The Swansea University Dylan Thomas Award has now been running since 2006. It honours young writers, so entering writers must be 39 or under (the age Dylan Thomas died). This year’s shortlist will be announced on March 20th, with the prize being awarded on May 15th.
Pity by Andrew McMillan
Review by Lix Broomfield
As Simon walked back across to his phone, he remembered the time he’d left his mobile in the temporary classroom where they were taught history in secondary school; someone had picked it up and read out the text messages he’d been sending to another boy. He’d refused to go to the next lesson. He’d had to tell a teacher he was gay. The teacher paused momentarily, looked up to the Styrofoam ceiling tiles, and then whispered ‘fuck Thatcher’ before turning back to reassure him as he sobbed. Simon still remembered that, it came back to him every so often, when the wheel of memory dredged it up and brought it into the light and then sunk it down inside of him.
Set in Barnsley, the town the mentioned in the Acknowledgements in relation to McMillan’s grandmother, to whom it’s dedicated, this book sets out to record ordinary lives in an ordinary town. It charts a week or so in the life of the town, a family within that town, the miners who came before them and the academics who come to study them, hopping around in time to show all facets of the town and people’s lives.
Alex and Brian are brothers who’ve both worked in the local mine, following their father. We open as Alex starts to come of age and experience a sexual awakening, and we’re subtly led to see what’s happening in his life and later find out how that’s fallen out as he grows older. Alex’s son Simon, one of the two hearts of the book as I read it, is negotiating a new relationship with Ryan, who is a security guard and seemingly less secure in his identity than Simon. He certainly doesn’t like it when he comes to see Simon’s drag show and Simon doesn’t remove all his makeup before they travel home.
Simon also works in a call centre and has an online sex work side hustle (it’s worth noting that this is quite an explicit book; however nothing is gratuitous and the scenes are written with great care and precision). But his drag work forms a thread through the book, especially as he builds up to moving away from his standard character to a portrayal of Margaret Thatcher. Meanwhile, Uncle Brian is somewhat confusedly attending drop-in sessions run by a group of academics (and a poet with a handful of post-it notes who McMillan suggested might be his Alfred Hitchcock-style cameo appearance) who want to know about the layers of his experience of his town, while Ryan and then some unknown viewers watch the shopping centre on CCTV and Simon’s films online. All of these sections are interspersed with passages taking us through miners’ lives – earlier miners, it turns out, of the grandfather’s generation, with repeated mornings, each slightly different, the trip in the cage, the coal face.
So the sections, in different type faces, revolve around each other: Simon, Ryan, Brian, sometimes Alex, the viewers, the academics. There are moments of wry laughter at the academics and their academic code, their bubble of acceptance of regional dialect pricked by Brian’s practicality, and quiet appreciation of the technical brilliance of the writing: while I can’t give too much away, one scene seen on a CCTV echoes many points of one of Simon’s videos, telling us something important about the way we see people and identity through a screen. The culminating scene for Simon’s Thatcher drag story is seen partially, through a screen; the culminating scene for his grandfather is so very there.
All this is packed into just 171 pages: a spare and careful book, so well-crafted but with an emotional punch.
Liz Dexter came of (political) age during the Miners’ Strike and sent her pocket money to the miners (how? That is lost in the mists of time). She blogs about reading, running and working from home at https://www.librofulltime.wordpress.com.
Andrew McMillan, Pity (Canongate, 2024). 978-1838858957, 176 pp., hardback.
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The Coin by Yasmin Zaher
Review by Laura Tisdall
Yasmin Zaher’s debut The Coin thoroughly smashes any expectations about what fiction written by a Palestinian woman about a Palestinian woman should look like. Its unnamed narrator is wealthy, young and aimless in New York, obsessed with her personal hygiene and increasingly trying out experimental pedagogy with the young teenage boys she teaches. What starts as ‘free lessons’, where she allows the boys to do what they like, morphs until they become guinea pigs for her own literary and political tastes. On one occasion, she takes them to see a radical poetry reading in New Jersey: ‘
After the dagger poems, I called for a head count.
The Coin is one of those novels where the blurb promises something that doesn’t turn up until halfway through the book and doesn’t end up being that important, but the publisher had to say something about what happens. In this case, it’s the focus on the narrator getting involved in a scheme to resell Birkin bags, which she does do, but it lasts about twenty pages.
The writing is sharp, and I particularly liked Zaher’s wry observations on beauty routines:
Two thousand years of snail cream and you will see a woman’s brain through her face; I even used a hand mirror for better views, the type women use to be stunned by their vaginas.
We see her narrator’s conflicted relationship with race as she continually tans to look more visibly Other, then loofahs off the dead skin. And while I struggled to connect with the first three-quarters of the book, I thought Zaher showcased her protagonist’s alienation and dispossession cleverly in the surreal final section, which reaches beyond the unravelling woman trope to become something rawer. While this wasn’t exactly my kind of thing, I’d press it into the hands of anybody who loves Ottessa Moshfegh, especially My Year of Rest and Relaxation.
Laura’s blog can be found here.
Yazmin Zaher, The Coin (Footnote Press, 2024). 978-1804441374, 340pp, hardback.
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