ANIMALS, by Emma Jane Unsworth

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild,

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world’s more full of weeping

than you can understand.

W.B Yeats, The Stolen Child

Laura Joyce is an occasional writer, a regular drinker, a lover of Yeats and unfortunately she isn’t related to James. Tyler is her best friend, her housemate, a bon viveur and Laura’s enabler. Together they tear through relationships, Manchester, each other, and the pages of Emma Jane Unsworth’s Animals, and we are invited to act as both the intrigued voyeur and the potential participant. What liberty! What liability.

Unsworth’s novel is an exercise in narrative seduction. We meet Laura during a particularly ginny hangover, which is to my mind the peak of human vulnerability. We know the colour of her piss – ‘white piss good, amber piss bad’ - before we know much else – and a bizarrely familiar bond is established. She’s engaged to a teetotal concert pianist, she’s writing a novel about a priest who’s in love with a pig and she’s desperately trying to balance a life of hedonism with an impending life of fine home furnishings. She is every bad hangover we’ve ever experienced and now we’re friends, we’re witnesses, already we are in on something. However, the beauty of Unsworth’s second novel is that the ‘something’, the secret, turns out to be nothing at all. We are all aspiring writers, we are all stuck in dead-end jobs, we are all disappointed and we all of us want to pretend that we are otherwise. And so, we meet Laura and we see ourselves, from the drinking habits, to the Mail on Sunday reading parents, to the secret love for Take Me Out.

The first-person narration superbly draws out this powerful, painful sense of familiarity, whilst the quick-fire dialogue, dirty humour and the assumption of an accomplice-reader keeps us on side through the messiest moments. It’s an obvious statement, but Laura Joyce is a fundamentally enjoyable character to act as a confessional for – not always the case when you’re in someone else’s head for a novel. In Laura, Unsworth has created a character that is part Holden Caulfield, part Bridget Jones, with a twist of Plath, spiked with stolen meth. She is ‘one part optimism, two parts masochism, like all the best cocktails.’ I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a bit of Unsworth too, There was certainly a bit of me in there, and probably every other reader who’s downed a bottle of rose because they couldn’t decide between white or red, or told someone to royally toss off for assuming they have a say in your lifestyle choices.

Tyler, on the other hand, is pure legend. Whilst Laura reaches out of the novel, Tyler explodes it. She is a mythological demon-goddess luring in the human child (me, you, Laura, everyone) like one of Yeats’ goblins. She doesn’t belong in this novel, in anyone’s life, in this plane of reality, which is precisely why she is such a perfect foil to Laura. A manic-pixie-nightmare-girl, and make no mistake. Tyler turns a gritty and realistic novel about the (societally-inflicted/bullshit) perils of being thirty and unsettled, into a tale of messy, meth-y, Mancunian magical realism. Well, almost. There’s vomit, sex, drugs and decisions, peppered with literary allusion and classical tragedy - Laura’s love of Yeats is very apt indeed. You need a bottle of something to soften the assault.

Animals explores tricks, trips (both sorts), bad habits, and what-happens when-you-leave-uni-without-a-publishing-deal, but for me it boils down to a sense of disillusion, even down to the reified setting of city famed for it’s 20 year old cultural wealth. What do we do now? Why didn’t my degree get me anywhere? Why should I care? Why shouldn’t I tell you about the time I had a tick in my groin, why shouldn’t I keep my ‘wreckhead friend’, why should I give up drinking, why should I behave, why should I have kids, why should I have you, why should I give a fuck?

I do give a fuck, especially about this book, but I don’t have the answers, and that’s fine. None of Unsworth’s characters do, nor does Unsworth profess to. We’ve all been given a bit of a shit deal at one point or another, and how you make do is your own business, whether it’s ploughing on with that novel you’re writing or easing yourself in with a quick bev or five at the pub. There’s hope at the end of the hangover, o human child. This is a brilliant, prescient piece of writing, and will need to be read twice – you’ll spend the first time texting your mates all the best lines.

