After reading a couple of dismally disappointing Big Publishing House novels [one of which inexplicably has made it onto the chattering classes self-congratulatory Booker Long List] it was a breath of fresh air to read this excellent novella from a small independent press.
In barely 40 000 words Tyler Stevens in Street
achieves more than the current British literary novel ‘heavyweights’ [excuse me whilst I hold my sides laughing] manage to muster in three times that number. The story is told in the first person by Tyler, over a couple of days running up to Christmas in a provincial British city. Other characters drift in and out of the narrative- notably a homeless woman called Veronica- but bang central to proceedings is the narrator, who is in the advanced stages of a serious decline in his mental health.
He has a continual desire to inflict violence on random people he meets; although he fantasises about it, he never sees the urges through though, because he still knows its wrong. But the urges are driving him crazier and crazier and crazier…
For one night though he offers shelter in his flat to a homeless woman which is to some degree cathartic for him. She leaves the next day though and Tyler decides to track her down again.
The novella is then primarily focused on his couple of days wandering the city centre and his experiences there. He has become a small-time drug dealer who obviously once had a job which he lost; he is also clearly up to his neck in debt and his tenure on his flat is on a knife-edge as he rapidly falls apart mentally. Central to his wanderings also is Old Storm, a huge winter snow storm blowing through the city and something he takes up as a soul mate, in that its wayward tempestuousness mirrors his own plight. In fact the description of this storm and particularly the first night, as thick snow falls on the city centre park he’s moving through, is wonderful, evocative stuff in its sublimely atmospheric description of both the natural and built environment. Even jaded old me felt as if I was in that park with him…very, very good.
To mention any more of the story would be a spoiler so I’ll leave it there, but I’m so pleased I took a chance on this sparsely told but deeply affecting book. it will not win the Booker Prize but that to me that is now A Good Thing when it comes to new literature. The new, vital voices in British fiction are clearly now all in the small independent presses or, increasingly so, being self-published. So if you want to find out what is really happening and vital in British literature today, this is as good a place to start as any.
