‘Everywhere is monsters,” roars the beginning of Kate Tempest’s Mercury-nominated album Everybody Down, “Tits out / Wet-mouthed / Heads back / Shouting and roaring / Just to prove they exist”. There she was conjuring a south-east London she has now re‑versioned – or re-visioned – for her first novel. Song titles – “Marshall Law”, “Lonely Daze”, “To the Victor the Spoils” – become chapter headings, and many of the protagonists recur in identical scenarios and dilemmas. For those who wonder at this artistic choice – why not come up with an entirely new story? Why recycle? – a clue lies in Tempest’s affection for populous NYC hip-hop group the Wu-Tang Clan, whose members operate under multiple monikers and aliases, spinning stories across media and genres; the basic point of all this is not to find a form and snuggle down for the long haul, but to stretch the boundaries of genre until you see where it breaks.
This is all very well, as long as it works – when it doesn’t, it leads to something iffy, straining against the edges of a box it doesn’t fit. When Tempest’s angst-ridden lyricism is let off the leash, the effect is thrilling, unspoiled even by its melodrama and occasional mawkishness. Her lonely protagonists, weaving their way in and out of unloved cityscapes in search of they know not what, come to seem both painfully particular and impressively archetypal. As these moments shine, the mundane details that run through them also attain a kind of lustre, and a terrible, bathetic poignancy. But when that poetry is absent the dreary business of narrative – the traffic of moving people around, their condensed backstories, of which there are several that might happily have disappeared from the manuscript – comes to grief.
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