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The Folded Man
In 2018 Manchester is a rotten city propped up by a few bad men. After the cuts, the toppling of its flagship tower, the riots and the terror, the promise of a prosperous North is gone. The first industrial city is dying, its people left to themselves, and with the rise of nationalism, it's only getting worse. Now, the only currency is trust, and Brian Meredith - addict, depressive, wheelchair-bound - has new trouble with old problems. It doesn't help that Brian is a mermaid - or at least thinks he is.
256 pages, Paperback
First published May 16, 2013
4 people are currently reading
154 people want to read
About the author
Matt Hill
6 books66 followersMatt Hill grew up in Tameside, Greater Manchester.
He is the author of five novels including Philip K. Dick Award nominee Graft (Angry Robot, 2016) and The Breach (Titan Books, 2020).
His most recent novel Lamb (Dead Ink Books) was a Times best SF novel of 2023.
Instagram: @matthillwriter
He is the author of five novels including Philip K. Dick Award nominee Graft (Angry Robot, 2016) and The Breach (Titan Books, 2020).
His most recent novel Lamb (Dead Ink Books) was a Times best SF novel of 2023.
Instagram: @matthillwriter
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
October 28, 2024
Set in a post apocalyptic near-future Manchester (UK), depressed, drug addicted and wheelchair bound Brian gets involved in danger with a crisis that will change is life and viewpoint of the world forever. 3 out of 12 One Star read, because the best thing about this book is my synopsis of it :D
2013 read
2013 read
December 10, 2015
Brian, wheelchair-bound and ugly, in Manchester, in 2018, together with Noah, his old buddy, his old pal, his old drug dealer. Manchester in ruins after riots. Beetham tower laid down. Police raids, skin-heads plunder. No good time to walk or, in this case, wheel alone. Brian and Noah, on a spying job, get hold of a mysterious box and things are getting really rough for them. Then, a change, a metamorphosis, a nightmare, and then–possibly?–a dream.
Spartan language, dialogs without tags (Saramago style), Northern England idioms. All this made it a hard read and I almost gave up after a third, thinking the language barrier is just too high for this ESL reader. Like surmount a road blockade on a wheelchair, this was. But – I managed, tuned in somehow. Still don't know exactly what it's all about, but I really do like it. Brian, the Folded Man, demands a re-read.
UPDATE 12/10/15
Just learned that the next book by Matt Hill will be out in February and it's called Graft .
Furthermore a piece of flash fiction, called The New Tradition, is available here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Spartan language, dialogs without tags (Saramago style), Northern England idioms. All this made it a hard read and I almost gave up after a third, thinking the language barrier is just too high for this ESL reader. Like surmount a road blockade on a wheelchair, this was. But – I managed, tuned in somehow. Still don't know exactly what it's all about, but I really do like it. Brian, the Folded Man, demands a re-read.
UPDATE 12/10/15
Just learned that the next book by Matt Hill will be out in February and it's called Graft .
Furthermore a piece of flash fiction, called The New Tradition, is available here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
May 14, 2013
The Folded Man was the runner up in The Dundee Book Prize, and Stephen Fry himself said “the book captures the smell and essence of Britain.”
So, expectations were high.
I was blown away.
Books these days are plastered with quotes from other authors and the press, who throw words around like extraordinary, vivid and original, and the books never are.
The Folded Man is all three, and more.
I read The Folded Man in four days because I couldn’t put it down. I sat in a coffee shop in Bermondsey and sat back frequently to mull over the ideas the writer was putting into my head.
The little snippets of delightful descriptions, twists of phrases and turns of wording; of which there are many.
Matt Hill has one distinctive voice, he’s set The Folded Man in an image of Britain around the corner from here...The events, the people, the life and the living it are so relatable the reader breathes in the smoke from the fires, and touches the fear of the characters burning inside.
Brian is disabled and a bit of a mermaid, of sorts. He has his addictions; he wants to be left alone to rot; but then in this place nobody seems to get what they want.
Simply put, The Folded Man is a must read.
A put whatever book you are reading down and start reading this book instead book.
