Home town horrors

Byron Rogers

ABERYSTWYTH MON AMOUR by Malcolm Pryce Bloomsbury', £9.99, pp.245 ISBN 0747553858 For sheer cheek this takes the Garibaldi. In the Aberystwyth I know, the old Wales, its back against Cardigan Bay, makes a last stand, with the grim theological college on the front, the chapels, and its twitching net-curtained respectability. They may know all there is to be known about sin there, but, according to Malcolm Pryce in this book set in the town, they may know even more about murder. If you believe this, you will, as the Duke of Wellington huffily informed the man who had addressed him as Mr Smith (or was it Jones?), believe anything. You may even believe this to be a crime novel.

After all you do find yourself in familiar territory. Everything is there, the hardnosed wise cracking private eye, the chorus line of whores (one called Siani y Blojob, Welsh for Siani the Blow-job, also capable of swallowing three curries at once), the brutal police force, and, of course, organised crime, It is just that everything is there in Aberystwyth. And the mean streets of a Cardiganshire seaside town, unlike those of Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, do on the whole present problems.

The Mafia consists of the Druids, who, having given up organising eisteddfodau in white bed linen, have taken to organising crime in sharp Swansea suits' and mauve Mondeos (Mr Pryce seems to have a down on the Ford car company). Their capo is the Welsh master at the local school. (Mr Pryce, born in England moved to the town at the age of nine, and so must have collided with compulsory Welsh.) His hit-man is the gym master, one Herod Jenkins. Fair enough. For most of us gym masters were natural recruitment material for Einsatigruppen (Vein headmaster, I have the honour to report that the school is now fat-boy-free.') But when the severed head, an essential in-house element ever since The Godfather, turns up under the hero's sheets (into which he is just about to plunge with a whore called Bianca), this turns out to have belonged, not to a thoroughbred, but to a donkey from the Promenade.

At this point, even the doziest reader, or one who has never heard of Aberystwyth, will be starting to suspect that Malcolm Pryce, who, since he left, has, according to his blurb, been doing tourist promotional work for head-hunting tribes in Borneo, may be having us on in order to exact a bizarre revenge on his home town.

Some details of small-town Welsh life are very accurate. This, for instance, is Saturday night in an Indian restaurant: Before I could answer, a fight broke out in the corner of the room and the waiter strode off wearily and without any sense of urgency to attend to the situation. I looked around. On the table next to me a man lay face down in his curry.

I can vouch for this, having once been in an Indian restaurant in Aberystwyth where, the night before, a local man had thrown a wheely-bin through the window. His name, oddly enough, was also Malcolm, and when the chap I was with happened to mention that he was a good friend of his, we were served with free lager and asked by the management to appeal to his better nature.

Fair play. Malcolm Pryce does try to ground his narrative in such realities. This is a description of the smells on a hot summer's night on the mean streets of Aberystwyth.

It was a mixture that would have kept a wine-taster happy for days unravelling the different notes. Heavy tones of fried onions, spilled beer and the salty tang of sun-dried seaweed: and on top of that coconut oil, sweat, spilled ice-cream, cheap aftershave and dog piss.

Things start to go wrong when the fantasy breaks away from such moorings. His hero walks along the Prom with the donkey's severed head in a cardboard box under his arm. He would not have been able to get a donkey's head into a cardboard box, let alone carry it under one arm. I am indebted for this information to my old friend PC Arwyn Hughes of the Dyfed-Powys force, who once had to carry a severed human head into the Ivy Bush Hotel, Carmarthen. The head weighed 14 pounds.

Aberystwyth is odd enough anyway. It has one chapel converted into a pub,

where, with the Ten Commandments on each side, the pulpit is still in place but with a life-sized cut-out of Vinnie Jones inside it. A brand-new town clock tower

now stands in the square with the inscription commissioned by the local council:

'Thou shalt not remove thy neighbour's landmark which they of old time have set in thine inheritance. Deuteronomy 19,14.'

Council members have forgotten it was they themselves who pulled down the old tower. Given his setting, Malcolm Pryce had no need to make anything up.

He includes a town museum with a Combinations and Corsetry section. There is such a museum, and when I was there, it had a special exhibition of women's underwear. It is when he starts making things up that lunacy comes in a tidal wave.

Wales is an independent imperialist state, waging a Vietnam-like war in Patago nia with old Lancaster bombers, paid for with the sale of tea-cosies. There is a 24hour whelk stall, a secret society of middle aged female assassins called the •Sweet Jesus Against Turpitude, and a cat which can use a microscope. I gave up on the plot, but then I do this with Chandler, relishing him just for his asides and monologues. Malcolm Pryce is nowhere near that level.

At one stage his plot involves the reclamation of Cantref y Gwaelod, the lost lands under Cardigan Bay. But eventually a dam is bombed, and Aberystwyth, like Atlantis, is destroyed by water, the hero

having decided not to save it CI sort of said "fuck it"). At least that is what I think happens. It can give you a terrible headache, trying to make sense of this sort of thing.

This book will be a romp for those who know the town. Others may find, once the fantasy takes over, that 245 pages is stretching it. Pity. But it does prompt one question. Edmund Gosse wondered what God had done to Thomas Hardy that he should rise up in the land of Wessex and shake his fist at Him. What has Aberyst wyth done to Malcolm Pryce that in the Far East, where, with a first-class honours degree (he is Welsh enough to record that), he has managed to become a tramp, that he should shake his fist at his home town? Had he answered that, this would have been a funnier book.