I can't remember ever starting a book review by rating its cover 5 stars. But the cover of Pity summarises the content so perfectly that rating it thus is definitely justified.
McMillan's novel traces three generations and their experience/memories of living in a town where mining once dominated everyone's life. Each dimension of the novel receives a different font which guides the reader effortlessly through it's overlapping elements. There are memories of working down the pits, memories revived in recalling, for the media, how the town was before the mines were closed and the area redeveloped and, finally, memories of how gay men desperately hid their sexuality for fear of being called out and ostracised.
The quality of writing is both wonderfully descriptive yet succinct as befits a poet. The sections describing the miners early morning trek to the pit will linger long in the mind.
The relationships between the male characters, be it within their families or with their partners, are beautifully drawn and leave the reader with some confidence that both the town and the post mining generation face a brighter future, albeit what lies buried must never be forgotten. Exceptional.

Definitely one of my top five favorite reads of 2023. A short yet very powerful novel set around a present day Barnsley (Yorkshire, Northern England) still haunted by the echoes of its mining past . It truly is a "short and magnificent ..... lament for a lost way of a life as well as a celebration of resilience and the possibility for change". The writing is matter-of-fact and earthy yet simultaneously soaringly elegant and poetic. Highly recommended. Special thank you to Canongate Books and NetGalley for a no obligation advance review copy.

I fell under its spell. This short interwoven piece is hard to put down once you’ve started it. Fantastic debut

This is a short book, perhaps a novella. It is set in South Yorkshire but equally could be set in almost any mining or ex-mining community. Therein lies one of the main themes; how a town, a community, manages when the economy is devastated. Not easily at all is the obvious conclusion. This nigh-on existential threat to a community is mirrored in the relationships of the people living in it through several generations (theme two). Some families are torn asunder and others reveal hidden stories about their kith and kin. Theme three explores how sexual relationships have developed over time and what secrets lurk in family backgrounds. For me, the descriptions of sex acts mar the overall story - probably just me; I prefer a lack of detail in this regard. The descriptions of mining life and of communal belonging - and of loss - are poetic, as to be expected from such an author. Overall, a very strong recommendation to all readers of literary works.
I received a copy through NetGalley but my review is given as an independent reader.

There are several narrative threads to this novel, and what I loved about it was that it springs from very basic premise. The lives of characters, Simon, Ryan, Alex, and Brian and their various connections and relationships link to the sense of place and industry. What McMillan does incredibly well is link place with people - and I don't mean in an obvious way. Simon's academic interest in cultural history and the mines that still lurk (and collapse) connect with the characters, and Ryan's link (don't ask) to watching men in toilets are areas that could easily be analysed in a philosophical Deleuzian way. Or not. That's the clever thing about this novel. It's definitely one I'll return to. Highly recommended. Grateful thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Absolutely stunning. I love the structure and style of the writing. One could say it's experimental or whatnots, but knowing that McMillan is firstly a poet, whose poems I enjoy and like a great deal of? This was to be expected, in all the loveliest ways. I haven't read anything like this in a while, narrative-wise, and I was completely blown away, excuse the clichéd expression. I might be a bit biased as I am always a bit weak for stories and books in general that are set or at least based in or on Northern towns. They're so under-represented and truly not written about enough. Even as I was reading the book, I was thinking like what do I know about Barnsley? A bit of football, I suppose. But the book introduces a whole lot more to that, so thank you. Beautiful novel, but a little short, or am I just a bit greedy about it? Novella, perhaps? Love it either ways, and I hope to see McMillan have some more fun with prose.

