Vulgar Things

by Lee Rourke

Jon Michaels – a divorced, disinterested and fatigued editor living a nondescript life in North London – receives a sudden phone call from his brother, informing him that their estranged uncle Rey has been found dead in his caravan on Canvey Island. Recently sacked from his job, carrying a hangover from hell and craving some sort of escape, Jon reluctantly agrees to spend the week on the island to sort through his uncle’s belongings.

Haunting, modern and utterly compelling, Vulgar Things follows Jon as he unearths a disturbing family secret while losing himself in the strangely alluring landscape. Vulgar Things is a novel about love, longing and being lost. It’s about desire, the sea, big skies and nothingness. It's about money and how much we'll dirty our hands to get it. But, above all, it’s about how a chance meeting with a mysterious person can change your life forever.

Genres: Fiction

320 pages, Paperback

First published July 3, 2014

About the author

Lee Rourke is the author of the short-story collection Everyday, the novels The Canal (winner of the Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize 2010), Vulgar Things, and the poetry collections Varroa Destructor and Vantablack. His latest novel Glitch is published by Dead Ink Books. His debut novel The Canal is being adapted to film by Storyhouse Productions, summer 2020. He is Contributing Editor for 3:AM Magazine [www.3ammagazine.com]. He lives by the sea.

Reviews

[Doug H · Rating 3 out of 5]

“I’ve found a book he attempted to write; it’s an odd thing, more about not being able to write it than anything else. It’s about the truth, his search for the truth, how to put the truth down on the page, I think … I don’t know what he was trying to attempt …”

Yeah, well, that’s a problem here.

I’m left wondering if this was actually an earlier work than The Canal, which felt much more restrained and controlled. I’m not giving up on this author and I will probably read whatever he produces next (mostly out of curiosity), but this was mostly a miss for me.

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this, Vulgar Things is one of those immersive reads that, when you put it down for a bit, you convince yourself its somehow carrying on without you. I was completely swept away by Jon’s week in the wilderness and the chaos and confusion that ensues.

The plot was good, no big surprises where the reveals are concerned, but the interplay between characters is brilliantly mysterious and at times stifling.

But for me the story was of secondary significance. What I enjoyed most about this book was Rourke’s grip on Southend. He has that place squeezed tight in his fist and is hell-bent on ringing out all its beauty and blackness.

I grew up in Essex and have spent a lot of impressionable years ducking around its various towns and (now) cities. It has always struck me as a very strange and unsettling place. You can spend days winding in and out of throbbing countryside, pulsing shorelines and stretch your eyes across acre and acre of meadow and field. But take a wrong turn and you can find yourself in the bleakest corner of England, only ever ten feet away from confrontation or insult.

Rourke gets this riot between nature and simmering small town aggression brilliantly. My skin prickled countless times at his descriptions of those tense Essex nights where every figure you pass, every shadow, hums with threat.

This book sums up the bizarre feeling of claustrophobia I get in Southend, especially on the pier, where even an expanse of sea, bobbing all around you with promise, can’t help shake the encroaching anticipation of something nasty.

A great book and a writer I will definitely be following in the future.

Review from Hannahreadsstuff.wordpress.com

[Brian Mimpress · Rating 5 out of 5]

A kind of homage to my hometown. Is this why I enjoyed it so much, each and every location I’ve walked the streets of a thousand times and still do.
“ Everyone you walk past is fighting their own battle”
This story just confirms this to me as much as any other.
A dead cheap charity shop find for me, picked up not even knowing is was ( for me ) a local story.
One of the best I’ve read this year.
Thank you.

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pleasingly kept me off balance throughout. Like his first novel, a character chucks his job in, but here is called to clear out the caravan of his recently suicided uncle in coastal Essex and begins a vertiginous, destabilising journey. The book is also a love poem to Essex, which is quite an achievement to pull off to the eyes of a hoary old capital city dweller like me. I guessed the big reveal, but this didn't detract any, because the rest of the novel left me dizzy and unable to get my bearings, much like the protagonist himself.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lee Rourke’s second novel Vulgar Things captures sharply the multifaceted nature of “edge of the world” places — in this case, Canvey Island and the region around it. Like many seaside locales it offers the promise of escape, complete with scenic pier for tourists and arcades and strip clubs delivering fantasy to all ages. But the flipside of escape is exile, and how easily a life becomes mired at the edge of the world, and in Vulgar Things narrator Jon Michaels arrives in Canvey from London to sort the remnants of his dead uncle’s life only to fall into rut and mire of his own. The tension and temptation between Jon slipping into a life readymade and left behind by his uncle, versus sorting out the problems of his own life, resonates with that estuarine landscape through which ships pass and oil flows but where people often have no choice but to sink and get stuck. As in Rourke’s earlier novel Canal there’s a interrogation of the banal here, of life willfully lived outside the active and productive, and of the ways such a defiantly “empty” life offers up its own surprises whether the discovery of Jon’s uncle’s Dr Feelgood albums, or his telescope and the night sky it reveals, or darker, less welcome things. And there’s a very smart, very compelling view of the power of even the by-now-mundane devices of our everyday lives — our cellphones, say — to both exacerbate and break through the fogs we lose ourself in, an aspect of the novel I especially liked. There are echoes here of Ann Quin’s Berg — another novel hard to imagine anywhere but beside the grim off-season sea — and of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape in the strain between characters acting out lives and routines already set for them and struggling to find the cracks in those routines where their own agency might become possible. But those echoes add to without overwhelming the novel, which is very much its own book and a fine one at that.

