Midland

by H. Gareth Gavin

An industrial accident in a wire factory and the chance discovery of a birth certificate. Church services held in a ruined swimming pool. An unidentified elephant skull.

Midland tells the stories of three young women as they fight to find their feet amidst the accumulated rubble of the twentieth century. From the bombsites of the 1940s to the construction sites of the 1960s and the school halls and decaying tower blocks of the 1980s, Honor Gavin has created an ingenious narrative of one Midlands family that is also a startling, anarchic history of a city.

Composed in electric prose that soars and dives, blending keenly observed dialect with urban theory, cinema, farcical digressions and surrealist timekeeping, Midland is a novel out of time but in the middle of everything.

Genres: Novels

314 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2014

About the author

H. Gareth Gavin is a writer from Birmingham. Midland: A Novel Out of Time (Penned in the Margins, 2014) was shortlisted for the 2015 Gordon Burn Prize and his short story, ‘Home Death’, was longlisted for the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize 2019/20. Funny Queer, a hand-sewn limited edition collection of stories, was published by the Aleph Press in 2021. An essay on transmasculinity and femininity, ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me,’ takes its title from a Muriel Spark ghost story and is collected in Queer Life, Queer Love (Muswell Press, 2021). He currently teaches in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester.

Reviews

[Daniella · Rating 3 out of 5]

One gains a sense of comfort in that feeling of familiarity, and, for me Midland did just that. A smile always comes to my face when I'm in a city far away from home and I hear that Brummie accent, and it felt like a walk along Broad Street. The novel cleverly interweaves themes of time through the lives of three generations of women, centred around the destruction and construction of the roads surrounding the City. You can tell Gavin is somebody who really knows and has a deep admiration for her City and all its nitty grittiness.

[Gretel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Honor Gavin has an affinity for her hometown, the Midlands, and it shines through in this novel. It's a joy to read about a subject that an author feels so strongly about and has done so much research about, but I found this novel to be a little too fragmented for my tastes. It is an experimental novel, so approach it with an open mind. Some of the experimental prose was a joy to read and showed great creativity, like the chapter narrated by the town itself and the chapter about Zero's factory accident was one of the most enthralling things I have read this year. But I wish things 'slotted together' more. When reading this I felt that Gavin was 'testing the water' so to speak, putting a bit of everything in that ultimately didn't mesh too well.

[Ian Cann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, more 3 1/2 stars. this was almost excellent, but just falls short to good-very good. As an experimental history of a family and the development of post WW2 Birmingham, it works well, but lacked a certain something for me, for example more could have been made of using the city as a narrator. Also it didn't tie together for me as well as it should.

Still though, it was a good read, the use of Brummy dialect during the book and the historical figues and places gave the story depth, and I rather liked the central characters, and the elephant's skull. The footnotes were a nice touch too.