A debut novel by poet Andrew McMillan which will be published 8 February 2024. This short novel takes place in Barnsley and we have narratives from three generations of the same family. We have Simon who works in a call centre and supplements his income by performing as a drag artist and having his own OnlyFans account. A WARNING - the sections about the OnlyFans account are very explicit. His boyfriend, Ryan, is a security guard at the local shopping centre where he watches the CCTV and monitors and policies the gents toilets which is where men meet to engage in sexual activity. Simon's father Alex is separated from his mother and our first meeting with Alex is when he and his brother, Brian, bond over a pornographic magazine. Alex has his own secrets. Brian is a former miner but is now engaged in a research workshop which is being run by academics to explore the city's past and to get the residents to engage with the past. The final family member is Alex and Brian's father through whom we glimpse the life of a miner when the pits were thriving. The novel is separated into different sections and the one I loved were the sections about the grandfather going to the pit - this was so poetic with the use of similes and metaphor and repetition to emphasise the daily grind of going underground. There were also sections called Fieldwork which were the words of the academics running the workshop that Brian is involved with as well as Brian's own feelings about this task. Simon's part - and his relationship with Ryan -comes in sections named Surveillance and CCTV which almost juxtaposes the 'work' he does with the work of his grandfather. There are no women in this book which doesn't matter. This is about masculinity, sexuality and family bonds. An excellent read and one that may appear on lists next year.

Really enjoyed this read. Set in the area where I lived through the miners strike that is still affected by the pit closure, if rings very true. Hard going in places but a very good read. Definitely recommend. Thank you to Net Galley for an ARC

Andrew McMillan's short novel Pity, delves into the lives of three generations in a mining town in South Yorkshire. It wasn’t one of my favourite reads, I feel it’s one I need to go back to perhaps, at a later stage

The lives of three members of a Barnsley family,, from a miner in the 70s to a drag artist today, are cleverly interwoven through time, place and change to 'tell their story ... to future generations'. This isn't a read for the faint-hearted and is certainly not for by the pool as it needs a great deal of concentration to follow the threads and engage with them at the level they deserve.

Pity by Andrew McMillan

This book for me started slowly, in fact I wasn’t sure what was going on at all so I looked up some reviews to get the gist of the story.

Armed with this – and perhaps I only needed it because I don’t like fumbling around in the dark so much – I carried on reading and now with a light shining the way, I began to relax and to enjoy.

Very soon I was gripped, by the quality of the writing and by the atmosphere so expertly conjured up in my imagination.

This is a world populated by men – on the one hand the researchers from the university and on the other those men who were part of the mining community. The university men want to explore the psychological landscape of a mining town which has had its heart ripped out by the closing of the mine and the deliberate destruction of the community that lived from and within it. The miners come in to be questioned about their memories while keeping silent about so much of their history. They had seen posters advertising ‘a week of recollection…in three fun and interactive sessions’, with refreshments! As I didn’t understand the book when I started it, the too didn’t really know why they had come along.

There is sexual tension and also attraction and love between some of the men. We are shown the family ties and what so impressed me with the writing is that feelings that are complex, and almost beyond words (loyalty and fears, mixed feelings, distrust and longing) comes across from the page to the reader’s heart. I began to really love this book.

I could write an essay about this book but I am trying to put into a few hundred words the great pleasure in reading something that is so much more than a story. I felt better able to understand something after reading it, although I’m not quite sure what.

Something ‘strongly felt but not easily known’ is created in this book and I would strongly recommend it.

There really aren’t any women in the book – correct me if I missed one in passing. Which made it all the more surprising that there are so many in the Acknowlegements. It is dedicated to the author’s grandmother Margaret Goldthorpe who died this year of 2023. So underground, in the foundations, there are indeed women and their lives too.

This short novel from Andrew McMillan examines the lives of 3 generations of a South Yorkshire mining town. In a surprisingly short amount of words, he looks from both within and outside the men, exploring masculinity, class, sexuality and family bonds. It manages to marry a poetical tone with both the outsider, academic narratives that book-end chapters. A surprising and thought-provoking read. (Copy received via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review).

We pose some questions to each other, to our fellow academics reading this article, as we acknowledge our debt to Bright, to Gordon, to Skeggs: what is it that is being concealed? What does it mean for it to be alive and present? What is it to be looked at, but not seen? What is the difference between feeling and knowing?

