A Lone Walk by Gul Y Davis (Tindal Street Press £6.99, 0953589536)
Tindal Street Press, 217 The Custard Factory, Gibb
Street, B9 4AA
e-mail:- managing
editor Emma Hargrave : ehargrave@btinternet.com
commissioning editor: Jackie Gay jackiegay@btinternet.com
web: www.tindalstreet.org.uk
STOP PRESS Tindal Street Scores Again - 23rd April 2001
Gul Y. Davis has won the prestigious J. B. Priestley Fiction Award from the Royal Literary Fund for his first book, A Lone Walk, published by Birmingham publisher Tindal Street Press. The award is given to a highly promising young writer in honour of the distinguished novelist, playwright and essayist.
Gul Davis has been praised in the national press for his ‘terrifically mature writing ability’; ‘a brave new voice, he writes with honesty and passionate conviction’. A Lone Walk has been called ‘one of those rarebooks that justify their existence by their energy and truth’; it ‘demands to be read, and deserves to be recognised as a leading book of its kind’.
Tindal Street Press has now won awards for two of its first four books
(Hard Shoulder, an anthology of stories by young Birmingham writers, edited by Jackie Gay and Julia Bell, won the Raymond Williams Prize last year), taking its hit rate to 50%, an achievement larger publishers would be hard pressed to equal. These accolades amply justify the confidence of WMA, Travel West Midlands and Birmingham City Council, which are supporting Tindal Street’s expansion over the next three years.
Now read the reviews .....or go straight to the book.
The Bookseller, 21 July 2000 click here The Daily Telegraph, 15 September 2000 click here
The Big Issue, 9 October 2000 click here Raw Edge 11, autumn/winter 2000 click here
Disability Now
!Just Added The Birmingham Post click here
‘A Lone Walk is a short novel about the life of a
patient in care for his mental condition. Gul Davis has the advantage of being able to
write and I have nowhere read a description of such a life more convincing and more
readable.’
His Honour Sir Stephen Tumim
‘Gul
Davis is a real writer. The novella encloses the reader in a tight grip from the
beginning, refusing to let him go till he’s listened.
It’s strange, to have entered someone’s head, and their skin, to this extent
– quite eerie. His turn of phrase is striking and his control of effects remarkably
assured.’
Margaret Forster
‘Gul
Davis’s moving tale of an innocent betrayed, abused and tipped headlong into the
corrupting world of psychiatric care is bleak, fierce and powerful.’
Paul
Wilson,
prize-winning author of Noah, Noah
‘If A Lone Walk by Gul Y Davis (Tindal Street Press,
19th, £6.99, 0953589536) is not written from personal experience, it constitutes a
tremendous leap of imagination. If it is, it is a brave and well-communicated account of
long-term mental illness: the altered priorities and perceptions of the sufferer, the
exasperation or lack of sympathy from carers (professional and otherwise), and the threats
to dignity and individuality with which the mentally ill are confronted daily. All of
these aspects are covered with a hectic, twitching intensity – the outpourings of a
tormented mind translated from jumble into sense. This is a novella which demands to be
read, and deserves to be recognised as a leading book of its kind.’ Duncan Bowis, Booksellers’ Choice
‘This is a terrifying story about a persecuted man wrongly imprisoned in a mental hospital. As the horrors of institutional life accumulate, Gul Y Davis’s novella recalls Franz Kafka at his darkest.’ Andrew Biswell, First Novel Choice
From The Big Issue,
9 October 2000:
‘Gul Y Davis’ depiction of
life inside the psychiatric system is made even more horrifying because of the sharp,
clear way it is written. In a short book which packs an almighty punch, Davis follows one
patient, beset by paranoid delusions, through a nightmarish mental health system.
It’s an unsparing, frightening book which conveys the hallucinatory horror of
derangement heightened by the fear of being trapped in an uncaring system. Chilling.’ Tina Jackson
Review by
Matthew Gidley for Raw
Edge 11:
Late one night Wil Shaw, alone and
distressed in his bedroom, gets out of bed, treads his dinner into the carpet, goes
downstairs and out the front door, and walks off into the gloom dressed only in his
pyjamas. So begins the lone walk of the
title, a desperate attempt to escape his demons and find a place to belong. Wil is seventeen.
He has been in care for ten years and has just completed his first week back
at his mother’s house. It is an attempt
by the authorities to integrate Wil back into the community rather than introduce him to
adult psychiatric care and a life in institutions. So
far it isn’t working.
What follows is an incredibly frank
and unsentimental account of the terrible suffering and often cruel treatment experienced
by the mentally ill, recounted by the voice of an innocent.
It’s The Catcher in the Rye meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and it is
surprising to come across a young writer with the skills and discipline to make it work. It works because of Davis’ humanity and
sensibility. He can write too which is always
useful, with a keen eye for imagery and an apparent ease in shifting registers and moods. This is a novella with a pained, anguished
message, a story which demands the reader’s attention, and once you are in its thrall
it won’t let you off lightly.
A
Lone Walk will divide readers and critics alike.
It accurately documents the confused, escapist mind of the mentally ill, and at
times the language borders on magic realism and fantasy (mermaids and guardian angels
feature heavily) -- but without ever becoming tiresome or overbearing. Of all the books so far published by Tindal Street
Press this is the one that could conceivably acquire cult status. A disturbing and challenging debut by a promising
young writer.
