A Room Above a Shop by Anthony Shapland review – a fantastic debut of forbidden desire
This spare, luminously pure novel charts a secret gay relationship in post-industrial Wales Set during the late 1980s, against prevailing Aids paranoia and the Tories’ Section 28 bill forbidding the promotion of homosexuality in education, Anthony Shapland’s taut debut novel about the relationship between two men in the Welsh valleys packs a considerable punch. In an interview, Shapland suggests there was “a generational howl of film and literature about that era when legislation combined with moral attitudes and misconceptions”. Indeed, there are echoes of 80s queer cinema, such as the work of Derek Jarman and My Beautiful Laundrette, in the forbidden liaison between the men, who are known only as B and M throughout. The difference here is that their world is not metropolitan but suffocatingly provincial, a fact that adds considerably to their predicament.The novel begins on New Year’s Eve 1987, a time when “Don’t Die of Ignorance” HIV information leaflets were being pushed through letterboxes, with their melodramatic images of icebergs and black marble slabs, warning “the virus can be passed from man to man”. At the time, B is living with his father in a cul-de-sac near a “man-made mountain” of coal waste, a “place to be alone with this feeling he’s different to the others”. In the pub, he meets the “good-natured M” from the ironmonger’s, who is 11 years his senior, and with whom he feels an immediate spark.The summers were full of falls and leaps and forfeits. Of scabs picked at the edges and tarmac-grit grazes, dock-leaf salve on stings, breath held underwater. Of running alongside trains and freewheeling bikes down the steep rutted tracks. Summers of dares and whispers of what men do and what women do, and who has seen what. Continue reading...
This spare, luminously pure novel charts a secret gay relationship in post-industrial Wales
Set during the late 1980s, against prevailing Aids paranoia and the Tories’ Section 28 bill forbidding the promotion of homosexuality in education, Anthony Shapland’s taut debut novel about the relationship between two men in the Welsh valleys packs a considerable punch. In an interview, Shapland suggests there was “a generational howl of film and literature about that era when legislation combined with moral attitudes and misconceptions”. Indeed, there are echoes of 80s queer cinema, such as the work of Derek Jarman and My Beautiful Laundrette, in the forbidden liaison between the men, who are known only as B and M throughout. The difference here is that their world is not metropolitan but suffocatingly provincial, a fact that adds considerably to their predicament.
The novel begins on New Year’s Eve 1987, a time when “Don’t Die of Ignorance” HIV information leaflets were being pushed through letterboxes, with their melodramatic images of icebergs and black marble slabs, warning “the virus can be passed from man to man”. At the time, B is living with his father in a cul-de-sac near a “man-made mountain” of coal waste, a “place to be alone with this feeling he’s different to the others”. In the pub, he meets the “good-natured M” from the ironmonger’s, who is 11 years his senior, and with whom he feels an immediate spark.
The summers were full of falls and leaps and forfeits. Of scabs picked at the edges and tarmac-grit grazes, dock-leaf salve on stings, breath held underwater. Of running alongside trains and freewheeling bikes down the steep rutted tracks. Summers of dares and whispers of what men do and what women do, and who has seen what. Continue reading...
