Sheepshagger
Niall Griffiths
Jonathan Cape, £10, 264pp
Buy it at a discount at BOL
Niall Griffiths earned the dubious honorific "the Welsh Irvine Welsh" for the stunning vernacular monologues and drug-taking drifters of his debut, Grits , now out in paperback. Though his project bears linguistic and political similarities, that novel was much more than Trainspotting set in Aberystwyth: layer by layer, using the different voices and perceptual shifts of its main characters, it built an utterly convincing world, founded upon a mythic yet exact comprehension of the Welsh landscape.
Set in the same environs and revisiting from a darker perspective some of the characters and events of Grits , Sheepshagger adds another layer to the Griffiths universe. It was Essex boy Malcolm in Grits who gave us our first glimpse of its anti-hero, Ianto: "im from tha mountains wiv tha buck-teeth an tha inbred drool an tha manic giggle . . . Fuckin Deliverance ain't in it, man". Here he is still "the world's best inbred backwoods feeb psycho mong"; a near-mute idiot savant with a mystical connection to nature who divides his time between roaming the mountains of his childhood and accepting whatever drink or drug is offered by his circle of half- teasing, half-accepting friends.
Enigmatic, impassive, gnarled with lust and inarticulate longings, he tags along with them to pub, squat and rave. "The Irish kill each other, the Scots kill emselves, an us, well, all we do is kill time . . ." sighs one character during a post-rave comedown. As inchoate fury at the repossession of his home as a holiday cottage ferments inside Ianto along with the inner demons given shape and licence by drugs, the gang's tolerance of his increasing oddities sustains and ultimately destroys him.
The story of Ianto's downfall unfolds in three contrasting strands: a stoned post-mortem conversation between the friends who failed to see his latent violence, burnished moments of sublimity and horror from his childhood, and flashbacks to the stations on the path to his bloody end. Griffiths expertly orchestrates these different registers in the struggle to comprehend Ianto, knitting together his tragedy with a classical and sociological inevitability. His erstwhile mates circle the subject with fascination, making confused stabs at issues of abuse, culpability and nature versus nurture ("I reckon Ianto's childhood would've turned Mother fuckin Teresa into a murderer, mun").
Italicised vignettes of Ianto's feral youth trace primal traumas of a world red in tooth and claw, from the moment he first, at five, follows the universal urge to "put something where there is nothing, to bring substance upon emptiness", push ing pebbles into the blank sockets of a newborn lamb which has lost its eyes to a raven, to his glimpse of a couple making the beast with two backs in a forest clearing and the horror of a sexual attack by a paedophile.
But his almost shape-shifting kinship with wild animals and sublime comprehension of the natural world was forged then, too. Up in the "wind-stripped and rain-flayed" mountains, Ianto is free of humanity's double burden, a burden Griffiths's other characters are eternally struggling to lessen with drugs: like the "absolute birds, avians utter", he is wholly unselfconscious, and completely at home in his world. "Umbilicus unseen never to be snapped the brutal beauty of this place has battered itself into his blood, his brains." This is daringly overcharged prose, often reaching the heights of Old Testament ragings but sometimes straying into the more garish gothic of Nick Cave's And the Ass Saw the Angel (it's pertinent that the epigraphs are taken from the Psalms, Cave and Nietzsche). However, Griffiths is smart enough to counterpoint his incantatory voice with vernacular force: "Should've been born a fuckin fox, ee should uv," sniffs one ex-friend. He's also careful not to lend "scruffy skinny spotty Ianto" the physique of the noble savage, reserving all the grandeur and agency of his swirling, compacted sentences for the mountains and storms; perhaps the most astonishing feature of Sheepshagger is the fierce facility of its nature writing.
As we tumble into Bacchanalian horrors, the insistent privileging of the non-human and identification of Ianto as a force of nature leads to some dangerous rhetoric of sacrifice. "Might the mountains need and demand this, the unacknowledged harrowing of those that cling to their immense flanks like lice?" we are asked, when Ianto begins to lash out at those trespassing on his homeland. As he stalks hikers with the pure amoral intent of "a cat at a hamster cage", their pretentious ersatz empathy with place is cruelly contrasted with his own unsevered umbilical cord to the natural world; yet there is no mythologising glamour in the tortuous detail of his carnage.
Ianto remains, to the reader and to his shellshocked friends, an unknown quantity; igniting the capacity for chaos in their own souls, he leaves us with ragged, unanswerable questions. With a modern sensibility informed by Greek tragedy and the Blakean sublime, Sheepshagger demands total engagement, and is never less than compelling; the range of Griffiths's achievement is as exhilarating as the reach of his ambition.
