So much to answer for
Gabriel Flynn, Poor Ghost!
Sceptre, 272pp, £18.99, ISBN 9781399740739
reviewed by Hugh Foley
One of several good jokes in Gabriel Flynn’s debut novel, Poor Ghost!, comes when the narrator, Luca, a youngish man adrift back home in Manchester after flunking out of his Harvard PhD in English Literature, encounters a Manchester-specific table display in Waterstones. His eye is drawn to ‘a new novel by a Mancunian writer named Jonny Fletcher’:
Cotton City and its professionally flat-capped author act as negative images for the book we are reading. We might say that Flynn stakes his claim to seriousness on refusing to write this book.
Luca encounters Cotton City because he is conducting ‘research’ for his new job. He is studying autobiographies to help him ghost-write the life story of Andy, a middle-aged Manc with MS, with a special focus on how ‘mint’ the Hacienda nightclub was in the 80s. Luca has fallen into this work by chance, still in dejection over his failure at Harvard, and over the failure there of his relationship with a British poet, Mia. Trying to tell Andy’s story also obliges him to confront the memories of his father, who likewise struggled with MS, before killing himself when Luca was a child.
That is the situation, which does not quite become a plot, of Poor Ghost!. Over its course, we move freely between the three temporal layers of the novel: the deep past of Luca’s father drinking and trying to write about Coleridge; Luca’s own recent ignominies in New England (failing his Harvard ‘generals’ — oral exams — and emotionally overburdening his lover until she compares his opening up to an unwanted ‘soft-boiled egg’); and his purgatorial stasis in present-day Manchester. Each layer of Luca’s life reaches into the other, changing how he frames it, as he tries to imagine a possible way forward.
This is a novel preoccupied with the shifting structure of its narrator’s experience, how he understands his compulsion for ‘conjuring nostalgic tableaux’. He is assisted in giving form to these tableaux by a vision of Manchester as a city ‘neglected and brooding with violent resentment’, and built on nostalgia, where the present trades off its various pasts (from satanic mill to Britpop mecca) to sell real estate and vibes. His friend Tom works for a radio station that focuses on playing Manchester hits.
Such concerns, though expressed comically, strike me as Sebaldian, even if the narrative and sentence by sentence mechanics are efficient and solicitous of a less attentive reader than Sebald demands. Luca is a companionable, witty narrator, but like Sebald’s narrators, he is obsessed with the shaping power of traumatic memory, the ‘amorphous impression’ of distant grief as it pulses under the everyday. Responding to this power, Flynn’s eye is keenly focused on the overall form, on the novel’s architecture. Parallel timelines are a device domesticated by TV, but Flynn takes care not to use them for generating cheap suspense, and instead puts them to work generating structural tension, helping us to see how much story you can fit into a briefly conjured tableau. When we hear Luca ventriloquising Andy on the subject of his walks ‘between the mills of Ancoats’, empty because of ‘de-industrialisation’, describing a city ‘falling apart’ we hear Luca speaking, too, about history and his own griefs and grievances.
At the heart of it all is the pain of losing a parent, a pain compounded by the resemblances to this pain that are found wherever Luca looks. Readers who admire the portraits of difficult parents in the fiction of Gwendoline Riley will find comparable satisfactions (and pathos) in the portrayal of Luca’s father, ruined by drink and nostalgia, as he tries to finish his PhD on (fittingly) Coleridge. And we see, as with Riley, the way that sensibility of a certain kind, combined with bad luck, can make someone impossible to live with — a lesson Luca himself is struggling to learn.
Unlike Riley’s bleak, locked-in cycles, however, Flynn’s gives his narrator a little more space. This is a novel with a genuine social world. Many of the secondary characters in the book are well drawn, the sympathetic but no-nonsense friend Tom, especially. The dynamic between Tom and Luca is genuinely affecting and one of the better depictions of ‘male friendship’ in recent fiction. The voice of Andy, Luca’s ghost-writing client, comes through clearly, too, even as Luca keeps projecting his own grief onto Andy’s story. The characters in the USA, however, including Mia, the British poet, are less interesting. I can vouch for the accuracy of Luca’s portrayal of Harvard as upsettingly professional by British standards, but Flynn doesn’t do much with this material. Instead, Harvard and Mia serve largely as ways of repeating the theme of the book, what Luca and his father and Manchester seem to share: the fantasy of culture as a force of social mobility, and our self-defeating investment in this fantasy. The academic satire and the love story are load-bearing without being especially well-made.
