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My review of Karl Parkinson’s The Blocks, which appeared in the Irish Times of October 1st 2016.
(Might be a pay-to-view page for some.)

Dublin being a small place, I’d heard through the grapevine that a spoken-word poet called Karl Parkinson was writing a novel set in inner city Dublin. It remained in the back of my mind as something I’d like to read, as debut novels from working class Dubs were so rare as to be almost non-existent. But when I heard that the storyline is about a visionary poet/artist, and it’s strongly influenced by the works of William Blake, I knew I had to read it. It sounded like something very out of the ordinary.

I’ve been a follower of William Blake since my teens. I have a fond memory of going to the Tate Gallery when I worked in London, and looking for the Blake drawings and watercolours. I asked a member of staff – or perhaps it’s more likely a member of staff asked me what I was looking for – and was told that they had been housed separately for restoration work. “I can let you in to view them,” he offered, very unexpectedly. He opened the door to a storage room, showed me the cabinets, and left me to look at them. I was made to feel like a visiting scholar. At that time, sometimes when I was on the Tube home from work, people would get up from the seat beside me and move to a vacant one somewhere else.

I had no expectations of Karl Parkinson’s novel, because I couldn’t begin to imagine what a novel about a visionary in a Dublin corporation block might be like. But it didn’t disappoint; in fact it was the best novel I read that year, as well as being easily the most unusual.

Anthony Cartwright’s new novel Iron Towns bowled me over. It’s set in the industrial heartland of England – memories of the furnaces and forges and hammers and anvils are still alive, the local football team too is living off memories. Resonant fictionalised names are used – Kowton, Oxton, Ironport, the Spider House, Chaintown, Lowtown. The novel is a powerful blend of the mythological, the industrial and the lure of football stardom.

Anthony was spontaneously generous in instigating a mini-reading tour of London back in August. Rather than say anything more about his novel, I’m just going to drop a few extracts that struck me:

• And there along the valley bottom, between the two rivers, is the Anvil Yards, a maze of ancient works and roofless brick factory buildings. The blocks of the old Greenfield Ironworks stand at its heart like some secret kaba. Names from the glory days of a revolution appear on road signs and raised on metal. Newcomen and Stephenson and Darby and Watt. And there at its edge, hard against the banks of the river Chain, is the football ground, built to look like one of the factories, still going, creaking into life for another season, one more year.

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(Eli is Joey’s 92 year-old father, who occasionally disappears on a ramble)

• At least the riots were in the summer. He’d got the bus out towards the flyover to go and have a look at the trouble himself, a bonfire burning in the Tesco car park at four in the afternoon. Young lads tried to nick trainers at the shopping village. Joey could never get to the bottom of whether Eli had gone to tell them all to go home or whether he thought the revolution had come at last.