Reviews

Vulgar Things by Lee Rourke

shimmer's review

5.0

Lee Rourke’s second novel Vulgar Things captures sharply the multifaceted nature of “edge of the world” places — in this case, Canvey Island and the region around it. Like many seaside locales it offers the promise of escape, complete with scenic pier for tourists and arcades and strip clubs delivering fantasy to all ages. But the flipside of escape is exile, and how easily a life becomes mired at the edge of the world, and in Vulgar Things narrator Jon Michaels arrives in Canvey from London to sort the remnants of his dead uncle’s life only to fall into rut and mire of his own. The tension and temptation between Jon slipping into a life readymade and left behind by his uncle, versus sorting out the problems of his own life, resonates with that estuarine landscape through which ships pass and oil flows but where people often have no choice but to sink and get stuck. As in Rourke’s earlier novel Canal there’s a interrogation of the banal here, of life willfully lived outside the active and productive, and of the ways such a defiantly “empty” life offers up its own surprises whether the discovery of Jon’s uncle’s Dr Feelgood albums, or his telescope and the night sky it reveals, or darker, less welcome things. And there’s a very smart, very compelling view of the power of even the by-now-mundane devices of our everyday lives — our cellphones, say — to both exacerbate and break through the fogs we lose ourself in, an aspect of the novel I especially liked. There are echoes here of Ann Quin’s Berg — another novel hard to imagine anywhere but beside the grim off-season sea — and of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape in the strain between characters acting out lives and routines already set for them and struggling to find the cracks in those routines where their own agency might become possible. But those echoes add to without overwhelming the novel, which is very much its own book and a fine one at that.