Marabou Stork Nightmares by Irvine Welsh – Scottish Southern Gothic

Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995) by Irvine Welsh is a curious jumble of various states of consciousness, memory, nightmare, coma and near wakefulness. The protagonist is Roy Strang, born in Leith in Scotland where he grew up in the scheme, a low rent housing project, basically the slums of town. His father is a happily prejudiced drunkard, his mother about the same. He also has three brothers: Tony, a handsome womanizer, Bernard, the flamboyant poetry-writing gay and Elgin, who is not all the way with it. Kim, his sister is described as whiney, promiscuous and not too bright. To say that the Strang family is dysfunctional is putting it mildly. There’s violence, drugs, mental illness, drinking and incest, just to mention a few minor details. There’s also the beloved family dog, Winston, who has attacked and maimed Roy when he was a boy, but who is still doted on by the rest of the family.
That’s one level of the story, told mostly in reminiscences and in a Scottish dialect, which takes some getting used to, for me at least. It’s very consistent, though, and you find yourself getting along with it just fine after a while.

The second level of the story takes place in Roy’s “deeper”, a place he runs to in his subconscious when he comes too close to the surface of waking up out of his coma. This fantasy world is a kind of Africa filtered through wishful thinking, at least initially, where Roy and his companion Sandy hunt the evil Marabou Stork. The stork itself has almost demonic qualities and certainly mythical ones, but it is a myth created out of Roy’s experiences in the actual, real South Africa where his family relocates in the hope of turning their lives around. In Africa they live with Roy’s uncle who repeatedly molests the young Roy and bribes him into silence with gifts and threats.

The lead character is in a coma here, and that makes the narrator so unreliable you have to really be careful where you put your trust, as you see in the very last chapters. It is also evident that Roy has done something to wind up in a coma. Every time he starts to surface he deliberately turns away from the waking world and dives back down deeper, something that’s shown typographically in the text. It’s never difficult to tell where we are, which level of reality we are dealing with. It is, however, sometimes difficult to make any kind of sound judgement of what’s really going on, because it’s obvious some of the tension created for Roy is between lies and truths and secrets he’s keeping and that spills over into the text.

Everything about this story is grim and dark and tastes like Scottish Southern Gothic the whole way through. It’s close enough to horror in the more original sense that the pure joy of the telling is sometimes the only thing that carries the reader. Roy is not a very likeable character, and it does not really matter that he is shaped by his circumstance, which he agrees with himself. He is aware of his own darkness, flaunts it at times and talks of how violence is sometimes preferable to sex. He perpetuates the cycle of vicious denigrating violence himself, takes to football hooliganism like an answer, sticks a blade in a classmate when he’s just a kid and in an act of coolly calculated menace kills the family dog in retribution for the injuries he suffered as a child.
The main stumbling block is however, sexual violence, but I’m not giving away the whole game here by telling how and why that plays such a pivotal role in Roy’s current state. Suffice to say that as the novel progresses, things get increasingly more disturbing and in the end all the levels of narrative are infused with this undercurrent of disintegration and violence until finally Roy gets to the end of the tale.

There is always this yearning for redemption in this kind of literature, both from the characters themselves and from the reader. There is no way there could be a happy ending to a tale as sordid as this one, but redemption is something else altogether. This thing, however, just has to run its course and redemption is not really an option.

On a technical level this is really brilliant work. It surfs between the heavy Scottish accent and the more refined speech of Roy and Sandy, which is comically precise in it’s elocution and very much The Queen’s English. Roy is not by any means stupid, or an oaf, or unaware of what he himself is doing and that only serves to drive the point home.

This is overall a very interesting read, consistent and true to the narrative parameters it sets up. It’s not for the shiny, happy crowd, but if you like your stories dark, gothic, smart and intriguing – then this is a good choice.

Mule