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Nutcase
Aidan Wilson’s misfortune is to be hard as nails.
In this darkly hilarious and seriously horrifying book Williams tells the story of Aidan, a vigilante and young offender from one of Sheffield’s roughest estates.
At breakneck speed, we see Aidan’s world unravel as he goes from hero to outlaw, fighting against all-comers and the circumstances he can’t escape. But is he a victim or architect of his own demise?
A brutal and breathtaking account of living with violence in the English city.
There are lots of crime novels, but Nutcase is something different: a novel about crime which isn’t interested in the conventions of crime fiction. The novel is based on a specific Icelandic saga: the Saga of Grettir the Strong.
Nutcase explores the lives of people who live with violence on a day-to-day basis – how it shapes and distorts their lives, and ultimately becomes part of the normality that they live with.
In this darkly hilarious and seriously horrifying book Williams tells the story of Aidan, a vigilante and young offender from one of Sheffield’s roughest estates.
At breakneck speed, we see Aidan’s world unravel as he goes from hero to outlaw, fighting against all-comers and the circumstances he can’t escape. But is he a victim or architect of his own demise?
A brutal and breathtaking account of living with violence in the English city.
There are lots of crime novels, but Nutcase is something different: a novel about crime which isn’t interested in the conventions of crime fiction. The novel is based on a specific Icelandic saga: the Saga of Grettir the Strong.
Nutcase explores the lives of people who live with violence on a day-to-day basis – how it shapes and distorts their lives, and ultimately becomes part of the normality that they live with.
252 pages, Paperback
First published September 15, 2017
2 people are currently reading
60 people want to read
About the author
Tony Williams
265 books14 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads' database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
February 8, 2018
Read this on the train after meeting the author at a reading - what a novel! It's based on an Icelandic saga and is written in this utterly fascinating style - no character interirority whatsoever, just this happened, then this happened, then this happened. And what mainly ends up happening is violence. LOTS of extreme, dark, intense violence. And yet you end up feeling for Aidan, the thuggish main character, you really do! It's not without dark Goodfellas-esque humour - I cackled at the guys setting fire to U2 CDs in a biscuit tin, and the drugged out guy "making a deranged angry face like some kind if neo-Nazi," or sentences like "Carl had turned into the sort of person who paid his TV license." What an amazing novel! The style is really quite the achievement. Thank god for independent publishers! Fuck books that make money; this shit is WAY more interesting and will stand the test of time, blessed be.
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November 22, 2020DNF: gave up not because it wasn't brilliant, it was, not because it was inauthentic, certainly not. I know people like Aidan Wilson and family, lives dominated by reputation, drugs, violence and jail. It was just that the relentless and graphic violence was puncturing me, letting all my air out, so - about halfway through - I gave up. I may go back and finish it off, because I am interested. I just need to get my breath back.
May 6, 2019
Trouble with updating a saga of unremitting violence is the unremitting violence. This is well written but I really hope that no one on any estate anywhere lives like these characters. There is no light to go with the shade. I know the author said he tried to present it dispassionately so readers would draw their own conclusions but ultimately it felt to me like a video game. I had no emotional attachment to Aidan or any other character and I lost track of who was a relative, a girlfriend or an enemy because there were so many similar characters. Grim.
February 21, 2018
Nutcase, by Tony Williams, is a retelling of the Icelandic saga of Grettir the Strong. The protagonist is Aidan Wilson, a hard lad born and raised in one of Sheffield’s roughest housing estates. Surrounded by violence and addiction he goes from young trouble maker to convicted criminal to vigilante. His size, strength and willingness to defend family and friends leads him down a road chequered by brutality.
Those living on the estates Aiden roams have low expectations. They deal drugs to make money, steal whatever else they need to use or sell, and get off their faces on alcohol and other drugs at every opportunity. Many of them take on jobs labouring, transporting goods (many stolen), or in the shops and pubs they frequent. Few stick to anything long term. Sex is recreational with babies a byproduct, accepted but with little responsibility.
Aiden is one of five siblings. As they grow up and leave the family home to set up with partners or friends they look out for one another whenever they are able. At times Aiden has his own place to live but there are regular periods when he stays with others for work or to escape trouble. This is accepted practice in his community. There are fallings out and regular fights. Aiden acquires a reputation that is both a threat and a means of survival.