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dull and unremarkable trot through some postmodern narrative cliches: found manuscripts, taped confessions, unreliable uninteresting narrators, obsessional White Knights, the blurring of reality and hallucination, etc. The writing is as flat and banal as in a Stewart Home novel, but without the occasional amusement the latter can muster. Some half-baked ideas about technology changing the texture of life are scattered in as well, with no development, integration or purpose. Motifs are clatteringly inserted with nil effect, and the social backdrop is familiar to any Mail reader: a modern Britain of hooded lo-slung denim tearaways and menacing East European white slavery rings. This is Creative Writing fiction, ticking the thematic checklist for use in college reading groups. I don't think Ballard was any better, so I suppose it succeeds as an homage to his work.

[Tobias · Rating 4 out of 5]

Terrific sense of place, and a good use of a first-person narrator who's both observant and quite capable of missing certain things.

[Julia Rice · Rating 1 out of 5]

Despite ringing endorsements on the cover from the likes of Deborah Levy I struggled to find very much of merit in this book. The pace was slow, and it took me a long time to read, despite the fact it's a short book. A man finds himself in Canvey Island, Essex, following the death of his Uncle Rey, a mysterious loner who had lived alone in a caravan on the island for many years. Jon finds some mysterious things in the caravan, many DVDs of Rey talking, notes of his observations of the stars, and a manuscript of a story that seemed to be based on The Aeneid. Jon 'pops into' Southend on foot on seemingly daily basis (it is in fact a 3 hour walk). One day he spots a beautiful woman on the pier whom he finds mysteriously engaging and decides to follow her. In doing so, he gets mixed in the local underworld and sex trade. But it soon seems that this woman (whom he refers to as Laura) is more of a figment of his imagination than a real person. I found this book confused and confusing, and, despite a couple of plot twists, not enough happened to sustain my interest. Much of it also did not have anything like a ring of authenticity. I really dislike criticising books - I picked this one up as part of my own research into a book I'm writing set in Canvey Island, so I know how hard it is to write one, but I'm afraid this book was not one I can recommend.

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the longest fictional piece I’ve read by Lee Rourke and I loved everything about it. A cover quote likens his writing to JG Ballard; I can understand why. Often stark but never brutal for brutality’s sake. It’s deeply unsettling, but never strays so far from reality to be unbelievable. This book feels alive when you read it and I was quickly drawn into Cal’s world as he has to clear out the belongings of his recently deceased uncle’s caravan. The chapters are split into mini-fragments which are named. This gave me flashbacks to books from the 60s I read as a kid...prepping you with what was to come. It seemed written with a similar style from that era too; simple, never prosaic but not self-consciously stripped. It also has a cinematic edge to it. Echoes of the Get Carter film or the Hammer Horror TV series. Terrifyingly realistic portrayal of the hidden underbelly and dark secrets half buried in peoples’ lives.

[Des Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Life, a series of silent alarms. Sounds and sensations as a form of mathematics. Life is, I say, also a series of catharses and sudden realisations and reconciliations of connections, like reading a fiction book about oneself for which you wrote the real-time notes without consciously doing so, till you reach that hindsight gestalt, that Saturn in the sky, made paraeidoliac or synaesthesic as a form of found art by re-recording it. Some beautiful concepts of Saturn, here, including Jon’s black and white photos of it, via his uncle’s telescope, and through his uncle’s hawling-roof. These pages have plot catharses and realisations and rejigged backstories. The arrival of infinite space to house all of us, leaving our filth behind! Soon to be bodiless as a positive form of homeless. A poignant and powerful denouement. Re-recorded here, by my review.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long to post here.
Above was one of its observations.

[Simon P · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unrealistic dialogue, unlikeable characters, uninspiring plot. I wanted to like this book so much, but could not. It is a terrible, clunky read, and I have no idea of its target audience.

[Fiona · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book isn't very good.

[Jo Floyd · Rating 2 out of 5]

Man’s uncle dies in caravan in Southend. Good start and then tedious.

[Simon K · Rating 5 out of 5]

Characters and back stories that eternally try to transcend their setting, yet forever drawn back into the banality, limbo, and vulgarity of the versions of Southend and Canvey Island depicted.

[Ian Mapp · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chosen at random during a library visit, this wasn't quite what I was expecting.

The cover made it seem like some lad lit, light heated reading with a touch of humour. Maybe it was just the book title and the jaunty cover.

It was a touch deeper than this.

Jon is down on his luck. Living in London, split from his wife, getting sacked from a job he hates and winding up getting over the mother of all hangovers by being presented with the challenge of cleaning out his uncles caravan in Canvey Island. His Uncle has committed suicide.

This is where the book comes into its own. A very distinct sense of place. I worked at Coryton refinery for a time and some of the locations resonated with me. It is an odd little place.

During Jons week in Canvey, he drinks a lot, eats a lot of breakfasts and discovers things about himself and his uncle. Reality gets blurred and he gets obsessed with a girl.

The story did enough to keep me interested, even if it did kind of peter out towards the end.

Worth a read.

[Marnie Z · Rating 2 out of 5]

apparently I read this book 2 years ago? ha... I still give it **.. the story seemed like it might be interesting but I couldn't read through all the rantings of Uncle Rey, I skipped through a lot of that and also the part about Jon following/looking for that girl made me really dislike him, what a weirdo...she obviously doesn't like him but that doesn't stop him from agreeing to give her money to help her out? That part of the book was really pointless to me and made Jon just look like a loser.
The eventual family secret which is uncovered was unexpected but also unbelievable to me...

[Charlston Goch · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eh? I didn't like the characters is what I think it got down to. I don't like being negative, but it seemed to take a long time to not get anywhere. Not for me.

[Alistair Archibald · Rating 3 out of 5]

Evocative description of landscape, though not sure of the walking stick as it seemed to draw attention to the character.