"Pity"' by Andrew McMillan

An audio book. Short - less than 4 hours.

Pubescent Alex is looking at a porn mag when his older brother Brian come in. They look at it together.

Ryan, watching shopping centre CCTV footage, replays clips of his new boyfriend Simon, who works in a call centre. He replays their date - no audio. Simon's preparing to do a drag act. He lives in Barnsley, and performs in Sheffield. Alex, Simon's father, asks to watch. He's divorced. He'd been called a faggot at school.

Barnsley gets a bad press. Some academics want to do a project to commemorate a tragedy when kids were crushed. They interview people, asking them to provide a map of their neighbourhoods in their own words rather than the official ones - The Rec; saying "meet outside McDonalds" when McDonalds had been replaced by the halifax for years, etc. A poet visits.

We get impressionistic notes about what it's like to be a miner - going down in the cage, the darkness, the squeeze of men. The academics are interested in attitudes to a shop that used to be run by 2 openly gay men. The shop is now the local museum. Brian's interviewed as part of the project - he wants to remember.

Ryan sees Alex come out of a male toilet that has a reputation.

Simon wants to be "followed" and offers bonus porn clips but he doesn't want to be too exposed locally. At the end he does his new act dressed as Maggie Thatcher (not a new idea, and he realises that some people think it's flattering Thatcher instead of satirising her) and later appears on regional TV. At the end, Brian and Alex go to a pigeon coop and release the birds - "feathers like smoke after an explosion".

The language doesn't always work for me - "Brian thought to himself"; "he removed the covering from the sandwiches like someone removing their cap for a passing hearse"; "the weekend like fluff in their pockets that they couldn't quite reach" - but I like "hanging buckets, each with the name of a local business" and "the long corridor of early dawn"

Maybe it's because I was listening to (rather than reading) the book, but I found some time-switches unnecessarily confusing. The non-academics sound more literate than I'd expected.

Other reviews

• Catherine Taylor
• Declan Ryan (The chief plot driver is Simon’s plan to develop and stage a drag show in which he’ll dress up as Thatcher, hoping to make a local audience see both itself, and Thatcher’s own use of gendered image-making, anew ... This carousel approach to structure can make it all feel a little heavy handed. The idea of bothering to bear witness overrides subtlety and the novel signposts its unifying symbols.)
• ontheprize (it's fragmentary, provisional and purposefully inconclusive. ... It also emphasizes how the novel is told from points of distance, rather than an epicentre of ‘truth’ ... It’s a novel in which women are oddly absent, present only as background characters (the club ‘gossips’) and absent mothers