Sound, Rhythm and Form
Kevin Davey, Toothpull of St Dunstan
Aaaargh! Press, 240pp, £11.99, ISBN 9781068587603
reviewed by David Collard
I’m a dentist. I prefer to be a historian.
Historian, that’s me, by necessity pressed to dentistry.
— A tooth teller!
— The whole tooth!
— Nothing but!
Kevin Davey is a novelist of extraordinary range, ambition, and uncommon literary courage. His work defies genre constraints, narrative expectations, and even reader comfort but, rather than alienating, this boldness makes his work feel vital, and a reminder that fiction can provoke, disturb, and illuminate. His novels don’t offer ‘relatable’ characters conventional emotional arcs or easily digestible messages. Rather, they present radical historical re-imaginings, linguistic play and political bite. They are novels of ideas, but also of sound, rhythm and form.
His third novel, Toothpull of St Dunstan, perhaps best exemplifies this approach. It’s narrated by an immortal dentist stationed just outside Canterbury’s West Gate, who recounts, through bloody dental procedures, political musings, and surreal anachronisms, the sweep of British history over the past 700 years. Royal entourages and armies pass through the Gate, clergy and pilgrims, traders and revolutionaries, mods and rockers. Kings and Queens come and go, the religious establishment changes and generations are born and live and die out, but the West Gate, and the dentist, endure.
The conceit is deeply strange but it works superbly well. The dentist becomes a kind of Tiresias figure: observing, absorbing, chronicling. His trade, tooth extraction and oral health, becomes a lens for exploring war, class, monarchy, medicine, religion, and politics. His voice is irreverent, witty, and rich in invention. The novel is formally inventive as well. Structured in eight sections, it fragments into vignettes, lists, digressions, and bold-titled micro-scenes. The prose is polyphonic and richly textured, embracing temporal simultaneity: pilgrims take selfies, medieval characters scale plastic crates and historical figures brush up against mods and rockers. Language evolves with time, yet remains distinctively voiced. The West Gate (which resembles a colossal stone molar) serves as the novel’s symbolic and literal anchor, through which all the world eventually passes.
The book is also crammed with literary references and Easter eggs. Attentive readers will recognise nods to Chaucer (and his ‘gat-toothed’ Wife of Bath), Eliot, Powell and Pressburger, and many others. The compact literary density may seem daunting to some, but the effort is certainly worth it. Davey doesn’t spoon-feed, and his work respects its reader’s intelligence and curiosity.
The political dimension of Toothpull of St Dunstan becomes especially potent in its latter sections. As the dentist reflects on the establishment of the NHS, the grim legacy of Thatcherism and the brutality of the class system, Davey’s satirical edge sharpens. The novel insists that dental care, as with all health care, should be universally available, and the dentist becomes a quietly radical voice, empathetic and gently subversive. He sees all but seldom judges, allowing the reader to make their own inferences.
Davey’s engagement with sound is another distinctive feature. From cracked medieval handbells (‘CLOCCAGLONG COLOCALONG […] GLOCCAGLONG!’) to a wartime air raid (‘Boofdoomboom’) and pinball machines (‘DING A PING-PING, DAK-DAK.’), his prose captures a wide spectrum of auditory experience, and the effect is almost musical. This interest in voice and sound links Davey to a broader lineage of experimental British writers such as B. S. Johnson and Ann Quin, authors who rejected literary norms and saw the novel as a space for formal innovation and dissent. I’m also reminded of William Golding, whose tremendous ten-year run produced five durable masterpieces (Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors, Pincher Martin, Free Fall and The Spire), changing the direction of post-war British fiction. Davey, with three novels under his belt, is catching up.
His two earlier novels are equally daring. Playing Possum (2017) is an ingenious reimagining of T. S. Eliot’s life, placing a version of the poet in Whitstable in 1922, in hiding after a possible crime alluded to in Sweeney Agonistes. It’s a brilliant act of literary ventriloquism, packed with unsettling ideas about literary reputation, memory, and guilt. Its title, referring to Eliot’s nickname and the act of feigning death, becomes a metaphor for both its subject and the novel itself: still on the surface, but seething with life underneath. Radio Joan (2020), meanwhile, blends fascism, feminism and media theory through a fragmented modernist style. The result is a dizzying, hallucinogenic experience, far removed from narrative convention but rich with meaning and affect.
All three novels are set in the author’s home county of Kent, suggesting a regional focus. But Davey is not a parochial writer. Like Golding before him, he uses his setting to explore universal questions about power, identity, belief, and change. His work, published by the tiny Ipswich-based Aaaargh! Press, is bracingly uncommercial, and unlikely to be found in mainstream bookstores.
Yet this outsider status is part of the appeal. In a literary culture driven by marketability and social media metrics, Davey’s work stands out as a fearless countercultural gesture. He writes not to entertain but to unsettle, not to reassure but to provoke. He is, in the fullest sense, the real thing. Whether our current literary ecosystem is ready for him, or even deserves him, is another matter entirely.