Currock Press
  • HOME
  • About us
  • John Irving Clarke Writer
  • The Red Shed Poetry Competition 2023
  • What Am I Looking For?
  • Competition Entry Form 2023
  • Poetry Competition 2021 Results
  • Wakefield postcode poem 2021
  • Viv Longley's Tally Sheet
  • Who the Hell is Ricky Bell?
  • Sound and Vision
  • 2020 winning and commended poems
  • Poetry Gallery
  • Events
  • The Red Shed Readings
  • Of Chalk and Talk
  • The Word for Moving Clouds
  • Listening to Owls
  • Laura Potts' Chatterley
  • Giving the Voiceless a Voice
  • I Figli di Mondovi
  • Book Stall
  • Contact
  • currockman blog
  • WEA students and Carys Davies' West
  • W.E.A. Short Stories
  • The Red Shed Poetry Competition 2023

Mark Connors' Stickleback

10/29/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
 Stickleback
 Mark Connors

 
Throughout literature there are numerous protagonists who don’t fit in, characters who at best march to a different drumbeat or at worst are castigated as mad. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye and Christopher John Francis Boone in Mark Haddon’s, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time spring immediately to mind, characters who, despite not fitting in, point up the absurdities of society or the burden of being normal.
To that list of characters, we can now add Alan Siddall in Mark Conner’s, Stickleback, a character who might prove to be the most unlikely anti-hero of all. Siddall is a 68-year-old Black Sabbath fan who alerts our sympathies as the resident of a Mental Health Unit facing a transfer to another facility at the behest of the health bureaucracy. Siddall leads a life of apparent aimlessness involving a succession of cigarettes, cups of tea and wanderings around Leeds which often end in the police returning him to his unit. But gradually, it is revealed that Siddall has a bi-polar condition and a history of attempted suicide. But make no bones about it, as a foul-mouthed, utterly selfish individual with a penchant for masturbating in public, he strains readers’ sympathies to the full.
As the novel develops, our “hero” descends into a spiral of hopelessness as more and more drugs are prescribed and administered not so much as to “cure” him but to control him, to keep him manageable. Docility is prized above long-term recovery but the nightmares which these drugs induce become increasingly vivid and disturbing.
The longing for some kind of uplift or release becomes most intense and a tormented climax is reached via a masterful piece of repetition by Connors. It arrives via a brilliant analogy from the author, an analogy which incidentally, also answers questions around the choice of title for this book, but more importantly, there is a clear suggestion of how people such as Alan Siddall can be treated with compassion, dignity and respect.
Stickleback carries a painful lesson. We might laugh at Siddall’s, often profane and scatological, turn of phrase but it is a difficult read. It is also a piece of bravura writing, a sustained first-person narrative which reeks authenticity and passion. On finishing I felt as though I had been through the proverbial wringer, but as with reading all powerful novels, I also felt as though my perception of the world had undergone a significant shift. I highly recommend this book.  

0 Comments

    Author

    A visit to the Media Museum in Bradford and a damn good curry at the Kashmir. What greater pleasure can life afford? Writing a film review afterwards seems only fair. The routine began many years ago and the first review: Sam Taylor Wood's, Nowhere Boy is included here. But there will also be space for books and anything else that takes John Irving Clarke's fancy.

    Archives

    November 2018
    September 2018
    January 2018
    October 2017
    August 2017
    June 2017
    August 2016
    August 2015
    June 2015
    April 2014
    December 2013
    October 2013
    July 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013

    Categories

    All
    Film Review
    On This Day
    Poetry
    Short Stories
    Travel

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.