5/7/2023 0 Comments Morning star brown novel![]() ![]() The Burn estate, built on the site of a slum, is itself now being run down and dismantled to make way for a new housing association, keen to profit from the tenants’ increasing desperation and powerlessness. ![]() This is certainly a society at the front line of the class struggle, however unwittingly. Jim Clarke, his body and mind smashed, struggles to recall the exhilarating acid raves of his teen years, while Frank and Scott Hulme recall the humiliations heaped on them by hard-man Vincent, husband of Jean and father of Alan, his peaceful and pedestrian son. Jean Barr, dying of cancer, records her childhood friendship with an enigmatic local artist whose work is heavily influenced by the estate’s abandoned iron works and underground drainage system. The style, predominantly social realist, is at times uncompromising and often bleak in recording the injustices and ill-luck heaped upon the protagonists. In so doing, Brown exposes the loyalties and antagonisms that lie within the infrastructure of any working-class community –- the veins that keep it alive. Glen James Brown’s debut work is breathtaking in its ambition and delivery.Įmploying the testimonies of six different people living on a Middlesbrough estate and using a range of voices and letters, the author meshes together their shared histories over a number of decades. ![]() BY ANY measure, Ironopolis is an extraordinary novel. ![]()
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