Swann has a particular knack for evoking the unique sense of reality we have as children, when the lines between what can and cannot be aren’t so fixed. Thus, the protagonist of ‘The Trees in Earth, the Trees in Space’ thinks that all his neighbours look like Ray Reardon and wonders if ‘they’ve stuffed our real neighbours into bins’. The author also poignantly captures the naivety of childhood: in the same story, for example, the narrator refers to ‘that cow Thatcher. Which is what you had to say after you’d said Thatcher’ – but it’s all just words to him. This naivety is perhaps most effectively shown in ‘Badly Good’, where a group of boys fail to spot the problems befalling their friend, because they are beyond the children’s experience.

Several tales in ‘Johnny North’ deal with puberty, accurately presenting it as a confused, confusing swirl of emotions and hormones. ‘The Boggart Hole’ tells of 13-year-old Lucy’s trip to the country, to convalesce after an operation. It’s an evocative depiction of both the contrast between city and country (‘Lucy longed to hear the lifeless smack of some cheap football off a garage door’) and of burgeoning sexuality. ‘The Coming Attractions’ ties the experience of puberty up with the cinema, as Matt finds a hair growing on his chin on the way home from the ‘Fleapit’, imagining it stuck in the film projector, ‘a tiny squiggle of hair that swells up into a question mark’, a question for which he has no answer.

Swann frequently employs a fragmented writing style that can be hard to follow (such that I wasn’t always sure if I’d grasped the point of a story) but is nevertheless distinctive and, in some ways, more ‘realistic’ than conventional storytelling. After all, doesn’t life tend to happen in several directions at once, rather than in a straight line? And this isn’t all that rings true: so do many of the people, places and small details; examples are the grandmother cleaning out her grandson’s ears with the corner of a handkerchief in ‘The Spike’; or the bleak atmosphere of an orange juice factory where ‘[n]o one…ever saw an orange’ in ‘The Only Fruit’; or the trials and tribulations of a provincial journalist in ‘The Collector of Small Town Secrets’; or…

When reviewing a book of short stories, I would normally choose a few and focus on them one at a time. That doesn’t seem quite so appropriate for ‘Johnny North’, whose themes overlap so much that it invites consideration as a whole. I will single out a couple of pieces that I particularly, enjoyed, though. ‘The Maker’s Name’ takes a striking look at racism through the story of young Saleem, who hones his cricket bat as diligently as any hero would sharpen his sword – but he finds this world sorely lacking in magic. ‘The Privilege of Rain’ is an account of Swann’s tenure as writer in residence at Nottingham prison; though labelled as non-fiction, the author structures it as a series of vignettes that have the same feel as his fiction. The result is one of the most powerful pieces in the book: when Swann cautions against using a hoary old cliché like ‘at the end of the day’, one inmate retorts,‘What do you know about the end of the day?’, before describing how it’s anything but a cliché ‘when a stranger closes the door on you’ at night. ‘The Privilege of Rain’ is full of such striking moments.

I’ve made it this far into the review without mentioning that the majority of these stories are set in the north-west of England, particularly Manchester and Lancashire; I’ve done this because I think it does ‘The Last Days of Johnny North’ a disservice to label it simply as a collection of ‘northern’ stories. As Alison MacLeod comments on the back cover, ‘[Swann] brings the landscape and voices of the North to life with an energy that catapults his characters into the universal.’ Not just that, I think he captures something of the essence of life as we experience it; and that, for me, is what pushes his tales beyond their geographical setting. Wherever you may live, this book is well worth your time.

David Hebblethwaite lives out in the wilds of Yorkshire, where he attempts to make a dent in his collection of unread books. You can read more of David's reviews at his review blog.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.