The Unlit City by Patrick Hawkes

cw: self-harm, mental illness, substance/alcohol use

It’s hard to imagine now, in a moment in my life where apathetic perseverance is what I have committed to, that things used to matter.

That things used to feel like they mattered, more accurately.

Obviously, they never did.

It felt, it just felt, right (right?), that being alive was an important thing to be.

That the creative act was a noble pursuit and that the attempt to turn experience and/or emotion into prose was the only thing worth pursuing.

Anything that happened in life – be it positive or negative or some weird amalgamation of the two (which is most things) – had no purpose, no reality, until turned into a poem, an image, a story (I mean an actual story not a social media one, please), or – the highest aim of all – into a chapter of a novel.

Being a novelist, becoming a novelist, felt like the only true and the only acceptable calling in life.

In many ways, yes, I probably do think that is true.

A life that doesn’t reflect itself outwards is – for me – a life that curdles.

A life that sucks in the exteriority but doesn’t speak or advocate for itself is a husk. And that’s me.

Of course, I’m still posting things on this blog, but the posts here are all so much tamer than they used to be.

Yes, if you read regularly, you can probably ascertain that I’m quite fundamentally not-great, but even the misery itself is so passé that i don’t bother to write about it here.

Or even think about it much.

I don’t self-medicate the misery with the bottle and so on, I don’t scratch valleys into my arms with scissors and I don’t punch blue bruises into my flesh in any kind of regularity. No.

I’m not doing anything with the misery to make it narratively interesting, or even interesting to live.

It’s boring, actually, deeply boring, being frustrated by your own life and choosing to try to build solidity and stability rather than do anything that actually lifts or distracts from the ennui.

Like Camus feared, I have become a person who has a coffee instead of committing suicide.

I exercise on a Saturday morning instead of throwing up the regrets of Friday night.

I rehearse my performance routines while walking around the block instead of necking a beer if I have a free 10-15 minutes in the late afternoon or early evening.

I go home early. I wake up on time. I am punctual.

I pick the sensible choice, the responsible choice, every time. And it’s absolutely fucking intolerable.

What a relief, then, what an absolute fucking relief, to spend my reading time over the course of a few days with some people whose lives still matter to them, even as they disintegrate beautifully, poetically, achingly.

The Unlit City by Patrick Hawkes is self-published and, yes, it has the usual frustrations that type of book is known for¹, but there is very often both a clarity and a poetry to the text that means these elements can all be ignored: The Unlit City is by no means a failure of a text, though it is something that would now, alas, be unfashionable, for it is a grimy picaresque set in Soho and its environs in Central London, where consequence seems to skitter into the background as the young(ish) protagonists play, don’t play, rot, and don’t rot, to the sound and the energies of misery and artistry and intoxication and other people’s money.

–///–

There are four main characters, a group of friends who congregate for coffees in Bar Italia²…

One is a failed model turned something shady on the peripheries of international organised crime… one is a beautiful hustler haunted by a killing they did when self-defence got a little out of hand… one is a failed academic who writes poetry and academese on toilet walls in blood… and the main one, Joe, is a writer with a crippling block that only starts to recede when he becomes the pet-slash-protege of a very important writer type (kinda what Will Self would have imagined himself to be in the 1990s)… All of them live in and around Soho in the cheapest, dirtiest accommodation available, or sometimes in the luxurious homes of the people they seduce (or are seduced by..?)

Booze and drugs and art and literature and staying up all night and regretting everything and regretting nothing and sex and love and thought and poetry and conversation as an artform and love as an artform and life as an artform and everything energetic and felt and important and meaningful and hard and easy at the same time…

Surrounded by people who party, seemingly professionally, surrounded by beauty and opulence and overdoses and splendour and regret and traps and difficulty and travel and a lack of a sense of home, of stability, of anything really…

Any cash quickly becomes spent, lived through, on, with… any moment of peace quickly descends – or ascends – into hedonism, into chasing towards (or away from) something with meaning, something that matters.

To turn feeling into prose is the goal, to turn thought and knowledge and experience into words, into haunting, potent, powerful, literature. They seek danger and adventure and turn away from anything dull, anything.

The novel is full of parties as well as conversations, of action and actions and intoxication and its as much about being intoxicated as it is about doing the intoxication. Youth and beauty and hope and glamour twinkle around the edges of possibility as joy and the future twists and dances in the back of the mind.

I had a great time.

–///–

When I was young, I often drank in some of these bars. When I was young, I too believed that nothing mattered in the moment if it couldn’t be turned into prose. I too have never had money of my own to manipulate the world with, and I, too, have been buffeted³ by those that do. (See here.)

I, too, would have blown up my life to have the opportunity to be in the inner circle of an established literary success. I too would have slipped into serious and dangerous addictions had intoxication ever led me to places that I didn’t want to leave. I, too, did things that were not good ideas because I did them thinking of the potential benefits they would have to my literary output… And it’s nice, yes, it’s fucking nice, to be around people – even though they’re fictional people who exist only in a book – who feel the same way, who live the same way.

