ENGLAND
SPORTS AND SOCIAL KEVIN BONIFACE 130pp. Bluemoose. Paperback, £12.
In a sane world Kevin Boniface would be a household name. He’s not: he’s a postman in West Yorkshire. He’s also an artist, writer and podcaster who has published two books of deadpan observations gathered during his postal rounds: Lost in the Post (2008) and Round About Town (2018). Sports and Social is his first work of fiction. Sort of.
What we have here are vignettes – artful arrangements of the kind of material Boniface covers in his nonfiction. Who’s to know where the observations end and the artifice begins? Most of the stories consist of short, diary-like paragraphs that build slowly into loosely connected narratives. “In the queue at the bus stop I stand behind a woman who looks like she probably looks older than she is … The bus squeals to the kerb and I flick the remains of my rubbish cigarette down a storm drain and find a seat by a nearside window” (“Body Heat”). “I walk on, past the old methodist chapel which is now a carpet remnant centre and the old primary school which is now a mosque” (“Transcendence 1999”). “She notices that the neighbour who wears flip-flops in the winter has tried to dispose of the big pile of rubbish in his yard by setting it alight, but it hasn’t really worked; it smells and his wheelie bin has melted” (“Charisma Club”).
As a form of witness Sports and Social is remarkable: meticulous, unjudgemental and intelligent. Truly this is England, now. As a collection of stories it is emotionally charged without being sentimental, and considered without seeming contrived. It is also quietly hilarious. The character Matt in the story “Confusion”, for example, claims to be in a New Order tribute act with his – it turns out imaginary – wife, Laura. “Matt was Bernard Sumner and Laura was usually Peter Hook, but she could deputize as any of the others if she needed to because she was a proper musician. Matt said she even wore a fake moustache when she was being Hooky.”
In “The Owl Ladies and the 1980s” – the best story about the practice of giving Girl Guide leaders strigine nicknames that I have ever read – the narrator’s mother and friends, “who are all called things like Linda, Pam (you know, from Gomersal), Christine, Eileen, Jean, Barbara, Susan, Carol, Pat, et cetera and so on” end up with a vast collection of ornamental owl figurines.
Boniface probably wouldn’t thank you for describing him as a great writer: in “An Inventory of the Family Rubbish” a character remarks disparagingly about artists and “our tolerance, our indulgence even, of mollycoddled selfi mpor t ant wankers”. So we shouldn’t indulge him. But we shouldn’t underestimate him either.
COMMONPLACES
MEMENTO MORI: MEMENTO VIVERE GRAHAM MOSS 104pp. Incline Press. Ordinary edition £250, special edition £375
