voice and mind
by Douglas Messerli
Thomas
Frick The Iron Boys (Santa Fe, New
Mexico: Burning Books, 2011)
Thomas
Frick’s 2011 fiction, The Iron Boys,
is full of rich characterizations and is densely plotted. By the book’s
completion, the reader has a strong sense of the early 19th century
northern English communities, in which many individuals were involved in the
Luddite Movement, destroying machines and mills in strong reaction against the industrial
machines newly installed. Not only were these individuals angered by the
incessant noise of the new mills, run, in Frick’s fiction, by George Cogent
Meadows Richard Pilfer Withy, but were disturbed by the economic shift from
hand labor to machines, forcing some of them out of jobs and fair payment. The
central characters of this book gather on street corners, in pubs, and in each
other’s homes, or take long walks together, permitting the author to present us
with dialogues between all sorts of beings, from radical agitators like Pank,
hard-working women such as Rose Stonewarden and Sarah Maldon, and poor and
wandering, poverty-stricken children such as Milky, to homosexual intellects
like Eddard Weedy, lovers such as Silvy, and brutal drunkards, one of whom—in
the most vicious act of the book—kills and eats a puppy. The world Frick paints
is nearly Dickensian in its depiction of people of enormous appetites and hard
living.
Yet for all its density of good,
old-fashioned story-telling, the brilliance of The Iron Boys lies not in its secondary characters or plot, but in
its focus on the voice of its narrator, Corbel Penner, an intelligent but uneducated
local, who tangentially gets involved in a violent attack on Withy’s
lace-making mill. And concentrating on Penner, Frick’s story, following the
free-associations of the character’s thinking and his personal language, turns
what may at first seem like straight-forward realism into a fairly radical and
highly poetic text. While Frick gives us a good story that will end, we know
from the beginning, in a highly dramatic attack and destruction of the mill,
crippling our hero, what really matters in this book is the sound and movement
of that figure’s voice and mind.
How Frick—who was born and raised in Kentucky
and Arkansas, before living in England, Michigan, New York City, Boston,
Strasbourg, and, for the past several years, in Los Angeles—was so able to
create a credible North England dialect for his character is unimaginable. But
then perhaps this character’s voice, in its open eccentricity, is nothing like
what it pretends to be. Who cares, when a fictional figure can speak so
wondrously?
Hangin over
that year is the comet. Cant never forget
that. It
first appear in that cold spring. Biggest comet
ever seen
Weedy says. That should tell you something.
Aint but a
smudge in the sky at first. I make nothing of
It but I
don’t see so good. Theys some talk in the square.
Misfigewsured
lambs an blight in the comin crop. Bad twins.
The fortunes
a Napoleon. One crystal night seem all close
at once. I
can see a blood red tail brushed out like feather
malt. Wide an tall an just that spiky. Weedy
says it were
a Frenchman
spot it first. Out a their froggy pride they
drum up all
the virtues a their comet wine.... What we did
have that autumn is the
fattest sweetest penny lucre melon
you ever
taste.
If, at first, this language seems a bit
too close to a work in dialect, the reader soon comprehends this as a masterly
made-up language that reads throughout more like a poem. And along with the
meandering mind of our hero which determines the various directions the tale
takes, the fiction becomes something closer to being a long narrative poem.
Even though the Burning Books format is small, and the work is only about 260
pages, it took me longer to read, at times, than the momentous novel I was
encountering during the same period, Remembrance
of Things Past by Proust.
Consequently, Frick’s central figure,
although he may be a kind of everyday man, is transformed into something very
extraordinary, beginning the book by being able to comprehend the language of
the birds, and ending up with a kind Homeric nobility in his late discovery
that the boy from Child Town whom he has so long admired, is his own son, the
mother his former lover. And like Homer’s heroes, throughout Penner sings—such
as the song sung about the mentally retarded local, New Billy:
O
New Billy my charm a New Billy
When
shall I see my New Billy again
When
the fishes fly over the fountain
Then I
shall see my New Billy again
When
your fishes fly over the fountain
Then you shall see your New Billy again.
Penner also has a sense of moral being
that far outweighs most of the other figures in his world, growing disgusted
with himself and others in the bar where, as drunk skins and eats a puppy, he
and others sit passively watching. The result of that outrage ends in him
murdering the drunk soon after, which, obviously, represents his personal fall
from grace. If the book begin with his being one with nature, as opposed to the
mechanical world created by Withy and other capitalists, his and the Luddites’
actions to do not result in any real change, as Withy simple builds a new and
grander factory. Having lost the use of his legs, Penner himself is forced to
rely on a kind a machine, a cart-like contraption fixed up for him so that he
can travel about.
If
by novel’s end, the birds no longer can be comprehended or, as Penner suggests,
no longer even sing, however, the human voice of Frick’s picaresque has sung
such a memorable song that you may be tempted to wander its pages all over
again.
Los Angeles, New
Year’s Day 2014
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