What is striking about Poor Ghost!, then, is not so much the individual parts as the whole; taken as such, the novel offers its own version of the historical investigation of Cotton City, focusing on the fantastical, illusory quality of what some would call ‘cultural capital’ as it affects ‘a family and a city’, as the creative industries, which once seemed to drive urban redevelopment, enter decline, just as heavy industries did. The Hacienda, which began as a yacht-builder’s warehouse, was sold off for luxury flats. Luca, trying to turn his literary education to use, finds it worthless when he looks for writing work:
Andy’s story, of a man on the ups as a t-shirt entrepreneur in the late 80s, before being struck down by MS (‘a Mancunian boy who was born with nothing and still managed to lose everything’), might stand in for the same story of social mobility hitting a wall. So might Luca’s father’s. At one point, Tom makes fun of Luca’s hope that telling Andy’s story might bring ‘opportunities’:
In this way, Poor Ghost! depicts not just Luca’s own grief, but something like a ‘structure’ of feeling’, a shared pattern of experience — not amounting to much.
However, the novel is less interested in this story than in Luca’s inability to tell it, his inability to make his grief representative. You could easily imagine a similar story, written differently, as an allegory about the failure of ‘neoliberal creative industries policy’, or about a writer forced through precarity to realise his duty as the voice of the downtrodden. In that story, a writer might connect all of these griefs, some event might bring them together. But then the novel might look like Cotton City. Poor Ghost!, by contrast, deliberately avoids narrative resolution, to the point where a last-minute suggestion of tension (a dispute over payment between Luca and Andy) is literally (and inconsequentially) phoned (or texted) in. Things are held together only from Luca’s point of view, as if in tableau vivant. He, and not this wider feeling of stuckness, remains the novel’s structuring principle.
Luca’s vision of the world, then, remains personal. It is an open question whether he is the product of his environment, or his environment is what he makes of it. Does Manchester really have, as another, less accomplished novelist — Morrissey — once put it, ‘so much to answer for’? Poor Ghost! keeps its claims unsettled, dramatised at the level of Luca’s consciousness. Whether Luca’s consciousness is always compelling enough to bear the weight of all this history or not, Flynn’s willingness to have him shoulder the burden is the boldest gesture in Poor Ghost!.
When even the exposure of trauma and historical pain are sold back to you as uplifting, using this trauma to make some wider point might seem equally suspect, another version of the ruinous fantasy of culture as regeneration. Examining the generic nature of Luca’s disappointments only from his perspective serves, we might hope, to keep them from being turned into a product, like Cotton City. Poor Ghost! ends with Luca set to forge a new path, but insofar as this is merely a narrative which, as he says, ‘I could plausibly tell myself’, we can admire Flynn’s dedication to keeping his novel honest.
Cotton City. It seemed to be about a DJ who gets drawn into Manchester’s criminal underworld when he begins to research his grandfather, a militant trade unionist who disappeared after murdering a mill owner in the 1960s. The author, who looked about the same age as me, was pictured wearing a plaid shirt, braces, and flat cap, standing in front of a red-brick wall with his thumbs tucked into the beltline of his jeans. The Guardian had called the novel ‘a gripping, poignant portrait of a family and a city’.
Cotton City and its professionally flat-capped author act as negative images for the book we are reading. We might say that Flynn stakes his claim to seriousness on refusing to write this book.
Luca encounters Cotton City because he is conducting ‘research’ for his new job. He is studying autobiographies to help him ghost-write the life story of Andy, a middle-aged Manc with MS, with a special focus on how ‘mint’ the Hacienda nightclub was in the 80s. Luca has fallen into this work by chance, still in dejection over his failure at Harvard, and over the failure there of his relationship with a British poet, Mia. Trying to tell Andy’s story also obliges him to confront the memories of his father, who likewise struggled with MS, before killing himself when Luca was a child.
That is the situation, which does not quite become a plot, of Poor Ghost!. Over its course, we move freely between the three temporal layers of the novel: the deep past of Luca’s father drinking and trying to write about Coleridge; Luca’s own recent ignominies in New England (failing his Harvard ‘generals’ — oral exams — and emotionally overburdening his lover until she compares his opening up to an unwanted ‘soft-boiled egg’); and his purgatorial stasis in present-day Manchester. Each layer of Luca’s life reaches into the other, changing how he frames it, as he tries to imagine a possible way forward.
This is a novel preoccupied with the shifting structure of its narrator’s experience, how he understands his compulsion for ‘conjuring nostalgic tableaux’. He is assisted in giving form to these tableaux by a vision of Manchester as a city ‘neglected and brooding with violent resentment’, and built on nostalgia, where the present trades off its various pasts (from satanic mill to Britpop mecca) to sell real estate and vibes. His friend Tom works for a radio station that focuses on playing Manchester hits.
Such concerns, though expressed comically, strike me as Sebaldian, even if the narrative and sentence by sentence mechanics are efficient and solicitous of a less attentive reader than Sebald demands. Luca is a companionable, witty narrator, but like Sebald’s narrators, he is obsessed with the shaping power of traumatic memory, the ‘amorphous impression’ of distant grief as it pulses under the everyday. Responding to this power, Flynn’s eye is keenly focused on the overall form, on the novel’s architecture. Parallel timelines are a device domesticated by TV, but Flynn takes care not to use them for generating cheap suspense, and instead puts them to work generating structural tension, helping us to see how much story you can fit into a briefly conjured tableau. When we hear Luca ventriloquising Andy on the subject of his walks ‘between the mills of Ancoats’, empty because of ‘de-industrialisation’, describing a city ‘falling apart’ we hear Luca speaking, too, about history and his own griefs and grievances.
