The Hard Shoulder
Chris Petit
(Granta; £12.99)
If the Kilburn State Gaumont, where Marilyn Monroe and David Bowie have performed in the past, was magically transformed into Northwest London’s very own Statue of Liberty, the inscription on its base would have to read, ‘Give me your tired and your poor, feed ’em two drinks more than they can handle, and turn ’em loose on Kilburn High Road.’ Chris Petit — variously novelist, critic and film-maker — sets The Hard Shoulder in a small corner of the world bounded to the west by Harlesden, to the east by West Hampstead, to the north by Cricklewood and to the south by Maida Vale. It’s County Kilburn, the traditional home-away-from-home of London’s expat Irish community. The action takes place sometime during High Thatcherism: the only definite temporal marker provided is that the 1985 western Silverado has just hit the cinemas.
Petit’s scenario is, seemingly, archetypal noir. O’Grady is fresh out of jail after serving time for a robbery which went wrong, in which he went down and his colleagues got away: presumably with the money. Cue echoes of Parker, Lee Marvin’s obsessed, driven human tank in John Boorman’s movie of Richard Stark’s Point Blank: remorselessly mowing down all obstacles in his blood-splattered quest to punish his betrayers and get his mitts on his rightful share of the loot.
Genre convention dictates that The Hard Shoulder should thus turn out to be a translation of this hardboiled archetype into the mean streets of Irish London. With The Psalm Killer, Petit demonstrated that he can handle classic thriller formalities more than adequately, and had he chosen to play this one according to the standard rules of the game it might have have turned out to be an efficient page-flipping potboiler. However, here he has very different fish to fry, and it doesn’t turn out like that.
Why? Because the characters simply don’t behave the way they do in genre thrillers. O’Grady is an almost utterly passive protagonist, at the opposite end of the motivation scale from Parker or, indeed, some Elmore Leonard anti-hero in the same situation. O’Grady is beaten, broken, a man at a loose end who could conceivably remain that way for the rest of his life. His drinking companions — the sly, slimy Shaughnessy, a fellow-lodger at O’Grady’s sister’s tatty boarding-house, and the pathetic Tel, an accomplice in the misfired robbery who claims he was diddled, too — keep winding him up to take on the role of avenger, clumsily attempting to manipulate him into taking some form of action. They, too, have archetypal thriller roles to enact, but they aren’t up to it. They are simply not reliable enough, committed enough, smart enough or even desperate enough to be the kind of functional career crimmos capable of driving a typical failed-caper story. They’re just drunken also-rans incapable of anything significantly more challenging than propping up a bar or placing a bet.
Petit attacks noir cliches at their weakest point: character. The conventional caper plot which dominates the second half of the novel fails to take off precisely because the weight of the characters drags it down. Elmore Leonard’s magic lies in his ability to create a background sufficiently authentic to support characters far more resilient and picaresque than their real-world counterparts. Petit’s Kilburn is evoked with a verisimilitude which easily matches Leonard’s Detroit or Miami, but since his characters are as ‘real’ as their backdrop, they are incapable of behaving like their literary or cinematic equivalents: instead, they burst through the conventions like rocks through wet Kleenex. The ‘hard shoulder’ is what they get, and also where they end up.
Moral: don’t try this at home. Especially if you live near Kilburn High Road.
Independent, 2001