I felt, in some ways, like I’d gone home. To a more miserable, yes, a more miserable, time in my own life, but also to a more meaningful one.

Somehow partying and playing and losing control all seem so much more… literary… than being a good little 30-something who still posts a little too openly on their blog but doesn’t ever do anything, ever, really, to rock the boat of their own life…

I can’t remember the last time I made a bad decision because I thought that bad decision would be fun. All the bad decisions I’ve made in the past decade were decisions I made because I thought they wouldn’t be fun.

Because fun, yes, fun, is something that breaks you, something that drops you but, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, something that makes you feel alive.

I sit, then, far away from the nightlife of Soho, awake in the small hours these days only if my toddler has woken in the night, and on the occasional times I work late, travelling home on the night bus instead of the indulgence of an Uber.

You could write about the nightbus, sure, you could write literature about the nightbus. But if you’re the most sober person on the nightbus and you’re sat on it listening to ambient music while reading novels that won’t change your life, then there’s nothing to be written about you.

Only in the peaks and the troughs can literature be found – the stars and the gutter, baybe, and The Unlit City is a novel that really fucking knows that.

From grime and dirt and blood through to high fashion and swaggering properties and gorgeous fucking beauty, Patrick Hawkes’ novel grabs a reader and pulls them, face and crotch-first, through a mess of debauched London.

To be rounded in my comments, yes, I’d have liked the book a little more if it had ended without truly exiting, and if it had tidied up the timelines of its storylines a little more, but those are the kind of notes to focus on for a novel that has no other redeeming features.

This is fun, this is serious, this is glamorous, and this is engaging and very readable.

–///–

Some quotations to show the tone:

“The kind of face that only looks good when it’s dying young.” (Ch. 1)

“That was what they all wanted, wasn’t it? […] Not to go forward, not to change. Just to stay still. Half-beautiful, half-destroyed.” (Ch. 1)

“I used to dream of being brilliant” says one character in Chapter 10. A friend responds, telling them they are. But it doesn’t feel true. Even if it is believed…

“Her lipstick was half-eaten, her eyeliner still holding its own, and the bruises on her arms- just above the crook- had faded into something almost abstract. Not blue anymore, but green, gold, yellow” (Ch. 14)

“Until the reading turned to writing and the writing to silence.” (Ch. 15).⁴

“Everyone was beautiful, yes, but only in that expensive, transient way that photographs well and ages terribly, a superficial sheen over a deepening void.” (ch. 20)

The writing of one of the characters: “Aftermath isn’t epiphany. It’s residue. […] It’s getting up. Showering. Not smashing the mirror. Not disappearing. Not today. Not yet. It’s not a triumph. it’s just continuing. That’s all. You just go on.” (Ch. 21)

And that last one, yeah, that’s the bit that really stuck with me and sat with me as I finished the book…

An idea that is sometimes difficult to shake off from as you age… the idea that as things feel like they matter less, that they do. And I don’t know how to argue with that, what to respond to it with.

Because, right, do i want to be out on the town all weekend, vomiting in bins and barely sleeping and having chest pains the first half of the workweek? Is that what I want? No, it’s not. But what is there instead?

There’s a concept that addicts talk about which is the “dry drunk”, someone who doesn’t get wasted any more but hasn’t replaced the boozing and the partying with anything else more meaningful. And, usually, what’s encouraged to fill that void is religious faith, something that most people would now essentially consider a stepping away from reality, from personhood, from life…

I don’t think the only choices in life are constant hedonism or a god. But maybe, for some people, they are…

Literature functions as a god. The arts, the creative urge, the creative process, is a true thing. A guiding star. Something to need and love and never divert from.

Maybe I need to re-find my faith in books. Maybe I need to re-find my faith in writing.

I liked The Unlit City a lot. Yes.

But it made me think a bit about my life, which is generally something I try to avoid doing. And that’s my fault, not Patrick Hawkes.

Absolutely worth a look, especially if you’re someone who used to party in Soho and now doesn’t, well, do anything at all.

Find The Unlit City online here

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1. Formally, there is inconsistent formatting (especially page and paragraph breaks), chapter numbers are skipped, and – the most conspicuous one – there are no page numbers at all, and textually there are some jarring/off elements to the narrative and moments of characterisation that an editor would/should have buffed out. But it’s not shit, hence why these quibbles have been relegated to the footnotes most readers won’t get to… ↩︎
2. Like an old friend of mine who was into Pulp insisted we do the two times we hung out before our lives diverged. ↩︎
3. Buffeted like the wind does, yes, but also buffeted like “being the contents of a buffet”. ↩︎
4. And it does, it does. It goes. From something to more to nothing. Giving up because because because the heights are impossible to reach… ↩︎