At the heart of it all is the pain of losing a parent, a pain compounded by the resemblances to this pain that are found wherever Luca looks. Readers who admire the portraits of difficult parents in the fiction of Gwendoline Riley will find comparable satisfactions (and pathos) in the portrayal of Luca’s father, ruined by drink and nostalgia, as he tries to finish his PhD on (fittingly) Coleridge. And we see, as with Riley, the way that sensibility of a certain kind, combined with bad luck, can make someone impossible to live with — a lesson Luca himself is struggling to learn.
Unlike Riley’s bleak, locked-in cycles, however, Flynn’s gives his narrator a little more space. This is a novel with a genuine social world. Many of the secondary characters in the book are well drawn, the sympathetic but no-nonsense friend Tom, especially. The dynamic between Tom and Luca is genuinely affecting and one of the better depictions of ‘male friendship’ in recent fiction. The voice of Andy, Luca’s ghost-writing client, comes through clearly, too, even as Luca keeps projecting his own grief onto Andy’s story. The characters in the USA, however, including Mia, the British poet, are less interesting. I can vouch for the accuracy of Luca’s portrayal of Harvard as upsettingly professional by British standards, but Flynn doesn’t do much with this material. Instead, Harvard and Mia serve largely as ways of repeating the theme of the book, what Luca and his father and Manchester seem to share: the fantasy of culture as a force of social mobility, and our self-defeating investment in this fantasy. The academic satire and the love story are load-bearing without being especially well-made.
What is striking about Poor Ghost!, then, is not so much the individual parts as the whole; taken as such, the novel offers its own version of the historical investigation of Cotton City, focusing on the fantastical, illusory quality of what some would call ‘cultural capital’ as it affects ‘a family and a city’, as the creative industries, which once seemed to drive urban redevelopment, enter decline, just as heavy industries did. The Hacienda, which began as a yacht-builder’s warehouse, was sold off for luxury flats. Luca, trying to turn his literary education to use, finds it worthless when he looks for writing work:
All of the listings seemed fake, or else I couldn’t understand the roles they sought to fill; bid writer; technical writer [. . .] SEO optimiser [. . .] the world had changed since I last needed a job.
Andy’s story, of a man on the ups as a t-shirt entrepreneur in the late 80s, before being struck down by MS (‘a Mancunian boy who was born with nothing and still managed to lose everything’), might stand in for the same story of social mobility hitting a wall. So might Luca’s father’s. At one point, Tom makes fun of Luca’s hope that telling Andy’s story might bring ‘opportunities’:
'What, do all his mates want books too? Will you become a bestselling ghostwriter of misery memoirs?' 'There's probably decent money in it [. . .] I bet there are thousands of people like Andy who want to tell their stories.’
In this way, Poor Ghost! depicts not just Luca’s own grief, but something like a ‘structure’ of feeling’, a shared pattern of experience — not amounting to much.
However, the novel is less interested in this story than in Luca’s inability to tell it, his inability to make his grief representative. You could easily imagine a similar story, written differently, as an allegory about the failure of ‘neoliberal creative industries policy’, or about a writer forced through precarity to realise his duty as the voice of the downtrodden. In that story, a writer might connect all of these griefs, some event might bring them together. But then the novel might look like Cotton City. Poor Ghost!, by contrast, deliberately avoids narrative resolution, to the point where a last-minute suggestion of tension (a dispute over payment between Luca and Andy) is literally (and inconsequentially) phoned (or texted) in. Things are held together only from Luca’s point of view, as if in tableau vivant. He, and not this wider feeling of stuckness, remains the novel’s structuring principle.
Luca’s vision of the world, then, remains personal. It is an open question whether he is the product of his environment, or his environment is what he makes of it. Does Manchester really have, as another, less accomplished novelist — Morrissey — once put it, ‘so much to answer for’? Poor Ghost! keeps its claims unsettled, dramatised at the level of Luca’s consciousness. Whether Luca’s consciousness is always compelling enough to bear the weight of all this history or not, Flynn’s willingness to have him shoulder the burden is the boldest gesture in Poor Ghost!.
When even the exposure of trauma and historical pain are sold back to you as uplifting, using this trauma to make some wider point might seem equally suspect, another version of the ruinous fantasy of culture as regeneration. Examining the generic nature of Luca’s disappointments only from his perspective serves, we might hope, to keep them from being turned into a product, like Cotton City. Poor Ghost! ends with Luca set to forge a new path, but insofar as this is merely a narrative which, as he says, ‘I could plausibly tell myself’, we can admire Flynn’s dedication to keeping his novel honest.