We are beautiful pieces of meat by Colwill Brown Review: you will not read anything else like this year | Fiction

SortSometimes you have to leave a place before you can write it, and Colwill Brown’s Doncaster from the late 90s to 2015 is that place. This novel of lacerating and exhilarating debut, written almost entirely in the dialect of South Yorkshire, lasts almost 20 years in the life of its protagonists Kel, Shaz and Rach, from the Spice Girls to The Drug Spice. He manages to be both rowdy and desolate, who go alive and who decorate life, familiar and yet completely original. It seems essential. You will probably not read anything else like this year.

“Remember when we thought that Donny Wut Whole World? Before knowing that we were in the North, when we seemed to be central, when we sculpted the countries outside the farmers’ fields, by bicycle through the high rapese, the cut tracks … ask anyone who is not north, they will know Donny as a joke for a joke or place have changed the trains once in London.” The novel begins as a choir, meditation and retrospective, with unripe force. Each chapter transmits a separate, non -linear accident, which involves intensely. Sometimes a “plural omniscient” we “is used; more often the second and first -person narratives pour from one of the trio. In a chapter the names of the girls have changed in the characters who play in a school production of Romeo and Giulietta, without identifying who is who.

It is impossible to know where these stories will lead, and it is what makes the book fresh and exciting; Just like occasionally it is not clear who is speaking. Where does the group ends and individual autonomy starts? A moment the three are faithful to death, a close -knit band; The next fractured, angry and isolated. Brown naked as it is to cultivate a girl in the working class in a small northern English city who saw decades pass with little notion of “leveling”.

We meet for the first time the girls at 15, lined up to enter a disco in nearby Sheffield. It is 2002. Later, we learn that they have had clubing since the age of 11, the so -called diaper nights in their local in Donny. Sheffield is the great evening outside and they dressed accordingly: “We three trampled in the doors with the stripper heels … We went back, they met, ready for the rave of our life”.

At 6 in the morning, with the aftermath of the hangover (“Shaz had a little luggage of pills … the pills slipped the throat along us”), the three shake the rate for the 20 miles of return to Doncaster hiding in a bath by train. It is here that the implicit hierarchy that marks their bond becomes clear: Rach is the best, with a traditional family, a house, a car; Kel and Shaz come from single -parent houses, scraping. Kel never met his father; Shaz is saddened by his premature death. Shaz lives at the end of the “most rough” city. Rach and Kel are firmly ready to go out, via, at the university. For Shaz, the options are closer. Brown, who now lives in the United States, clearly writes about the lack of dignity for those trapped forever in the economy of concerts or worse. These are these thin differences and the terrible secret one of the girls taken from the others, who will determine their life choices and the compelling course of the novel.

Brown’s language is poetic and rhythmic, physical and distinct; Rarely it goes apart one or two very non -not Donny Americanisms. Misoginia is rooted by the OFF and ugly. In the first chapter, Victory, a sadistic teacher of male sport causes girls to play the boys to football in a snowstorm; This is not a game, rather a battle, ancient and bloody. The sense of danger and conflict rages in everything: Kel’s first guy calls her “munter”; At the center of the book is a serious sexual aggression. It is a heavy reading, yet in Brown’s hands the material turns in some way lighter. While the novel ends ambiguously, it is also a reminder that in that longtime football match, the girls’ team triumphed: “We said, fuck!”