It's incredible what Andrew McMillan has done with relatively simple means. The novel consists of several narrative threads, including Simon's (who does drag at a local club and OnlyFans to support himself), Ryan (his boyfriend and a security guard), Simon's father Alex, Alex's brother Brian who's engaged with a group of academic researchers, academics and their article, and Brian's and Alex's father (the miner). Relations between the threads often overlap and the point where they converge is the question of what remains in memory, individual and collective, especially after the event of a particular significance (the collapse of the mine, first stirrings of desire, etc.). The novel also speaks about what has changed, especially from the angle of labor - Simon's all about cultural industry in one way or another with his digital and clubbing presence, while earlier forms, such as mining, are long gone (Thatcher figures also). And with changing forms of labor, the novel's also about changing forms of knowing - Ryan spends his working hours in front of surveillance equipment, watching for men in the toilets. A very Foucauldian thing, digitally transformed.

Pity is a short novel that trains its eyes on the former mining town of Barnsley, near to Sheffield in northern England. It focuses on three generations of the same family, covering the late twentieth century up to the present day (or thereabouts), and almost exclusively focusing on the men of the family. Simon is a call-centre worker by day and drag artist and OnlyFans model by night. He is in the early stages of dating Ryan, a security guard at a local shopping centre whose job involves discouraging illicit activities in the centre’s toilets. Simon’s father Alex is a somewhat mysterious figure through much of the novel, a former miner who we are initially introduced to via his first childhood encounter with pornography, he has separated from Simon’s mother in circumstances unknown both to us and Simon. Alex’s brother Brian is another former miner, participating in research workshops run by a nearby university that aim to understand and ‘get people talking’ about the town and its past. Finally, there’s the elusive, spectral presence of Alex and Brian’s father, vividly evoking the daily grind of pit life at its peak, in the buildup to a crucial turning point for the town and the industry.

Being from another former mining town almost equidistant from Sheffield to Barnsley, there was bound to be a lot of interest in this for me. I’m a couple of generations removed from miners, and have lived much of my life away from the town I grew up in, so Simon’s present-day still highlighted a very distinct perspective from my own. Barnsley (like my own hometown) is a former ‘Red Wall’ (ie staunchly Labour-voting) stronghold, part of a group of north/midlands constituencies in England that supported the Brexit vote in 2016 and turned ‘Blue’ in voting for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in 2019. Both of those occasions represented shocks of pain to the likes of me, entrenched in our ‘metropolitan elite’ bubbles (I live in London now) but still carrying with us a sense that we understood something of our roots. Pity wrestles with that fundamental challenge of understanding, and purposefully tries to avoid the trap much of the media fell into when trying to explain these decisions. Its university researchers in the ‘Fieldnotes’ sections stand in for those attempts to explain, to produce simplistic ‘narratives’ that explain the changing political landscape in the region, while largely boil down in their heads to a failure to reckon with the violent trauma around the collapse of industry (mining disasters, psychological scars, the spectre of Thatcher) and to find anything substantial with which to fill the ensuing void.

McMillan tackles this partly with the structure of the novel: it’s fragmentary, provisional and purposefully inconclusive. The book is subtitled ‘notes from a town’, further emphasizing it’s lack of claims to holding any great answers or grand narratives about the ‘state of the nation’ or the region. It also emphasizes how the novel is told from points of distance, rather than an epicentre of ‘truth’ - the outsider perspective of the academics, ‘surveillance’ sections seen from the perspective of Ryan’s security camera (he himself a sort of outsider to the central family), the ‘gossip’ of patrons and staff of the local club where much of the action takes place, and vivid descriptions of Simon’s OnlyFans content, as if seen from the perspective of his viewers (scattered around the globe). There’s a sense that the ‘truth’ of history is unveiled to an extent through the poetic, frantic, disembodied voice of the elder Brian, but as much of the rest of the novel implies this is only one voice among many, however authentic it may seem.

