Reviews
Carrie Jadud enjoys John Williams’s new novel, in which even noir isn’t what it used to be.
Temperance Town
John Williams
Bloomsbury
£9.99 Paperback
ISBN 0747570981
Cardiff isn’t what it used to be. Maybe it never was. Taking us through various areas of an ‘imaginary’ Cardiff and Glamorgan, from Port Talbot to Newport, John Williams’s Temperance Town portrays a city that cannot quite be pinned down, even by its lifelong residents.
The three loosely connected sections show how life in the postmodern, post-industrial city is played out for those of different temperaments. The first section consists of several stories following Mikey, a professional shoplifter whose congenital optimism struggles with approaching middle age. A short middle section takes the point of view of the Colonel, a retired footballer trying to make sense of generational differences and similarities. (Mikey and the Colonel will be familiar to readers of Williams’s Cardiff trilogy; they appear here in particularly sympathetic form.) A meatier final section tells the story of Deryck, a would-be respectable cop whose promotion lands him back in his native Butetown. All three men feel the ground shifting under their feet, giving rise to the comic elements of Mikey’s stories, the sentiment of the Colonel’s, and the more pronounced noir character of Deryck’s.
Mikey has never entirely grown up, but he finds himself unable to avoid the conclusion that ‘he was getting older all right and the world was changing’. He does his best to change with it, attempting, among other projects, to break into reality television and to put together the next Destiny’s Child. All the same, his former sources of confidence begin to desert him. His shoplifting skills suffer as his eyesight deteriorates, and this incorrigible ladies’ man finds, to his bewilderment, that the ladies are actually more interested in football these days. He also has to contend with the inevitability of becoming merely mortal in the eyes of his son.
As he arrives in Newport to visit his niece, the Colonel reflects that ‘he liked the town centre. Liked it better than Cardiff these days, to be honest. Thing was, it reminded him of the way Cardiff used to be – quieter, not so much money being chucked around.’ His nostalgia is short-lived, however, as he soon finds himself listening to his niece’s contemporary music, in which ‘the fellers rapping all had these full-on Newport accents and were going on about driving round Newport selling draw, and despite himself the Colonel couldn’t help laughing’. His attempts to remain ‘cool’ in the eyes of his niece while simultaneously acting the unaccustomed part of the responsible adult come under further strain when he discovers her to be in love with a man his own age.
Deryck, coming back home to ‘the last place on earth he wanted to be’, is ‘finding his memories a hindrance rather than a help’. The roads and landmarks have changed, and he associates the city so strongly with his inadequate father that he actively resists feeling at home there. He struggles to come to terms with the idea of a would-be modern city where everyone still knows him as ‘Cyril’s boy, Deryck, joined the police’. He goes to some lengths to prove his difference – buying a Volvo, joining the yacht club, leasing a ‘brand-new identikit upmarket waterfront development’ flat with no history. In this Welsh noir, however, history has a way of coming back to haunt its characters, and the darker recesses of the soul demand their due. A young woman who arrives in town with only a backpack turns out to be carrying substantially more emotional baggage and a history that connects her to Deryck’s investigation. Deryck must deal with the material detritus of his mother’s death, confront his father again, and decide whom to trust as he finds himself increasingly undermined by corruption within the Butetown police.
Williams’s book is valuable for its further contribution to the literary landscape. It deserves praise for taking as given the racial diversity of Cardiff, and Butetown in particular. Williams as usual concentrates on the underside of the city, the side that tends not to appear in ‘Cool Cymru’ features. The trappings of new prosperity mask those who are only just hanging on, such as Mikey himself and the people for whom he shoplifts at Christmas. And moral decay, as always, stretches across socio-economic barriers; Mikey caddies for local drug kingpin Kenny Ibadulla at the Rhondda Riviera Resort, and Deryck’s investigation of a smuggling operation takes him from the seedy dockside bars of Butetown to a Sully villa. Disillusionment runs deep, and yet Williams finds genuine glimmers of hope – slim but vital opportunities for reconciliation and redemption. As the products of Williams’s imagination begin to grow older and marginally wiser, hope begins to spring from disillusionment itself. Even noir isn’t what it used to be.
Page(s) 81-82
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