Telling tales of our great city
Jul 11 2008 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post
Frank Cottrell Boyce, award winning screenwriter and novelist _320
In Frank Cottrell Boyce’s Permanent Granite Sunrise, the true present, and the present that should have been, play on the mind of bricklayer Ronald Brady, because the building he considers to be the inspiration for living is never completed.
It is the original design for the Metropolitan Cathedral, Edwin Lutyens’s colossal edifice that, due to the Second World War, was replaced with the concrete structure we have today, although the original crypt was completed and is open sporadically to the public.
The Liver Building also features in the short stories, embodied with an enigmatic personality that the protagonist falls in love with and ultimately leaves her husband for in Paul Farley’s All Aboard the Liver Building. Elsewhere, Newsham Park, the Bluecoat and the Blitz- damaged streets of Wavertree take supporting roles.
Maria describes Liverpool as a “self-mythologising place” – it creates its own story, its identity, and inspires writers.
“It’s a place acutely aware of its past, which is always fuel to a writer’s imagination, but at the same time it seems ambivalent about whether that past is something to be revered or to be knocked down and replaced,” she explains.
“So there’s a tension about the place – between the old and the new, between the positive and the negative, between being knocked down and getting back up again – that I think writers find themselves drawn to exploring.”
Cottrell Boyce says it was reading the work of other local authors that drew him to set some of his own stories in the city.
“You grow up thinking that, if you’re going to write, it has to be about the Russian Revolution or what’s happening in London,” says the Crosby-based author and scriptwriter (Millions, 24 Hour Party People).
“Alan Bleasdale and Willy Russell proved that it’s possible to write about Liverpool, about the place where you grew up.”
The grittiness of Bleasdale’s own writing is a common factor in those stories featured in The Book of Liverpool, but there’s a celebratory feeling there, too.
“We definitely didn’t feel under any pressure editorially to present a completely positive portrayal of Liverpool – in fact, we didn’t set out with any particular portrayal or agenda in mind, other than to try and generate some interesting short stories out of the raw material of the city and its history,” explains Maria.
“To portray a city in an entirely positive light, as if it’s never had any problems to overcome and everything is all sweetness and light is to me doing it a disservice.”
* THE Book of Liverpool: A City in Short Fiction, ed. Maria Crossan and Eleanor Rees, is available to order from bookshops, at www.amazon.co.uk and at a discount from the usual £7.95 at www.commapress.co.uk