There are girlfriends along the way but they bring their own dramas. When one young girl calls on Aiden to help an abused child he ends up in a situation that will haunt him. As will happen again, the grapevine carries different versions of his involvement. He will struggle to shake off the rumours some delight in spreading.
Aiden moves around the Sheffield and Leeds areas, spends time in prison, moves to Swansea, and gravitates home. He makes enemies, there are deaths, and he is blamed for his apparently uncaring behaviour. Relations of those he thwarts threaten retaliation. Damage to property is a distraction, bodily harm a regular and accepted risk. The violence of the lifestyle is gut-wrenching, the depiction all too believable.
The denouement comes as no surprise with the portrayal offering insight into the attention span and attitudes of the internet age. Few it appears place value on a life that lacks what the middle classes would describe as prospects, especially when that life has been spent recklessly.
The narrative style is almost blasé yet remains jaw droppingly intense. There are occasional asides about the lives minor characters will go on to lead which provide lighter relief. Nevertheless, the majority of what is being depicted remains horrific, especially that it has been normalised throughout the estates. I cannot say if it is realistic but that is certainly how it reads.
I haven’t been as perturbed by a storyline since I read the incredible We Go Around In The Night And Are Consumed By Fire yet even it has characters who desire a better way of living. Aiden Wilson and his family never seem to consider this a possibility. Given their repeated actions I am guessing this could be a depressingly pragmatic point of view. I am left pondering what it would take to instigate change, if the Aiden Wilsons of our world would even welcome such intervention.
My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, Salt.
Those living on the estates Aiden roams have low expectations. They deal drugs to make money, steal whatever else they need to use or sell, and get off their faces on alcohol and other drugs at every opportunity. Many of them take on jobs labouring, transporting goods (many stolen), or in the shops and pubs they frequent. Few stick to anything long term. Sex is recreational with babies a byproduct, accepted but with little responsibility.
Aiden is one of five siblings. As they grow up and leave the family home to set up with partners or friends they look out for one another whenever they are able. At times Aiden has his own place to live but there are regular periods when he stays with others for work or to escape trouble. This is accepted practice in his community. There are fallings out and regular fights. Aiden acquires a reputation that is both a threat and a means of survival.
There are girlfriends along the way but they bring their own dramas. When one young girl calls on Aiden to help an abused child he ends up in a situation that will haunt him. As will happen again, the grapevine carries different versions of his involvement. He will struggle to shake off the rumours some delight in spreading.
Aiden moves around the Sheffield and Leeds areas, spends time in prison, moves to Swansea, and gravitates home. He makes enemies, there are deaths, and he is blamed for his apparently uncaring behaviour. Relations of those he thwarts threaten retaliation. Damage to property is a distraction, bodily harm a regular and accepted risk. The violence of the lifestyle is gut-wrenching, the depiction all too believable.
The denouement comes as no surprise with the portrayal offering insight into the attention span and attitudes of the internet age. Few it appears place value on a life that lacks what the middle classes would describe as prospects, especially when that life has been spent recklessly.
The narrative style is almost blasé yet remains jaw droppingly intense. There are occasional asides about the lives minor characters will go on to lead which provide lighter relief. Nevertheless, the majority of what is being depicted remains horrific, especially that it has been normalised throughout the estates. I cannot say if it is realistic but that is certainly how it reads.
I haven’t been as perturbed by a storyline since I read the incredible We Go Around In The Night And Are Consumed By Fire yet even it has characters who desire a better way of living. Aiden Wilson and his family never seem to consider this a possibility. Given their repeated actions I am guessing this could be a depressingly pragmatic point of view. I am left pondering what it would take to instigate change, if the Aiden Wilsons of our world would even welcome such intervention.
My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, Salt.
January 20, 2018
I'm grateful to the publisher for a copy of this book.
In this remarkable, not to say unusual, book, Williams tells the story of Aidan Wilson, a young man growing up on a tough estate in Sheffield.
Aidan's story is inspired by the Icelandic Saga of Grettir the Strong. I'm sorry to say I am not familiar with that so I can't comment on how it has been adapted but I was very impressed with the way Williams maps the chaotic (from my comfortable middle class perspective) lives of his protagonists, adrift in a haze of drink and drugs and violence, onto the heroic pattern that we see in many ancient tales. After all, these sagas, ballads and myths are generally stories of strong men, strong warriors, whose chief concerns are drinking, having sex and fighting. To judge the lifestyle of Aidan and his mates while retelling and praising stories such as Beowulf or the Illiad seems rather hypocritical, perhaps. So a lot of respect is due Williams for forcing a new way of seeing things.
That said, it's often a hard book to read. No punches are pulled: rather we get close descriptions of fights and injuries, of the quantities of drugs and drink consumed, of squalid flats and squats, of a lifestyle that might be described as hedonistic if you thought anyone was actually having a good time. At times I didn't want to go on reading, although Williams does tell a rattling good story and it's so episodic ('The next thing was...') that none of the incidents lasts more than a few pages.
It's a story that is very much narrated, from the first sentence ('Mick Wilson was a man of steel.') to the last ('And there would be a little gap and then they would say "Same again?" ') Indeed, it soon becomes clear that the audience is part of the story - as Aidan rises briefly in popular esteem when he knifes a child abuser and then plunges again, we're very conscious of there being an audience, a wider society judging him, urging him on, condemning, cheering. Sometimes it's the people on the estates around (Irene at the taxi office is a regular chorus as she sucks on her cigarette), sometimes it's a wider public reading the tabloids or following on social media.
And sometimes, of course, it's us, the readers of the book.
If the book's hard, that's appropriate because Aidan himself is also hard in several respects - a tough man, yes, but also difficult to understand, often placid and accepting (as long as he has a few cans and the odd tablet to hand) of what seems an awful life, then animated, driven to avenge a wrong or pursue a feud. He's hard in another sense - unyielding to fate or society around him, apparently content to go the way he must. The only hint of weakness we see is the nightmares - PTSD, the prison psychologist says - brought on after that stabbing. How they affect Aidan's waking hours is left to us to guess.
The book rises to the pitch of a classical tragedy, letting Aidan rise, having apparently done something good for once - and then fall, doomed by some quirk or flaw of character, some lack of interest or focus that always sees him back with the drink, the drugs, shifting from one grim lodging to another, living from one side of the law to another.
Or, let's face, it doomed by having lousy parents, little hope of anything better and too many easy ways out. What was it they used to say about drink being the quickest way out of Manchester?
Overall a powerful, if disturbing, book that will remain with you long after you finish it.
In this remarkable, not to say unusual, book, Williams tells the story of Aidan Wilson, a young man growing up on a tough estate in Sheffield.
Aidan's story is inspired by the Icelandic Saga of Grettir the Strong. I'm sorry to say I am not familiar with that so I can't comment on how it has been adapted but I was very impressed with the way Williams maps the chaotic (from my comfortable middle class perspective) lives of his protagonists, adrift in a haze of drink and drugs and violence, onto the heroic pattern that we see in many ancient tales. After all, these sagas, ballads and myths are generally stories of strong men, strong warriors, whose chief concerns are drinking, having sex and fighting. To judge the lifestyle of Aidan and his mates while retelling and praising stories such as Beowulf or the Illiad seems rather hypocritical, perhaps. So a lot of respect is due Williams for forcing a new way of seeing things.
That said, it's often a hard book to read. No punches are pulled: rather we get close descriptions of fights and injuries, of the quantities of drugs and drink consumed, of squalid flats and squats, of a lifestyle that might be described as hedonistic if you thought anyone was actually having a good time. At times I didn't want to go on reading, although Williams does tell a rattling good story and it's so episodic ('The next thing was...') that none of the incidents lasts more than a few pages.
It's a story that is very much narrated, from the first sentence ('Mick Wilson was a man of steel.') to the last ('And there would be a little gap and then they would say "Same again?" ') Indeed, it soon becomes clear that the audience is part of the story - as Aidan rises briefly in popular esteem when he knifes a child abuser and then plunges again, we're very conscious of there being an audience, a wider society judging him, urging him on, condemning, cheering. Sometimes it's the people on the estates around (Irene at the taxi office is a regular chorus as she sucks on her cigarette), sometimes it's a wider public reading the tabloids or following on social media.
And sometimes, of course, it's us, the readers of the book.
If the book's hard, that's appropriate because Aidan himself is also hard in several respects - a tough man, yes, but also difficult to understand, often placid and accepting (as long as he has a few cans and the odd tablet to hand) of what seems an awful life, then animated, driven to avenge a wrong or pursue a feud. He's hard in another sense - unyielding to fate or society around him, apparently content to go the way he must. The only hint of weakness we see is the nightmares - PTSD, the prison psychologist says - brought on after that stabbing. How they affect Aidan's waking hours is left to us to guess.
