Award-winning poet Andrew McMillan’s first novel takes place in a world immediately recognisable from his three collections of poetry – Physical, Playtime and Pandemonium. It is set in his native Barnsley, a town still living in the shadow of the destruction of its mining industry and the after-effects of Thatcherism.
Pity’s protagonist, Simon, is a sometime drag artist and online sex worker whose key relationships are strained: his love interest, Ryan, hoping to become a policeman, has mixed feelings about the performative aspects of Simon’s life while his father, Alex, is stymied by trying to prevent his son from discovering his own, secret, gay encounters. 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.
Running alongside Simon’s narrative are chapters presented as “field notes” from a university research project, in which Simon’s uncle Brian is a key, if begrudging, participant. The project is examining the town’s collective memory of its mining years and the enduring trauma that – like the mines that squat, dormant, underground – remains a constant but unacknowledged presence. These sections introduce concepts such as “social haunting theory”; a reminder that “what’s been concealed is very much alive”. They also highlight local distrust of “experts”, and the sense that the skills required to survive in modern Barnsley, such as budgeting and carrying on regardless, aren’t ever acquired in school. A third narrative voice is studded throughout, too, in the shape of italicised, lyrical bursts of memories from miners en route to the pit. These short vignettes are the most poetic parts, albeit at times tonally off-kilter: the sky is “a threadbare sock of grey”.
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. Simon, like his father’s generation, “looked at himself through the dust”, but in his case it’s as he takes off makeup after a performance while “beneath their feet, a mile down, history; waiting to be hacked into chunks and pulled out”. Elsewhere, McMillan is keen to demonstrate a generational chasm in attitudes towards gay public affection in the shape of the fearful, closeted Alex’s warnings to Simon and Ryan about holding hands publicly.
Pity is at its sharpest when exploring and enlarging notions of community, and the various iterations of it that last, or develop, after industry leaves town and people are forced to find new purpose among reminders of their historic losses, one of which turns out to be a crucial aspect of Simon’s family’s repressed suffering. What’s being sought here amid the many excavations is freedom and self-possession – “There’d been something in Simon’s face… Alex recognised in him from childhood, before adolescence had extinguished it; a sort of freedom, a lightness.”
• Pity by Andrew McMillan is published by Canongate (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
