Mytho Massively Recommends Feral Class

Feral Class by Marc Garrett (Minor Compositions). 

This is a remarkable book; it not only recounts in sharp and daunting detail the author’s experiences in claustrophobic domestic circumstances growing up on a council estate in Southend-On-Sea in the 1970s and 80s, but it also retains a voice from that time that feels remarkably close to the moment of experience. At times, there is very little distance placed between a reader and the rawness. This can be dismaying, and if you do not want to read accounts of bullying, sexual violence, mental struggles or overbearing masculinity, then you may think twice before reading this book (and this review). Although that is far from all there is to ‘Feral Class’, and it is very definitely not what is most important about it.

For here there are the fine details of childhood discoveries and bewilderments, the warmth of friendship and the splintering of connections, the innovations of desperation (pretending failing eyesight, developing a limp) and living with the consequences of deception, the mind’s ingenious creations (“I noticed a thick, winding fog slowly slip in through the gap…. It floated over my dad…. The figure began to slap his face repeatedly”) and the ambits and devices for dodging the violence of fathers. Among these modes of escape is a developing voice —a self-articulation that sometimes breaks down, while at other times it creatively stutters as it shifts from doubts about conformity to out-of-control rebellion, speaking warmth and compassion to prejudice and division; unlearning and unpicking. More than once, this reassembling threatens to pull everything apart and bring Garrett down, but even the moments of almost self-obliteration are told in a calm, direct way that lets the reader in to the rebuilding. 

At times, the confidentiality is shocking; writing of his early sexual experiences, it is as if we are hearing the voice of a fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen-year-old in the writing. Many (probably most) writers would choose to recompose these experiences, applying a mature lens to smooth out the vulnerability and objectify the discomfort of inexperience. However, Marc Garrett writes from within the vulnerability, speaking outwards from the experience itself, rather than of lessons learned or observations generalised. This is compelling. 

I never slipped along the sentences in this book. I attended to every detail. For in them (aided by numerous private photos and Garrett’s artworks from the time) the book unpeels the contradictions of what composes a certain everyday life, bound up in circumstances; of his mum speeding over the wooden planks of the Wall of Death, a genius abusive father working either side of the fence (both drug dealer and police informer) while running a ‘black magic’ circle on the side, of the safe space created by a local vicar in which Marc finds a place to develop his art and which is burned down by his own brother, of the classroom where an art teacher tears up Marc’s work in front of the class (his mum comes into school next day and punches the teacher), of sudden interventions by authorities that lack explanation or care (social services removing Marc’s younger sister and he never sees her again; his grant being abruptly withdrawn two weeks into an Art degree).

As in all the great narratives, time here is not a given but a character. The temporal loopiness in ‘Feral Class’ means that while in one section an abusive father is sent to prison, in the next, set earlier, he is back; the reader is cleverly drawn into Marc’s feeling of being caged by circumstances, of living in a community conditioned to conflict and poverty like the psychic slaves of Squire Hendrick in ‘Children Of The Stones’. 

All the more precious, then, are those moments when Marc can prise the bars of the cage a little wider; hiding in his room to “make strange cut-up sounds with broken, second-hand tape recorders”, learning folk wisdom and tales from kind witchy Granny Barlow, valuing a conservative sensibility to keep from “pointless fatalism”, at a friend’s Bar Mitzvah eating strange foods and hearing from “those who had experienced fascism first hand”, his finding the alternative scenes in Southend with their fanzines and punk and tribal anarchist green movement; learning that “Society can hurt us if we do not challenge its powerful mistakes”. 

When Garrett does generalise, if briefly, it is to place himself and his family adjacent to working-class families, but in a ‘feral class’. Never put down for large workforces or public services, atomised, working low-paid, lonely jobs as cleaners or in ‘hospitality’, with the nagging threat of homelessness and sickness, or the option of sex work. The number of Marc’s Southend acquaintances who meet an early death is unnervingly high. 

Over everything hangs male violence, as the currency for getting on, getting by, around which women try to navigate; and all the time, the awareness that no one is prepared to share with the feral class the know-how for getting out. Marc’s escape route appears out of the blue – an unexpected act of kindness – and Marc finds a heaven that is “real” and “no longer captive to circumstance”. 

Buy the book here
https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1561
Review by Dr Phil Smith.
https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/staff/phil-smith

Main image: “Taking a break from going wild in the country by relaxing with a copy of Feral Class, the new book by Marc Garrett.” Stewart Home.

Buy his current, excellent book Fascist Yoga – https://www.plutobooks.com/product/fascist-yoga/

Feral Class