Ten Storey Love Song by Richard Milward
Ten Storey Love Song by Richard Milward
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Monday, 23, Mar 2009 05:06
Faber and Faber, paperback, out now, 286pp, £10.99.
In a nutshell...
Acid-fuelled artist finds himself
What's it all about?
Ten Storey Love Song tells the tale of Bobby the Artist as he takes a trip from his happy, dappy, acid-fuelled existence in a Middlesbrough council flat to top of London's art world and back again. Discovered by pure chance by a posh art dealer called Bent Lewis, Bobby gets swept up - somewhat to his own surprise - in the world of high art and higher cokeheads.
He returns home changed and must deal with his demons. And his dealer, who has himself been on a journey of self-discovery, learning to love his girlfriend and stop pretending to be such a hardnut. Meanwhile, Milward colours in the background with an animated supporting cast of characters who add depth and perspective to his celebration of youth, creativity and tower blocks in the north-east of England.
Who's it by?
Not unlike his protagonist, Milward is young, floppy-haired and prodigiously talented. He also hails from the north-east and has been praised by - among others - the self-appointed high priest of working-class fiction, Irvine Welsh.
Milward, who is still only 24, began writing in his mid-teens. Ten Storey Love Song is his second published novel. He wrote the first when he was just 19, as he tells the BBC, by "spending the weekends getting trolleyed in Boro, then writing about it in my room the rest of the week".
Among the other similarities Milward shares with his hero are his ongoing passion for painting and his art school background - so it is not hard to imagine that he experienced much of what Bobby the Artist feels when he first found himself in the cloying embrace of London's literary elite.
However, Milward's writing is much better than the average semi-autobiographical rubbish peddled by self-absorbed teenagers and creative writing students. Milward writes with a well-developed, distinctive voice which I hope to hear a lot more of in future.
As an example...
"Bobby's hunger came back unexpectedly and he had to make pills-on-toast for himself in the kitchen. Here's the recipe for pills-on-toast: 2 crushed ecstasy pills, 1 slice of toast (butter optional). Yawn!"
"The club had the bluey glitzy look of an aquarium, but instead of fishies was full of skinhead lads in horizontal-stripe sweatshirts trying to pull and noodle-haired girls looking sour in minimum clothes."
What the others say
"Milward is a major talent and his love for his characters shines through any degrading obstacles he forces them to encounter. When writers are being churned out of creative fiction courses like salmon from fish farms, he possesses that scarcest quality: a highly original and engaging voice. He's also a novelist of great emotional power and deft skill." - Irvine Welsh, Guardian
"Drugs, sex and violence take centre stage in the book. At times this feels laboured; like sex and dreams, someone else's hallucinations are something which aren't that interesting to hear about over and over again. For the most part though it works and Milward pulls off the rare trick of balancing literary experimentation with the creation of some truly engaging characters." - Laura Sandy, Isolationist
So is it any good?
Ten Storey Love Song sucks you into its world right from the opening acid trip. Readers will find themselves going along for the rambunctious ride almost without realising it - carried in one fluid movement by the single, unbroken paragraph of prose all the way through to the closing suicide.
The decision not to divide the text up into chapters or even paragraphs certainly adds to the pace of the novel. At the same time it enables Milward to create his swirling, oil-painted vision of the world by moving seamlessly between characters, drifting in and out of their drug-addled heads and regularly shifting his point of view.
But while the form certainly adds to the function of the text, Milward's real talent is for not making this decision look too studied. The novel may look like a surrealist stream of consciousness (he apparently admires the work of Andre Breton) but the story is one of down-to-earth realism. Milward's characters are instantly recognisable from real life - there's the hardnut-with-soft-centre Johnnie and his slutty girlfriend Ellie; there's the posh London teenage cokeheads who are delighted to have discovered a real-life artist; there's Alan Blunt the C**t, a sad old truck-driver and of course there's Bobby, the portrait of the artist himself.
Yet although this novel is realistic, and often gritty, you could never accuse it of being gritty realism. There's something fantastical about the world that Milward creates for his characters, not least the colourful trips he send them on. He makes these hilariously funny at times and deeply sad at others. But ultimately, this is a love song. It is a novel which celebrates the colourful lifestyles these people lead in their peach-tinted tower block at the wrong end of a lively north-eastern hometown.
Milward has created a rare gem with Ten Storey Love Song. It is a book that shines and shimmers as brightly as the Stone Roses single from which it takes its name. Like that band, he has managed to combine the guileless-ness of a straight-talking laddish delivery with subtle artistry of the highest calibre, all wrapped up in a compelling tale that drags you in as surely as any pop song.
9/10
Tristan Kennedy