Reviews

People were sick and tired of being told what to think and not think. He would try to explain that to her.

Peirene Press is another of the UK's small independent publishers. They are best known for focusing on Contemporary European Literature. Thought provoking, well designed, short. and indeed they managed an incredible run of 6 consecutive longlist places for the Independent Foreign Fiction (and it's reincarnation as the Man Booker International) Prize with 2016: [b:White Hunger|23697987|White Hunger|Aki Ollikainen|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1442356000s/23697987.jpg|19142490], 2015: [b:The Dead Lake|20308483|The Dead Lake|Hamid Ismailov|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388685676s/20308483.jpg|28143058], 2014: [b:The Mussel Feast|16138043|The Mussel Feast|Birgit Vanderbeke|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1361473560s/16138043.jpg|192385], 2013: [b:The Murder of Halland|14624369|The Murder of Halland|Pia Juul|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1338144615s/14624369.jpg|20268345], 2012: [b:Next World Novella|10300307|Next World Novella|Matthias Politycki|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348095186s/10300307.jpg|15202273], 2011: [b:Beside the Sea|7516243|Beside the Sea|Véronique Olmi|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1479890960s/7516243.jpg|9725380], particularly impressive as they only published 3 such books each year.

But The Cut is an English-language original and comes from their new 'Peirene Now!' series where they directly 'commission writers to respond with fiction to current political topics'.

As with the translated fiction, it is short - more of a novella. The TLS described Peirene's books as 'two hour books to be devoured in a single sitting for those fatigued by film', a tag-line which the Press has adopted as their own.

One could indeed imagine The Cut as a script for a movie - or perhaps a TV special - but unfortunately it failed to hold my interest even for those requisite two hours.

Peirene Press had actively campaigned for Remain in the EU referendum, indeed had orchestrated a campaign of cultural figures in its favour https://www.peirenepress.com/peirenes-eu-open-letter/:

We, the undersigned, representing a range of literary arts and institutions, believe that Britain should remain within the EU. The In/Out debate often neglects arguments from culture. We maintain that an isolationist step away from Europe is a step away from our own heritage. It is a step towards an insular position antithetical to the open interchange of ideas and support that has defined European culture.

even enlisting the help of the Gruffalo's illustrator:

description

Although my personal sympathies lie with this letter, one suspects interventions like this (rather like the Guardian's ill-starred intervention in the swing-state of Ohio in the 2004 US Presidential election (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/3981823.stm) would, if it had any effect at all, have had the opposite to that intended.

The head of the press, Meike Ziervogel, admitted to being shocked at the result and this book was the result

I realized that I had been living in one part of a divided country. What fears – and what hopes – drove my fellow citizens to vote for brexit? I commissioned Anthony Cartwright to build a fictional bridge between the two Britains that opposed each other on referendum day.

The author's own motivation he explained:

I wanted to write this book because, like many people, in the days after the referendum I felt angry. But I quickly realized that my anger was different. I was outraged at a reaction which labelled seventeen and a half million people “stupid” or “racist” or simply lacking (too poor, too old, too far away from london, too white). In the cut, I wanted to analyse the complex divisions undermining british society. We’ve been offered too many answers already, this is a story built on questions

The Cut is set in Dudley, birthplace of Duncan Edwards, who statue features in the early pages,

also of Sam Allardyce, the rather short-lived England manager who famously and rather relevantly (although with tongue firmly in cheek) once said his career had been held back "because I’m not called Allardici, just Allardyce", and of course of Lenny Henry.

Cartwright's story is of a brief relationship between Grace, a documentary film maker from London, and Cairo Jukes a retired boxer (although in his mind more resting) working as a casual labourer. Grace comes to Dudley pre the referendum looking for vox-pops in an area expected, even when conventional wisdom expected Remain to win nationally, to vote strongly Leave (in practice Dudley voted 68%-32% for Leave). Cairo proves - to her - to be surprisingly eloquent in his rationale for supporting Leave, not as an anti-immigrant sentiment, or even because he is particularly persuaded by the Leave campaign and the, locally popular, UK Independence Party, but rather as a form of protest against being taken for granted and being told what to think.

The Cut has some nice character sketches - for example when Grace meets Cairo's daughter (albeit coincidentally):

She told her that her name was Ann, realised too late it was because she wanted to impress this woman, was ashamed of the way Stacey-Ann might sound to a woman like Grace. Realised the irony that she was sitting in the clinic, nineteen years old, with a baby on her lap, thrown out of her mother's house and no sign of the dad, so if anyone wanted to make judgements it wasn't her name she need worry about. And Grace gave her a card with her name on it and email and number, like that was the most natural thing in the world.

However, too much was a little cliched for my taste - the Vote Leave sticker in the German car of the man wearing an Italian suit, the local UKIP branch that meet at the Indian restaurant, the colleague of Grace who spends most of his time in warzones but thinks Dudley is the biggest dump he's ever visited.

