Ironopolis
by
A fascinating, compulsive read during which the reader feels
sometimes enveloped by the fog of the river from which the visceral
embodiment of the spirit of the place emerges. I finished this book
wanting to begin again, feeling that though strands were knotted up,
there were questions unanswered or half answered and yet that deeper
truths had surfaced: what holds people, breaks them, sends them
spiralling off—and that is how it should be. In the sifting of documents
and oral histories, a history of the generational entanglements of
members of a community emerges. This is a community that has been sold
down the river, their houses gradually purchased, the people
disappearing and not only to known destinations but some leaching away.
The main assembler of narratives and narrator, whose identity is
revealed towards the end, is searching for his own history only to
understand that the process of research rather than its end is an act of
transformation. Through all of the structural circularities and
symmetries, resonances through generations, the well down which a
character might plummet in the old waterworks, the explosions that wipe
people out or allow them to vanish, the marginalised of the community
have an ear to hear the watery underground drawing them, many
experiencing unexpected moments of the extraordinary in the everyday.
Those who, on the surface, maintain a outward polish of respectability
may not be all they seem but goodness and love are found in odd corners.
The sense of loss and yearning is strong; those who leave in
geographical terms spend their lives obsessively trying to make sense of
where they came from. And the last laugh is on green-skinned, mildew
sodden Peg Powler, of course…