Royston Tester’s novel is set largely in the Black Country, an area of industrial development to the north and west of Birmingham in the English West Midlands, comprising a relentless stretch of iron foundries, lock-, chain- and nail-making factories, lime kilns, collieries and canals, “red by night and black by day,” as a local saying has it. The writer Theodore Dalrymple recently caused a considerable local flap when he called the region one of the globe’s “most depressing areas of urban devastation” and nominated Walsall, near where much of the book’s seminal action takes place, as the ugliest town in the world.
A predominantly working-class area since the industrial revolution, the Black Country has spawned a raw-knuckled poverty that has its own dialect, retaining elements of Anglo-Saxon and Chaucerian English (“summat else” means “something else”), its own accent, much derided even after other regional accents had become accepted in post-Beatles England, and...
Graham Harley taught English literature in Scottish, American and Canadian universities before founding the Phoenix Theatre in Toronto. He is an actor and theatre director.
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