There won’t be many novels published this year that’ll twist your melon more than Our Struggle – the second such effort by Wayne Holloway, who also has a short story collection and various films on his CV. Less on account of its subject matter, essential premise, plot or narrative voice than its muddying the waters between fiction and non, making your doomed efforts to unpick the difference wildly entertaining.
Beginning in the early 1980s, its chief protagonist is Anglo-Irishman Paul, who quits his tube driver job after witnessing two grisly deaths, becomes a student at Essex University and deepens his interest in radical left politics. At least some of this appears to be based on the author’s own life: depending on what’s being recounted and when, the narrator is either a close friend (Holloway himself?) shadowing Paul or a more omniscient observer.
Another motif of Our Struggle adding befuddling layers is the appearance of public figures in what, as far as we can discern, are invented settings (there’s something of David Peace about this, likewise the vividness of the decade’s drear). Most prominently, future trade union kingpin Bob Crow features as Paul’s drinking buddy: did the younger Crow, in real life, make a game attempt to appreciate the solo albums of Scott Walker, as occurs here? And if the novel spends plenty of time in the past, it’s often from a brashly contemporary vantage point – with the subplot of Rosa, Paul’s similarly insurgent daughter, taking hold in the latter stages.
Our Struggle, Wayne Holloway (Influx)
Price: £9.99. Info: here
words NOEL GARDNER