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Andalucía is famous for its variety: high alpine mountains and snow-capped peaks, river plains and rolling olive groves, sun-baked coastlines and arid deserts. It is the perfect setting for Neil Rollinson’s debut novel, which is its own kind of spectacular mosaic. Built from short, seemingly discrete chapters that take us between Spain in 2003 and the coalfields of Northumberland in the 70s and 80s, The Dead Don’t Bleed coheres into an extraordinarily tense and tender portrait of two brothers trying to escape their father’s gangland past.
Until now, Rollinson has been known as a poet; his collection Talking Dead was shortlisted for the 2015 Costa poetry prize. Here he brings his talent for compressed evocation to an exploration of fraternal rivalry and the enduring impact of a violent patriarchy. If you took Frank and his brother Gordon apart on the autopsy table, he writes, “you’d find the same bones, the same blood. Almost everything interchangeable. The corkscrews of DNA, the cells, the posture, the downcast glance.” But from a young age, change is afoot within Frank. He knows his father has “high hopes for him” in the family business of petty crime: “Frank Bridge. King of Northumberland”. But Frank wants to be a different kind of king. He carries within himself a “yearning for something more expansive” – the kind of dream that could get him killed in his family’s closed world of criminal secrecy.
Like his author, Frank is drawn to poetry – particularly the work of Federico García Lorca. He is also dangerously drawn to his brother’s girlfriend, Carol, often glimpsed with a mop and bucket in hand at the local pub, cleaning up after the men. Frank “loves to watch her move: tough, big boned, elegant but strong. He’s seen her put men flat on their backs for touching her up. A single punch.” In north-east England, “no one messes with Carol” – and even fewer mess with poetry. The twin risks of Frank involving himself in forbidden lust and forbidden literature power the whole plot, giving the novel the through line of a quest narrative. When Gordon and Carol flee to Spain with the proceeds of a robbery that went disastrously wrong, Frank, in the wake of his father’s death, makes the irrevocable decision to track them down.
Rollinson is expert at capturing the long shadow cast by a complicated father. Laurence is a local gangster who, through his own perverse code of ethics and innate charisma, has established himself as “a man of stature. Respected. Everyone stopping to chat.” His “loud laugh echoes across the room. A man among men”. Frank is caught between wanting to please his parent and wanting to escape the family’s gaze entirely. His “father’s scrutiny is like a physical manifestation,” Rollinson writes. Frank “always feels it in his throat, as if he’s being throttled”. The novel captures the way close observation can be an expression of love, but also a kind of violence. In the Northumberland boozers where men “get mortal in the afternoon”, pints “glow in the river light, amber gold and black, like beakers in a chemistry lab”. Many of these men will drink themselves to death. What catches your eye can kill you.
One of this novel’s many successes is in capturing the terror of illicit attraction – of admitting to yourself that you secretly want something more. Readers of Karl Geary, Douglas Stuart or Ross Raisin will appreciate the way Rollinson blends social realism with a knack for capturing risky intimacies. The “creeping deprivation” of Northumberland in the Thatcher era – the closure of its core industries, “more and more lads on the dole” – is put in beautiful contrast with Frank’s longing for his brother’s girlfriend. In one lovely, expertly judged scene, Frank and Carol sit “on a wall by a waste ground” as the rain beats down around them. A “demolition squad takes down a terrace behind them. A whole street. Houses he’s known, and been in.” A fireplace “hangs, mid-air, levitating, its grate gaping. Improvements, they say. For whom?”
That question – “for whom?” – reverberates on every page. How much of our lives should be spent in service of the family that made us, as opposed to the family we hope to make? Spain seems to offer the relief of fresh contrasts: “the shadow and light, the scent of orange blossom, the endless, undulating fields and the high, unblemished sky”. But every landscape in this novel holds its ghosts. Lorca was murdered in Andalucía, and his exact resting place remains a mystery – one echoed in a final moment of violence that is all the more powerful for being played out largely off stage, in the space between sentences, the gap between chapters. Rollinson’s novel is heartbreaking, but he is no sentimentalist. Life and love spring up from the cracks, he seems to say, but damage continues to be done.
