I’m 60 pages into Anthony Cartwright’s (2009) novel Heartland and admiring it deeply already. I was impelled to start reading it now because it has a timely World Cup (of 2002) theme running through it, but really it attracted my attention because it comes garlanded with praise from two of my favourite authors: Jonathan Coe and David Peace. It’s set in Dudley, not so far from my own heartland in North Staffordshire, and my familiarity with the territory gives me the advantage of being able both to hear the Black Country accents of Cartwright’s characters as they trip off the page and to recognise the setting – which I suppose in north America would be called ‘rustbelt’. But I think it would resonate for anyone who’s lived through the socio-economic upheavals of the past three decades, and I recommend it.
When I googled Cartwright, I came across the website for his publisher, Tindal Street Press, of which I am ashamed to say I was ignorant. This independent publisher, based in Birmingham, boasts on its website that it ‘aims to find writers of national and international significance from places other than London and the South East – where nearly all of the English publishing industry is based’. What a brilliant ambition, and I can’t help but compare it with the Library of Wales publishing initiative (see earlier post on ‘unremarkable authors’) which, in seeking to ‘print the English-language literature of Wales in ways that will connect our past to our present’, surely risks silencing the irreducibly complex, dissonant and sometimes terrifying voices and characters in contemporary British life that authors like Coe, Peace and Cartwright capture and explain so well.
Both Tindal Street Press and the Library of Wales are subsidised from the public purse and I hope that in the present funding climate that can continue to be the case. I can’t help wondering, though – and I suspect that I’m a voice in the dark here – why Wales’s cultural institutions are so reluctant to join with initiatives in England which, like Tindal Street Press, are trying to rebalance the economics of cultural production away from London and the south-east of England. Must ‘nation building’ be the dominating principle of initiatives in Wales to recover or celebrate silent or forgotten literary voices? Or am I constructing a straw man here?
