lit – Book, Bell & Candle

Stewart Ennis’ strong debut novel Blessed Assurance is a coming of age story set in a Scottish evangelical community in the midst of the Cold War. It follows the troubled Joseph Kirkland, whose casual lie that he has been ‘saved’ by Jesus quickly spirals out of control. As Joseph heads towards disaster, secrets long buried by his family and community come careening dangerously to the surface.

In his depiction of the fictional village of Kilhaugh, Ennis perfectly captures the claustrophobia of small town life. There is a distinct feeling of a world on the brink of collapse, either through the erosion of the beliefs on which the community is founded or from the ever-present threat of nuclear war.

With its simmering tensions and bloodstained bibles, Blessed Assurance reads like a Flannery O’Connor story with a distinctly Scottish twist. Ennis’ use of Scots language words makes the dialogue shine and makes a contribution to much needed linguistic diversity in British writing.

The emotional heart of the story is Joseph’s relationship with his best friend Archie Truman, a kind-hearted juvenile delinquent from the “Glasgow spillover”. Their friendship challenges Kilhaugh’s rigid class divisions and the hypocrisy of its religious leaders. In this tragicomic tale of faith, grief and redemption, Blessed Assurance reminds us that ultimately it is people, and not religion, that will save us.

Blessed Assurance is published by Scottish indie publisher Vagabond Voices. You can buy the book directly from them here. Review copy provided by the publisher in return for an honest review.

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Isabel Waidner’s We Are Made of Diamond Stuff came highly recommended from a friend, with the caveat that it was “quite weird”. I wasn’t disappointed.

Waidner’s protagonist — the unnamed 36 year old lookalike of Eleven from Stranger Things — and their friend Shae are both migrant workers struggling to survive in a characteristically grim off-season seaside town on the Isle of Wight. Their world stubbornly refuses to cohere into a single reality. Images of polar bears bleed from Shae’s jumper into the real world, Reebok classics transform into their animal namesake and start running around, and a character from BS Johnson appears in the form of their corrupt and tyrannical boss. (There’s a strong intertextual relationship with the novel House Mother Normal by the experimental writer BS Johnson, but you don’t need to have read it to understand what’s going on.)

Waidner’s absurd, darkly comic prose unflinchingly tackles the harsh reality of life for queer migrants pushed to the edges by Brexit Britain. The phrase “hostile environment” has never felt more apt. They also construct and incisive and sorely-needed critique of queer culture in UK, its co-opting by right wing movements and the impact of respectability politics. Diamond Stuff marks out the battle-lines in our increasingly confused and violent culture wars. In the face of all of this, its characters keep fighting.

No other novel I’ve read has so sharply captured the strangeness of our current political moment. The narrative refuses to resolve itself — there are no resolutions for the mess we’ve put ourselves in. Furiously preoccupied with the now, We Are Made of Diamond Stuff is set to be one of the defining novels of the Brexit era. Essential reading.

We Are Made of Diamond Stuff is published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe. You can buy the book here.

If you want to find out more I recommend listening to this great round-table discussion at the London Review Bookshop featuring Isabel Waidner.

Tag: lit

On ‘Blessed Assurance’ by Stewart Ennis

On ‘We Are Made of Diamond Stuff’ by Isabel Waidner