Shadows of the past

The Shangri-Las’ song ‘Past, Present and Future’ divides a life into three, Beethoven-underpinned phases: before, during and after. Each section turns in on the next, binding them together with devastating effect. It is one of the oddest and most radically structured moments in pop, and one that came to mind when reading these three very different debut novels. With similar temporal concerns to the Lieber-Butler-Morton lyric, each traces the implications of past action on the present —and how these in turn could shape the coming years.

The future is most notably explored in Danny Denton’s brilliantly conceived The Earlie King & the Kid in Yellow, a polyphonic trawl through the murky waters of a permanently raining Irish dystopia. The plot, in precis, looks suspiciously conventional: a teenage runner for a crime syndicate decides to escape a life of violence, rescue his daughter from the head of the family and fulfil the promise he made to his now-dead girlfriend. But what could have been a standard-issue, sub-Clockwork Orange tale of unlikely redemption becomes a daring and tightly orchestrated story of myth, narrative and love.

The prose is a firecracker in the cloudburst; sentences twist one way and the other, Joycean wordplay meeting street slang and invented parlance. But Denton’s ability to create a fully rendered cityscape and a varied series of communities is equally impressive. His drowned Dublin is authentic and meticulous, cinematic and sensuous; his characters, whether fleeting or part of the principal cast, are rounded, full and bloodied. And while this is a violent, unforgiving novel, its tender depiction of friendship and family help counterbalance the unremitting darkness of the future. Hope, Denton implies, is always there, no matter how grey the sky.

If hope underscores The Earlie King, then fear is the primary driving force of Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu: specifically, of the long arm of the past on the shoulder of the present.