         Be sure to read with wine, especially on trains.

Valparaíso - how absurd you are...

Valparaíso, 'how absurd you are, you haven't combed your hair, you've never had time to get dressed. life has always surprised you…'


Pablo Neruda, Chilean poet and Valpo-lover, wrote these words about the port city which became his home. Friend of poets, painters and philosophers, Valpo is a curious little place which sits in a rather haphazard fashion on the hills of the Chilean coast. Over the last century, half-undressed with tangled hair, it went from being the richest city in Latin America to one of the most dilapidated, and has now settled into the architectural and cultural equivalent of distressed leather - run down, but unashamedly, and increasingly intentionally, cool. It's the haunt of bohemian Chileños, or people who want to be bohemian Chileños, of muralists and graffiti artists, and of enamoured travellers who stumble across it all, like myself. 


I'm not really a travel writer so I won't be writing about all the places we visited in South American over the last summer, but this one really stood out. The city consists of several cerros - hill villages - each with their own identity, culture, and pack of stray dogs. Each hill is connected by narrow passageways and staircases - which some crazy kids bike down - and century old ascensors. In fact, the whole city feels like a pedestrian adventure playground. There's even a slide next to one set of stairs on Cerro Alegre, just in case you're not a stairs-kind-of-commuter. Read; hipster. 

It's a city that has been furiously claimed, reclaimed, and claimed again. First the giant, colonial houses which were home to the wealthiest expats in the land. Then, when the opening of the Panama Canal diverted the monies away, came the city's darker years, with civil disruption and gang control in many parts of the city. Meanwhile, Chilean hazards such as earthquakes and fires in the hills destroyed much of the architecture. But, then came the most recent claim on the city - a joint bid from the city's artists and the city's elders. In reaction to a (really very bulky) glass building in the port's main square, Valpo was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003. The Historic Quarter is now caught between its past and present - a memorial of the fantastic pastel-coloured architecture of the colonial period, and the run down building which now, due to the tricky UNESCO rules, cannot be restored. 

However, the art-filled streets are what make Valpo such a gem. These houses do not house art - they are art. Brightly-coloured murals of all shapes and sizes plaster the houses on the hills - art fights art as the home-owners invite muralists to paint their homes in an attempt to deter the more common and far less attractive 'tags' found on some buildings. Local legends such as the muralist INTI have displayed their work all over the city, and its as though the porteños (people of the port) have finally been able to reclaim their city as they wish it. 

From a culinary perspective, it's all about seafood and chorrillanas. The former takes its best form in empanadas filled with sizzling shrimp washed down with an ice-cold beer, the latter in a dingy port bar, where one is confronted with a mountain of fries, onions, pork and cheese. For the sake of your cholesterol - share.

Of the five South American countries we visited, and of the countless places, Valpo was the one which really got to me. I felt for its unsettled history, I wanted to know its people, and I am fairly sure that we will be returning in the not too distant future. Like many South American cities it is one of many juxtapositions; cosmopolitan with a bit of an edge, wearing its heart and its history on its sleeve, inviting you to simply wander around and see for yourself. Pablo Neruda said it better than I ever could, but for my part, it's just bloody lovely. 

All images my own. 

In which this blog takes a turn for the unemployed.

SO. I always think it's good to start with a SO. It gives this ramble an edge of purpose. SO. This blog began as a way for me to think on the page, as it were. To hash out my ideas and then look back at them after six months with a slight cringe at what the gin-soaked-part-time-hipster-student mind can create. Basically, a handful of okay not-quite articles. It all kind of petered off when university exams came about, then I buggered off to South America for two months (more on that at some point) and now I am unemployed. Tip top! SO. I'm going to endeavour to start rambling at nothing and no one again, in a bid to break up the daily routine of pestering my cat, signing on and looking for jobs. 

Here we go...