A Cleansing of Souls by Stuart Ayris
Stuart
Ayris is an immensely powerful and talented writer. His writer’s mission
if you like is to ‘bring hope’ and he tackles difficult subjects with humanity
and insight. I first read Tollesbury
Time Forever (which will be reviewed here next
month) and was blown away. Immediately I finished it I picked up A Cleansing of Souls, knowing it had been written some 20 years earlier and expecting it to
be good but not as good. I was blown away all over again. Okay maybe the
energy is more raw, maybe the writing style less completely original but the
unique voice is there and the fact that he wrote this in his twenties (and then
waited another twenty years for a follow up) is incredible. If a
publisher had picked up A
Cleansing of Souls twenty years ago, Stuart’s
life course might have been very different. And then, then maybe he’d never
have written Tollesbury
Time Forever! These sort of conjectures are
actually quite germane to an understanding of Ayris’ writing.
A Cleansing of Souls opens to the scene of a seventeen year old Michael waking up next to his
dead fourteen year old sister (you can tell immediately this is not going to be
a happy clappy read) with the conjecture: ‘What do you honestly do at times like this? What do you
honestly do?’ and if the response, ‘Well Michael, he just grinned. And he kept on grinning’, doesn’t
hook you, then you’re probably not ready to read this book. It requires an
open, questioning mind to fully appreciate it. It blows genre fiction out of
the water.
Michael’s
story sometimes runs parallel and sometimes in the background to the
central character Tom Sparrow, a young man who has his own troubles. And his
own story. With its own complications. A shifting of perspective is a
feature of Ayris’ work I particularly like. It can make things complex but it’s
always purposeful. I loved the central narrative voice. It put me in mind of
Orwell’s Down
and Out in Paris and London. The
narrator stands outside Tom but is clearly for much of the time giving us an
interior view of Tom. I love the way Ayris experiments and plays with
‘voice.’ I love the way Ayris uses language in general. He is poetic and even
when he is telling us the most grim things he manages to use language not to
distance but to draw us in and make us complicit in the emotional story of his
characters. Michael should not be a sympathetic character but as the
story progresses we really begin to understand how and why his life has turned
out the way it has – yet Ayris keeps the suspense going and in the process
teaches us that you can’t judge a person when you have insufficient evidence to
do so. Because the end is a surprise. A shock. Unexpected and yet makes such
sense of a life and the devastation caused to lives that it is heart-rending.
Ayris
chooses very difficult areas to write about and he rocks it. His work can be
truly enlightening for anyone genuinely interested in issues of mental
health. There is no gratuitous darkness, though darkness is there
aplenty. Ayris is not buying into thriller/horror genre fiction. He’s telling
you something more important. Something real. Something people need to
know. And the understanding and self-reflection he exhibits as a young
writer is both incredible and devastating. He should never have waited
twenty years for the follow up. But then, life has to be lived. Life gets in
the way. All I can tell you is that if you read A Cleansing of Souls and
appreciate it (I can’t say ‘like’ it because Ayris is so far beyond the cheap
five star, ‘like’ share culture it’s ridiculous) then you will be absolutely
transformed by The
Frugality Trilogy.
If the reader really buys into Ayris
work, and reads it as intelligently as it’s written, he/she finds that Ayris
always allows, no indeed encourages the reader to ask questions
throughout his work. This can be uncomfortable and the reader cannot escape the
spectre of child abuse, lurking underneath, and yet the blind alleys you take
yourself up in coming up with ‘the answer’ are all controlled (rather than
manipulated) by Ayris clever narrative in order to teach you something about
your own preconceptions and prejudices.
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