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 of 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 fictions’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, July 18, 2011
Reprinted
from EXPLORINGfictions (January 2014).
