In Review: Katy Massey, All Us Sinners (2024) and Andrew McMillan, Pity (2024)
This article was published in The Oxford Review of Books, Summer 2024 Edition.
What was Yorkshire like in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and to what extent can fiction ever truly embody placehood? In Katy Massey’s All Us Sinners, Leeds is presented as a gloomy city paralysed by the Yorkshire Ripper’s horrific murders of sex workers. Half an hour away from Leeds, the small industrial town of Barnsley is described by Andrew McMillan’s Pity as almost inert, only the monotonous toil of miners providing the city with any semblance of life. Although the subject matter of the two novels could not be any more different — All Us Sinners strikes a quasi-detective tone that follows a sex worker uncovering the truth behind her friend’s son’s murder, whereas Pity describes different generations of men grappling with relationships, identity and loss — the similar setting allows us to look again at what ‘the North’ signifies in contemporary literature.
All Us Sinners takes us to the Leeds of 1977, where the Yorkshire Ripper’s horrifying murders of sex workers are chilling the city. The novel revolves around Maureen, the tough but kind owner of a clean and well-kept brothel who embodies the literary cliche of ‘the rough lass with a heart of gold’. As the Yorkshire Ripper’s murders draw closer and closer to her workplace, the city becomes increasingly deserted and business sparse. This is overshadowed by the tragic death of David, the teenage son of Maureen’s colleague and close friend Bev. Maureen is thrust into an investigation alongside her friend, Detective Sergeant Mick which embroils her in the dark underbelly of Leeds. Her search for truth must confront the world of crime, drugs, and gangs that lurk beneath working-class strife.
McMillan's Pity examines a town in South Yorkshire through the eyes of three generations of men in a mining family from the 1970s to the 2020s, investigating men through time rather than women in the worst of times. Through three separate perspectives, the book charts the lives of grandfather and miner Brian, his sons Alex and Brian, and Alex’s son Simon, who works at a call centre in the day and moonlights as a drag queen. With recurring themes of masculinity, social class, industrialisation, queerness and sexuality, the book describes a town grappling with the raw wounds of shrivelling industry, as well as the legacy of Thatcherism and neo-liberalism. The book is interlaced with multiple narrative viewpoints: the section ‘Fieldnotes’, written by a group of anthropologists conducting research on social trauma; ‘surveillance’, which includes CCTV footage shedding light on the relationship between Simon and his boyfriend Ryan, and a third section filled with poetic daily snapshots of Brian’s mining life.
With both books based on the authors’ own experiences of coming of age in Yorkshire, scene-setting is uniformly excellent. Massey was raised by her single mother striving to make ends meet by working in Leeds’ sex industry in the 70s, while McMillan grew up in the former mining town of Barnsley in the 80s. Massey successfully captures a picture of dread and gloom with natural, subtle details, which cast the Ripper’s dark shadow over the entire book. She also treats the sex workers and their jobs delicately in a non-judgemental tone devoid of sensationalism; the brothel’s apparently warm and inviting atmosphere contrasts beautifully with the sense of doom permeating the rest of the city. While the Yorkshire Ripper ‘haunted the marginal streets around this side of town,’ Maureen manages to create a ‘party atmosphere’ within Rio’s on Christmas Eve, putting on a running buffet with bottles of Pomagne, cheese and biscuits and ‘whisky which they drank out of tea mugs’.
Pity similarly evinces a mixture of nostalgia and despair, skilfully describing the historic fissures in a northern English town. So tormented are the characters by the loss of the Northern mining industry that it infects the novel’s lexis. The sky is described as ‘a solid lump of cloud’, recalling the coal that is no longer brought up from the deserted mines, and metaphorically referred to as the ‘the embers of a furnace’ echoing the hearths gone cold. Discussing his inspirations for Pity, McMillan says he wanted to ask, ‘Who gets to tell what story about what place? What narratives get known of a place?’ He deftly tackles this in his book; while offering first-hand descriptions of the town, the ‘Fieldnotes’ section cleverly grapples with the question of who the narrator ought to be, and how memories of a place and community are inherited and distorted through generations. McMillan’s lyrical prose consciously works against the stereotype of the disaffected Northern ex-miner as crude, rough men defined only by their occupation.