So, expectations were high.
I was blown away.
Books these days are plastered with quotes from other authors and the press, who throw words around like extraordinary, vivid and original, and the books never are.
The Folded Man is all three, and more.
I read The Folded Man in four days because I couldn’t put it down. I sat in a coffee shop in Bermondsey and sat back frequently to mull over the ideas the writer was putting into my head.
The little snippets of delightful descriptions, twists of phrases and turns of wording; of which there are many.
Matt Hill has one distinctive voice, he’s set The Folded Man in an image of Britain around the corner from here...The events, the people, the life and the living it are so relatable the reader breathes in the smoke from the fires, and touches the fear of the characters burning inside.
Brian is disabled and a bit of a mermaid, of sorts. He has his addictions; he wants to be left alone to rot; but then in this place nobody seems to get what they want.
Simply put, The Folded Man is a must read.
A put whatever book you are reading down and start reading this book instead book.
June 13, 2013
[No spoilers]
It's pretty safe to say that no book resembling The Folded Man has ever been written, nor will it in the future. It's absolutely, stunningly unique. It's also the most disgusting book I've ever read, with a protagonist who isn't easy to like - which has a lot to do with the mentioned disgusting stuff.
Without ruining the story: Manchester has turned to shit: society has fallen and all that's left is dirt and hate. Brian, our protagonist, is disabled, disfigured (although we don't know how much of that is real or in his mind), and he hides and numbs himself employing any method at hand. He is everything we hope we won't be in a crisis but many of us fear we might be. Not exactly a hero, no. And then strange and dangerous things start to happen that pull Brian out of his safe but hopeless hole.
Throughout this story I've winced, pulled faces and clasped my hand over my mouth several times, but not once did I want to stop reading. Sure, Matt Hill has one impressively twisted imagination, but on top of that his prose is gripping - it pulls you along as it flows. Not a swear word too many, full of Northernisms but none out of place, every description celebrating the English language.
Although The Folded Man is a post-apocalyptic story with a few fantastical, speculative and sci-fi elements, it's very far from genre fiction. In no way does the story lean on plot: in my experience it's entirely character driven, and that the plot works out in the background is a bonus because it supports what needs to happen to Brian. This happens very rarely and I'm impressed.
Go on then, read it.
It's pretty safe to say that no book resembling The Folded Man has ever been written, nor will it in the future. It's absolutely, stunningly unique. It's also the most disgusting book I've ever read, with a protagonist who isn't easy to like - which has a lot to do with the mentioned disgusting stuff.
Without ruining the story: Manchester has turned to shit: society has fallen and all that's left is dirt and hate. Brian, our protagonist, is disabled, disfigured (although we don't know how much of that is real or in his mind), and he hides and numbs himself employing any method at hand. He is everything we hope we won't be in a crisis but many of us fear we might be. Not exactly a hero, no. And then strange and dangerous things start to happen that pull Brian out of his safe but hopeless hole.
Throughout this story I've winced, pulled faces and clasped my hand over my mouth several times, but not once did I want to stop reading. Sure, Matt Hill has one impressively twisted imagination, but on top of that his prose is gripping - it pulls you along as it flows. Not a swear word too many, full of Northernisms but none out of place, every description celebrating the English language.
Although The Folded Man is a post-apocalyptic story with a few fantastical, speculative and sci-fi elements, it's very far from genre fiction. In no way does the story lean on plot: in my experience it's entirely character driven, and that the plot works out in the background is a bonus because it supports what needs to happen to Brian. This happens very rarely and I'm impressed.
Go on then, read it.
September 27, 2013
The cover of Matt Hill’s debut bears a quote by Stephen Fry, which tells us that the work within captures the “smell and essence of Britain”. This is a considerable claim but one that rings entirely true, despite the book’s post-apocalyptic premise. The Folded Man offers a frighteningly plausible rendition of the future, bleak and disturbing. The city is Manchester, the year is 2018. The five year leap forward sees the country in ruins, plunged into social disorder, widespread deprivation, violence, crime and vigilante rule. We learn of this desolate new world through the book’s protagonist Brian Meredith, a drug-addled “cripple” reliant on the state which he fears and despises. It is both through Brian’s internal meditations and external experiences that Hill creates a chilling picture of the outside world – a phantasmagorical panorama which constitutes the backdrop of the story. Both dynamic and very craftily constructed, it compells the reader to fully immerse in the writer’s vision of the future, bereft of the social norms and conventions that govern modern Britain.
