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Thursday, Jul 9, 2009
Liverpool literary sensation Helen Walsh talks about teen rebellion, prostitution and her debut novel "Brass," the story of a bisexual female predator roaming the Merseyside streets.
Dec 11, 2004 | There's a particular trifecta of elements that will make not only a book but an author instantly famous: shock value, literary merit and an intriguing personal story. Helen Walsh was 26 last year when she became a star in Britain for her first novel, "Brass." A mixed-race, bisexual outsider who was socialized in the club culture of her small English town, Walsh fled to Barcelona, Spain, at 16, where she worked fixing up prostitutes and johns before moving to Liverpool, cleaning up her act and sitting down to write a novel.
Considered one of the raciest tales of British sex-and-drug culture since Irvine Welsh's "Trainspotting," "Brass" has earned Walsh a lot of hype and, because it's so well written, possible staying power as well. Recently, the (London) Observer named her one of the "prodigiously talented young people" who will define the 21st century. Now that the book has been released in the United States, it promises to make Walsh a household name on this side of the Atlantic.
"Brass" is the story of Millie, a 19-year-old Liverpudlian who devotes most of her time to dropping Ecstasy, drinking and chasing after sex -- with schoolgirls, prostitutes, a womanizing Mafia man and whoever else catches her fancy. Her lyrical voice alternates with the slangy one of her best friend, Jamie, to tell the story. Jamie is in his mid-20s and ready to settle down into marriage and domestic life; as a result, his friendship with Millie starts to deteriorate. The rift between them triggers all of Millie's self-destructive instincts as well as a bout of soul-searching, and she wanders the streets looking for redemption even as she propositions hookers and has bizarre, coke-induced encounters with strangers in bars. It is the tension between the two desires, and the two friends, that gives Walsh's narrative its particular energy.
As she's trying to understand her relationship with Jamie, Millie is also coming to terms with her absent mother, who she thinks has abandoned her. It's only by leaving her life in Liverpool to find her mother that she can, by the end of the book, make peace with herself. "Brass" is, more than anything, an exercise in watching a character come to that realization -- but it's the sex, the drugs and the gorgeously perverse street culture of Liverpool that keep it from becoming tedious. Walsh's writing veers between poetic and startlingly rough.
Critic Sarah Adams wrote in the Guardian that "Brass" is "more a bellow from the guts than a cry from the heart," and Walsh's prose is certainly a sustained bellow, both agonizing and deeply compelling. Rather than a quiet coming-of-age story, "Brass" reads like an emergency, as if to ignore it would be some sort of crime. On the first page we are told, as Millie is guiding a teenage prostitute to a cemetery for a sexual encounter, that the nearby cathedral "pierces the night like some majestic foreboding." Two pages later, the prostitute is splayed over a tombstone, and Millie reaches into her own pants to "manipulate myself hard and selfishly, the whore becoming nothing but a body. A cunt in a magazine." That such a sentiment is coming from a character who herself is a young girl is shocking, but it is the kind of shock that makes you want to keep reading.
