BOOKS & ARTS
is a writer well settled into his consider-
able talent, much of which is expressed in
his astonishing ability to downshift from
an unsentimental and lyrical evocation of
the natural world to the seamy and sordid
rendering of the basest of human inter-
actions. It’s like hearing Ted Hughes
declaim one of his poems, only for him to
follow up by describing his favourite videos
on Pornhub. No, worse, it’s like that, but in
a Wetherspoon’s.
Griffiths comes out of the tradition
of Bukowski and Barry and Kelman and
Welsh, a writer actively hostile to bien pen-
sants readers, a writer happy to goad you to
the brink of revulsion. Sitting on a hot train,
Adam sucks down ‘the sour cheap Scotch
in the vegetable-soup lager’ he has boughtfrom the unrefrigerated trolley and reflects
on the alcoholic’s ability to suppress the gag
reflex. It is a skill Griffiths’s readers would
be well advised to learn: the use of the word
‘gristle’ in a description of what is surely the
most dispiriting threesome evoked in liter-
ature will never cease to haunt. Another
scene, featuring a corpse and crabs, is not
going anywhere either.
This is not just épater les bourgeois. The
politics of the novel run naked and raw.
Broken Ghost is about what seeps out at
the periphery when the centre is rotten, a
novel that seethes with anger at austerity
and Brexit and the way those at the edge of
society are discarded and destroyed, even at
the moment of their yearning for something
more. At its best, it is a novel that intoxi-
cates. But you had better be able to handle
the hangover.A gruesome threesome
Duncan White
Broken Ghost
by Niall Griffiths
Cape, £16.99,pp. 356
Broken Ghost begins in the aftermath of
a rave on the shores of a mountain lake
above Aberystwyth, with three partygoers
gathered in the dawn light, waiting for one
last buzz off a tab of ecstasy. At that moment
a strange glow appears in the morning air, in
the middle of which seems to be a shadow
in the shape of a woman. A hallucination?
Not if all three are seeing the same thing.
They barely know each other, but they walk
away from that precipice changed by their
shared vision.
And change is what they need: Adam
is a recovering addict trying to piece his
life back together; Emma is a single moth-
er living hand to mouth; Cowley is broke
and trapped in a cycle of violence by the
traumas in his past. In the days after see-
ing the woman-in-the-glow, all three feel an
unexpected calm and fortitude. They
become attentive to the natural world
around them, finding relief from everyday
pressures in moments of fleeting transcend-
ence. This, though, is not some pastel-toned
New Age parable; it’s a Niall Griffiths
novel, and therefore, with pilgrims flocking
to the site of the vision and Wales gripped
by a heatwave, everything falls apart in an
orgy of booze, drugs, violence and magnifi-
cently tawdry sex.
This is Griffiths’s eighth novel and he
depression without resorting to any hack-
neyed black dogs. Some of the passages
on the symptoms themselves are beautiful
and accurate: he tells us about the ‘water
torture of negative thoughts’. He manag-
es, as narrator, to appear to be regarding
his own behaviour from afar, which doc-
tors would call dissociation and explain as
another common symptom of illnesses that
follow trauma and abuse.
He also mocks some of the things you
end up doing in counselling, which many of
us will recognise. Attempting mindfulness
means he takes so long to sit down that his
cup of tea goes cold. His therapist tells him
to have a go at seeing household chores as
valuable achievements. ‘I think I twitched
my nose. This was what I was paying for?
Actually, it was the NHS, so I wasn’t, but
someone must have been. It sounded insult-
ingly basic.’ The trouble is, he then does
try it and is ‘dismayed to discover it had
a huge effect’.
This memoir too has a huge effect and
deserves all the gasping endorsements on
its bright cover. There isn’t another book
like this: it stands out among the grey.
A strange glow appears in the dawn
sky, in the middle of which seems to be
a shadow in the shape of a womanSympathy for
Monsieur Bovary
Greg Garrett
Fabulous Monsters:
Dracula, Alice, Superman,
and Other Literary Friends
by Alberto Manguel
Yale, £14.99, pp. 229Whether we see the primary cause as being
postmodernism (for decades we’ve been
told that our master narratives no longer
connect us to each other) or cultural frag-
mentation (apart from worldwide phenom-
ena such as Game of Thrones and the World
Cup, we possess few shared encounters), the
intellectual consensus is that we don’t talk
meaningfully to each other because we lack
communal stories. Leavers and Remain-
ers, Trumpers and Never Trumpers seem
to read the same experiences in entirely
different ways.
This failure to communicate is what
makes Alberto Manguel’s Fabulous Mon-
sters such a charming and essential book.
As a result of a lifetime of reading, he
argues that as divided as we may be about
the universality of shared stories (the Ben-
net sisters, he says, never spoke to him,
while Pride and Prejudice is one of my read-
every-year books), our culture and our his-
tory are indeed marked by a multitude of
characters who can still help explain us to
ourselves and to each other.
Manguel calls Dracula an ‘essential mon-
ster’, and argues, in smart, funny short essays,
that all the figures about whom he writes
represent something essential about human
experience. In a wide-ranging exploration
of literature, religion, myth and pop culture,
he delves into what 40 of these characters
might deliver to us, how they might limn
those universal human themes that William
Faulkner spoke about in his Nobel Prize
acceptance speech.
It takes a certain amount of romantic lit-
erary optimism to believe that these char-
acters — some of them more than 2,000
years old — might continue to speak to our
wired world; but Manguel convinces us that
they could help heal our fractured public
and intellectual life. Fabulous Monsters is
a paean to the value of literature, an affec-
tionate literary memoir in tiny bites, and
a close critical and cultural reading of signifi-
cant stories worthy of our attention.
In the process, Manguel finds the kernel
interest in many canonical figures, including
a number I’ve overlooked. His sympathetic
embrace of Monsieur Bovary made me think
about that character in an entirely new light
(and about all of us who have been overshad-
owed by a more photogenic partner). I’ve
rarely considered Queen Gertrude from the
standpoint of her story, but Manguel’s analy-‘The almost painful sense of exquisite placement,
the putting of one stone upon another, the
joining, the connecting, the closure of space, the
sense of containment, the ancient heaviness of
baked clay, the rhythm of toil, warm pride in
my aching back — to mention just a few of the
thoughts imputed to me.’