The Folded Man crosses several genres and defies exact classification, comprising elements of Sci-Fi, surrealism, traditional storytelling and experimentation. Hill locks a range of themes into a novel literary whole, defined by intricate plot turns, seemingly freeform dialogue and a prolonged sense of suspense. It is Hill’s ability to tap into our collective consciousness that lends the book much of its realism, and his dark imagination that turns a straightforward narrative into a dystopian riddle. But it is the book’s protagonist, Brian, that’s The Folded Man’s real strength. Albeit a highly divisive character, Brian is predominantly a victim. Wheelchair bound by a rare genetic condition called Sirenomelia (Mermaid Syndrome), he spends his time in his squalid flat watching the world on CCTV and eating his own hair. There are reasons behind Brian’s psychological idiosyncrasies, which Hill weaves into the plot seamlessly. We learn in vivid snapshots of his early life and his upbringing, his fears, desires and worries and discover a very complicated and downtrodden man, who has resigned from life until his mate Noah coaxes him into an outing across the city.
The pair’s excursion leads to a series of events and characters that are at times as bizarre as they are exhilarating. Hill fuses the real with the imaginary, the factual with the fantastic to create a world characterised by an eerie introverted externality. This eeriness also extends to Hill’s literary stylings, which give the book its narrative verve. Written entirely in northern dialect, The Folded Man is full of linguistic quirks, colloquialisms and staccato sentences, sometimes as short as a single adjective. “Brian’s in his chair – the wheelchair in the middle of his world,” writes Hill of his protagonist when he returns home from the outing with Noah, “All the days are the same. All day, every hour – trapped. The fat man in his yawning city. Ageing. Smoking and sleeping between damp walls and under bare bulbs. The fat man who sat through power cuts and water shortages. Listened to new riots and masked radicals on his telly. The same chair at the arse-end of Manchester, old capital of the north. The cold city, the blinking city.” The Folded Man is both a dark tale of humanity and a tribute to Hill’s home city. Manchester is very much at the heart of the novel – a city once great now reduced to an abject quagmire by an “endless war for love between the dead and dying”.
It is difficult to imagine The Folded Man being set anywhere else, just as it is difficult to imagine the protagonist being anyone other than Brian. This is a great achievement on Hill’s part, a writer whose style and subject matter may be considered challenging. But Hill is someone who didn’t set out to write a challenging debut, merely a book that came together almost miraculously inspired by his interest in folklore, urban legends and strange phenomena, his home town and some of the people he’s met there. Brian, for example, Hill told me recently, was partly a result of his experiences with “a close relative who had terrible hip problems from a very young age” and partly a product of his own imagination, fuelled by “one of those crap, slightly exploitative documentaries about a girl born with Sirenomelia”. Brian’s congenital disorder is as integral to the plot as it is to his character. “I wanted Brian’s condition to be as ‘realistic’ a treatment of the mermaid myth as possible,” Hill explains, “So even though the book veers away from reality (far, far away in places), there’s at least a medical grounding.” There certainly is that but there is also more – much more – than that to this intriguing debut which, as Stephen Fry said, has a “direct vividness that keeps one inside its totally realised world”.
The Folded Man is an absorbing and original work that falls into a somewhat nebulous field of literary production. Hill has a keen eye for topical peculiarity similar to the writers in the prophetic tradition, distinguished by their ability to penetrate surface-reality and delve into the deepest recesses of the human psyche. In line with this tradition Hill tells the story from an outsider’s perspective, which gives The Folded Man its disturbing immediacy. It also prompts the reader to question – or at the very least ponder – the validity of the moral, cultural and socio-economic structures that frame our society and the potential consequences of their abolition. J.G Ballard once wrote that “civilised life” is based “on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly” and the trouble is that we sometimes forget “that that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us”. Hill’s book serves as a stark reminder of this, urging us to look at the uncomfortable and unsightly possibilities behind those seemingly orderly and burnished optical trickeries.
