Manchester Slingback
Nicholas Blincoe
Pan, pbk, 261 pgs, £5.99
Review by Gerald Houghton (1999)
To say Manchester Slingback is better than Blincoe’s last, the asinine Jello Salad, is to choose being run over by a lorry rather than a train: it’s just as painful and no less messy. At least his latest moves in vaguely linear fashion, as opposed to Salad’s grab-bag of badly strung together, essentially random scenes that simply stopped rather than ended. As writing, Jello Salad was, if you will, literary ethnic cleansing.
Here is some plot from its follow-up: Jake Powell drank deep of the Manchester gay scene in the 80s, running with pornographers, rent-boys and purse-snatchers before the city ate him alive. He bolted for London. Only now here comes Davey Green. Detective Inspector Davey Green, a nasty, greasy little man who wants to take Jake back to his old stamping ground, especially now one of his erstwhile compadres has fetched-up dead and buried on the moors. And he wasn’t the first.
This is middling mid-week ITV drama stuff. It certainly has the same slack thought: a plot - all hackneyed flashbacks - realised in images and set-pieces, with broadstroke characterisation about as subtle as a NATO air-strike. The central relationship, between little Billy-both-ways and the Sweeney off-cut, is about as believable as Bill Clinton’s protestations of sexual innocence. It’s a double-act with two straight-men. And for a man who scribbles regularly for a couple of our more respected broadsheets, Blincoe’s prose is, frankly, artless wank.
It’s also larded-up with the kind of research that sticks out like Michael Jackson in an orphanage. Bowie Boys, Fall songs, "flashing green-techno" lettering on single sleeves, Gary Numan, Kraftwerk: it might all be true, but it needs to be bedded into a book, not left laying about like a building site. Authenticity is one thing, literary-LEGO quite another. And besides, if you are going to play that particular game, there are rules: it was ‘Homosapien’ by Pete Shelley (page 157), not ‘Homo Sapiens’, Mr Blincoe. Do try and keep up.
It could be a gag, but then the award-winning (!) Manchester Slingback is a book possessed of no humour and precious little skill. The solution to the ‘mystery’ is little more than rather foul-tasting kiddie-fiddler porn masquerading as social conscience, and the finale is just laughable. These are novels you write in the privacy of your own bedroom and stash away in the bottom drawer, long long before you ever look up a publisher. Blincoe is doing his growing up in public, and on this evidence it’ll be a while yet before he’s able to go to the toilet without having have someone watch him do it.