Review by Rob Spence
When I started reading this quirkily entertaining novel, I was reminded of a remarkable Turkish film I saw some years ago. The film, 10 to 11, written and directed by Pelin Esmer, is based on the true story of her uncle, who plays himself. He is an inveterate hoarder, filling his apartment with newspapers and knick-knacks, so that simply moving around becomes an impossibility. It was difficult to believe anyone would live like that. Then I saw the documentary made by Esmer some years earlier on the same subject, and if anything the fictionalised version toned down the reality.
Craig Jordan-Baker’s unnamed narrator introduces himself as a hoarder of documents in the first pages of the novel. He is a self-confessed loner, the butt of cruel pranks by the local kids. His council house is crammed with all kinds of printed material, so much so that he is threatened with eviction. But even if that were to happen, he would find some way to preserve the most precious part of his archive. As he says:
“And if it comes to it, and I’m forced to choose what to keep, then I’d choose to keep all the stuff about the Nacullians. Because I feel like I know them, and I’m writing this because I want you to know them too. And I’ve realised that if the council come and skip my archive, then they’ll be no way to tell you about what all this stuff I have means. And of course, then they’ll be no one to tell you about the Nacullians either.”
The reader is about to learn a great deal about the Nacullians, but this passage illustrates Jordan-Baker’s approach very well. The chatty, informal address to the reader, the sense that we are being buttonholed by someone with a fund of anecdotes, is maintained throughout. Having said that, much of what follows is written in a fairly standard third-person style, though there are frequent interventions from our narrator, often discussing what to reveal or how to describe a particular event.
At the centre of the novel are the Nacullians, a Northern Irish Catholic family we first meet in the 1950s when the young son is horrifically wounded in a sectarian revenge attack, having been discovered in flagrante with a Protestant girl. The episode concludes with his escape to England where he builds a new life. I say “episode”, because the novel progresses through a sequence of vignettes dealing with various members of the family over a timespan of seventy years. Occasionally, one of the narrator’s documents carries the tale, but mostly we are led through the history of the family through set-piece scenes which illustrate their developing lives in London and Southampton, and the lives of peripheral characters whose experience intersects with one Nacullian or another.
Jordan-Baker’s predominant tone is, despite some grim material, lightly sardonic. He is precise in his observations, very carefully locating the zeitgeist as we move from the fifties to the present day. The story is enlivened by a series of recurring motifs and phrases which help the disparate strands to cohere. This is an entertaining, often laugh-inducing novel, which I enjoyed reading at a gallop.
Rob Spence’s home on the web is at robspence.org.uk
Craig Jordan-Baker, Brick Dust ( époque press, 2025) ISBN 978-1-0687-162-3-2, 192pp., paperback
BUY at Blackwell’s via our affiliate link (free UK+ P&P)
