On selfies: ‘Here’s me outside the palace of me.’ It was a great moment. The performance poet, Kate Tempest, nailing the emptiness of our narcissistic obsession with the self and our physical appearance. Tempest mesmerised the audience at the opening of the Sydney Writers Festival on May 18. She ‘told’ us (aka performed) a few of her poems and extemporised passionately about her concerns. Her riff included urging empathy, humility, love and reparation as a way to heal the ‘damaging and dangerous racism at root in this country’.
Tempest’s deep-seated anxiety extends beyond the borders of Australia, of course.
‘We are in the middle of such an insane time, where the amount of inequality that exists on this planet can be forgotten about by some,’ she said. ‘We can’t keep pretending that everything is okay, because until somebody stands up and says ‘I’m actually really f—ing worried’—because I am, I’m really worried, I’m really f—ing worried—I think that unless we actually engage with the reality of what’s going on, in terms of the inequality in the Earth … I believe we have it in us to be empathetic beings.’
Tempest won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2012 with her lengthy performance poem Brand New Ancients. At 26, she was the award’s youngest recipient. Now 30, she is also a published playwright and respected recording artist—not bad for a gal who started rapping at 16 on a late-night London bus.
A tiny piece of meaning
Like the ‘selfies’ quote, there’s a sentence from Kate Tempest’s new, bestselling novel The Bricks that Built the Houses that sums up perfectly what I think her book is about. It’s this: ‘Everybody’s looking for their tiny piece of meaning. Some fleeting, perfect thing that might make them more alive.’
Harry and Becky, the two young women at the heart of the narrative, are struggling with their identities and ambitions. Harry turns a buck through some serious drug dealing and Becky through café work and intimate massage. Both women are nurturing dreams of—and taking practical steps towards—less risky and more fulfilling lives and work. It is within this day-by-day struggle, their search for transcendence lurks.
The context? Drug deals, family breakdown, pubs, clubs, gutters, dingy hotel rooms and characterless flats.
The complication? Harry’s unemployed, skunk-using, depressive brother Pete falls for Becky—an underemployed dancer whose ‘muscles have a shelf life’ and who is ‘jealous of every struggling dancer in a company’. Pete and Becky form a relationship. It’s rocky. It also transpires that Harry met Becky first. They lost touch, then touched base again—and their connection was electric. One of Harry’s drug deals has also gone belly up—so imagine the fireworks. Harry fears serious retribution and paces (internally) like a cat on a hot tin roof.
The women decide to flee London and its underworld threats. The scenes away from their city are touching. They show how your unfulfilled dreams can follow you—infecting the new life you’re desperate to begin.
The voice and vernacular
I was fully expecting to appreciate this novel more when I heard Tempest speaking—given that she’s the kind of writer who believes literature should be read aloud. It worked. Hearing her voice in my head has added depth to the book’s south London context and to her characters’ vernacular. I believe in the place and the people evoked in the novel just that little bit more having heard her speak.
Tempest wrote the first draft of The Bricks that Built the Houses in one week on tour with her band—an amazing achievement. She admits it was a baggy, messy draft that needed a lot of work. Even so, I’m still gobsmacked. I calm down a bit when I read more about the extensive research she did and the wide-ranging help she enjoined to sharpen the manuscript for publication. But I’m still overawed by her prodigious skills.
Ergo: There is some fabulous writing in The Bricks and, as another critic noted, the price tag is worth the poetic beginning.
Here’s a grab:
‘The people’s faces twisting into grimaces again, losing all their insides in the gutters, clutching lovers till the breath is faint and love is dead, wet cement and spray paint, the kids are watching porn and drinking Monster. Watch the city fall and rise again through mist and bleeding hands. Keep holding on to power-ballad karaoke hits. Chase your talent. Corner it, lock it in a cage, give the key to someone rich and tell yourself you’re staying brave. Tip your chair back, stare into the eyes of someone hateful that you’ll take home anyway. Tell the world you’re staying faithful. Nothing’s for you but it’s all for sale, give until your strength is frail and when it’s at its weakest burden it with hurt and secrets. It’s all around you screaming paradise until there’s nothing left to feel.’
Along with this stirring beginning, I particularly loved the cameo about Harry’s father, Graham Chapel. He’s a defence lawyer ‘worn out from carrying the hate of the world on his shoulders. He just wanted to build his boat and write his play and invent his synthesiser and as long as his children were healthy, the world was OK by him. Other people’s pain had lost its potency. The world outside his garage walls was a hideous, feverish mess, and the days of trying to make a difference were far, far behind him.’
One question: Have you met this guy holding up the walls at a party in Sydney as well?
The relationship between Harry and her business partner, Leon, is also nicely drawn.
‘The love they bore each other was the kind of love that flourishes best in the dismal parts of town, between friends who want more than cheap drugs, shit sex, casual violence and eventual dullness that all their peers seemed to be settling for. A brother-sister relationship that went deeper than blood, because it was about survival and betterment and they trusted each other completely.’
Several of the one-liners that littered the text grabbed my attention. Here are two:
‘Harry’s face is a lottery win. She throws her hands up, open arms.’
‘Joey’s features are thick and cumbersome, his lips are like Cumberland sausages.’
Watch and learn
There’s more I could say about The Bricks but it would be window dressing. Instead, I want to suggest you first watch Kate Tempest perform her work on U-Tube. She has a shaman-like intensity that will show you how passionate and worried she is about the state of the world. It’s sobering. The novel fits in with her other works, so it’s worth getting a sense of them before you start reading. But do start reading. There is much in The Bricks to reflect on and enjoy in this melancholic love song to south London.
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