The Folded Man crosses several genres and defies exact classification, comprising elements of Sci-Fi, surrealism, traditional storytelling and experimentation. Hill locks a range of themes into a novel literary whole, defined by intricate plot turns, seemingly freeform dialogue and a prolonged sense of suspense. It is Hill’s ability to tap into our collective consciousness that lends the book much of its realism, and his dark imagination that turns a straightforward narrative into a dystopian riddle. But it is the book’s protagonist, Brian, that’s The Folded Man’s real strength. Albeit a highly divisive character, Brian is predominantly a victim. Wheelchair bound by a rare genetic condition called Sirenomelia (Mermaid Syndrome), he spends his time in his squalid flat watching the world on CCTV and eating his own hair. There are reasons behind Brian’s psychological idiosyncrasies, which Hill weaves into the plot seamlessly. We learn in vivid snapshots of his early life and his upbringing, his fears, desires and worries and discover a very complicated and downtrodden man, who has resigned from life until his mate Noah coaxes him into an outing across the city.
The pair’s excursion leads to a series of events and characters that are at times as bizarre as they are exhilarating. Hill fuses the real with the imaginary, the factual with the fantastic to create a world characterised by an eerie introverted externality. This eeriness also extends to Hill’s literary stylings, which give the book its narrative verve. Written entirely in northern dialect, The Folded Man is full of linguistic quirks, colloquialisms and staccato sentences, sometimes as short as a single adjective. “Brian’s in his chair – the wheelchair in the middle of his world,” writes Hill of his protagonist when he returns home from the outing with Noah, “All the days are the same. All day, every hour – trapped. The fat man in his yawning city. Ageing. Smoking and sleeping between damp walls and under bare bulbs. The fat man who sat through power cuts and water shortages. Listened to new riots and masked radicals on his telly. The same chair at the arse-end of Manchester, old capital of the north. The cold city, the blinking city.” The Folded Man is both a dark tale of humanity and a tribute to Hill’s home city. Manchester is very much at the heart of the novel – a city once great now reduced to an abject quagmire by an “endless war for love between the dead and dying”.
It is difficult to imagine The Folded Man being set anywhere else, just as it is difficult to imagine the protagonist being anyone other than Brian. This is a great achievement on Hill’s part, a writer whose style and subject matter may be considered challenging. But Hill is someone who didn’t set out to write a challenging debut, merely a book that came together almost miraculously inspired by his interest in folklore, urban legends and strange phenomena, his home town and some of the people he’s met there. Brian, for example, Hill told me recently, was partly a result of his experiences with “a close relative who had terrible hip problems from a very young age” and partly a product of his own imagination, fuelled by “one of those crap, slightly exploitative documentaries about a girl born with Sirenomelia”. Brian’s congenital disorder is as integral to the plot as it is to his character. “I wanted Brian’s condition to be as ‘realistic’ a treatment of the mermaid myth as possible,” Hill explains, “So even though the book veers away from reality (far, far away in places), there’s at least a medical grounding.” There certainly is that but there is also more – much more – than that to this intriguing debut which, as Stephen Fry said, has a “direct vividness that keeps one inside its totally realised world”.
The Folded Man is an absorbing and original work that falls into a somewhat nebulous field of literary production. Hill has a keen eye for topical peculiarity similar to the writers in the prophetic tradition, distinguished by their ability to penetrate surface-reality and delve into the deepest recesses of the human psyche. In line with this tradition Hill tells the story from an outsider’s perspective, which gives The Folded Man its disturbing immediacy. It also prompts the reader to question – or at the very least ponder – the validity of the moral, cultural and socio-economic structures that frame our society and the potential consequences of their abolition. J.G Ballard once wrote that “civilised life” is based “on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly” and the trouble is that we sometimes forget “that that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us”. Hill’s book serves as a stark reminder of this, urging us to look at the uncomfortable and unsightly possibilities behind those seemingly orderly and burnished optical trickeries.
