Cardiff Dead

It seems that I accidentally stumbled upon a book that no one gives a fuck about even in its homeland. When I Googled 'Cardiff Dead' trying to find out if there's any movie adaptation of it, half of the results were about some university stuff member from Cardiff who'd fallen from the fifth floor a couple of days ago. Exactly, 'Cardiff Dead' is dead. But there're still reasons to read it, I believe.

This is a book about a music band. No, this a book about the Black community of Wales. No, this is a book about leftist youth movements in '80 Britain and Bobby Sands. Or no, this is a book about a lonely alcoholic who craves for love but doesn't get any because he doesn't know what he actually wants.

A musician named Mazz comes to Cardiff, the city of his youth. Back in his nineteen, he was almost famous, playing guitar in a spontaneously formed Ska band called Wurriyas. He comes there because Charlie, an ex-boxer and the band's founder, is dead. And this visit turns out to be a sweet reunion with people he used to know but knows nothing about now.

Mazz is just another mildly problematic man, the kind that floods British literature of those days in spades. He has a beer for breakfast, a joint for lunch, and a line of coke for dinner, still being a fully capable adult with some kind of career and interests outside his bad habits. He fucks haphazardly, still preserving some kind of romantic intention (his heart is just really volatile). One moment he thinks he wants something, just to realize the next he doesn't care. If he were a woman, his life would be considered over by now. But since he is a man, a white ever-longing man, his life could never be over because it has never truly started.

This book starts like a detective, but it's not one in fact. The Internet calls it 'Noir', but it's rather some mix of comedy drama and a failed-coming-of-age novel. I was looking for a book about Cardiff, and this one definitely is one. The city is a standalone character here, growing and changing and molding its citizens into some kind of people they wouldn't always prefer to be. It's simple and sometimes even primitive (for example, I still have no clue what some of its hookups were for), and Mazz is definitely a Marty Stu (handsome and always getting a woman and an author of the song of the generation and learned to swim just yesterday and today he's already catching the coolest wave of Wales on a surfboard). But God, it's so beautifully written. Dry, ironic, deliberately aloof, very British, very 'just sit and watch, that's all you can do.'

Don't let the genre fool you: it's not a detective. The mystery line is so poor it hurts. It's rather a compilation of portraits: a portrait of an artist as a young man, a portrait of the British music scene, a portrait of Cardiff. Good luck visiting this gallery.