The Bricks That Built The Houses - Kate Tempest

“We stand badly in need of novels which show an understanding of the ideological hijack which has taken place so recently in this country, which can see its consequences in human terms and show that the appropriate response lies not merely in sorrow and anger but in mad, incredulous laughter.”

These lines, spoken by a fictional reviewer in Jonathan Coe’s 1994 novel What a Carve Up! satirise the literary establishment’s obsession with the state of the nation novel. Every few years, a new one arrives, and slots on prize shortlists are cleared. Writing in The Observer, Alex Preston summarised the characteristics of the genre as ‘shifting viewpoints, keen engagement with contemporary themes and use of London as a microcosm’, resulting in ‘a sprawling tour de force with a huge cast of characters and a labyrinthine plot’.

Far too often, the state of the nation novel is the preserve of the middle aged, middle class and out of touch – Amis is still writing them, for fuck’s sake! – but every now and then a fresh new voice enters the debate, as Zadie Smith did with White Teeth, and Irvine Welsh did with Trainspotting. Kate Tempest’s debut novel, The Bricks That Built the Houses, falls firmly into the latter category. There are a few similarities with Trainspotting - the blend of hedonism and despair, the dream of escaping bleak urban surroundings, the main character benefiting from a bungled drug deal. While Tempest’s book is lighter on dialect, there is a comparable energy to the writing; where Trainspotting listed the detritus of Nineties consumer society in the ‘choose life’ monologue, The Bricks… lists

'the jobcentre, the classroom, the pub, the gym, the car park, the flat, the filth, the TV, the constant swiping of newsfeeds, the hoover, the toothbrush, the laptop bag, the expensive hair product that makes you feel better inside, the queue for the cash machine, the bowling alley, the phone shop, the guilt, the absolute nothingness that never stops chasing... people's faces twisting into grimaces again, losing all their insides in the gutters, clutching lovers till the breath is faint and love is dead, wet cement and spray paint, the kids are watching porn and drinking Monster'

The plot focuses on Becky, an aspiring dancer and part-time masseuse; her partner Pete, long-term unemployed, anxious and frustrated; and Harry, Pete’s sister, a drug-dealer who uses an unspecified role in ‘recruitment’ as her cover. Of these, Harry is probably the most interesting character: 'a boyish woman who swaggers when she walks,' she has 'the physicality of someone who is desperate to escape themselves'. Her occupation allows Tempest to show the other side of Austerity Britain: 'I get phone calls from the secretaries of company directors. I go in, like, we have a coffee, talk about the weather, then, like, I give them a load of gear... meant to be a recession on,  right? I never sold so much gear!' There are hints that Harry may be trans, and Tempest dramatizes the turmoil of her adolescence vividly.

In classic style, Harry and her business partner Leon have a dream, beyond selling coke to company directors: opening a café cum community centre in South London. They plan to retire once they’ve made a million, and they just need one more deal to get there. Of course, the deal doesn’t go as planned, and their reaction to this situation drives the dynamic final third of the novel.

The gangster elements of the novel, which play on the Sixties conventions of the genre (there are a pair of gangsters called Ronnie and Rags), are contrasted with well-realised domestic scenes, as in the scene where Harry and Pete’s post-nuclear family attempt to bond over Sunday lunch. The awkwardness of the encounter - the mother's new partner, two children both on ecstasy comedowns, one a dealer now, one unemployed, struggling to find a shared language to communicate with their parents – is well-paced and plotted. Tempest contrasts the experiences of the two generations, in the form of David, who started working for a small company, and worked his way up for twenty years until he bought it, and Pete, a graduate who finds himself working in Asda, or in bars, when he can find work at all.

Becky’s side of the narrative is more flawed, marred by a sense of the author pushing their worldview too deliberately. Becky’s mother was a well-known photographer, and her father a radical writer and speaker, who rose to prominence in the late Eighties. They lived in a ‘proud’ Housing Association block, until her father was fitted up on rape charges, and jailed. After this trauma, her mother sank into alcoholism, and Becky was largely left to herself.  

The points being made, that Becky’s generation has been let down by both the previous generation of radicals, as they sink into despair, and by the state who harassed them, that institutions like school seem irrelevant, but community projects (such as dance classes she attends) offer self-expression and hope, is almost certainly right; however, in literary terms, Tempest is a little too clear that this is her aim, and the initial set-up feels too idyllic. Where Harry feels well-rounded and complex, passing references to Becky’s bulimia ('it was all about control, she realises now') feel clichéd.

As you’d expect, from her background in poetry and theatre, Tempest is strong on dialogue, and her prose is full of memorable images, as in her description of the London skyline, where 'sharp financial buildings rise like fangs in the city's screaming mouth'. The narrative is largely linear, with digressions in which Tempest gives her characters’ backstories, and there is a sense of the author moving her characters around a board to be bought together at the climax, in the style of films like Layer Cake or Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The Bricks That Built the House may lean on familiar forms, but the quality of the writing means that it never feels like pastiche.

One comparison between The Bricks… and Trainspotting does illustrate what a difference twenty-odd years has made. The educational message of Welsh’s novel is often overlooked in favour of the hedonism and despair. Throughout, Welsh pushed the idea that Renton was the only character with a hope for escaping the cycle of dependency that the novel depicted, because of his education, and an outlook on life that extended beyond the Edinburgh schemes. There is no such optimism for Tempest’s characters: the best educated among them are the most disenfranchised, their job prospects just as limited as anybody else’s, the only legacy of their university degrees being a simmering resentment at their circumstances.

So what does Tempest’s novel tell us about the state of the nation today? While hedonism is still a temporary escape from the struggles of working class life, opportunities for genuine, lasting social mobility are disappearing fast, and a generation which has been let down by left and right alike is still struggling to find alternatives for itself. The result is a simmering anger which Tempest gives voice to here. Whether or not it ‘deserves to sell more copies than the bible’, as Rebel Inc said of Trainspotting, expect it to make an impact.