Review of Keir McCabe's ICE CREAM AND AESOP

IN QUEST OF FAMILY .. a review of Keir McCabe's debut novel ICE CREAM AND AESOP



Some stories are so strong we cease to be aware of languge, such is our absorbtion in the story. Others boss our eye with the beauty of their language.

Keir McCabe's ICE CREAM AND AESOP does both.

The architecture of the story is excellent in the way it skips deftly back and forth from the big picture spanning a lifetime to its intense focus on the events of a single climatic day of resolution among a community of bums, tramps, vagrants and derelicts who have formed an alternative tribe in an abandoned ice cream factory in Ipswich, which becomes their home for several years.

The story is pleasingly balanced, assured and intelligent. It yields nuggets of meaning in an entirely natural and believable way.

So, too, the language deployed is of a very high order. There are some exquisite dabs of observation, both of the character of Ipswich's declining industrial underbelly in the early part of this century, and of a dispirate of broken down individuals struggling to survive as they sink to the bottom of the social order which, for the most part, would rather they were not there at all.

One of my favourite dabs was a description a dog -- Luukas -- and its relationship with the human players. Luukas is at the heart of all and links a very modern story with Aesop's timeless fables.

A mixed up dog whose bark 'concealed a nuance of decline, Luukas symbolises hope amid despair: 'And yet in her eyes -- those entrancing, walnut-brown eyes -- there still shone a mischief and a vigour that could release a man from even the deepest sorrow.'

Beautiful.

But brutality and insensitivity are more the norm for the self-styled 'residents' of Jacobs former ice cream parlour. ICE CREAM AND AESOP is as much a spiritual and moral study as a sequence of events.

Such is its psychological power, I was reminded often of the philosophical insights and poetic prose of Vasily Grossman's LIFE AND FATE, a towering work of great insight and sweep. In that story, Krymov's 'dog in two halves' plays an Aesopian role similar to the role played by Luukas in Keir McCabe's story. In the latter story, the simple act of removing a splint of glass from Luukas' paw on an Ipswich street alters the course of a dozen or more broken lives, leading as it does to an unlikely blossoming of companionship and co-operation.

The ragged trousered society of characters in the ICE CREAAM AND AESOP reminded me of the desperate Russian troops in LIFE AND FATE who were stuck in a house surrounded by the German army. Both groups are up against it and do all they can to cling onto their temporary respite in a dangerous setting.

In this passage towards the end of ICE CREAM AND AESOP the residents have collapsed after a baking August day of drinking punctuated by distressing violence:

"Bodies rolled and limbs twitched atop their beds of concrete. Bodies writhed atop their beds of brick, of stainless steel, of corrugated iron, of common chickweed, and black medic, dandelion, and a copse of emptied bottles, bottles lain scattered, impotent as spent shells; remnants of a War fought; battled - a War lost."

Such people are among us all the time. We most ignore them when we can.

If you read ICE CREAM AND AESOP you will at least KNOW in future how a life can crumble, how an ordinary person can find themselves broken and lost, unemployed and then homeless. I found myself wondering how I would cope were I ripped from what Keir McCabe describes as 'the analgesic nirvana of a structured life'. It does bear to think too much about it. Of course, if you are caught in the trap your mind may literally become your enemy within.

The book touches on many themes: parental desertion, bullying, rejection, hopelessness, alcoholism, survival, friendship, justice .. and treachery. Not all survive, both in reality and in the story. That said the story is literally a phoenix which rises from the ashes. The existance of the story is itself a remarkable and important thing.

ICE CREAM AND AESOP also shows us, normal folk, how we are and it is not always pretty because the story is uncompromising in its honesty. Not all of us can face our true nature. Many would dispute that we are as we are. There is a thread of misanthropy at the heart of the story spun by the lessons of harsh experience. But there are also flashes of hope, companionship and compassion in the story.

The counterpoising of despair and hope is mirrored in the language, too. The street speech of the characters if captured with razor accuracy. But it is set against poetic prose which Vasily Grossman would applaud.

ICE CREAM AND AESOP faces ugliness. It highlights the death of five prostitues in Ipswich and rages at the vileness of some of the news commentary. I felt more than once that it was not the ugliness of the street people that I found myself regretting but the broader indifference in the rest of us.

That said ICE CREAM AND AESOP is a profoundly moving and beautiful book because of the humanity that breaks through the concrete of our callousness like the dandelions and common chickweed that break through the cracked concrete of JACOBS PARLOUR MAID .. EST.1897 .. QUALITY ITALIAN ICE CREAM OF EAST ANGLIA, 52-54 GRIMWADE STREET, IPSWICH.

I recommend it to you.

Here is the link to it: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ice-Cream-Aes...

Ron Askew, June 2013, St Albans.