emotional life with a clarity and heart-rending precision quite at odds with the stuttering and stultified protagonist. Named Stick by his friend Mac he is terrified of “getting stuck” and it is in the — totally believable — late adolescent intensity of this friendship with his extrovert partner in crime that he finally feels understood.
The pair are in total agreement that they need to get out of Manchester for their lives to begin.
Stick is suffocated by his feelings and a short life of exquisite tragedies, his sister’s death and the unravelling of his family is remorselessly drawn. Butler’s tight prose renders the riots of 2011 not just as rational but begs the question of why the alien ”new cathedral” (squares) of conspicuous consumption in the regenerated centre of Manchester aren’t all regularly razed to the ground by those they serve to exclude.
This is not the narrative of the place branding agencies drunk on northern powerhouse rhetoric, it is the far grimmer and more visceral reality of an abandoned, and stubbornly unglam axis to the regenerated city centre where government cuts have decimated phalanx of street-level bureaucrats who palliate the rump north of this conurbation whilst investment leeches southwards to the airport city and corridors linking the already-haves with the knowledge economy opportunities.
The novel is choked with the overwhelming sense of Stick’s awkwardness, as he struggles for articulation and quite literally to find his voice…
“his voice sounded thin. He had another go, lowering his chin and trying to boom the way Mac did”
He is tightly wound and tense from the start,
“Stick wasn’t good in crowded spaces, and it was hot enough to make anyone queasy. He finished his drink and ordered another, then stood with one elbow on the bar and imagined the place on fire”
However, this is presented as a sensible self-preservation strategy given the colourwash of griefs and the battalions of sorrows that have beset his young life. That so much tragedy is normalised shows a “nasty, brutish and short” expectation from his world. Life is all-too casually extinguished — in the case of the mysterious electrical fire claiming his sister’s life 10 years before , blowing apart his family and precipitating the decline of his mum into crippling anxiety which Stick has been managing since. There are overtones here of Paul Abbott’s Shameless, which showed graphically and as grotesques the range of mental health problems played out on another north Manchester estate. The novel, however is tragic and not comic as it describes an epidemic of sorrow getting washed down in booze and lit up in weed.
“He thought of his dad, those weeks after Sophie, slumped on the sofa with dead eyes — beer cans all over the carpet. He thought of Mac lifting a bottle of red square to his lips, laughing and coughing as it burnt its way down”
“He meant would he end up getting stuck like his mum because of Mac, because he couldn’t get over him dying. Would he get stuck? He wanted to ask her how you got over someone dying without them just disappearing into nothing”
There are sharp distinctions drawn, acutely felt between the relative class and status positions of Stick and those from the outside world, most obviously in the character of his step mum Jen
“You and your snobby house and your snobby pizzas and Sunday lunches and holiday’s in fucking France, the lot of you looking down on me”
But also in reference with to the transformative possibilities of outsiders, from where there are hopes of comfort and support, and people who are kind to stick — the sanctuary of J’s house in Cheetham Hill, to his nan’s new age experimentations with “crazy alan”, whose search for meaning seems so laughable to a sceptical stick, to the “anger management woman”
“When he was about fifteen Stick had been sent to anger management classes. They were run by a woman with gym-toned arms, green eyes, and a posh voice”
There is an echo here of The Casual Vacancy the futility of JK Rowling’s professionals diligently applying elastoplasts to gaping wounds with which they sympathise but cannot identify. Stick’s anger, managed and treated, is rooted in quotidian tragedy and despair and these feelings of dislocation and alienation underscore him as a Raskolnikov, a Hugo Barine, a Mersault and conjures the same existential questions posed by Matthieu Kassowitz in La Haine where the boys from the Parisien banlieue are driven inexorably towards their moment of choice. So then, our manc prince of Denmark in a dead boy’s trainers is driven relentlessly drives towards weighing options for vengeance or inaction in the face of the chaos of the strangeness of the night time Arndale on the night of the riots where, face to face with Owen Lee, putative murderer (and proven looter) he chooses not to take his revenge and in this moment the anger management woman “a lifetime ago” is in his thoughts as he walks away from revenge and towards love, joining J.
This intervention had initially been presented derisively as a complete waste of time but in a rare glimmer of hope in the bleakness Butler returns to these lessons it the story’s climax so we are to assume that she intends us to believe that investing in the mental health of children can be connected with better societal outcomes? If so this hopefulness is markedly at odds with the premise of the book, that the superficial hard edges of the regeneration of the city centre has not trickled down into the peripheral housing estates, and worse that the local economic development strategies of the ‘new economy’ are serving to heighten inequalities and sharpen class distinctions.
Because, despite of being front and centre within the novel Stick is not its central character. Of all the characters there is one who stands out who we understand to have suffered, to have struggled and to have changed, perhaps for the better… And that character is Manchester itself in all its paradoxical “original:modern” regenerating glory. Butler has deep misgivings about the aesthetics and politics of city, poster-child for a specific type of regeneration and economic development — dismissed by Owen Hatherly as “pseudomodernist”and utterly recognisable to those attuned to the visual codes of New labour’s urban renaissance. There are many references in the novel to the superficiality of these processes . Repeatedly Butler draws distinctions between the surfaces and “non-spaces” of the city centre with the more familiar spaces of the northern housing estates
“looking out over the estate towards the jagged buildings of the city centre”
The jaggedness reminds me of conversations in Ancoats as the Beetham Tower pierced the skyline a few years back — penetrating the open space with its blocky swagger. And here the role of urban splash in the titivation of the “three sisters” towerblocks, cladded and branded and flipped for a profit to a new demographic of urban dwellers
“up the hill to his left were the three tower blocks that had got fancied up a few years back.
Down where he was: barbed wire, security shutters, window mesh”
Stick’s territory, then, is marked out as somewhere along the Rochdale Road close to but not in the absurdly hyperbolic “Millenium community” of New Islington.
“’they did my estate up’ he said ‘started in the year I was born’… ‘My mum reckons its better, I reckon they should knock it down’”
The aesthetic of the reworked central business district is also a canvas for the story…
“Harvey Nichols was in the posh bit of town — by the tarted up Corn Exchange with the sloped concrete benches and a dug-out stream of water, the whole place full of pale grey stone and massive glass windows”… ”they’re not nice in here”
The awful pathos of a grieving woman compelled to spend money she doesn’t have on a designer dress for her son’s funeral is one of the bleakest sections of the book. But it serves to emphasise that town is a hostile and alienating place for Stick. The “tarting up” of the city centre does not extend to extending a welcome to this odd couple on their sad mission.
In contrast, the riots, according to the relentless dynamic of the book feel inevitable. Feel overdue even, in the face of injustices, griefs and indignities, of slights.
So if it isn’t yet clear I think that this is a really important novel about Manchester. It should be given out in the shiny tourist office, should be compulsory reading before casting a vote for the metro mayor, should be on the counter in Primark. It is a warning that the symbolic violence of regeneration in Manchester sets the scene for a reckoning from those who do not share in it’s prosperity.
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