the factory

There is something haunting about the writing of Derek Raymond. I suppose it has something to do with my living in a very old house and being frightened as a child by the long, dark winter nights, and by The Hammer House of Horror and Tales of the Unexpected.

Much is made of the grittiness of the factory novels-and rightly so. But what astounds you is the gentleness, the occasional lyricism and the attempt to speak with a human voice, to find it in the words of the dead themselves. 

Here he's talking about the dropouts, the homeless, the nobodys in eighties London...

'In the day you could see them,white, faded,and stained after such nights in winter...the thin, crazy faces, strange noses, eyes, hands rendered noble by madness and hunger...later, the flat, sullen grief of their meaningless statements'

That, for me, contains a brilliant line and makes me think just how false the hands of academics are!

And, as always, underlying the novels is the idea of an old England, some older and more fundamental sense of decency, moral norms, restraint that are sidelined and ridiculed in the brash new world of Thatcher's dark nightmare. 

then there's...

'..love is nothing but a thin remembrance, a deferred loss...All defeat, all battlefields are the same. Napoleon after Jena, even Wellington after Waterloo, finally learned how to weep over the waste of trust, over faith in death lying where it fell, the lazy eyes, the broken arms and the stink of last meals bursting open for the rats into fresh, uncaring air, birds, flies, sun settling...'

But there's also another kind of oldness...

There are certain types, characters, that have been with us since the beginning of human history: the wolves in the pack, the irredeemably evil, the outcasts who are recognised only by their cold and lifeless eyes. This primordial chaos in man's heart-and one has only to state the fact to be astonished: most of the violence and evil in the world is done by men- is not something one can reflect on or, perhaps more disturbingly, eradicate. One would like to think it some ancient vestige or trace of our animal-nature carried over all these hundreds of thousands of years and nothing more-an old scar and not something that is lodged permanently in our being, as if to say: we can't take too much reality, haven't got the right frame of mind to do so.

There is also this sense of the fatal moment, when paths cross and how no-one can avoid that. There is no mystery to solve since the bleakness of the human condition has no permanent answer in this life. There is no well-marked door that leads to innocence, no white hand that will reach down and wipe clean the blemishes. There is only this idea: keep your head down, get out of the way.

But there are moments of stillness, repose, of shelter from the fierceness of the storm, the vast incomprehensible sorrow...

'Betty, do you believe that apart from you, somewhere beyond all the people who only seem to be people, there truly are still some people left, real people?'