July 30, 2013
Here is a book about the beauty in the dirt. Manchester – proud, friendly, multicultural Manchester – is ruined and hopeless in a future that's as upsetting as it's plausible. Our hero Brian is a drug-addled mermaid sat paranoid and covered in his own filth in his fortress of a flat. And then the most extraordinary things start to happen. The prose is fantastic, prising lyricism out of decay and wonder out of the horrible. I'm all over this book.
June 9, 2013
I strongly recommend this book, which studies grimness and somehow makes it beautiful. I loved it more and more with each new page and I am inspired with hope for the British industry.
December 19, 2017
It’s 2018 and England is in a bad way. Manchester, to be specific, has run to ruin with riots having burned much of it to the ground and society ravaged almost to the point of being unrecognisable. The novel concentrates on the central character of Brian Meredith- drug addled, with a dysmorphic feature that leaves him wheelchair bound and depressed. He also thinks he’s a mermaid, and this is where The Folded Man gets confusing.
I loved Matt Hill’s writing. He has an easy confidence to his prose that makes it compelling to read and the character’s he has developed are wonderfully eccentric and English which lends a real sense of black humour to the novel, despite it being pretty close to home in turns of where our economy society appears to be leading us to currently.
However, for all that I loved the writing, at many points in the book I didn’t have a clue as to what was actually happening. At points I almost gave up and resigned myself to the fact I just wasn’t intelligent enough to keep up with the plot. I read on though, and I began to suspect that this sense of overwhelming puzzlement was down to the book being written from Brian’s point of view as it becomes abundantly clear that he doesn’t know what on earth is going on for much of the book!
Given the general sense of anarchy, panic and uncertainty of the book I didn’t mind not particularly knowing what was going on at all times. However, the absence of speech marks became a really big nuisance for me. On many pages I had to go over paragraphs I had just read to make sure that I knew who had said what. I see no reason for speech marks to ever be left out of books- they were invented for a reason and make the readers job a whole lot easier. The character’s, though artistically developed, did not have distinct enough voices for the reader to be able to instinctively know who was talking. Often, I’d be reading the page and wouldn’t realise that speech had begun until I was a couple of sentences into a conversation. This becomes tiresome after a while and did detract from my enjoyment when it was coupled with a general sense of having no idea what was going on.
I’m undecided as to whether I liked the ending or not. It’s difficult to discuss without spoiling, but it’s safe to say the novel took a turning that I did not expect. I can say that as a whole, my experience of reading The Folded Man was enjoyable. Putting this book down I felt like I’d just been on the biggest drug trip ever- which is probably exactly what Matt Hill wanted considering Brian’s constant and vast ingestion of substances. If you’re a fan of Orwell, Palahniuk, Bradbury or Huxley you should definitely give this book a go.
This review was first published on Nudge-books.com on 6th May 2013.
I loved Matt Hill’s writing. He has an easy confidence to his prose that makes it compelling to read and the character’s he has developed are wonderfully eccentric and English which lends a real sense of black humour to the novel, despite it being pretty close to home in turns of where our economy society appears to be leading us to currently.
However, for all that I loved the writing, at many points in the book I didn’t have a clue as to what was actually happening. At points I almost gave up and resigned myself to the fact I just wasn’t intelligent enough to keep up with the plot. I read on though, and I began to suspect that this sense of overwhelming puzzlement was down to the book being written from Brian’s point of view as it becomes abundantly clear that he doesn’t know what on earth is going on for much of the book!
Given the general sense of anarchy, panic and uncertainty of the book I didn’t mind not particularly knowing what was going on at all times. However, the absence of speech marks became a really big nuisance for me. On many pages I had to go over paragraphs I had just read to make sure that I knew who had said what. I see no reason for speech marks to ever be left out of books- they were invented for a reason and make the readers job a whole lot easier. The character’s, though artistically developed, did not have distinct enough voices for the reader to be able to instinctively know who was talking. Often, I’d be reading the page and wouldn’t realise that speech had begun until I was a couple of sentences into a conversation. This becomes tiresome after a while and did detract from my enjoyment when it was coupled with a general sense of having no idea what was going on.