He also goes about dismantling the idea of simple answers via the thematic concerns of the novel. While the academics seek to understand those ‘big questions’, Pity’s central characters are more concerns with smaller questions, the stuff of everyday life in the here and now: money, family, relationships, sex, personal identity. When the younger Brian finds his voice in the final workshop, he articulates the frustration with the academics’ attempts to rake over the past in search of explanation when they just want (/need) to ‘get on with [their] lives’. Separately,. Simon’s OnlyFans and his drag career (and attempt to widen his digital audience by taking a more ‘political’ angle) could be read as elaborate ‘escape fantasies’ that are typically found in these sort of stories (cf David Storey’s Saville among many others) but Simon’s objective is more clearly focused just on surviving, supplementing his meagre call centre income.

There are also some nice moves in terms of inverting expectations in there. While we’re given hints that Alex has a ‘hidden’ side to him from the start, it did feel to me for much of the novel like we were building towards some sort of conflict between Alex and Simon based on his sexuality (or at least the public/performative nature of it) so it was a pleasant surprise to find the plot heading in a very different direction. Alex’s story is probably the subtle highlight of the novel in terms of character studies, though on the more ostentatious side Simon’s drag performance in Thatcher drag (“this turn is not a lady”) is undoubtedly the most entertaining. Both of these come together to ultimately flip the novel’s theme away from those big political questions, and towards another, that of masculinity in its many forms - from the traditional ‘community’ (work, repetition, but solidarity of purpose) of the elder Brian, to the conflicted, closeted, confused world of Alex’s generation - in which we find violent hatred (both from others and self-directed) to the potentially more optimistic (but still incredibly complex) modern, digitally-influenced culture of Simon and Ryan’s generation.

It’s a novel in which women are oddly absent, present only as background characters (the club ‘gossips’) and absent mothers (an interesting inversion of the absent father narrative, much more common I suspect). I wondered about this for a while but ultimately it allows more space (in what is after all a very short book) for the exploration of the relationship between male generations - notably in what isn’t said between them and the gaps that emerge. There are hopeful elements in there too, though - some sense that while neither the Alex/Brian generation or Simon’s have any ostensible interest in talking in the ways the academics want, there are avenues through which past trauma can be explored - the younger Brian is briefly inspired in the workshops by using poetry to come to terms with the academics’ questions, and Simon of course mobilises his drag performance in a way that engages with the past (or at least the version of it he’s picked up from his father’s generation) by exhuming Thatcher’s ghost for satirical purposes.

Pity is an incredibly thought-provoking debut novel that touches on a range of issues of huge contemporary relevance. It doesn’t seek to provide answers, but instead illuminates through poetic prose the everyday reality and humanity of a small number of ordinary people who represent nothing but themselves, and are anything but the monolithic cliches of the ‘Red Wall’ world that the media narrative tries to impose.

A really enjoyable and hugely promising debut novel from an already established poetic talent. The pull quotes from Douglas Stuart and Max Porter felt particularly useful guides, with the novel offering both something of Stuart’s rich & authentic takes on working class masculinity and Porter’s formal innovation and sense of fragmentation.

Unsettling, absorbing and resonating. A novel with the layers of poetry.

This is a short novel, difficult to describe in some ways, as it is about much more than many books three times the length. The author IS a poet, and this shows – not because there are pages of lyrical description, or breathtaking images on every line. Rather, it is the division into short and sometimes mainly repeating sections, the sense of tautness in the writing. And, like a powerful piece of poetry, there are so many layers of meaning, the ‘what is it about’ . The more the reader thinks and feels about this book, during and after reading, the more the layers of meaning proliferate.

This is set in a Yorkshire mining town. It covers the period when the mines cohered an entire community, the period when that community was broken, and the continuing after effects. It does this through the stories of three generations of men. One who died in a collapsing coal face, his two sons, Brian and Alex, met first as young boys on the edge of their sexual awakenings, then as late middle aged men, having been miners, having lived through the loss of it all. The third generation, adults in present time, is Alex’s son Simon, working in a call centre by day, but with a couple of other, more surprising side hustles by night

None of this presents in linear fashion. The sections in the past, which repeat, over and again, are powerful images of the miners, leaving home in the morning, walking almost silently to the mine, descending in the cage, the repetitive, claustrophobic physicality of their work.

