Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Read this again recently, 18 years after I first read it as a teenager in college and despite being 20 years old, Grits has lost of it's potency.

Ostensibly, Griffiths' debut novel is a visceral account of a group of drifters' life of drug abuse, promiscuity and petty crime set in Aberystwyth on the west coast of Wales. Among the subtext Griffiths explores through the points of view of 11 characters themes such as hedonism, sexuality, identity, isolation, poverty, camaraderie and nihilism.

Each character's pov is presented via stream of consciousness in the dialect of their origin. There is no linear plot driving the novel, although it covers events over a roughly two year period in the lives of the protagonists.

Influenced by the likes of Trocchi, Ron Berry and Faulkner, Griffiths' focus on the marginalised through their lived experience gives potency to the characterisation. Although many of the same events are covered by each character, each point of view is different. The reliability of each testimony is questionable but uniquely revelatory and ultimately the full degradation and devastation of the group doesn't become clear until the closing pages.

There are lazy comparisons to be made with other novels with similar themes, but a distinction of Griffiths' novels are how rooted they in location and the claustrophobia of this area around Aberystwyth, hemmed between the expanse of the Irish Sea and the encroaching Cambrian mountains, is very much pervasive in the existential disorder of the characters.

Grits burst off the page and at times the nearly 500 page binge of booze, drugs, sex and violence is exhausting and disconcerting. But it's not intended as an easy read and is still one of the eloquent tellings (in their own voice) of the nihilism of the dispossessed and left behind in neoliberal, Thatcherite Britain.