‘Nice people suffer a tragedy and learn to be nice people again somewhere else’ – Luke and Jon by Robert Williams

I’m going to start by telling you why I picked up Robert Williams’ debut, Luke and Jon. You might think less of me when I tell you. The reason I picked up this book is because there is a (back) cover quote from Willy Vlautin. Having enjoyed Willy Vlautin’s three novels immensely and having met the guy a couple of times and found him to be genuine and likeable and all the rest of it, I’m inclined to believe that Willy did like this book enough to offer a cover quote (rather than simply because they both share the same publisher).

When I started reading, when Williams’ green-eyed narrator introduced himself (his eyes are so green, apparently, that people often double-take to ensure ‘it isn’t a trick of the light and those really are my eyes’), I was, I’ll admit, in a receptive state of mind, keen to see what it was about the book that Vlautin liked. (Which just goes to show that a good cover quote can work, if you’re a sad dufus like me, in the same way as a recommendation from a friend.) Our narrator is the eponymous Luke Redridge, a young lad whose bipolar mum has recently been killed in a pile-up between her car and an immense articulated lorry. His dad, who we sense, was always perhaps the dreamer in his particular relationship, Luke’s mum being the practical one, goes (understandably, I suppose) all to pot and the two of them end up losing their house and most of what they own, relocating to a quiet rural community in a place called Duerdale.

Luke’s dad is a toy-maker. He spends his days crafting toys and other, more esoteric, creations from wood. Forced to relocate to a house that could at best be called an urgent fixer-upper, he throws himself into the creation of a large wooden horse while his son does his best to make sense of his new life (watching his father drink himself unconscious some days, walking up into the countryside around his house, painting piles of stones and creepy looking trees). At which point, enter Jon Mansfield, stage left. Jon is a bookish sort, given to wearing old, post-war clothes and given to sudden spurts of relatively random information. The two of them become best buds and gradually Jon’s problems (he’s bullied at school, he lives with his senile grandparents in a house full of cats and teetering ziggurats of newspapers and stink) become Luke’s problems.  

If you, like me, read quite a lot of debut novels, you might at this point like to be reminded of Ali Shaw’s The Girl with Glass Feet, also set in a fictional rural retreat, also featuring damaged people struggling to make sense of a new world. You might also want to momentarily recall both Stuart David’s Nalda Said and Ross Raisin’s In God’s Country. When I started reading Luke and Jon, it did feel like an ideal marriage of Nalda Said and In God’s Country (both of which you should read, if you haven’t already). As things progressed, however, as Williams admits the cardinal sin of first novels (flash back digressions that flesh out the characters whilst not particularly moving the plot along), the novel did edge in the direction of The Girl with the Glass Feet (it isn’t as bad as that novel but it does have similar problems).

Luke and Jon feels like the kind of children’s film they used to show on the equivalent of CBBC decades ago at 4.25 in the afternoon. Wholesome drama in which characters to whom bad things may once have happened learn to find new, albeit adjusted, happiness again. Nothing genuinely bad happens in Luke and Jon (although genuinely bad things are remembered). Opportunities to introduce real page-turning drama (the bullies have got Luke as a reprisal for Jon beating them up! what will happen? what will they have done?… oh, nothing much really), quickly reveal themselves to be just another day in the life of a misfit. There is no real journey here. Because the book pitches itself as being nice, it needs a shock, something that jolts the reader out of his comfort zone. It needs a Dan Rhodes ending in order to warrant existing, really. Because otherwise what you have here is nice people suffer a tragedy and learn to be nice people again somewhere else.

Any Cop?: My wife (who read Luke and Jon before I did) thinks I’m being unfair. She says that the book is slight, admittedly, but not bad. It’s not a bad book, she says. It’s a pleasant afternoon read, she says. What’s more, I suppose it’s worth adding, given the number of people who think I’m wrong about Ali Shaw’s The Girl with Glass Feet, it may be that – if you liked The Girl with the Glass Feet – you should make a beeline for this (because it’s much better than that).