Niall Griffiths: Sheepshagger

By JOHN McCRYSTAL*

Just when you thought the Scots had both hands on the award for the nastiest writing in English literature, here come the Welsh.

No, not Irvine, although the author of Trainspotting has (inevitably) contributed an endorsement to the back cover of this, the second novel by the author of Grits. Never mind the leeks, boyo, Sheepshagger shows that there's just as much joblessness, hopelessness, violence, dysfunction, despair and drug abuse in the Valleys as in the darkest back alley in Glasgow.

It's the story of a lad named Ianto, who (it gives nothing away to reveal) has become infamous in his town for a triple murder. Sheepshagger intermingles narrative threads from three time frames: Ianto's childhood, the murders, and the post-mortem his mates are conducting in a pub.

It turns out there's a lot of rage bottled up in young Ianto. We get to know him for the strange, feral creature he is, for his affinity with the bleak landscape of Wales and the birds of prey which haunt its dismal sky. We begin to understand, as his mates cannot, why he committed the murders.

It's hard to ignore, in the background, the bitter relationship between Wales and its colonial master, England. The English are portrayed as rich and arrogant ("sheepshagger" is an English term of abuse for the Welsh) and there is a sense of festering Welsh resentment. Ianto begins to feel like an avenging throwback to those ancient and brutally pagan Welshmen, the Celts.

Ianto's mates' flights of bar-room psychoanalysis didn't ring wholly true to me, and I felt the twist in the tale was unnecessary, even if this was valid in terms of the book's larger purpose. It's written in a strange, deliberately stilted prose which takes some getting used to, and anyone who struggled with Irvine Welsh's phonetic representations of dialect will encounter the same difficulties here. And, needless to say, it's worth warning anyone who is faint of heart but who thinks they might like to read a novel called Sheepshagger that this book contains violence and language that might be considered offensive. Rather a lot of it.

For all that, this is an intelligent, cleverly written example of what must just about amount to a genre by now, namely Northern British Nihilism (or should that be Niallism ... ?). Read it and be grateful that we are comfortably far from the issues it raises. After all, there is no depression in New Zealand, is there?

Jonathan Cape

$34.95

* John McCrystal is an Auckland freelance writer.