One character in the book is a security manager in the shopping centre, looking over and again at repeating images on a bank of surveillance camera screens

Meanwhile, a group of sociologists are engaged on some kind of ‘detraumatising’ exercise, trying to record the memories of a time and a community long gone, and to ‘help’ a community free itself from the trauma of that generation ago mining accident.

And, in that third generation, there is also a story line which indicates certain societal changes. Thatcher’s ‘There’s no such thing as society’ and the instigation of policies which set out to make that a reality – the crushing of the unions, the closing of the mines, the selling off of social housing without the building of new affordable housing, new social housing, was also of course the time of Clause 28.

McMillan also trusts his readers, I think, so he does not need to TELL us what the layers are about, but there are stylistic sections which show. For example, the sections around surveillance cameras, the fractured images which can be played, over and again, the first person plural academic sections, with the distanced We voices, and the repeating collective sections, with small changes before the tragedy of the mine collapse

Highly recommended. I read this as an digital ARC.

Pity is a clever title to this book. It gives the reader an essence of Barnsley. Beautifully written with an unusual style. A clever exploration over 3 generations. A short easy read but one to be digested slowly to fully appreciate it's content. The use of different typefaces is a genius idea.
Anyone who knows South Yorkshire and it's people will identify with the characters and politics in this impactful book.
Thanks to Canongate for an ARC via Netgalley for an honest review.

Pity is a novel about the lives of a family in a South Yorkshire mining town and the impact of place and self to the people who live there. Brothers Brian and Alex have always lived in this town, once a mining town and now haunted by the memories of mining strikes and disaster. Alex's son Simon lives there too, but his world is different, working in a call centre by day but by night doing drag shows and sharing content on OnlyFans. Researchers come to the town, looking at the effect of memory, but sometimes the scars aren't what you'd expect.

This is Andrew McMillan's debut novel and being a fan of his poetry, I was excited to read this. The narrative is told through a variety of elements—CCTV footage, third person narration, research notes—and this gives it a particular atmosphere of looking in, almost spying on the lives on the characters (and there's a lot of watching throughout the book, a lot of viewers). It is focused a lot on place, but really the people who make up a place and how that can change as times change too, that a place isn't always just one thing, even when it seems like "mining town" is just what somewhere is. Though the novel is short, there's a lot to think about in terms of these elements, ideas of viewing and memory, and this kind of psychogeography.

Though the time with the characters is brief, there's some interesting things going on with them. There's the obvious different trajectories of Brian and Alex, the latter of whom's plotline is half-unspoken, very much mirroring ideas of what he feels like he can talk about. Simon's narrative is focused around him bringing his drag performance back to his hometown, where he's changing things up for something more political, and exploring his relationship with Ryan, a security guard who wants to be in the police. There was some complex bits with Ryan and with their relationship, which the novel doesn't delve into much as a lot is hinted at and implied rather than explicitly covered, like attitudes towards drag and who people are when they do or don't change outfits or make up.

I would've read more of this book, but I also like the fact that it is very much a snapshot, a controlled piece that teases you with glimpses of lives and experiences, but ultimately doesn't give you everything, just like the CCTV and Simon's OnlyFans. I enjoyed how it depicted queer life across different kinds of experiences alongside the focus on place and geographical and mental scarring (brought together neatly and horribly by the spectre of Thatcher).

Pity is one of my favourite reads this year. It is a wonderful novella set in Barnsley over several time periods in the lives of brothers Alex and Brian, and Alex’s son Simon. It is beautifully written with much compassion and a rawness which hits hard. A very moving book

I've been a fan of Andrew McMillan's poetry, and now, his debut novel has arrived. While it may be brief, don't be fooled. It's a smart, politically charged, and compassionate exploration of three generations within a mining family.

Set 9ver different timelines, from different points of view. I was drawn to this because of where its set. I have to agree the train announcements of a few places are hilarious. I was left wanting more from this novella.