amner
7th Sep 2004, 1:09
Certain books, and these are books that I like by the way, fill me with a certain frisson of shame every time I read them in public. One of these (and its sister, while we're at it, Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son) is Gordon Burn's Happy Like Murderers. Do I mean shame? Is that the right word? There is nothing lurid about the cover, after all, for it is just a photograph of topsoil upon which sits a bright yellow smiley from a child's toy. Indeed, the look of the thing is rather discrete. No red and black, no garish iconic overused photo, no trumpeting screaming tabloid cri de coeur blasted across the masthead.
No, none of these, but it does say - and it really does try and say it as soberly as possible - 'the True Story of Fred and Rosemary West'.
Straight away this puts you through the looking glass, and people stare. They do, they stare and they judge, I'm certain of it. You can't rush through it though, not like those ten-a-penny tie-ins that come out the evening after a juicy murder trial (Howard Sounes's Fred and Rose doing the honours in this case). In fact, I bet you're thinking it now, aren't you? But it's important to get this across; here, it's different. Really.
You'll know the story, of course. Fred and Rose West, seemingly 'OK but a bit rough' married couple, open house, waifs and strays, abuse, murders, burials - and that's all true. All of that shitty truth is detailed endlessly in these pages, but there is so much more to it.
To attempt anything within the parameters of the history of 25 Cromwell Street, you have to get past the violence. Burn runs at that particular hurdle head on. We get it all; the rapes, the casual assaults, the beatings, the murders, the disposals, the de-humanising brutality, everything delivered straight and unflinching. The effect, and you may argue that this is real shame, is to become numb to the horror. From that point on, you start to notice the other stuff.
Burn begins by picking up threads, different people, peripheral characters who knew the Wests, and telling their stories, explaining their lives and motivations. These people, you see, are real, interconnected, they're me and you. He gives a social history of Cromwell Street, painting a picture of Gloucester between the wars:
For five years from 1927, Eddie Fry, destined to be known as 'The Pocket Hercules' and 'Gloucester's Midget Strongman', walked along Cromwell Street on his way to the back playground entrance of Sir Thomas Rich's. He was aged eleven to sixteen then and would return to Cromwell Street to live a few years later when he married Doris Green, the girl at number 25.
Or:
Mr and Mrs Miles have lived at 43 Cromwell Street for fifty years...Mr Miles, a retired civil servant, grows flowers in beds that run around two sides of his house. He is often to be found on his knees on the pavement, pruning and trimming, forking and sifting, tending his little bit of suburbia.
Gradually the picture builds up, an existence repeated everywhere across England in working towns. Not too bad, full of community, full of systems of surveillance, restraint, obligation, a complex network of checks and balances. All about to fall apart, of course.
Sixties. Seventies. The rapid disintegration of established codes as economics forces square pegs into round holes nationwide. Somebody's Husband covers much the same ground in dealing with the new uncertainties of masculine sexual politics, here though it's all migration and social dislocation. Old rules no longer applying, certain unfortunate circumstances conspiring to bring the results to the doorsteps of predators (in Bingley with Sutcliffe, in Gloucester with Fred). Eighties. Choice, all glossy and blinding, a shiny new commodity we're eager for and sold on, comes rolling along and topples us over. HLM follows behind the ride and bumps over the wake, watching what is turned over and over, and usually it's kids. Kids picked up by Fred and Rose on the Gloucester Ring Road, or in pub car parks, or by burger vans and lay-bys. Taken in, fed and watered, bumped and dumped; Fred authors their destruction with a fierce and strongly held ambivalence.
He's so powerfully uncaring. His own virtual impotence with his wife - whom he demands sleeps around, and then reports back - only finds authority in the casual ruin he effects on those who wander into his orbit. He pushes their bodies (strangers, lodgers, his kids) into holes too small to take them. He twists their limbs off with a pop. He removes their fingers, toes, shoulder blades, takes them to certain places that mean something and buries them there.
When the floor of the cellar had been filled up with bodies and concreted over and made into a bedroom for the children, he would spend many hours sitting on the edge of their beds drinking tea and talking. Talking if there was anybody there with him but sitting hour after hour down there anyway where five bodies were buried.
Ah, sorry, should have warned you. We're back to the violence again. The thing is, like a dull background drilling, like roadworks or sitting in a dentist's waiting room, you tune in to the horror again. The anaesthetic wears off, the traffic eases, and it's there again. You're lucky, you've absorbed the point along the way, but without realising it surges insidiously back again:
She started hitting Anna with fists and hands and swearing at her, calling her names. Anna was gagged. She started screaming. She was screaming in her head. Rose raped her. And then Anna remembered her father being there and he had his work overalls on. She remembered pleading with him with her eyes. Her father raped her. She presumed it was his lunch hour.
But in the end the book triumphs because it is so glaringly humane in its ability to deal with the subject matter. Fred's inhumanity grows to colossal proportions. The book stares him out, it has to I guess, and proves itself by winning that particular contest. In the end, he's a pitiable creature, a bully, a thug, so totally without human recognition that it dawns on you you've won the battle because you cannot possibly get further away from this man. So, shame? No, I suppose not. But a missionary zeal, perhaps, a calling to convert and urge people to read this book because in the end you can't help but feel affirmed by it.
No, none of these, but it does say - and it really does try and say it as soberly as possible - 'the True Story of Fred and Rosemary West'.
Straight away this puts you through the looking glass, and people stare. They do, they stare and they judge, I'm certain of it. You can't rush through it though, not like those ten-a-penny tie-ins that come out the evening after a juicy murder trial (Howard Sounes's Fred and Rose doing the honours in this case). In fact, I bet you're thinking it now, aren't you? But it's important to get this across; here, it's different. Really.
You'll know the story, of course. Fred and Rose West, seemingly 'OK but a bit rough' married couple, open house, waifs and strays, abuse, murders, burials - and that's all true. All of that shitty truth is detailed endlessly in these pages, but there is so much more to it.
To attempt anything within the parameters of the history of 25 Cromwell Street, you have to get past the violence. Burn runs at that particular hurdle head on. We get it all; the rapes, the casual assaults, the beatings, the murders, the disposals, the de-humanising brutality, everything delivered straight and unflinching. The effect, and you may argue that this is real shame, is to become numb to the horror. From that point on, you start to notice the other stuff.
Burn begins by picking up threads, different people, peripheral characters who knew the Wests, and telling their stories, explaining their lives and motivations. These people, you see, are real, interconnected, they're me and you. He gives a social history of Cromwell Street, painting a picture of Gloucester between the wars:
For five years from 1927, Eddie Fry, destined to be known as 'The Pocket Hercules' and 'Gloucester's Midget Strongman', walked along Cromwell Street on his way to the back playground entrance of Sir Thomas Rich's. He was aged eleven to sixteen then and would return to Cromwell Street to live a few years later when he married Doris Green, the girl at number 25.
Or:
Mr and Mrs Miles have lived at 43 Cromwell Street for fifty years...Mr Miles, a retired civil servant, grows flowers in beds that run around two sides of his house. He is often to be found on his knees on the pavement, pruning and trimming, forking and sifting, tending his little bit of suburbia.
Gradually the picture builds up, an existence repeated everywhere across England in working towns. Not too bad, full of community, full of systems of surveillance, restraint, obligation, a complex network of checks and balances. All about to fall apart, of course.
Sixties. Seventies. The rapid disintegration of established codes as economics forces square pegs into round holes nationwide. Somebody's Husband covers much the same ground in dealing with the new uncertainties of masculine sexual politics, here though it's all migration and social dislocation. Old rules no longer applying, certain unfortunate circumstances conspiring to bring the results to the doorsteps of predators (in Bingley with Sutcliffe, in Gloucester with Fred). Eighties. Choice, all glossy and blinding, a shiny new commodity we're eager for and sold on, comes rolling along and topples us over. HLM follows behind the ride and bumps over the wake, watching what is turned over and over, and usually it's kids. Kids picked up by Fred and Rose on the Gloucester Ring Road, or in pub car parks, or by burger vans and lay-bys. Taken in, fed and watered, bumped and dumped; Fred authors their destruction with a fierce and strongly held ambivalence.
He's so powerfully uncaring. His own virtual impotence with his wife - whom he demands sleeps around, and then reports back - only finds authority in the casual ruin he effects on those who wander into his orbit. He pushes their bodies (strangers, lodgers, his kids) into holes too small to take them. He twists their limbs off with a pop. He removes their fingers, toes, shoulder blades, takes them to certain places that mean something and buries them there.
When the floor of the cellar had been filled up with bodies and concreted over and made into a bedroom for the children, he would spend many hours sitting on the edge of their beds drinking tea and talking. Talking if there was anybody there with him but sitting hour after hour down there anyway where five bodies were buried.
Ah, sorry, should have warned you. We're back to the violence again. The thing is, like a dull background drilling, like roadworks or sitting in a dentist's waiting room, you tune in to the horror again. The anaesthetic wears off, the traffic eases, and it's there again. You're lucky, you've absorbed the point along the way, but without realising it surges insidiously back again:
She started hitting Anna with fists and hands and swearing at her, calling her names. Anna was gagged. She started screaming. She was screaming in her head. Rose raped her. And then Anna remembered her father being there and he had his work overalls on. She remembered pleading with him with her eyes. Her father raped her. She presumed it was his lunch hour.
But in the end the book triumphs because it is so glaringly humane in its ability to deal with the subject matter. Fred's inhumanity grows to colossal proportions. The book stares him out, it has to I guess, and proves itself by winning that particular contest. In the end, he's a pitiable creature, a bully, a thug, so totally without human recognition that it dawns on you you've won the battle because you cannot possibly get further away from this man. So, shame? No, I suppose not. But a missionary zeal, perhaps, a calling to convert and urge people to read this book because in the end you can't help but feel affirmed by it.