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Shane Connaughton: captures the manners of non-genteel Camden |
The madness of the annoyed
Shane Connaughton’s novel casts a sharp eye on north London, writes Illtyd Harrington
Big Parts. By Shane Connaughton.
Muswell Press
TIME was when anguished young men as well as fragrant but fraught blue-stockinged maidens beat a path to literary Hampstead and Highgate.
The men in small, cheap bedsitters about to write the novel of the century; the young women with a vision of being the second Virginia Woolf.
Most entered the ranks of the quickly forgotten. Not so Mr Connaughton, who has planted himself in the middle of non-genteel Camden. He has written a very funny book, Big Parts, keenly observed and literally a compassionate account of a derelict house and its eight tenants.
The New Building Housing Trust, the landlord, wants to decant them to the distant borders of Camden.
At the top of the house is Freddie Parts-Rinser, showman and variety artist with his long-time “show business assistant” Violet. She has psychotic tendencies, curbed only by a secure chair and shackles designed by Freddie. Under them is Wally, a black Londoner addicted to pills.
Then there’s Phil and Rosa Gable and then our guide – unemployed with his wife an executive officer in the Whitehall civil service. She is Staffordshire county born – horses, land and father with money.
Steadily, this ragged army marshal their forces against tight-lipped Miss Chats and her adjutant – Reg Shand, the strong arm of the Trust. The tenants’ rearguard action against these two – the most callous of bureaucrats – is rich comedy. It is harsh reality but they are not overwhelmed by the ranks of the po-faced.
Connaughton, like Tom Sharpe, catches the madness of the annoyed. They will not be pushed around.
Written in a stream of consciousness mode, it leads top moments of hilarious disarray – Freddie’s variety act The Dancing Water Exhibition, performed in the local Gospel Church Hall; a horse-drawn hearse stampeding up Camden High Street, frightened by an exploding pizza box thrown by Filthy Will who reacts violently on finding it empty.
All leads to Freddie’s plan for religious regeneration. Violet takes off her usual Salvation Army Uniform and poses as the Virgin Mary. With her mysteriously pregnant on the back of Dickie Grimes’s old lorry, they set off to galvanise what’s left of moral Camden.
Dickie, an 86-year-old rascal is one of the old population of Camden. I enjoy, too Miss Rudge who defiantly organises all-night music parties in a commandeered flat for young West Indian men with girlfriends and an ample supply of substances.
Connaughton has captured the mode and manners at the heart of Camden and ultimately the sadness and hope of a community.
He is a fine writer and observer bathed in humanity and love.
I ran into a friend – a member of the Academy of Cinematic Arts – a couple of weeks ago who reminded me that Connaughton had almost won an Academy Award for his film script of My Left Foot: the Story of Christy Brown (played by Daniel Day Lewis) – a paraplegic whose mother taught him to paint, using his feet.
In Big Parts there are laughs and deep sighs. They’re all driven from this latter-day Eden into a foreign country outside the borough.
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