You know, sometimes I swear I don’t read the same book as other people. This novel is a case in point. The cover for ‘Sheepshagger’ comes smothered in superlatives from the likes of AL Kennedy, The Guardian, Independent on Sunday, etc, all breathlessly extolling the work’s ‘beautiful prose’ and ‘ferocious imagining,’ ad infinitum, ad tedium. Nowhere do they mention that the book is quite simply poorly written, and sick at that. Sheepshit, you might say, if you were feeling particularly unkind. Or truthful.

Set in the desolate, ferocious Welsh mountains, Sheepshagger tells the vile, vicious, violent, victim-strewn story of a hill-dwelling yokel named Ianto. After his grandmother dies the young man(iac) loses his ancestral home to English space invaders and goes completely insane, killing several people before being killed himself. And it’s then up to a few of his unlikable friends to wade through Ianto’s troubled, mysterious history and try to piece together why he went off the rails and acted in the brutal way he did.

Okay. First off: a wee note on the book’s supposedly ‘beautiful’ prose. It’s nothing of the sort. It is actually overwrought and overwritten pseudo-portentous purple prose. Griffiths has a vocabulary, and he’s not afraid to use it – unfortunately. He never puts down one word when five will do, and these passages about Ianto are simply far too intelligent for the character’s mindset. The deranged Welshman is meant to be a bit subnormal, and no way would he be waxing lyrical about the countryside’s past or creatures or gory nature.

And on Ianto’s friends themselves. They come across as mere rip-offs of Irvine Welsh characters, and the scenes where they sit and drink and drug and swear could have been lifted wholesale from any number of Welsh’s waster-chic books. I saw Welsh a few years ago giving a reading at the Edinburgh Book Festival, with Griffiths on the same bill after his first book, ‘Grits’ (apparently noted as a cookie-cutter rip-off of ‘Trainspotting’) had just come out. So the similarities are obvious, and all the more tedious for that. One one-trick pony is enough, never mind two of them.

But I pondered the wannabe-poetic passages, and I think the reason for Griffiths’ tortured, swampy prose is simply literary insecurity. He throws in huge words and highbrow concepts in much the same way Will ‘Thesaurus’ Self does, because he wants to make himself out to be much more big and clever than he actually is. Which, consequently, means he can’t relax and the reader eventually gives up trying to make sense of all the wet-concrete-dense pretentious metaphors and similes they are given to wade through and starts skipping material to keep moving.

On the flipside, I think this approach partly explains the reaction of the critics. Just because the material swears a lot, has a working class aesthetic, drugs and alcohol and raves, but also exhibits a pseudo-highbrow (non)sensibility, middle class literary taste arbiters don’t want to be seen to knock it or even declare that the syllabic emperor, in this case, wears no clothes. Nobody wants to criticize something the general London literary salon consensus holds to be a modern ‘anti-classic’, especially not when it deals with themes like child abuse and murder and rampant English colonialism.

And talking about child abuse, a subject some writers feel the need to address for no reason I have ever understood, ‘Sheepshagger’ contains one of the most vile scenes I have ever read in any novel, where a ten-year-old Ianto has his penis bitten in half by a predatory pederast he encounters when hill-walking one day. So, you see, he goes crazy and brutally murders (in passages as disturbing as anything Bret Easton Ellis ever wrote in ‘American Psycho’) three people because of this event in his life, and because he’d seen nature red in tooth and claw at work in the mountains. I remain unconvinced.

I don’t know what Griffiths was trying to accomplish with this book. An expose of child abuse and its effects? Yeah, right. The pederast came across as a ludicrous caricature of psychopathological evil. Trying to write an abuse scene as shocking (if not more so) as anything his tormentor mentor Welsh has written (cf: the vile, pointless rape scene in Porno)? Perhaps. Something to shock middle class readers? Who knows. Just avoid this like the plague. Know I’ll never read another book by the author: wish I hadn’t read this one, to be perfectly honest. It left a really bad taste in my mouth; maybe I’m too old for this shock-lit.

Of course, having had such a strong negative reaction to the book, you will probably want to read it. On you go. Have no fun. Only don’t say I didn’t warn you if you do...

Graham Rae is a 34-year-old Scottish scribbler from the cheery charming picture-postcard-perfect post-industrial up-and-coming internationally renowned tourist destination of Falkirk. He has been writing for as long as he can remember (started at any early age, carving graffiti into womb walls) and am halfway through my first novel (well, third, but the other mishmash misfires don’t count),’ Weekend Warriors.’ He has been writing about film for various electronic and print publications for 16 years now, and you can see a sporadically entertaining eclectic selection of his ramble/rantings at www.filmthreat.com

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.