Stale tales

>> John King's White Trash says nothing new about British classism

by JULIET WATERS

When an American girl remarks to Jonathan Jeffries that he reminds her of Hugh Grant, White Trash practically leaps onto the screen. Picture American Psycho without the satire and without America.

The characters that populate John King's microcosm of British class tension may also recall Hubert Selby on happier drugs. Brutality is expected from the author of The Football Factory and Human Punk; King is to Britain's chemical generation what Irvine Welsh is to Scotland's. But there's a dogged positivity in this book that seems a bit misplaced.

White Trash opens with a sentimental flashback by the novel's heroine, Ruby James, to the euthanasia of her dog, Ben. Much later we will understand this as symbolic.

Ruby, like Ben, "doesn't have a bad bone in her body." When we meet her she's been mistaken for a member of a gang of delinquent skinheads. Pursued by a police chopper, she escapes through familiar terrain. She runs "down an alley cutting through the one-parent flats, small starter homes where flaking cement hangs like icicles, frozen Arctic sculptures, the woodwork a two-tone mix of wood and paint, gravel earth and dried-out housing association trees, a square of grass that hasn't caught on, squashed fag ends and the smell of fish fingers from a ground-floor window, electronic heartbeats, a new orange bike and a fluorescent skateboard, leftover building materials, bricks and mortar, worm-shit blobs of concrete left behind the same as when the tide goes out a the seaside..."

She seems like any young working-class adult. She listens to her favorite DJs on pirate radio stations, enjoys clubbing, and likes most of the people she's grown up with, though her upbringing has its violent anecdotes. Like the time her friend Viv was a dating a boy and discovered he'd been sharing her with his twin brother. "That was nasty," Ruby remembers, "not far off rape." But Viv had her revenge by telling her brother, Bobby, "the sort of nutter who had lots of nutty mates," who put an end to the twins' deception by slicing up their faces with a Stanley knife.

Ruby's life has had its own tragedies--the early death of her father, the onset of her mother's Alzheimer's at 58. But unlike most of her peers, she has a good job. Whatever sadness she's known she buries in her devotion as a nurse.

Her coworkers are fun, bawdy girls who like a good time. Her patients are decent folk too. Even Jonathan Jeffries, the hospital administrator, is liked by Ruby and her fellow employees. A true gentleman, compassionate, rich, well bred, he's gained the trust of all the hospital workers with his low-key manner. It's doubtful, however, that anyone admires Jeffries as much as he admires himself. As we get to know him, Jeffries may be one of the most subtly irksome characters ever created.

It's hard to put one's finger on what it is about him that gets under one's skin. Something about his compassionate conservatism seems a little bogus. But whatever it is, it grows. About two thirds of the way in, White Trash takes a macabre twist and changes from a subtly textured series of character sketches to a macabre metaphor for classism in contemporary Britain. We are clearly meant to see Ruby's patients as more than just the victims of a sociopath, but the victims of people who--more than they would be willing to admit--share Jeffries' belief that the poor are pitiable but disposable.

It's a bit obvious. Readers who admire King's subtlety may be disappointed by the lurching finale, while those who appreciate the twist will be impatient with the slow pace for the first two thirds.

And for all of White Trash's implicit criticism of Jeffries' ideology, the novel has its own odour of musty politics. One waits for King to say something a little more interesting than "the poor are good and the rich are bad." But it never happens. White Trash has its moments, but the basic fable is past its expiry date. :

White Trash by John King, Jonathan Cape pb, 357pp, $25.50