Trouble in Wales: one arm, Twelve Steps and two sadists

Stump

A Novel

Niall Griffiths

Graywolf Press: 228 pp., $15 paper

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If Wales looms in your imagination it is probably because of Dylan Thomas’ charming “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” the best known work by a Welsh writer. There is also the faint possibility that David Jones’ two masterpieces, “In Parenthesis” and “The Anathemata,” introduced you to, among other things, the historical and linguistic complexity of Wales and the Welsh.

Now comes “Stump,” Niall Griffiths’ most recent novel, named the Welsh Book of 2004 and now published in the United States. It thrusts us into a place that is disturbingly similar to the most awful examples of the American nightmare and also uniquely Welsh, offering various forms of demotic and obscenity-laden English.

Griffiths efficiently, if mechanically, shapes his story by means of alternating chapters on the pursued and the pursuers.

The title character, the “one-and-a-half-armed” Stump, is the pursued, and he is trying to get away by lying low. “This little thing jerking at me left shoulder, I’ve never been any different, never looked any different,” he says of himself. “I’ve always had a limb made up of one part flesh, one part air. The entire atmosphere for a left forearm, that’s what I’ve always had.”

Stump goes about his days in a morass of memory and the sheer difficulty of staying alive in a dreary seaside town. He is in recovery, and each of his chapters ends with a scabrous rephrasing of one of the famous Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. “We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. Yeh, cos we were completely incapable of doing so arselves cos we abjured every semblance of responsibility cos we were just alkies, we were just drunks. An as if God cared anyway, as if He repented of the broken way He made us or even of the ways He broke us, as if Pity and compassion were for some reason now going to prompt even a blink in His empty yellow eyes.”

His pursuers are Darren and Alastir, who chase Stump in a Morris Minor, a “jalopy dilapidated” that “trembles and threatens to disintegrate.” For most of the novel these hired thugs are lost in an unforgiving landscape of Welsh towns with unpronounceable names, not knowing where they are going, knowing only that they are looking for a one-armed man. Their minds are packed with sadistic visions of what they’ll do to Stump because of something he did back in Liverpool. “We just do the knees or summin, that’s all. This one-armed divvy, we’ll just do one of his legs, like. Balance him out, knowmean?”

“Stump” is a slice of sadistic sleaze promoted as another example of the baleful influence of “Trainspotting” author Irvine Welsh. But Griffiths is his own man, one who wallows in a sometimes pastoral grotesque, as when Stump remembers an episode of a deadly myxomatosis outbreak that drove wild rabbits crazy: “I can still remember watchin one scratch its own eye out. Scratch with the big back leg an pop, there was thee eye, dangling, leakin.... I was about seven years old. Robbed me of my sleep for weeks, that did.”

Many a reader might feel a similar sense of debilitating loss, but “Stump” may provide a balancing shadow to any fond memory one might have of Wales.

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Thomas McGonigle is the author of “The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov” and “Going to Patchogue.”