The lowest depths of the human condition in civilized,
Western nations (specifically in this case urban England) are drawn in
exquisite detail in Huw Thomas’s The Tale
of Findo Gask. Findo is a child thief, born into a world devoid of all that
four thousand years of human effort has sought to make orderly, yet a world
utterly familiar to the 21st century reader, down to the minutest
detail of Mars bars, packaged foods and the latest in surveillance equipment.
This work is a good deal more than an entertaining
picaresque novel in the tradition of Lazarillo
de Tormes and Oliver Twist; it is
a close look at the feral side of mankind where well meant social programs are
cancelled and the rough instincts of homo sapiens are all that is ultimately
needed for survival. Findo Gask’s self effacing cautions and delicately fostered skills of
observation of his surroundings are those of the human animal in a deadly
wilderness.
Here the wilderness is the abandoned buildings of failed urban
industry and their inhabitants who live by illegal means from theft to drug
dealing to prostitution and “protection” rackets.
Yet The Tale of Findo
Gask is a curiously tender work, not only because the young hero finds a
few people who treat him with care and kindness, but because the author delves
into an understanding of his every impulse and perception with an intimacy that
injects the reader under his skin – and there the reader finds a being quite like
he could have been.
The child thief is not the only character drawn with such
insight and intimacy. A series of characters, from the drug raddled prostitute
mother, to a second generation Marxist librarian, to a lonely little middle
class girl, to an astute mobster kingpin are explored in what amount to side
essays on the history of each. While these habitual digressions of the writer
may be seen as a structural flaw according to the canon of creative writing’s
“show, don’t tell”, it is perfectly in keeping with the shape of the picaresque
novel.
Should society not have done better in its millennia of
effort to create a civilized world?
Should governments take note and find the means to eradicate these lower
depths of suffering and violence? Or is mankind still feral in nature,
recreating wilderness in even the most “developed” and controlled of societies?
The Tale of Findo Gask
is a brilliant work of observation of the human condition in its most tried and
trying circumstances short of literal battlefields, and Thomas has rendered his
insights, miraculously, in an enjoyable and compelling way.
Katherine Ashe is the author of the four volume Montfort novelized series
http://www.amazon.com/Katherine-Ashe/e/B004OTWHNQ/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1398361940&sr=1-2-ent
Katherine Ashe is the author of the four volume Montfort novelized series
http://www.amazon.com/Katherine-Ashe/e/B004OTWHNQ/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1398361940&sr=1-2-ent
