The problem with Manchester is that, in its rush to define itself, it can be quick to paper over its cracks, over the contradictions which lend the city its character.
This pride in its contrarian reputation, in turn, draws people towards the lights, so that Manchester both swells and displaces, fraying at the seams. Fittingly, Comma Press’s collection of stories set across the city and its satellites is all over the shop – a babble of voices by which it distinguishes itself.
In The Book of Manchester, the first of these stories by acclaimed author David Constantine makes for an auspicious start. His aptly-titled Beginning is like a flower pressed between the pages of a teenage diary, compressing the vivid self-consciousness of stirring adolescence, absorbing the world in its own image, its restless anticipation of the future tethered to a particular crossroad of history and geography. Its specificities, bridging the River Irwell and the last century both, render it universal.
The coordinates of The Cat’s Mother, Tom Benn’s contribution, are, by way of contrast, mapped out against the axes of Manchester’s Perry Boys and Mozza. It shares with Beginning the quality of capturing the urgency of onrushing adulthood at a cultural collision point, in this case the backdrop of so-called ‘Gunchester’ during an era when warring drug gangs carved out the city’s streets into opposing fiefdoms. Aptly, it’s easy to imagine its protagonists, Henry and Alice, watching Brookside on Channel 4 and seeing lives very like their own, played out at the other end of the M62.
Captured in hindsight, each evokes a sense of loss and, in the flux of a changing city, is a recurring motif across the collection. Its pains are perhaps felt most acutely in Bronte Schiltz’s second-person portrait of a girl uprooted from some southern estate to grow into the full flower of Mancunian womanhood, Contents May Vary. A life abbreviated with an attentiveness that reads a lot like love, its eye and ear for detail add bruised flesh to the bare bones of its paragraphs, so that the final sentence hits home, where the heart is.
The layers of Cloaks are harder to pin down. Yusra Warsama’s tale strains against the cocoon of generic constraints, spinning silken threads of social realism into something more allusive. What emerges is a piece with the richness of poetry, and, in its protagonist, something beautiful and new. Where some of its companion pieces look to the glass skyline and see dystopia, Warsama’s vision is wide enough to encompass hope.
There’s hope of a more grounded kind in Mish Green’s Occupy Manctopia, which bookends the collection. A fiction of direct action against the housing crisis, its revolution not televised but livestreamed. It’s disheartening than it seems no more realistic than Warsama’s counter-Kafkaesque metamorphosis. For all that, wishful thinking seems preferable to defeatism.
At its best, The Book of Manchester is the city in miniature, more embracing than excluding, singular in its plurality. It has no need to look south, except as a warning. London, increasingly, serves as a premonition of a city with paywalls. As it stands, Manchester can still choose to write itself a better future. It could do worse than starting here.
The Book of Manchester is published by Comma Press and is available to buy. For more information, click here.