I’m undecided as to whether I liked the ending or not. It’s difficult to discuss without spoiling, but it’s safe to say the novel took a turning that I did not expect. I can say that as a whole, my experience of reading The Folded Man was enjoyable. Putting this book down I felt like I’d just been on the biggest drug trip ever- which is probably exactly what Matt Hill wanted considering Brian’s constant and vast ingestion of substances. If you’re a fan of Orwell, Palahniuk, Bradbury or Huxley you should definitely give this book a go.
This review was first published on Nudge-books.com on 6th May 2013.
January 28, 2014
Such a good book but felt like it became slightly ridiculous with the fantasy angle at the end!
October 16, 2015
Painful to read withiut any great benefit
June 5, 2024
I struggled with this and almost stopped reading. I found the sentences frustrating to read and didn't find any of the characters particularly endearing. Maybe that was the point? I'm writing this review about a month after I finish it and I can't remember anything about it other than it had lots of references to mermaids, which I didn't quite understand.
February 10, 2020
A pretty hard book to read. I get the dystopia but the satire is too graphic for my taste. The first 50 pages took some getting through. On the plus side, there are some memorable scenes of a potential Mancunian future.
July 9, 2013
This will make you feel dirty. Kelman’s How Late it was, how late smashed headlong against Noon’s Vurt without any redemption. It’s hard to read, because you just don’t like anybody: It was handed to me by Jared with the words “This is a really good book that I am not enjoying”. Which is about right. It captures something essential about the soul of Britain in this moment, and that is its ugly underbelly, all the racism, classism, the crime, the differences, the difficulties, and fear the future: an audacious deconstruction of all of the above, and an important book.
March 5, 2014
Unfortunately I found this book a really hard read, it got to the point I was forcing myself to read it. Rarely for me I had to bite the bullet and stop reading it. After reading the previous plaudits from all quarters , I just believe it didn't click with me. I hope this doesn't put people off though, as many people have enjoyed it.
August 29, 2013
A rather nervy and disturbing premise, into riots that have plunged 2018 Manchester into ruin and chaos. some very good destructive descriptions of the City
August 23, 2013
A recognisable and horrendous dystopia which seems alarmingly plausible. As the book is set only a few years from now, this is a worrying prospect.
September 26, 2013
good, but not a pleasant read
April 14, 2017
This is one of the final handful of dystopia-keyword-library-search novels, and for once I consider it an actual dystopia. 'The Folded Man' also feels well-suited to Brexit Britain, as it’s set in a 2018 in which everything is broken down, squalid, racist, and insular. Kudos to Matt Hill for seeing the way things were going, given it was first published in 2013. There are various points when characters talk about how ‘we all used to be liberals, before we became so afraid’ and, ‘this country has been consumed by nostalgia for an impossible past’, which seemed depressingly apropos. On the other hand, such an atmosphere of grim collapse meshed oddly with the slim quasi-supernatural-mcguffin-chasing plot and interludes of extreme body horror. Although I thought the degradation of Manchester was evoked well, the book didn’t do all that much with the setting. Brian, the narrator, remained very much a self-consciously revolting body rather than a character as such. Although the reader learns a lot about his aches and pains, they don’t get much of an insight into his mind. I thought the atmosphere was well-sustained, but the blurb’s claims of ‘a dystopian satire in the tradition of Swift and Orwell’ aren’t borne out. Much like the Magnus Mills novel I read last night, it left me wondering, ‘but what exactly are you trying to say?’ Is the mcguffin supposed to symbolise hope for a better future? If so, then apparently which I don’t think is terribly helpful. ‘The Folded Man’ is a novel mired in the body, with a lot of impressively disgusting visceral stuff in the vein of Chuck Palahniuk. This makes for some vivid images, including one straight out of series 1 of Hannibal, while the more abstract elements are relatively neglected.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews