Broken Ghost

by Niall Griffiths

A Welsh community is drawn together and blown apart by a strange vision in the mountains: the huge spectre of a woman floating over a ridge. The people who live here in these mountains already have their own demons – drink, drugs, domestic violence, psychoses – but each character has a different experience of this strange apparition, a different reaction, and for some it will change everything. Is it a collective hallucination? A meteorological phenomenon? Whatever it is, they all saw something, early one morning on the shores of a mountain lake, something that will awaken in them powers and passions and, perhaps, a possibility of healing these broken people in a broken country.

An examination of modern humanity’s desperate need to live meaningfully and vividly in a mediated world – where individual autonomy is lost and the collective heart is atomised and exploited – this is a novel that gives voices to the marginalised, the dispossessed, the forgotten. Disturbing and unforgettable, darkly funny and deeply moving, written in a charged language that is vernacular, lyrical and hieratic all at once, Broken Ghost is – simultaneously – a howl of anguish and a summoning of gods.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

368 pages, Hardcover

Published August 15, 2019

About the author

Niall Griffiths was born in Liverpool to a Welsh/Irish/Romany lineage. He’s been a labourer, a barman, a server of fish and chips, a burglar, a farmhand, a tree feller, a factory worker and many other things too tedious to relate. Now, he’s a full-time writer, living at the foot of a mountain in mid-Wales, with seven novels published, several works of non-fiction and more short stories and radio plays and travel pieces and reviews than he cares to, or possibly even can, count. His fourth novel, Stump, won the Wales Book of the Year Award. A film adaptation of his third novel, Kelly+Victor, won a BAFTA. He’s now working on the screenplay for his sixth, Wreckage. His latest novel is Broken Ghost.

Reviews

[Max Reads · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was way more political/social than I thought it was going to be. It follows an ex-addict, a single mother and a violent man who was abused as a child after they see a ghost in the mist in the moutains at Pendam. I was sort of lured in with the promise of magic by the blurb, and then was left wanting the return of that for the rest of the book and it never did come back. BUT, it felt almost like this was the point of the story. How would you react having seen something miraculous and then returning to normal life in brexit-racked Wales?

There's a lot in here about trespass, and the privatization and ownership of land, the claims laid to Wales by the English, and how the Welsh counties are changing in the face of separation from Europe. The desperation of a working class and desire for escape and stability. There's a big theme of "I understand you're having life problems but could you please go and have them somewhere else".

This is a beautifully written book. I especially loved the interlude chapters and passages which almost look at the country from a birds eye view and step back from the human elements of the story to describe landscape and nature. You get sucked into these very personal conflicts and then constantly reminded how small they are in the grand scheme of things.

Liked this book, but I'm only giving it three stars because it wasn't what I wanted or was expecting when I picked it up. Not the kind of thing I usually read, but I guess I'm glad I read it. Would appeal to fans of Iain Banks contemporary stuff (not his scifi).

[Andy Weston · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have spent the first part Election Day finishing Broken Ghost by Niall Griffiths , very appropriate indeed.

In a Bukowski / Vlautin style Griffiths presents his pessimistic vision of the effect of austerity and discontent by emphasising a malaise in society. The book is a richly textured evocation of a small town living with a gritty concoction of depravity, sex, drugs, alcohol, and violence; more specifically the effect on three of its inhabitants, Emma, a single parent struggling to make ends meet through benefits and her weekly part-time job caring for the elderly, Adam, a recovering addict, and Cowley, a labourer with a violent temperament inflamed through his dwindling opportunities and traumatic childhood.

But instead of rooting the story completely in reality, he gives the novel an almost dystopian, supernatural feel as the narrative opens with the three characters seeing the spectral figure of a woman in the sky when walking on hills just outside their hometown of Trebaron. The three are seeking an escape from the frequent nightmarish situations in their lives.

The novel’s fascination with squalor might be too much for some, but if you can bear it, Griffiths’s unflinching approach succeeds. It’s an explosive journey of rot and recovery all the way up to the repression of its harrowing finish.

There’s a political theme also, with the effects of austerity and frequent references to Brexit and its effect on society; a timely reminder that the prelude of a dystopian tomorrow is today.

Here’s a clip that demonstrates how his prose builds the dark atmosphere that surrounds the story..

Hill towns do their thing and in high summer they do it raw; their bamboozled inhabitants sit on sweaty stone balustrades of river bridges in the hope of receiving a lifted cool from the water below, even crawling as it now is, the eddies smudged under gnats and syrupy in their coilings like semen.
And around this particular town burps the bog, fetid in its soupy sumps and abuzz with insects and the regular plops and hiccups of bursting bubbles. It gives off salt and steady throbs of sweetish stinks. And all around it’s rancid reservoirs the sundews reach for the midge, their deadly pearls of such ugly honey. Dragonflies, joined tail to tail, create lovehearts on the canary grass. The heather, the moor grass, deep purple and maroon - shades familiar to the spirits of sex and death. Polecats skulk for the moist caves beneath the boardwalk, there to curl and grasp. Old energies heave in the peat.

Inside the Talbot pub, a hen night is happening; pink fairy wings and a lot of thighs and belly.

[Ian Mapp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rather surprised that at the time of writing this review, that there are only 4 others and 23 ratings on Goodreads. Surely a writer of Niall Griffiths talents deserves a wider audience?

It's been a while since I've read him but he remains one of the few authors who's entire back catalogue I have read.

This is very familiar ground - small town, working class people - an overload of violence, sex, drugs and alcohol. Written in lyrical local dialect. You can't avoid the similarities with Irvine Welsh and he is just as good.

Our three protagonists - covering the aforementioned vices - see an apparition of woman on a mountainside that in all likelihood, is a broken spectre. Emma writes a blog, it goes viral - the community come together in search of something spiritual, taking up residence on the mountainside - encouraging all sorts of waifs, strays and even the clergy onto the mountainside.

This is the just the structure to get into the lives of the three characters- as they go from pub to pub, fight to fight and person to person. Its simultaneously funny and shocking to get in their heads for the 350 pages or so.

There's also the chance to explore where society is going - particularly in the post Brexit UK. It feels bang up to date - and not only as its full of despair, with a very down beat ending.

Deserves to be wider read.

[Steve Clough · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Mis-)Adventures of the lost and lonely in Brexit Britain. A stark yet hugely enjoyable novel set in West Wales, that follows the lives of three central characters, struggling, in they’re own way, to fit in the modern world. Strong voices (-the recreation of various accents and dialects is very effective and helps create well defined characters) and a strong sense of place (I’m possibly a bit biased having lived not far from Aber...) abound.
A couple of times I caught myself making what is probably a bit of a lazy comparison to some of Irvine Welsh’s writing, but I think that fans of his books would probably find a lot to like here.
It’s not a perfect novel but I really enjoyed it, and so in the absence of fractions I’m happy to round my score up!

[Jasmine]

No rating, no date - DNF @ p65.

I didn’t enjoy the writing style of this personally. I get where Griffiths was going with it in terms of personalising it to the characters, but I found the characters so unlikeable and intolerable that I couldn’t get on board with that writing style. There was potential for a great storyline - I’m sure the people who finish it will find that - but I don’t think this book is for me.

[Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The origins of it don't matter to the people up here. They've come for many reasons, not just one."

Phew.

What a novel.

At times utterly dark and radical. At times thoroughly uplifting and blissful.

The greatest depths of despair side by side with the infinitesimally beautiful.

And what a finale.

Has some issues, yet a great novel and unlike anything I have ever read.

I may put down some more thoughts and some quotes once I have had some time to reflect.

Until then:
dim esgus, dim cosb, byth yn rhoi'r gorau iddi.

[E. · Rating 3 out of 5]

this was less ghost story and more lamentations on the social situation of post-brexit Wales than I expected. knowing Welsh would also have been helpful.

[Billy Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

A paean to the transcendental, Griffiths necessitates spiritual reinvigoration amid a world embroiled in hard-headed politics. As we are brought along on the drug and sex-fuelled escapades of the protagonists - Emma, Adam and Cowley - the seedy underbelly of post-referendum Wales (and briefly England) is punctuated by moments of tenderness and bold meditation on the existential malaise of each character. Griffiths blends the sordidness of Hunter S. Thompson with descriptions of nature couched in lofty, poetical language. As much a study of Brexit Britain as it is an impassioned reflection on our relationship with nature. Vacillating between scenes of libidinous excess, sipping cocktails of cider and whisky on an Arriva train service, to exploding into vatic lyricism on organic processes of growth, transformation and decay seems to be one of Niall Griffiths' many hallmarks. The prescience of the novel is undeniable, as is Griffiths' status as an astonishing writer.

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciated the technical things the author was trying to achieve more than I appreciated the book itself.

[Duffy]

Who’s Black Jerry?
Before yewer time mun. Black feller called Jerry. Did a bit-a dealin. Few years ago, iss was.

Without any warning a memory pounces. I shagged one such a woman once, years back, a model for them KP boards, like. Well she was probably a model for a lot of other things as well but that’s how I met her, in a pub on the Wirral, when she was doing some promotional tour thing for the nuts.

Up on-a mountain. That party last week, remember?
— Never went.
— No but yew heard about it. Yew were gonna come remember? But The Apprentice was on.

No wonder she miscarried, aye? All em fags an cider an all em fuckin oven pizzas an chips an sausages she eats. No unborn baby is gonna survive all that shite fallin down on top-a it.

He called himself Weasel, Tom’s dad did. Never did find out his proper name cos he said he didn’t have one anymor cos he was really a weasel in human form.

You leak - i mean you give out fluids, all kinds of gunk, and that means you’re alive. Living things are smelly: living things stink. Your life is a miracke and you need to remember that every morning as soon as your eyes open. P.39

— What the fuck, Johnny? A didlo?
— Not just any dildo, babe. It’s mine.
— What?
— Make-your-own-dildo kit. It’s my dick, see?

The last words are said in a kind of high-pitched screech that screws his face up into a horrible mask. Spit flies out of his gob.

Their podgt, unlined, never-known struggle faces, theit dead fucking eyes unlit by any imagination, their sober-suited insistence on Doing The Right Thing, their tax-avoiding Bullingdon Club restaurant-smashing fucking stinking hypocrisy, their fucking fucking fucking fuck –

No money no worries agwin, sor. Take every belonging - house, car, the lot. Get a private car down to Cardiff. Limo. Or do what every other fucker with a lot of money and some Welsh ancestry does and buy a flat in fucking Pontcanna. Or emigrate to Patagonia. Or just fucking London, where you can sit in the bar of the Welsh Centre and whinge about hiraeth and the old soil when you can be standing on it again two hours out of Paddingron. Hiraeth, bollax; that’s what the Great Western is for. It’s just another thing to enrich the sense of self.

— i know you. Ive met yis a thousand fucking times. And youve always been tge same, you have. You’ve always envied people who, to you, have led more, more fuckin, realer lives, haven’t yeh? Yus, yis’ve always fuckin wishes you were poor. Jarvis Cocker. When you hear ‘Common People’ you’re not the, the Greek girl, are yeh?

— My war-man in yur? He asks. Accent strong Swansea. – Yew been in yur with my war-man? Someone said yew av.
— I don’t know, Emma says. – You tell me, and she raises herself on the tippy-toes of her cork platforns, gains a few more inches, sufficient so that she can lick the man’s lips, swipe her tired tongue twice across them. — That taste like her, does it? Anything in that you recognise?
The man rubs the back of his hand across his face. SCFC on the knuckles. — Fuckin lezza.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a lot of talk about books that sum up Brexit but this and another book set in Wales, Easy Meat, have both done a good job of showing how unexpected parts of the country voted for leave, and neither have had much hype. Welsh literature just doesn’t seem very fashionable. It’s a shame because this has all of the kind of devices that are generally lauded - most of it is written in the local vernacular, interlinked are a smattering of beautifully over the top descriptions of nature and the countryside, there’s the focus on those on the periphery, it’s anti-establishment.. Very occasionally the book’s message is a bit too obvious but overall the book shines a great light on rural poverty in the UK in a way that is rarely seen I think, and it’s well written and engaging to boot.

[Richard Howard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Outrage! The last book I read with that screaming out of it was 'Last Exit To Brooklyn'. I know there will be comparisons made with Irvine Welsh's 'Trainspotting' but this book has a far more obvious political aspect and has very little humour in it. It's scalding and visceral and though the political message is often hammered home with little finesse, it's still bloody effective.

[Mike Gagg · Rating 2 out of 5]

Trainspotting without the story

[Daniel Carpenter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautifully written, but emotionally draining story about people haunting a landscape. Is it a ghost story? I think so, and an excellent one at that.

[Ian Onion · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good one by Niall Griffiths. Broken Ghost is full of the usual best-avoided characters. Also, there's mysticism and politics and stuff I didn't know about with startling lyrical passages.

[Beth Monty · Rating 1 out of 5]

Didnt finish this book a real difficult read

[Sam Hicks · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stars for the fantastic descriptive passages etc, but I ended up feeling like I'd had a truck load of creative writing emptied over my head and very little else.