Rooted in West Cumbria and in David Gaffney's personal experience of debt counselling, his novel, ‘Never, Never’ challenges a society disintegrating under the pressures of unsustainable debt. Already enthusiastically reviewed by The Observer, The Independent and The Guardian, it gives a local habitation to a universal problem and invites an international readership to walk the gritty streets of Cleator Moor, unflatteringly described as "a rash of tiny lights under the shoulder of the fells, looking as though a giant crane had picked up a city council estate and dropped it into the centre of the national park."
It was also very entertaining to hear Gaffney not only reading extensively from his work at Rosehill Theatre on 26th February, with amazingly versatile illustrations on his white board but also exchanging banter with former classmates at Whitehaven Grammar School and colleagues at Debt Counselling centres. We now know where Apartfromtheobvious got his name from!
But it would diminish ‘Never, Never’ inexcusably to confine it to its local setting or its appeal to the recognition of local places and people. It would be like calling 'David Copperfield' a novel about Great Yarmouth. Like Dickens, David rubs readers' noses in messes for which they are partly responsible and treats horrific events with hideous humour.
As Gaffney has previously specialised in his highly explosive and enigmatic 150 word short stories, ‘Sawn Off Tales’, and ‘Never, Never’ is his first novel, we will not drive too far a comparison with the author of countless 900 page classics, but he and Dickens do have something in common, besides a fascination with the spontaneous combustion of human bodies: a devastating sense of irony and the ability to spring horrific shocks as apparently unrelated strands of narrative are suddenly locked together in place.
In order to show how pervasive his theme is, he presents in his chief character, Eric, a debt counsellor more deeply bogged down by debt than any of his clients, and the dilemma of counselling a loan shark he has helped to drive out of business.
No one could accuse Gaffney of being a moralist. He remains as non-judgemental as a counsellor is supposed to be, and shows no sympathy for those who look with disdain on the supposed irresponsible behaviour of the lower classes. He puts into the lips of the repulsive Bennett Lowe from the Department of Stealth and Social Insecurity, a just challenge to middle class superiority: "Do you think the poor want an extra fiver a week on the brew, a lower sub to the tally man, a social-fund loan for a cooker? Like fuck they do. They want what you and I have got. The freedom to waste money." The link is made when Eric's very superior partner, Charlotte, protests that he is not spending up to his credit card limit. "How can you leave £1000 lying there unspent? It's a sin. What could I do with £1000!"
In the same vein, Eric reflects: "It is our job, our duty our right, to default, to fall into arrears." And the author no doubt intends us to feel that this is one facet of the truth: "Who wants to die with money in the bank?" Is living responsibly all about playing safe? But coming at the end does not make it the last word.
Earlier, the same fallible character, handling vast amounts of unearned cash, has another reflection: "The reality of his job was in front of his eyes, a great steaming turd on the freshly hoovered carpet. Eric thought of all the work performed to earn the money. The sinews of a shoulder picking up a weight, the tendon of a leg climbing a stair, the muscles of a finger assembling a part. In this money lived all this effort, all this energy." It leaves us with a devastating sense of the fatuous gap between the labour of those who produce goods, for pathetically small wages, to feed the insatiable cravings of those of us who compulsively spend far more than we can ever earn.
As an alternative last word there is the crazed speech of Eric's childhood sweetheart, the enchanting punk, Spangles, obsessed with bloodbrainvolume and the need to bore a hole in her own forehead. She struggles to explain the evolution of the human brain: " - the bits that do speech and logic and reasoning - took over the brain. That's when consciousness became corrupt and that's why we are as we are as we are today - violent, cold, rational, unfeeling." Madness, we hear you say, but what’s the difference? She simply feels we were not meant to be like this.