Literary tour of the North

RICHARD T KELLY, AUTHOR OF THE ACCLAIMED 'CRUSADERS', ARGUES THAT CONTEMPORARY NOVELS SHOW THERE IS MORE TO THE LITERARY TRADITION OF THE NORTH THAN BLEAK LANDSCAPES AND DARK SATANIC MILLS.

'Knaves and foul weather come out of the north.' Thus ran a proverb much favoured by the late poet Ted Hughes, whose craggy eloquence made him the quintessential literary Yorkshireman. But if Hughes' words strike you as denigration then you're missing the mischief of them, and you must be from London or some other godforsaken place down south. Because northerners, you understand, are proud of their own hardiness in the face of daily adversity. We appreciate a certain bleak aspect of the world, and we tend to like our literature that way too.

I say 'we' a little ruefully. I am a Newcastle man, and a 'northern writer' inasmuch as I have published a 550-page novel about the north-east, Crusaders: a sort of love letter to a region where I was born but which my family left when I was a boy. Writing about the north makes one feel a part (however minor in my case) of a northern literary lineage. It is a lineage that often seems to need advocacy, or defence against prejudice.

In his Preludes William Wordsworth famously extolled the 'visionary dreariness' that he beheld from the heights of a Cumbrian hilltop. But to unsympathetic eyes the dreary rather than the visionary is the dominant mode of northern writing. To many readers 'northern' is itself mere shorthand for working-class stories and grimly 'realistic' style. It has been thus ever since Charles Dickens painted industrial Preston as the 'Coketown' of his Hard Times (1854). And once the 1950s/60sera northern novels of Stan Barstow, John Braine and David Sillitoe had been turned into fi lms of 'kitchen sink realism' - all cobbled streets and soot-blackened buildings - then the die was cast.

There is an alternative northern literary cliché, one built on brooding moorland and rolling green dales. The north - Yorkshire especially - has a tradition of romantic sagas about families and history: books that tend to hymn the 'rugged beauty' of the landscape and offer a male protagonist made of the same stuff, tough enough to withstand foul weather and steep hills. Emily Bronte's Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights is the archetype (and Ted Hughes was often felt to be Heathcliff's living embodiment.) The genre encouraged strong women too, which is why Catherine Cookson from South Shields, creator of Kate Hannigan and Tillie Trotter, became one of the world's bestselling authors.

But what about the northern novels of our own times, those we've lived through in the three decades since Margaret Thatcher's election in 1979? By the 1980s the north was well into its post-industrial era, the decline of coal and steel greatly hastened by Thatcherism, and for a while it seemed like all the great northern writing was on television and stage: Alan Bleasdale speaking for Liverpool in Boys From the Blackstuff and GBH, Peter Flannery for Newcastle in Our Friends in the North; Jim Cartwright refl ecting Bolton in Road, Tony Harrison lamenting Leeds in V. These masterpieces reaffi rmed the north as a dark, hard-bitten, masculine world, but their visionary force was testament to the might of the northern imagination.

Novels of the north have since enjoyed a resurgence; and many of the best new exponents are women. The Yorkshire family saga, for instance, was reinvented to great effect in Kate Atkinson's widelyloved fi rst novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995), a multigenerational tale of a dysfunctional family narrated by one Ruby Lennox from the moment of her conception above a pet shop in the shadow of York Minster cathedral. But Atkinson is only one of the northern writers now looking anew and breathing life into old forms.

Since the late 1980s pretty well all of England's industrial river cities have been cleaned up, the pit winding gear and 'black satanic mills' confi ned to museums. The new north is defi ned by leisure, service industry and tourism, and the business of 'post-industrial regeneration' has become a glaring theme for northern writers. Nowhere has this process unfolded so dramatically as Newcastle.

Its chief literary chronicler has been Tyneside-born novelist Gordon Burn, whose death in July 2009 was a huge loss to English letters. Burn left Newcastle at 18, and his fi rst literary heroes were Americans (Truman Capote and Norman Mailer.) But over the last decade he returned to mull over the changing face of Tyneside. In Born Yesterday (2007) he wanders through Durham and refl ects on 'the mining past whose deep scars have been landscaped and reclaimed; 'swarded over; attractively concealed.' In The North of England Home Service (2003) his protagonist is a clappedout working-class comic, Ray Cruddas, who opens a 'variety club' offering well-heeled businessmen and premiership footballers an ironic, retro version of an old-fashioned working-class night out - testament to what Burn reckoned as a strange cultural urge on our part to be 'cast back to a time when nobody spoke of 'community' and everybody belonged to one.'

If you scoot down from Tyneside to Teesside you will fi nd no smack of nostalgia about Middlesbrough's Richard Milward, whose fi rst novel Apples - a story of dreamy teenage delinquents in 'the Burra' - was published in 2007 when he was only 21. Milward was conscious of the miserable cultural stereotype affl icting the north. But as a young reader he had been galvanised by Irvine Welsh and the so-called 'Scots-Lit' of the 1990s; and its harshness, leavened by humour, was a trait he identifi ed with his own hometown.

Cumbria is the chocolate-box of the north, its charms more heavily marketed, owing to the allure of the Lake District and the literary heritage of Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter. In the last decade, however, Cumbria has brought forth a young female novelist so strong as to set a national standard, and she is fully alive to the ambiguities and contradictions of her locale.

Sarah Hall's 2002 debut Haweswater revisited the 1930s for a story of a Dales valley chosen to be evacuated and fl ooded as a reservoir. She stretched her range once again with The Carhullan Army (2007), a dystopian science fi ction set in a near-future England governed by a despotic 'Authority'. The novel is offered as the prison testament of a young woman ('Sister') who rejected her repressive society and sought refuge in the Cumbrian hills with a fi ercely selfsuffi cient all-female community. Hall has a glorious eye for describing physical terrain but prefers the tougher contours of the Lakeland Fells where her Spartan female warriors construct their (profoundly northern) alternative civilization.

Yorkshire, like Cumbria, has literary packages ready to offer the touristconsumer, trips to 'Herriot Country' by the Dales or 'Bronte Country' by the Moors. The lure of the rural idyll is such that villages built around farming or mining are now home to commuting management consultants and their families. Incomers to Yorkshire, though, are never given the easiest reception, nor is the land always as lovely as it looks in the brochure.

You will fi nd that menace in God's Own Country (2008), the sensational debut novel by Ross Raisin in which adolescent Sam Marsdyke, expelled from school and working his family's hill farm, watches venomously while 'his' valley fi lls up with bourgeois scum. Eventually young Marsdyke takes a fancy to the daughter of one such well-heeled blow-in family, and all bloody hell breaks loose.

If it's the dark stuff you want, Yorkshire's eminence noir is David Peace, whose vision of his home county - 'bloody Yorkshire', 'Wakefi eld deserted and barren', 'Leeds the grim and concrete medieval' - might be described as unforgiving. Peace's fanbase was founded on his treatment of pitch-black material, now immortalised by the TV adaptation of his Red Riding series about the corruption of West Yorkshire society and its police force in the years that the 'Yorkshire Ripper' was at large.

Warped sexuality and violence against women are hallmarks of northern writing, as of writing anywhere. Authentic depictions of female sexual feeling (beyond the longing of Cathy for Heathcliff) proved more elusive until the right female writers came forward. In 1985 Accrington in Lancashire brought forth Jeanette Winterson and her brilliant debut Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) a barely-veiled account of how she herself escaped a grim adoptive childhood within a Pentecostal evangelical church, and so won herself the right to love another woman.

Lesbianism is a much less fraught matter if you take a tour around the regenerated Hope Street Quarter of Liverpool in the company of Millie O'Reilly - erotomaniac narrator of Helen Walsh's Brass (2004). Brass shows off the half-Malaysian Walsh's vision of Liverpool as a 'sexy city', somehow 'luminous and majestic' even as its streets are crammed with 'broken glass, fast food packaging and the drunken lurch of sodden bodies.'

Manchester, that other post-industrial city, has also found able chroniclers of its prodigious nightlife and subcultures. Nicholas Blincoe's crime novel Manchester Slingback (1998) is set in the city's Canal Street gay community during the early 1980s, under siege by the police in an era when Manchester's top copper James Anderton spoke freely of homosexuals 'swirling in a cesspit of their own making.'

But to my eye Manchester's fi nest is Livi Michael, a novelist who now writes mainly for children, but whose earlier 'adult' novels - beginning with Under a Thin Moon (1992) - were fi rmly set among the council estates of Ashtonunder- Lyme where she herself grew up, within range of Saddleworth Moor, chief site of the Moors Murders. In their subject matter Michael's novels face all the charges usually employed to damn the art of 'the bleak north'. But if Michael's eye is unsparing, she brings empathy and humour, and her characters are desperately true to life - as in All the Dark Air (1997) with its hopeless relationship of two old classmates.

Even professed admirers of northern literature may yet be unfamiliar with Michael's work, but its virtues are emblematic of the writerly prowess that the region boasts. I commend her and indeed all the writers mentioned above without reservation, indeed with absolute cocksureness - which, as Ted Hughes knew, is another of those characteristics (like bad lads and lashing rain) that are very much abroad in the great north.