LOCATED A HEMISPHERE APART, these darkly tinged, corrosively honest memoirs share a measure of deep disenchantment. Christopher Fowler's Paperboy, set in England on the cusp of the 1960s, offers the painful personal story of a lonely, curious boy
who seeks escape through imagination, by means of comics, films and radio. But it is Australia and New Zealand, sparsely populated by awful characters in Craig Sherborne's riveting Muck, that cut the deepest. Amid the dazzle of the Antipodes something dark unfurls and slithers across the page: the serpent of all the deadly sins.
To start with, the sins are those of the parents, cruelly visited on the teenage only child, who values nothing – not the expensive private schooling dished up in Sydney (where the family lived before shifting to a dairy farm in New Zealand); not the labour of the parents: a narking mother, known disparagingly as Feet, the fat cat father, nicknamed Duke, proud of his farm and the brand-new mansion, built to order, named Tudor Park.
Nor does much value seem given by Craig to the notions of inheritance, or truth, or passing empathy for others – except in so far as he is able to exercise power over them, turning up the heat of emotional blackmail whenever he wishes.
The father worships him, not demonstrably so by saying the dread word "love", but by building a fortune to be bequeathed. Pride and love are omnipresent – but in the subtext. When, early on, Craig attacks a farmhand employed to break horses, and then heaps the blame on his angry victim, Duke forgets himself. Momentarily love shines through obvious pride. And Craig has him at his mercy.
The tone of the writing is haughty and supercilious. The narrator, now years older, peers back to the boy he once was with the mercilessness and calculating stealth that Craig in the story displays towards others.
The nasty sound you hear is skin being ripped from the past, and you see the weeping, naked, vulnerable corpse of something foul just before the rot sets in, and the maggots start. Then you realise that in fact the process is happening right in front of you – the words crawling down the page are those very maggots devouring, exposing, seeking out flesh.
No-one is spared – the farmhands, the country girls out to snare Craig's coming fortune, the uncouth, thankless neighbours whom the family visits, or the boys at Craig's school, the superior masters, the visiting vet who forces Craig to kill a sick calf. There are more grotesques here, more leering gargoyles than in a medieval cathedral. Confrontation is the watchword, while the currency of life is the selfish act, the next plotted revenge.
Feet and the Duke and their chilling son are pieces of work, but Feet has a calculating detachment and vicious anger that are unique. Only the Duke comes across as approachable, even vulnerable. He gets sick by the memoir's conclusion. Sherborne never bottles out, never falters. His style is quirky, ear-grabbing, fresh.
He is harshest of all on himself, the teenage ogre, depicting the lethal immaturity and the nastiness, the neediness, the moments of moral cowardice. Moral courage, though, has propelled this book to the page. Its execution is sublime.
Fowler's romping Paperboy is a much more conventional telling. Cue the imaginative misfit trapped in a working-class London household. Here are parents who graft, a younger brother, the father's mother a thorn in the flesh. It is the father in this memoir who cannot connect, freezing Christopher out, latching on to the brother while Christopher's mother plays the good cop, understanding his love of words, his wish to write, to become a lyricist, own a yacht. There is gentle humour, a sometimes wry negotiation of rites of passage.
The book works best as a social history of 1960s and 1970s Britain, written truthfully, and bringing towards its conclusion a moving reconciliation. It also contains one of the best encapsulations of what it is to be a writer – in words uttered by Christopher's mother – the art, the craft of it. Page 264, for readers rushing to take instruction.
