Sally Bavage writes: A literary soirée! At last, after a three-year absence, Headingley LitFest hosted an event in Headingley Library with real people in actual space. Not called Zoom, but Whoosh - still a word that indicates fast-moving and risk-taking. Words that certainly characterise Ray Brown's newest novel. He is an acclaimed author and old hand at Radio4, also a local denizen whose work encompasses playscripts, broadcasting, talks, articles and longer pieces. His latest book is also published by the eclectic Armley press, which has over the past decade or so published some original and exciting work by local writers. Check out their catalogue - https://www.armleypress.com/about2-c69n
Ray whooshed us through some of the many characters in his book. And when I say characters, they certainly were. Oddball, eccentric, ornery and horny as well as argumentative, committed and occasionally almost normal. You've met the people Ray has based his writing on, or passed them in the streets you walk between the thinly-veiled venues (not even thinly in some cases!). Or heard them talking over a drink in one of the local hostelries. His motley crew of characters is both strangely gripping - and they are us! As Ray said, "Any resemblance to persons living or dead is intentional".
The events of the book take place on one Saturday afternoon and evening in May 1979. Yes, shortly after that election and when the word gay was still applied to jolly parties. It hasn't stopped some people from continuing to live - not always well - or love - not always wisely - and laugh - not always kindly. There's plenty of pathos and drama amongst the dramatis personae of these pages. An illicit affair found out, a bank manager with a secret, a domestic bully, students of human behaviour as well as the university, media types and misfits, sex and lust, arguments and desire. All normal then! And you'll find you whoosh through it, caught up in the lives of those who were probably your colleagues, your neighbours or friends.
Richard Wilcocks writes:
This book is like a large landscape painting, a landscape heavily populated, somewhat in the style of Frith's realistic Victorian masterpiece 'The Derby Day'. Brown is a realist with a sense of humour, and any Victorian connotations which are in this modern panorama of an afternoon and evening in a city still in touch with its grimy industrial past would have to be found in accounts of the underworld of that time, or in some of the many officially banned publications which once circulated widely. Readers, that is the viewers, can linger over individual characters (most of them 'amalgamations' of people the author knows or once knew) or relish groups of people linked by snatches of superb dialogue, often startling, or funny. Brown is so good at dialogue. Leeds is not the city to be found on maps, not quite. Districts are delineated approximately, sometimes misleadingly: Burley, for example, appears as Leeds 6, not Leeds 4.
If the book was translated into one long film it would be long and fragmentary, but many of the vividly evocative scenes could be tackled by storyboarders for shorter works, which could be pieced together according to taste, or to emphasise contrasts, from the brick-built toilets on the edge of Woodhouse Moor once frequented by cottaging gays and predatory, enticing policemen to the Fenton pub near the (then) Polytechnic and the University, which was in 1979 the preferred meeting place of a very diverse range of extraordinary people, not all of them artistic, who turned it into a Leeds equivalent of Paris's Left bank. Well, sort of...
A book by the American author John Rechy, The Sexual Outlaw, was a big influence. It is a non-fiction series of vignettes about the homosexual scene in California in the seventies, and was part of the movement against oppression at the time. Brown's book is not just about gay liberation, but the author is obviously very conscious of the fact that 1979, the year of Margaret Thatcher's election, preceded a decade of tragedy and prejudice for the gay community, from the infamous Clause 28 to the hysteria which came with the beginnings of the AIDS crisis.