The book rises to the pitch of a classical tragedy, letting Aidan rise, having apparently done something good for once - and then fall, doomed by some quirk or flaw of character, some lack of interest or focus that always sees him back with the drink, the drugs, shifting from one grim lodging to another, living from one side of the law to another.
Or, let's face, it doomed by having lousy parents, little hope of anything better and too many easy ways out. What was it they used to say about drink being the quickest way out of Manchester?
Overall a powerful, if disturbing, book that will remain with you long after you finish it.
January 9, 2025
Well. This was wild, quite the rollercoaster ride 😅 Got through this in just under 3 days because I couldn’t put it down, however at the same time it was utterly morbidly depressing and yet funny too?
In a nut shell, I feel like I’ve been on a 3 day bender and can only imagine that living three days of Aidan’s life would be equally - if not more - exhausting.
Loved it. It’s brilliant, if you can stomach a lot of violence and working class horror. I’m off for a herbal tea and some Beatrix Potter
In a nut shell, I feel like I’ve been on a 3 day bender and can only imagine that living three days of Aidan’s life would be equally - if not more - exhausting.
Loved it. It’s brilliant, if you can stomach a lot of violence and working class horror. I’m off for a herbal tea and some Beatrix Potter
February 27, 2019
Great lad lit
The book begins slowly but soon gets into its stride. Anyone who likes John King and Irving Welsh should enjoy this book. It is heartbreaking, violent and funny. Although it does not make the depth and quality of Marabou Stalk Nightmares, I would highly recommend this book and will look forward to reading more from Tony Williams, as he has a chance of reaching the dizzy heights of those afore mentioned authors.
The book begins slowly but soon gets into its stride. Anyone who likes John King and Irving Welsh should enjoy this book. It is heartbreaking, violent and funny. Although it does not make the depth and quality of Marabou Stalk Nightmares, I would highly recommend this book and will look forward to reading more from Tony Williams, as he has a chance of reaching the dizzy heights of those afore mentioned authors.
May 19, 2019
I wanted to like this but didn’t. I get what the author is trying to convey, it’s just not a style of writing that engages me. I need a bit of description now again and found the ‘he did this and she said that then this happened and he did.....’ writing along with the dozens of named, yet practically identical characters a turn off rather than engaging. You can’t like every book I suppose...
October 19, 2024
Depressingly true to life, it's barely noticeable this is a modern adaptation of an Icelandic saga. The violence is brutal at times, and I was left wanting more of the internal motivations of the supporting characters, because their actions seemed so inexplicable to me.
May 31, 2018
I wanted to get inside Aidan’s head, but the author keeps us firmly outside. This book reminds me of “King Dido”, in that the protagonist gets turned bad by circumstances.
February 7, 2019
Both interesting and useful for dissertation.
I like the style and story.
I like the style and story.
May 22, 2019
Interesting thought provoking book!!
January 20, 2020
Incredibly violent, but fascinating and in parts funny
August 7, 2020
Phew,I can come up for air again. This retelling of an Icelandic saga repositioned in a modern day rough housing estate in Sheffield rattles along at breakneck pace. Absolutely loved it.
February 23, 2023
This vibrant and violent novel has a real freshness. Odd that given that it is inspired by an old Icelandic saga.
June 15, 2019
Absolutely loved this book, this is real life for many in cities up and down the country. We never see it with our 9 to 5 jobs and wives/husbands and 2.4 children, but it goes on every day of the week. Great story telling more like this please Mr Williams.
February 28, 2018
Nutcase is in a class of its own, a fascinating re-telling of an Icelandic Saga set in some of the poorest, roughest communities in Britain. It's written very sparsely, very much like oral histories written down, it reads like recitation which has an almost hypnotic effect. There is very little emotional or descriptive language in it, but the characters are extremely well-defined and evocative. You're not encouraged to try and imagine being them, but you are forced to recognise and acknowledge them and their lives, which is ultimately a much more powerful tool.
Other reviews here have summarised the story etc.. so I won't duplicate but I would definitely encourage people to read it, it's an experience not to be missed and a great piece of writing.
Other reviews here have summarised the story etc.. so I won't duplicate but I would definitely encourage people to read it, it's an experience not to be missed and a great piece of writing.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews