FICTION: WaterlineBy Ross Raisin Viking Penguin, 263pp. £12.99
IN HIS MEMOIR, Experience(2000), Martin Amis talks about "tramp dread": the fear, peculiar to men in their 20s, that you will fail so utterly at adult life that you end up homeless and drunk, kipping out with the tramps under railway bridges. I'd be willing to bet that Ross Raisin experienced a pretty acute case of tramp dread while writing, and possibly even while conceiving, Waterline, his second novel.
Raisin's pointedly surnamed protagonist, Mick Little, is a former Clydebank shipbuilder. As the novel opens, his wife, Cathy, has just died of mesothelioma, caused by the asbestos Mick carried home on his workclothes. (Mesothelioma, by the way, is the literary terminal disease du jour: it cropped up in Lionel Shriver's So Much for Thatlast year.) Bereft, penniless, Mick drifts down to London, where he finds, and loses, a job washing dishes in a hotel; thereafter, truly below the waterline, he becomes homeless and drunk, panhandling and sleeping rough, as down and out as any fictional character has ever been.
Mick is estranged from his grown children, Robbie and Chris – the reasons why are never made clear. What is made clear, over the book’s mercilessly repetitive first 100 pages, is that Mick is a very sad man. He visits Cathy’s grave. He doesn’t sleep. He runs out of food and goes to the shops. He visits Cathy’s grave. He doesn’t sleep. And so on, in a pitiless present-tense prose that tracks the smallest details without infusing them with much in the way of life or passion: “It is dark, walking back. The streetlamps are on, and there aren’t as many people about as earlier, though there’s still a queue in the chip shop. They turn off the high street, through an alleyway, past a group of bevvied-up lads playing football in the dim light of a back court.”
Raisin tries to invigorate his prose with a sprinkling of Glasgow slang: "greeting" for crying, "huckled", "scootling", "blootered", "maunderley". But there's nothing in Waterlineto equal the thrilling linguistic inventiveness of Raisin's first novel, the lauded God's Own Country(2008). In that novel, the voice of Sam Marsdyke, 19-year-old Yorkshire farmhand and budding psychopath, was a feat of real writing: vivid, original, powerfully rhythmic. The book read like a moorland Wasp Factory, full of verbal fizz and dark laughter. There was also a classical sense of narrative economy at work: details, perfectly chosen and apparently casual, returned at their appointed time to move the book along its grim path. And, best of all, there were jokes, whereas Waterlineis unrelievedly grim.
Once its drab and static first 100 pages are safely out of the way, Mick Little’s story does attain a kind of forward momentum: arrival in London, marginal employment, joblessness, poverty, homelessness. This point in the novel – Mick’s failure in London – is where the tramp dread gets going in earnest: the details of scrounging for pennies, falling asleep in railway stations, hunkering down with malodorous derelicts in church welcome centres, are rendered with dull, convincing horror.
Raisin has done his research, and notes the small aspects of homelessness that effectively summon up Mick’s predicament: he buys chocolate rather than sandwiches because sandwiches are too expensive; a fellow vagrant complains that the church should serve beans rather than bacon, because “beans is cheaper for them, and it fills you up better”.
The prose, however, remains in low gear. The real problem has to do with how Raisin goes about conveying Mick’s inner life, his emotional progress. “A slow, heavy sadness is weighing on him” – as well it might. “He feels lost – adrift.” No kidding. There are flashes of interior monologue, made up entirely of cliches: “You keep on. What else can you do? You keep on.” John Updike, in the Rabbit books, knew that Rabbit’s inner life was as rich and riveting as, well, as John Updike’s. Mick Little, in Raisin’s hands, never rises far above passive suffering, expressed in brief banalities. It makes him a frustrating protagonist and finally thwarts the reader’s empathetic urge.
On the evidence of God's Own Country,Ross Raisin has many gifts. But Waterline– repetitive, gloomy, written in largely undistinguished prose – does him few favours.
Kevin Power teaches creative writing at University College Dublin. He is the author of Bad Day in Blackrock (Pocket Books)
