The Hard Shoulder

by Chris Petit

O'Grady comes home from jail to an Irish area of London weathering the harsh new climate of Mrs. Thatcher’s Britain. Though this is a place he recognizes, he now feels lost in it. His estranged wife has moved on, and the daughter he barely knows is living with a wealthy record producer. Alcohol and the random chances it brings begin to define his life. People offer him schemes and fantasies, and he is expected to perform some action that will change lives. Undermining the conventions of the thriller, this book is an evocation of the grey avenues and pubs of Irish London as its most hopeless, semi-criminal milieu of the lost.

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

English novelist and filmmaker.

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

“They crossed three of the roads that O’Grady had always thought of as the great divides, the Kilburn High Road, the Finchley Road, then, via the back-streets of Chalk Farm and Kentish Town, the Holloway Road, always to his mind the most sullen of the lot. He knew little or nothing of what lay beyond...”

It was Soho in Chris Petit’s first novel, Robinson, but in The Hard Shoulder it’s Kilburn: Kilburn’s Irish past, which ex-convict O’Grady remembers, and the changes wrought by 1980s’ Thatcherite Britain which now confront him on his dazed release from prison. He tries to keep a low profile but inevitably the past sucks him in and the present spits him out.

This is a novel of desolate lands – ancient and modern – “places that were too far from the centre to count and not far enough out to have any point of their own.” Through this bleak suburban wasteland O’Grady pursues money he’s owed. But the money has become small change. The intended recipient, his estranged daughter, isn’t interested in him, or the money, or the past. Everyone’s moved on.

The Hard Shoulder can’t be said to be a fun novel. It’s dark - but less dark and less strange than Robinson – and somehow there’s a bit too much plot for its own good. Still atmospheric, however, and chillingly well-observed.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in 1985 or '86, Petit's fourth novel operates on two levels, both of which succeed, though neither is overwhelming. Most obviously, it is a psychological novel about Pat O'Grady, a former tough guy just released from ten years in prison. Not so tough anymore, he goes to live in his sister's boarding house in the unfashionable Kilburn neighborhood of North London. Unlike the typical Hollywood "just-out-of-jail" story, there's no one waiting for him-in fact, quite the opposite, his wife left him as soon as he went to prison and took their 8-year-old daughter with her. His nunnish sister wrote him off ages ago and is barely civil to him, while their mother lives in mute senility in a nursing home.

O'Grady commences this new part of his life intending to live a quiet, solitary existence. However, with no real plan, he soon falls prey to Shaughnessy, a sly chatterbox fellow Irishman who fills his head with schemes of recovering "what's owed to him" from the job that landed him in prison. Confused by the changes in society, and fueled by long sessions in the local pub, the adrift O'Grady starts getting notions of redemption. In addition to halfheartedly following Shaughnessy's lead, he also starts searching for his now teenage daughter. It's a compelling portrait of a half-broken man, a realistic ex-con who doesn't burst from prison with plans, but is indecisive, weak, and with without purpose in a changed world.

It's this changed world that is the other level on which the novel operates. Petit has done a rather neat job of showing how Irish have operated socially as a traditional underclass in London, and how one such neighborhood stands on the brink of gentrification. The "grab-what-you-can" ethos of the Thatcher era is displayed through O'Grady's ex-wife (whose name, in case you needed a little nudge, is Maggie), and his former partner in crime, who now lives in a mansion and deals in currency speculation. O'Grady comes to realize that those with the drive and ambition are operating on a whole different level, and the money's he's after is a joke in this world.

Ultimately, this is a tough story, and not a little depressing. O'Grady is someone who chose the wrong path long ago, has spent ten years in jail realizing it, and now has no future in Maggie's Britain.

[Ben Carpenter · Rating 1 out of 5]

Got to page 96 and decided that I was just not interested in reading any further… a very mundane read at the best.

[Jonathan Budds · Rating 4 out of 5]

A novel that should be better known. Ex-hard man, the lugubrious O'Grady, returns home from a long prison stretch to find the London he used to know has changed: 'the immigrants are more confident now,' he notes. Set in the dusty, boozy hinterlands of Kilburn and Wembley, Petit writes with economy and compassion as O'Grady attempts to understand the new, Thatcherite values the criminal fraternity have embraced - 'We're trading under a different name,' his old boss Ronnie tells him. O'Grady struggles to connect with something 'beyond himself', but after getting involved in doomed schemes to retrieve an old debt and re-unite with his flighty daughter, he finds he is caught in a snare of his own making. Exactly observed and authentically voiced, this is a gimmick-free book that feels right.