Saving Grace

Kevin Saving on

Andy Croft

Andy Croft, Ghost Writer, Five Leaves Publications (2008)

ISBN: 978-1-905512-38-6

Andy Croft's verse novel, Ghost Writer, is a clever, 'spirited', anachronistic tour de force, which manages to uplift and frustrate in almost equal measure. Written in Pushkin sonnets (ababccddeffegg) it takes both author and reader a while to pick up the rhythm and, successively, 'get into' the governing concept.

  Rex Dedman is an old-Etonian, philanderer, fellow-traveller and minor poet who'd fought

in Spain in the Thirties then 'spent the Fifties on a bender'. His would-be biographer, Tod Prince, has a 'useless PhD' and a series of ghosts, actual and metaphorical, in his cupboard. Together, (in the former's case, posthumously), they conspire to set the record straight in opposition to their shared nemesis, the influential, plutocratic (and poisonous) publisher, Claud King, who'd known Dedman in Spain. If these charactor's names seem just a little charged it's because they nod, referentially, to Shakespeare's Hamlet (which provides a kind of framework, quotation-base and 'pun-kitty'). My favourite conceit, slightly under-used, is the clown/concierge, Derek ('a man possessed/ of infinitely grubby vest').

  Something of a hybrid, this book (RRP £7.99, 83 pages) cannot quite work out whether it wants to be ghost story, satire, farce, detective fiction, polemic or history lesson and some of its in-jokes might not weather well. That said, it represents a highly accomplished, even ingenious, act of versification - English, as Croft well knows, is a far less rhyme-rich environment than Pushkin's Russian - which entertainingly digests its Dante, Freud and Anthony Minghella.

  Ghost Writer is permeated by the Spanish Civil War, a conflict which was primarily ideological in a way in which few others, particularly those of the epedient-ridden 20th

and 21st centuries, have been. The generation which volunteered for the battlefields of Spain did so out of idealism (for those of the two World Wars it would have been more patriotism) and the unsatisfactory conclusions to - and botched expedition of - all three, have understandably sounded the quite literal death-knell for both rallying calls. We still live in the rather pusillanimous penumbra which emanates from these conflagrations, so that British modernity appears entirely prepared to shrug away centuries of hard-won civil liberties, habeous corpus, and the prerogative of trial by one's peers. Croft is right to imply that Dedman's contemporaries would not have allowed this to happen without a fight. The following speech is addressed to 'King' but, I suspect, was written with the Bush/Blair/

Brown cabal - an axis of weasels - in mind:

  You talk of freedom to disguise

  The fact you've chained the world in lies.

  You think the past is done and dusted;

  And claim the world's one hope is dead;

  You know tomorrow can't be trusted

  Because you're scared the future's Red;

  You're terrified of any movement

  Committed to the world's improvement;

  Your liberty's a deadly game,

  A tragic farce. In freedom's name

  Progressive freedom's are eroded

  And dreams of justice are attacked,

  Unless, of course, they come pre-packed,

  Pre-paid, pro-West and colour-coded.

  You prate of freedom, but it's clear

  For you best safety lies in fear.

  Well said.

  Croft is the author of several previous poetry collections and has edited a number of anthologies (including, with Adrian Mitchell, Red Sky At Night, an anthology of Socialist Poetry). He runs the radical poetry press Smokestack and writes a regular poetry column

for The Morning Star. Five Leaves (supported by Arts Council funding) is to be commended

on its excellent production values and attractive format, incorporating a splendid, highly appropriate Martin Rowson cartoon.

Kevin Saving © 2008