Review of The Dead Don’t Bleed by Neil Rawlinson – A poignant story about family and forbidden love | imaginary

AThe Ndalucía region is famous for its diversity: high alpine mountains, snow-capped peaks, river plains, expansive olive groves, sunny coasts and arid deserts. It’s the perfect setting for Neil Rawlinson’s debut novel, which is its own kind of stunning mosaic. Built from short, seemingly disconnected chapters that take us between Spain in 2003 and the Northumberland coalfields of the 1970s and 1980s, The Dead Don’t Bleed combines into an unusually tense and tender portrait of two brothers trying to escape their father’s gangland past.

Hitherto Rawlinson had been known as a poet; His collection Talking Dead was shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Poetry Prize. Here he brings his gift for compact evocation to explore sibling rivalry and the lasting impact of violent patriarchy. If you separated Frank and his brother Gordon on the autopsy table, he writes, “you would find the same bones, the same blood. Almost everything is interchangeable. The switches on the DNA, the cells, the posture, the exhausted look.” But from an early age, change is afoot within Frank. He knows that his father has “high hopes” for him in the family business of petty crime: “Frank Bridge. King of NorthumberlandBut Frank wants to be a different kind of king. He carries within him a “longing for something broader” – the kind of dream that could get him killed in his family’s closed world of criminal secrecy.

Like his author, Frank is drawn to poetry, especially the works of Federico García Lorca. He is also dangerously attracted to his brother’s girlfriend, Carol, who is often seen carrying a mop and bucket at the local bar, cleaning up for men. Frank “likes to watch her move: strong, big-boned, elegant yet powerful. He’s seen her put men on their backs when they touch her. One punch.” And in the north-east of England, “no one messes with Carroll” – and even less so with poetry. The dual dangers of Frank’s involvement in forbidden lust and forbidden literature fuel the entire plot, giving the novel a full line of quest narrative. When Gordon and Carol flee to Spain with the proceeds of a disastrously botched robbery, Frank, in the wake of his father’s death, makes the irreversible decision to track them down.

Rawlinson is an expert at capturing the long shadow cast by a complex father. Lawrence is a local gangster who, through his skewed moral code and innate charisma, has established himself as “a man of standing. Respectable. Everyone stops to chat.” “His loud laugh echoed throughout the room. A man among men.” Frank finds himself between wanting to please his parents and wanting to escape the family’s sight completely. Rawlinson wrote that his father’s “scrutiny resembled a physical appearance.” Frank “always feels it in his throat, like he’s being choked.” The novel depicts how close observation can be an expression of love, but also a form of violence. In the Northumberland brewhouses, where “men are deadly in the afternoon,” the pints glow “in the river light, golden amber and black, like beakers in a chemistry laboratory.” Many of these men will drink themselves to death. What catches your attention can kill you.

One of the many successes of this novel is in its depiction of the horror of illicit attraction—admitting to yourself that you want something more secret. Readers of Carl Gehry, Douglas Stewart, or Ross Raisin will appreciate the way Rawlinson blends social realism with a talent for capturing precarious intimacies. The “creeping deprivation” of Thatcher-era Northumberland – the closing of its core industries, the growing number of young people on the dole – contrasts beautifully with Frank’s longing for his brother’s girlfriend. In one beautiful, expertly judged scene, Frank and Carol sit “on a wall near a wasteland” as rain falls around them. “A demolition squad clears the balcony behind them. The entire street. The homes he knows and is in. The fireplace hangs in the air, rising into the air, its grate open. They say they are improvements. for whom?”

This question – “For whom?” – resonates on every page. How much of our lives should we spend serving the family that made us, rather than the family we hope to create? Spain seemed to offer a respite from new contrasts: “shade and light, the scent of orange blossom, endless undulating fields, and the high, flawless sky.” But every landscape in this novel carries its ghosts. Lorca was murdered in Andalusia, and his burial place remains a mystery – echoed in a final moment of violence that is all the more powerful because it is played largely off-stage, in the space between sentences, the gap between acts. Rawlinson’s narration is heartbreaking, but he is not sentimental. He seems to be saying that life and love emerge from the cracks, but damage can still be done.