Latest news with #AnthonyShapland
The Guardian
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
A Room Above a Shop by Anthony Shapland review – a fantastic debut of forbidden desire
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. They agree to meet the following day on the mountain, where they begin an intense and tender love affair, which plays out against the backdrop of a postindustrial landscape, captured in Shapland's muscular prose: 'a brownfield slicked in frost above the river and road, railway and town … The valley is shrinking. Houses fall apart, worthless. A place of industry now sagging, underfed, starved of purpose.' Respected in the community, M has a daughter who lives with her mother and stepfather, and thus has a lot to lose from this risky affair. Before long, he offers B a job and lodgings at the ironmonger's shop, where the younger man 'handles stock, bulky farm deliveries, paint orders'. Soon he can 'signwrite, sharpen knives, occasionally turns his hand to shoe repairs … A language of admiration builds between the two men.' Much of the novel's tension derives from the duplicitous life B and M are forced to live in the homophobic, close-knit community. The risk of exposure is a constant threat. The titular room above a shop is in reality two rooms, one for each of them, though 'nobody comes up here to discover only one bed unmade'. From adolescence, B has learned to pass as straight with other men in the dominant pub-culture: 'Men with men, mates. He understands how to behave, what to talk of, how far apart to sit.' To come out in this world would be suicidal. With a litany of slurs, he acknowledges that men like him are seen as 'against nature, effeminate, weak. Light in their loafers, shirtlifters, nancies, benders'. He finds he and M are 'always lying. Exposed, they would be shamed. Shamed in the town that knows their fathers and their mothers.' It's a situation that ultimately proves corrosive to their love. While the novel covers territory familiar from the early work of Alan Hollinghurst and others, it takes stylistic risks with its fragmentary structure, allowing a nimble alternation between the points of view of B and M. In spare sections and single standalone lines, Shapland's prose achieves a poetic intensity, shifting from vivid evocations of sex to childhood memories. B and M's fraught but freeing first coupling is full of 'spit and awkwardness … This thing is happening. They are both laughing, smiling. Kissing.' Later, Shapland distils the freedom of a 1970s upbringing into a single paragraph: 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. With its poignant rendering of a loving relationship undertaken against great odds, compounded by a hostile political climate, A Room Above a Shop is a powerful and luminously pure novel. At 53, Shapland has arrived with his talent fully formed. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Jude Cook's novel Jacob's Advice is published by Unbound. A Room Above a Shop by Anthony Shapland is published by Granta (£14.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
A Room Above a Shop by Anthony Shapland review – a striking story of concealed love
Finding a distinctive voice that stands out and speaks clearly is an essential test for a novelist, and it's one that Welsh artist and writer Anthony Shapland effortlessly passes in his impressive debut. A Room Above a Shop opens in south Wales in the late 1980s, where a young man, B, is feeling excited, about to make a big decision. It will take him away from the sense of provisionality that's embodied by his council house with its 'doors with weightless cardboard interiors and hollow aluminium handles'. He's going to meet an older man, M, to view the sun from a hill on New Year's Eve. But he's not really going for the sun. 'He'll go to hell for what he wants, but still he climbs.' M and B edge closer to each other, certain and uncertain at the same time, heading towards an intimacy they can't speak aloud. 'The hunger for another body, for a person to know, to see what he knows, to share.' Over time, M, who owns the local hardware shop, gives B a job there and invites him to stay in the room above the shop. Thus, mutely expressed, begins an affecting love story that picks up force as it progresses. The relationship is in their bodies and the consequences in their heads: B imagines, but only imagines, introducing M to his father. They do the weekly shop separately, at different times. Government leaflets on Aids come through the letterbox, and 'papers shout of abominations, a disease, a cancer, a time bomb, a plague, of men like that swirling in a cesspit of their own making'. In a world of division – shop v home, public performance v private life – M is 'ashamed of his own shame'. The challenge is to find a language that expresses B and M's inability to articulate their own feelings. (This, after all, is a world where concealment is so ingrained that even the main characters' names are withheld.) Shapland does this with brevity, and a style intimate and impersonal at the same time. 'He slips into the water low and soundless. All otter. The cold grips lungs tight until shoulders slide in rippling beats across the deep.' The pithy approach means Shapland can evoke multitudes in a single line: when M and B go on holiday, we learn that the B&B owner assumes they're father and son with the simple words: 'Sorry, the family twin's taken. Takes after you, doesn't he?' Shapland was mentored by Cynan Jones, the best in the business at this laconic style, and you can see Jones's influence. But there's more here, a Beckettian – or Eimear McBride-ish – shaking of syntax to reflect the men's head-spun emotions but also to slow the reader down and make the descriptions sink deeper. 'Tense, the flex and judder, and seaweed smells of semen and spit and blood and food all capsize as they slump and sink sleep-deep.' The atmosphere conjured by the language means that when the plot's payoff comes, it hits hard, sending the reader reeling. A Room Above a Shop is a sticky book: memorable, striking, dark, beautiful and one of the best debuts I've read in years. A Room Above a Shop is published by Granta (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
