Wheatley's tale of Teeside builders is dark and tightly wound
Pigeonholes are best kept for pigeons, especially when it comes to the debate surrounding the English novel and whether it has become too middle-class. If there is a trend towards the well-to-do middle ground, James Wheatley bucks it. His characters are mostly Teesside builders, driving from their small depressed town to work on barn conversions in the more affluent countryside, their culture tightly focused on beer. Jim's a builder, too – or, more accurately, a builder's labourer – but only because he missed out on the chance to do better for himself when a teenage confrontation went desperately wrong and he ended up in prison. As a consequence of this and other hard blows, Jim comes at his life obliquely. The people he can still call friends are very few; some of them are not the finest. Brickie Barry is an unreconstructed boor, a drunken racist with a sideline in "paedo-hunting". What hope, then, for the eponymous Joe, a simple man who joyously calls the things he likes "magnificent" and can't read danger signs? A dark, angry novel, tightly wound. Jane Housham
via Books: Fiction | guardian.co.uk
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