Flashbacks and narratives build to
describe the world of Wil Shaw, now discharged after ten years of psychiatric care.
This is a journey through the
twilight of life. Wil is not confused; he is removed from everyday values of social
functioning and on the brink of disconnecting totally.
He has had the humanity knocked out
of him. What is left is a remote observer who takes us on a chilling rour of the asylum
and what it is like to be locked in. “Rooms were strange things. If one could come
and go, put pictures up, put carpets down, they were a space to call one’s own, to
enjoy being alone. Lock someone in, then the room becomes a cell. The walls closed in, the
smell stifled, the isolation pained. Doors no longer kept the others out but kept me in:
and yes, so easily, I could have let myself scream, scream with the woman out there.”
But Gul Y Davis is able also to find
the chinks in the armour, the warmth in the snow. He has the skill to describe the
hopeless with a poetic intensity that engages.
Is it authentic, true to the
experience? Well, it evokes familiar sensations for me, certainly took me back to my own
experience of psychiatric admissions. The cold mind of an estranged young man and his grim
surroundings are well described.
I like this book and am keen to read
it again so I can really absorb the rich description of a lone walk in a society that is
ambivalent about the recovery of its lost souls.
Rufus May, Disability Now, November 2000
Time Out, 15 November 2000:
'As a matter of expediency, the often patchy nature of psychiatric care is always up for inspection, and it is this area that first-time novelist Gul Y Davis explores in 'A Lone Walk', a short, hard-hitting (in many ways) account of life in a mental institution. Wil Shaw, an adolescent sufferer of severe mental distress, is deemed unable to look after himself and returned to a place of nightmares, a 'client-centred care unit'. Here he suffers nut-house ignorance in extremis as his attempts to explain his feelings and behaviour are swept aside with eye-popping brutality. The nurses' misuse of words, trust and drugs lay bare the sham therapeutic symmetry of carer and 'caree'.
'Inevitably, Wil finds true empathy among his fellow residents - they know what it's like to be bottom of the asylum shitheap - though there is encouragement from Mo, a big friendly nurse who asserts that 'not all of these places are the same'. Eventually, Wil feels torn between this rationale and the promptings of a marine guardian angel whose siren call threatens to seduce him into a different conclusion to his troubles.
'At times one feels literally battered by the violence, and it's a fact that for all its faults, the NHS's ratio of 'good' nurses to 'bad' is rather better than depicted here. But Davis, with his terrifically mature writing ability, has a real message to sell, and beneath this spare, harrowing indictment of psychiatric intervention, there is a thick gleam of veracity. A target-swiping read for all those involved in the delivery of institutional care.'
Paul Sayer, prize-winning author of The Comforts of Madness and Howling at the Moon
From The Birmingham Post, 18 November 2000:
'There are quite a few novels dealing with life in mental hospitals and institutions. They range from Malcolm Lowry's 1940s account of the notorious Bellevue hospital in Lunar Caustic, through Janet Frame's appalling experiences in Faces in the Water, to Paul Sayer's recent The Comforts of Madness.(Paul's review of A Lone Walk is directly above: ed) What these books all show, apart from their literary worth, is how depressingly little has changed in the experiences of the mentally ill over the past 60 years.
'Now we have Gul Y Davis's short novel, A Lone Walk, to paint an anguished and compelling picture of what is called psychiatric care in a new century. The story is told by a young man, Wil Shaw. His voice is staccato, urgent, sometimes awkward, but always driven by a fierce, bitter energy. It is obvious from the first page that Wil is in terrible mental turmoil. He is in his bedroom at home, treading the meal his mother has made into the carpet, his mind flooding with visions of violence, and fears that he will be taken back to "The Unit".
'There are brief, cold, horrifying flashbacks showing the sexual abuse by his father that has caused Wil's condition but most of the book is taken up with his treatment.
'Readers who have no experience of mental hospitals, or whatever we are now to call them, will be horrified by the sheer dreariness of food and surroundings and the incessant underlying sense of violence. We don't seem so very far from Bedlam when Wil recounts the callousness and black humour of staff, their threats to cow patients and their actual use of powerful drugs with appalling side effects to sedate and punish at the same time.
'What redeems the novel from utter and unrelenting horror is Wil's ability to see beyond the institution. There are tender encounters with girls in the hospital but Wil is confused and disgusted by sex. His fantasies are of mermaids swimming and calling to him to join them; symbols of freedom and love to oppose the horrors of incarceration and sexual abuse.
'Near to the book's end is a description of a sadistically-conducted compulsory swimming session that puts Wil's gentle fantasies of river and sea into terrible perspective. But the climax of the book sees Wil escape from the hospital to walk barefoot by the river. In the final paragraph, his mermaid rises, reaches out from the water, and says, "Are you coming with me?"
'A Lone Walk is not just a harrowing document drawing perhaps from some autobiographical experience of the author but a genuine work of literature. Gul Y Davis can write. He can summon a character in a few lines, his dialogue is true and vivid and there are flashes of dark humour. In short, this is a book that will be painful for many to read but one which deserves as wide an audience as possible. It is one of those rare books that justify their existence by their energy and truth.'
William Palmer
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