Elizabeth Gregory Sep 28, 2008

Debut Novel by Acclaimed Short Story Writer

 Eric is a debt advisor, working from a converted church in Cleator Moor, a town in West Cumbria which he describes as “looking as though a giant crane had picked up a city council estate and dropped it into the centre of the national park, a scrap of urban decay in the middle of the countryside”. To his customers, Eric is a lifeline: a responsible figure, helping them to organise their debts and claim every penny in benefits they possibly can.

The Caravan Postcards

Eric, however, has a secret: he himself is deep in debt, and has a complicated life involving a spendthrift girlfriend, who has no idea about the state of his finances, and an ex-lover in Manchester to whom he is still drawn. On top of all this, a series of postcards begin to arrive, each with a picture of a caravan on one side and a single word on the other – words such as Coerce, Harrassment and Distress.The threats soon become rather more direct: Eric is followed by a man in an oversized costume shaped like a lemon, his cat meets a grisly end, and one of his co-workers is sealed inside a wheelie-bin in a case of mistaken identity –his attackers believed he was Eric. As the debts mount and the loan sharks start circling, the novel moves towards a violent and grisly conclusion.

Narrative Structure of Never Never

The novel is structured around three parallel plot lines, each involving Eric but taking place at a different moment in time. The main story is interspersed with flashbacks to a teenaged Eric and the growing relationship with his first love, and an altogether more sinister strand involving two inept kidnappers and their attempts to torture and kill a man. It is to Gaffney’s great credit that this complex structure works as well as it does, perhaps a reflection of his skill as a writer of short stories. The vividness of the characters – even those who appear only for a page or two, such as Eric’s awkward bank manager - may also be an extension of Gaffney’s skill in the shortened format.

Credit Crunch

Much has been made of the autobiographical elements of the novel, as Gaffney grew up in Cleator Moor. A brave move then, to have Eric’s girlfriend comment that “‘the success of a Cleator Moor person is measured by how far away from the town they now live’”. Gaffney also worked as a debt counsellor in Manchester, a detail that perhaps explains the sympathetic attitude towards debt that runs throughout the novel. In the current climate of financial uncertainty, it is surprising to find that Eric’s attitude to money remains unchanged despite all he has been through: “debt is the sticky stuff; it binds. It is danger, it is chance…We owe the world, and we owe it to ourselves. It is our job, our duty, to borrow, default, fall into arrears. Who wants to die with money in the bank?"Peter wild Book Munch

Bitesize: They're calling him the UK's answer to Chuck Palahniuk but David Gaffney's brilliant and brutal debut novel is more Ken Loach by way of the League of Gentlemen...

Eric MacFarlane is in some ways a hapless hero. He's hapless because he is, for large parts of David Gaffney's thrilling, hilarious and occasionally bittersweet debut novel, up to his eyes in events, circumstances and situations largely out of his control. At the same time as one could say he is hapless, however, one would also have to admit that much of Eric's misfortunes are down to his own skullduggery, mischief and foolishness. He's hapless but he's the engineer of his own misfortune, his hands on the steering wheel even though what he's steering turns out to be the front car of a brakeless rollercoaster, hellbent on its own destruction...

Let's rewind a little, shall we? David Gaffney first. He's the Manchester author responsible for two collections of (mostly) flash fiction published by Salt Books - Sawn-off Tales and Aromabingo. Never Never marks a stepping up to the hockey for the man Gaffney, moving from a form he has arguably perfected into an entirely new mileau - the mileau of the novel - a mileau that, thankfully, he appears to have confidently taken to task.

But what about the novel itself? Well, it concerns Eric MacFarlane, as I said, a debt advisor working out of a small subsidised debt advisory centre in Cleator Moore in Cumbria (Gaffney's home town, fact fans). MacFarlane works with those poor unfortunates who have got themselves in a whole heap of trouble, approaching debt collectors and local authorities in order to get debts wiped clean or reduced or packaged up in a way that benefits the person who ran up the debt rather than those who want their money. But that's not even half of Eric's story - because, you see, it turns out Eric is himself up to his eyes in debt and he's involved with characters who are, if we're being kind, at best shadey and at worst downright nasty and unpleasant. This is how Eric's orbit comes to involve the likes of Mr Shopaloan and the bejewelled Overspill Mayor. On one level, the novel could be said to be a story of Eric and his various, debt-chasing adversaries converging on one another.

There is more to it than this, though. Gaffney is a past-master when it comes to taking the world we know and recognise and subtly skewing it (or should that be skewering it) a la Magnus Mills. Eric starts to receive postcards relatively early on in the novel, postcards with caravans on, postcards that have odd, stray words written on the back - words like COERCE and HARASSMENT and DISTRESS. We are gifted glimpses into another world, a world of strangers, it would seem, for much of the novel, a man called Apartfromtheobvious, a woman called Magnum, themselves busy trying to kill a grey-skinned man in a variety of unsuccessful ways. From time to time, we skip merrily back into Eric's punky youth in the company of him and his first love, Julie - a woman who surfaces again with disturbing talk of brainbloodvolume.

It's a busy novel, all told, and there's a lot going on. Like Memento, you aren't really given the opportunity to relax. Gaffney wants you to enjoy yourself, certainly, and be glad that these people exist within the confines of a novel you can close from time to time to gasp a fresh air, but he doesn't want you to switch off either. He wants you to think. He wants to put you through your paces. And you'll like it. You'll like the fact that here is a book of what you might call palatable experimentalism. You'll feel cleverer for reading it. And you might have the odd chuckle and the odd bitter twitch of recognition too. These people are, after all, out there, not too far, I'm sure, from where you and I live.

Any Cop?: If you're tired of waiting for Magnus Mills to get around to writing a new novel, you'll want to assuage your woes by picking up the debut Gaffney. You'll enjoy it. I promise ya.