Carry on at the car factory
Michael Hulse
THE DEVIL'S CAROUSEL by Jeff Torrington Secker, £15.99, pp. 226 hen a first novel earns the high praise and sales of Jeff Torrington's excellent Swing Hammer Swing!, reviewers like to give the author's second book a rough ride. Doubtless it's a custom more honoured in the breach than the observance; but the fact is that the short- comings of The Devil's Carousel weigh as heavily as its strengths.
His Gorbals epic suggested Torrington could be the scribe of underclass Glasgow, and The Devil's Carousel mines a similar seam. It is set in the Centaur car factory, transparently modelled on the Chrysler plant where Torrington once worked, and consists of several related but self- contained stories, somewhat in the manner of Steinbeck's Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat or Naipaul's Miguel Street. I had no idea what eight hours a day in a car plant are like for those who work there, so read- ing Torrington's account was as freshly engaging as reading Narayan's account of the life of an Indian sign-painter: he brings a whole world to life, with its jokes, bitch- ing, resignation, grief and resilience.
There is an entire vocabulary to this world (sequencers, greybacks, grommets, the high-track) and a way of behaving in it. Much as Tarantino has two professional killers socratically debating foot massage as they go to their morning's murder, Torrington has car-workers discussing dropsy as they make their assembly-line contributions. The stories are a blend of farce and sentiment. One man, feeling off- colour, is ordered home by the nurse, and dies of heart failure on a fishmonger's doorstep. Another, convinced that redundancy is imminent, runs amok. Another, Twitcher Haskins, in the longest and most substantial narrative, is given a pair of high-powered binoculars on retiring from his job as head of plant security: an apt gift for a bird-watcher, but one that coincidentally enables him to identify the plant thief he has been after. This tale ends on the most optimistic note in Torrington's book, with a vote for life, as Haskins, enthralled by a redpoll that has flown out of the factory compound, drives after it leaving behind him the life that had enslaved him. For those who remain at Centaur, there is bad news in store: The Devil's Carousel ends with the closure of the plant.
The strength of the book lies in the freshness of Torrington's material. Its weakness lies in the language. Swing Hammer Swing! led some critics to com- pare him with Joyce. There is vitality in the new book, certainly, of a joking kind, as when one character reports his inability to remember the emergency phone number: I knew the first three digits was 999, but when it came to the fourth figure I was lost down a mine with a gassed canary.
But a blonde is 'curvaceous', a scrawny neck is 'like a chicken's', a roomful of people noisily at work is 'bedlam': the clichés keep coming, and are matched by an occasional cliched Carry On-film quality in the conception of scenes (the blonde, a stripper, flashes open her coat to the `goggle-eyed' doorman). The effect of this un-Joycean linguistic lethargy is often to plummet the narrative to the level of Andy Capp or the Sixties sitcom On the Buses — a pity, and a pity that makes The Devil's Carousel less readable than it might be.
I'm driving. Got any low alcohol alcoholic lemonade?'
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