WINNER of THE 2013 GORDON BURN PRIZE. ‘Brilliant.’ The Guardian.’ PIG IRON is the story of a traveller who hasn’t travelled; a young man fighting for his surname and his very survival. They knew of the Wisdoms. Everyone did. Travellers and country folk alike. Some said they’d been cursed with the wickedness since the days of Cromwell. Said it had made them all crooked and wiley, and they weren’t … weren’t to be trusted. Said they had the violence running through those generations like a coal seem in the northern soil. Some born daft, some born sneaky, but all of them surly and tough as pig iron.
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This is a brutal, beautiful book, squalid and sublime. Benjamin Myers lifts a stone off the world and finds underneath everything that is rancid and squirming – humanity decomposing to mush – but also a hard shining diamond of resilience which will not be crushed or dulled or contaminated by the surrounding cess.
John-John is a young man recently released from prison. Haling from the travelling community but ostracised by it, he has nowhere to go, neither family nor friends, and he sets about rebuilding a life on his own. Dumped at a grotty flat in a run-down area of town, John-John gets himself a job and buys the meagre necessaries of life. He is independent, determined, guided by a clear personal compass of right and wrong. His spirit and his moral integrity shine like beacons amid the deprivation of the estate, the drugged-up and boozed-up, the dealers and louts and layabouts and thieves. There were times when John-John’s world seemed so heartless, sordid and bleak that I had to put the book to one side. It seemed impossible to me that he could survive, that he wouldn’t fall into the abyss of the darkest of dark sides.
John-John isn’t well educated although he has taken every opportunity for self-improvement that HM prison has afforded. He has been dragged up, beaten up and banged up. Life has not treated him well. And yet he is good; good with a resolute inner core of decency. And he is likeable. His character and his situation have shades of Billy in A Kestrel for a Knave and also of David Copperfield. They are all innocents abroad in a world which is uncaring and cruel. But they are not infected by it; indeed they make the utter hopelessness bearable.
Intertwined with John-John’s story is his mother’s, told in the second person, addressed to John-John (an unusual and difficult approach but consummately pulled off here) the reader discovers John-John’s story; his bare-knuckle-fighter father, his abused mother, John-John’s own place in the dysfunctional Wisdom family.
The story is set in the north-east of England, presenting an anachronism of extreme poverty in all its forms – economic, emotional, urban, moral – and breath-taking beauty. The countryside is simply splendid; a vast canvas of moors and hills, pastoral farmland, wild coast. All this Benjamin Myers portrays through the eyes of his protagonist in language which is soaring, apposite, cringingly vivid. He uses local dialect. Some readers might struggle at first with the idiom but be patient. The voices of John-John and his mother are authentic. They resonate. They imbue the text and the story with blistering, toe-curling truth.
It’s a story that drags you into a world all too readily prejudged and forces you to look at life another way. The character of John-John Wisdom is sympathetic, deep, dignified and endearing, even when he’s pounding another man to a pulp.
It’s hard and brutal and contains several graphic scenes of violence or cruelty, but these are not gratuitous. Shocking, yes, but crucial to both storyline and character. There are also tender moments, where we see the hope and love creeping through the cracks in both toughened facades.
The split narrative is an intelligent device which compounds one of the novel’s themes, that of the inescapability of the past. The second narrator, whom I won’t name for fear of spoilers, gradually reveals what happened in the past. There is a tragic fatalism in this for the reader, as we know how it ends up. Or think we do. Whereas John-John’s story is just beginning, and we’re willing him to sidestep all the traps.
The weaving of the two stories to the climax is perfectly done, and although horrifying, feels right and strangely satisfying. It explains a lot. The final image is one of optimism, albeit tinged with inescapable despair.
The author uses a rich vernacular for both the voices, which on the whole, works well. The accent and localised expressions take a while to get used to, but are not overdone.
Overall, this is not an easy read but it’s fascinating, well-constructed, intelligently written and absolutely worth the effort.