The story itself hinges round an arresting opening - a girl running through Dudley marketplace her hair on fire - which the plot then jumps back and forth through the weeks either side of 23 June 2016 to explain, except that the eventual denouement involved a rather unconvincing melodramatic act.

The Cut is not the first Brexit novel. Two obvious peers are Ali Smith's [b:Autumn|28446947|Autumn|Ali Smith|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1456560519s/28446947.jpg|48572278] published in 2016, and Jack Robinson's [b:Robinson|35400500|Robinson|Jack Robinson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1497111130s/35400500.jpg|56769853] (the book I read immediately before The Cut). In both of these books the Brexit element is more incidental and to an extent tagged-on: Smith already had a book planned and largely written about Pauline Boty, Profumo etc, and Jack Robinson similarly had a long-standing plan to write a novel about the literary descendants of Robinson Crusoe, and just needed the Brexit vote to give the impetus to write it. But actually the books were the better for that - there was obvious literary merit there which will remain after the immediacy of the Brexit vote has faded: indeed I've been struck by how those who re-read Autumn recently have said it actually reads better with distance. In contrast The Cut feels like what it is - something written purely in response to a passing event and with little stand-alone literary merit.

And the political insights of the novel - the divided nation - have been dealt with much better, and earlier, in the non-fiction world. While I disagree with his prescriptions, [a:David Goodhart|531166|David Goodhart|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] had diagnosed a culturally divided Britain several years earlier, and his [b:The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics|32446555|The Road to Somewhere The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics|David Goodhart|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1475829312s/32446555.jpg|53033116] stands alongside Steve Richard's [b:The Rise of the Outsiders: How the Anti-Establishment is on the March|34448445|The Rise of the Outsiders How the Anti-Establishment is on the March|Steve Richards|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1490877297s/34448445.jpg|55559279] as the definitive accounts of the era.

Which left me finding the intention behind this novel admirable, but the execution rather unfulfilling.

jackielaw's review

Go to review page

5.0

The Cut, by Anthony Cartwright, is set in the Black Country, where the skeletons of the industrial past are now regarded by those who have benefited from it the most as a blight. Cairo Jukes has lived in Dudley all his life. He feels indivisible from the land. His ancestors were amongst the men who dug the canals and tunnels, worked the foundries. None of these jobs now exist. Cairo works zero hour contracts cleaning up the old industrial sites ready for redevelopment, a tidying up and sweeping away for those who can afford the new order. He does what is needed to put food on the table for the four generations of family who share his home.

Grace is an award winning documentary film-maker from London. She travels to Dudley looking to interview locals about the upcoming referendum on Brexit, recognising that they are different from those she knows from her life. Most treat her with suspicion, veering away from her approach and the camera:

“She felt like there was some kind of invisible veil between her and these people. These people. And this is how it began, she supposed, prejudice on the scale of a whole country.”

Cairo agrees to be interviewed, speaking in an accent that, when played back on news cycles and Twitter, is given subtitles. What he says is ‘We’ve had enough’. He talks of ‘you people’, those who appear on the telly and believe what is happening is everybody’s fault but their own. Grace is drawn to this rough, unexpectedly cogent man.

The reader is offered snapshots of the Jukes family’s lives. Cairo’s daughter, Stacey-Ann, introduces herself to Grace as Ann. Judgements are made even over names. They are unused to talking to anyone like Grace. Her ways are foreign to them, and theirs to her. Despite their conversations, words cannot be found to bridge the gap.

It is this that the novel offers, a bridge between perception and reality. In packaging Brexit as a protest about immigration or even the EU the depths and complexity are disregarded, what is felt standing on a sun dappled mountaintop reduced to a sterile description of river and rock. Brexit was about how large swathes of the population are routinely admonished, their concerns dismissed.

“People are tired […] tired of other people getting things that you and people like you had made for them, tired of being told you were no good, tired of being told that what you believed to be true was wrong, tired of being told to stop complaining, tired of being told what to eat, what to throw away, what to do and what not to do, what was right and wrong when you were always in the wrong.”

Grace recognises that there is a disconnect but struggles to accept that she may sometimes be the one to be wrong. It is easier to find others wanting.

“‘This place is a hole’, Franco says to her and sits down.

‘I’ve never heard you say that anywhere. Hungary, the border camps, Serbia, when you came back from Syria. Never. But Dudley is the end of the road for you. Look out of the window. It’s a sunny afternoon in the English Midlands.’ […]

‘Those people have got an excuse, a reason for being how they are, but these people,’ Franco says.

‘Ah, these people, she says, these people'”

Cairo feels increasingly impotent. He sees that many in the rest of the country want the likes of him gone, that walls are built with their well meaning ways. When Grace appears to offer him a new hope and then as quickly takes it from him, something in him snaps. The denouement, which was touched on at the beginning, is shocking.

The writing in this work is stunning. It is sparce, poetic in places, and bang on point.

Required reading for anyone who despairs of Brexit, or anyone tempted to glance at the Stacey-Anns of our world and then self-righteously opine. It offers a plot driven window into a clashing of cultures. It deserves the attention of all.

My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, Peirene Press.

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