There’s a lot of remembering in The Afterglow, Anthony Cartwright’s debut novel. As the title suggests, this is a novel of remnants, of things fading away. A working-class community in the Black Country is suffering a post-industrial trauma, unemployment, and the overt individualism of the younger generation. While the older characters, often poetically, recall their younger, more purposeful selves, and no doubt remember a more hopeful politics, the younger generation are excellently drawn by Cartwright in their vulnerabilities, their status anxieties and ebullient hedonism. Though the content sounds explicitly political, Cartwright does well to craft rounded, engaging characters who sound and feel like real working-class people, with grudges, gripes, longings, cackling sense of humours and familial warmth. Luke – a sensitive, overly intelligent meat-packer troubled by the death of his brother, is compelling. His father, Ken, finds himself out of work but never without scruples. Luke’s ex-girlfriend and social aspirant, Sarah, has her anxieties, sense of division and divided loyalty cleverly rendered. These characters and the rest of the ensemble are not ciphers in a novel masquerading as a manifesto (as so often even the strongest social realism can be guilty of): their souls are tentatively, affectionately and singly served by Cartwright’s exacting and morbidly beautiful prose:
Steelmaking was all about transformation, alchemy, a kind of purification. It wasn’t something that could just happen by accident, it took all those men and machines, effort, industry, so that when you did your bit – tapping out the molten metal, for example – there was this sense of belonging to something, of being part of something bigger than yourself.
The sad beauty, the morbidity lay in the slow dying, the loss of energy. The double meaning of ‘industry’: the economic activity and with it, the effort of good men is lost too, the entropy of light in the soul and light in the metal. Without religion, without politics, without the chance to belong to something ‘bigger than yourself’, the cast ruminate throughout the novel and the cloying sense of loss is amplified by a family tragedy making for a poignant, if gloomy, canvas. In many ways – Cartwright is a secular priest – offering a kind of solace, through beauty, through examining heartspaces and recording the minutiae of the mundane, unearthing sad powerful truths. But it’s not all tear-jerk stuff: there’s some workplace banter that convinces and is genuinely funny; and in one stand-out scene an apparently oafish lads night out is perfectly captured. Drawn without lauding the yob behaviour or patronising the protagonists, the entire evening, the night out experience and quirks and sense of epic adventure are effortlessly unveiled. Take this observation from a queue to a club:
Move back against the wall, ordered the same [bouncer] who’d barged Luke. Again he stared at the wide back, this time as it marched towards the square orange light at the entrance. He shook his head and muttered, catching the eye of one of the girls Jamie had pointed out.
This could well be a scene from Booze Britain, but it’s the clever, apt detail that delves into the familiar complexities of clubbing etiquette. He gets the politics of the queue. The beauty of the ‘square orange light’. Though Cartwright’s register is broad, adeptly switching pitch between different genders, personality types, classes and aspirations, there does seem a pathological sense of sorrow in the main characters that can detract from the poignancy of more moving scenes. Characters are followed directly in chapters named after them, or indirectly through interactions with others. At times, I worried that dealing with the characters this way – with their own, often sad, back story could give the odd effect of several interlaced misery memoirs – and sometimes the detail does miss the mark and notes rather than illuminates, but the narrative, if slow on drive and acceleration, does meld together and is resolved satisfyingly in a hopeful and unsentimental finale. Despite some mid-novel concerns, The Afterglow, if anything, demonstrates that perhaps we are all, like Proust speculated, standing on ‘stilts of time’.
