SUSO

Disillusioned by contemporary literature, the Brutalist group took up arms and brought punk to the written word.

W / JEAN HANNAH EDELSTEIN

Independent bookshops are shuttered. Book review editors are made redundant. Books by glamour model Jordan are outselling all of the titles on the Man Booker Prize shortlist. It’s not, it seems, a good time for traditional book publishing; it’s not been, if you follow the headlines in the trade press, for some time.

And with the young and hip who ostensibly serve as our cultural trendsetters more likely to be storing an iPhone in the back pockets of their skinny jeans than a paperback novel, many are inclined to place the blame for the long-anticipated demise of the book publishing on the inversely proportional rise of new media.

But could Web 2.0, in fact, be literature’s saving grace?

Three writers from the north of England were amongst the first to see the potential for this in 2006 when they decided to consolidate their work under the moniker ‘The Brutalists’. While member of previous literary movements have formed their identities through publishing their statements of intent on paper, Ben Myers, Tony O’Neill and Adelle Stripe picked a medium more appropriate for the particular cultural moment in which they were living and working: MySpace.

The group posted their manifesto to the website in the autumn of 2006: “Brutalism calls for writing that touches upon levels of raw honesty that is lacking from most mainstream fiction. We cannot simply sit around waiting to be discovered — we would rather do it ourselves. Total control, total creativity. The Brutalists see ourselves as a band who have put down their instruments and picked up their pens and scalpels instead.

“The only maxim we adhere to is an old punk belief, which we have bastardised for our own means: ‘Here’s a laptop. Here’s a spell-check. Now write a book.’”

In the two years since they set up their literary shingle, the movement has expanded both in terms of output and followers. “We chose the word ‘Brutalism' to present a united front against the more conservatively-minded writing establishment,” Myers says. O’Neill is even more blunt: “I felt totally disenfranchised from literature, and I had the feeling that a lot of other people probably did too. If we didn’t give it a name, and make an attempt to push this kind of writing collectively, nobody would have done it for us.”

[Ben Myers and Adelle Stripe]

And thus the trio decided to take literary matters into their own hands. “Desperate times inspire desperate measures,” Myers says. “None of us had actually met at that point; we all just had a mutual admiration of each other's writing, which we had been reading in anthologies, websites, magazines and journals. Then when we stared corresponding with each other, we discovered we were all born around the same time, in small towns in the north of England and we all did much the same things, at the same time - hedonistic teenage years, a love of literature and music, Road-to-Damascus style relocations to London, the whole lot - just not together.” It wasn’t long before other like-minded people started contacting them to say that they also believed that their work fit into the Brutalist rubric. And despite what some might perceive to be a slightly chippy aesthetic, The Brutalists are eager to be inclusive, and to let the movement evolve as organically as possible.

“Brutalism calls for writing that touches upon levels of raw honesty that is lacking from most mainstream fiction.”

While Stripe regards the decision to use MySpace as more of a matter of convenience (“…Myspace is the cheap alternative. As none of us can really be arsed with building a website…”) than an act integral to their particular aesthetic, the web has turned out to be a fallow ground for the expansion of Brutalism on an international scale. “We do get quite a few people dropping us emails from various countries,” Stripe says. “You think you are the only writers pushing this genre, then you realise there are thousands of other people out there, worldwide, who are writing in a similar way. I wouldn’t want to label anyone a Brutalist, but if they want to call themselves one then that’s fine by me. There are some great writers out there, plenty of them undiscovered. We are collectively very low key; it’s not really our style to go round contacting other people and pushing an agenda.”

[Adelle Stripe's 'Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid']

But then what is their style, then? It’s raw, it’s spare, it has a strong punk aesthetic, and it is the kind of graphic that is once horrifying and very real. Myers elaborates: “Really we chose it to describe our pared-down poetry style… jagged, sharp-edged and occasionally ugly, but well-intentioned.” Brutalism is not, ultimately, didactic. Says Stripe, “It’s not like we have a manifesto or agenda in which to limit the way that we work, or the speed or volume of the writing we produce. It feels right we do it. If it doesn’t then we don’t bother.” The group’s first publication, in 2006, was a chapbook of six poems by each of the three writers, writing about their hometowns in the north of England – another volume is due in 2009. More recently, Stripe has published her own volume of poetry, ‘Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid’, with indie British publisher Blackheath Press, while Myers’ novel The Missing Kidney came out with Social Disease, another UK independent, in 2008 – his next one is currently on submission to publishers.

And then there’s O’Neill’s latest novel, the semi-autobiographical Down And Out In Murder Mile, an unflinching account of drug addiction. It was published this autumn in the United States (where O’Neill now lives) by HarperPerennial, an imprint of the Rupert Murdoch-owned multi-national publishing house, HarperCollins. This might seem, on first glance, to be in opposition to the Brutalist aesthetic. But challenged on the question of whether he’s going against principle by selecting a publisher that is owned by Murdoch, that key figurehead of everything mainstream about the media (and, incidentally, the owner of MySpace), O’Neill holds his ground. “There’s very little in this world that can’t be traced back to dirty money somewhere along the line,” he points out. “When I was buying heroin, I’m sure that before it made its way into my hands, somebody somewhere had gotten killed for it. Did that stop me? Nope. I mean if Murdoch’s money is going to go somewhere, it might as well go into my pocket. It might as well help feed my kid. That kind of stance – that you will never sell out, never take dirty money, never do this or that – well, it’s a luxury that you can only afford if you don’t live in the real world. That my book will be out there, in shops, and hopefully infecting many, many minds is the real goal for me."

www.myspace.com/brutalists