If both books shine in the evocative portrayal of their communities, they further excel in their intricate discussion of difficult social topics. All Us Sinners launches a subtle but effective critique of misogyny in Leeds, exposing how sex workers are treated as second-class citizens. Mauren is told that ‘no decent man will ever want her [Maureen]’ and ‘a bad woman’s a bloody cesspit full of trouble’, and even a policeman comments that the Yorkshire Ripper ‘wouldn’t have brought her here, would he, if she wasn’t a tart’. Only when a non-sex worker is killed do the newspapers pressure the police to act. Wider society deems the violation of the sex worker’s body to be valid, and the disregard for their maiming and murders is the natural extension of this societal disregard for the value of their lives. Massey’s criticism of patriarchal British culture is furthered in her critique of the acceptability of victim-blaming. Bev, who is in a violent, abusive relationship and has just lost her son, is shown little compassion and is even blamed for putting up with her controlling partner. Many characters publicly express their condolences but privately confide that Bev should not have stayed with the ‘troublemaker’, demonstrating how misogyny and gaslighting can masquerade as concern.
Similarly, Pity subtly critiques classism, particularly through the ‘Fieldnotes’ section where an external, academic perspective examines community trauma. The sterilised tone of the academic discussion of events, including a stampede that killed many children and the lethal collapse of a mine, permeates the research with ‘ivory tower’ elitism. This contrasts starkly with the participants who find it difficult to verbalise their feelings of loss, fear and nostalgia. McMillan shows himself a master of class criticism, questioning whether demography, social history and anthropology can ever cut to the heart of community trauma. Perhaps such studies are merely periphrastic aberrations that utilise academic theory to hide their failure to meaningfully engage in lived reality. McMillian’s discussion of queerness is likewise outstanding, highlighted by the touching description of a father struggling to come to terms with his son’s drag career, and the son’s embarrassment, love, and wish to be accepted by his own parent. Drag offers wider political commentary, with Alex memorably dressing as Margaret Thatcher and performing her infamous Section 28 speech together with the miner strike anthem ‘Women of the Working Class’. This cleverly encapsulates the contradictions of being gay in the aftermath of conservative Thatcherism, which destroyed the collective action and working-class socialism of the North, as the architect of homophobic domestic policy is reclaimed and queered.
However, this is where the similarities between the two books end. Massey’s prose is laden with descriptions and adjectives, in a way that occasionally appears cumbersome. Phrases such as ‘[the] long, rough grass fought through strong and unruly weeds’ and ‘the little dog rushed excitedly around her ankles with his happy whine and lavished his big brown eyes on her face’ are placed in suspenseful sections where more terse, economical prose would heighten tension. In contrast, McMillan’s lyrical prowess is exceptional, especially from the perspective of Brian’s claustrophobic experience of working in the mines. McMillan writes with a poet’s precision and talent for abstraction as we watch ‘More and more men fall out of their houses, the weekend like fluff in the bottom of their pocket that they can’t quite reach.’
Ultimately, All Us Sinners’s main problem is its uneven pacing. Considering the essential ingredient of a successful crime novel is suspense, it is surprising that the novel so often meanders away from its central narrative thrust. Pity conveys the essence of its Northern setting in far tauter prose and is much the better book for it. Pity is ambitious and efficient whereas All Us Sinners is sluggish and overwrought, failing to meaningfully break from the stereotypes of the crime genre. The predictability of All Us Sinners’ conclusion, which is intentionally spoiled at the beginning to generate interest, is another factor against its success. Pity might be the stellar debut of the two, but either book would be an excellent insight into Yorkshire’s recent history, and responses to community trauma. In a world where ‘the North’ is often oversimplified and homogenised in literature, All Us Sinners and Pity dazzle through highly poignant studies of their respective communities, with their historical backgrounds masterfully reflected in the characters’ stories.
Art Credits: Louis Rush
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