Book Review: The Night-Soil Men By Bill Broady

In an interview with Richard Owain Roberts,* Bill Broady recalls the unformed stylistic ambition of his teenage years with the kind of serendipity that propelled Harold Wilson from the doorstep of no.10 as a holidaying child to his later Prime Ministerial tenure. For if, with the ten-year long gestation of The Night-Soil Men, Broady has turned a promising authorial hand into a métier, then his early acknowledgment of the influence of Howard Spring looks to have been uncommonly prescient: the style, characterisation and attention to narrative structure that uniquely identify the former Manchester Guardian journalist’s fiction are revisited in refreshing, faintly anachronistic, abundance in Broady’s magnum opus.

Not least in the setting of his novel, whose opening in fin de siècle Bradford, mirrors the terrain, and the thematic milieu of Spring’s Fame is the Spur. Where the latter explores the trials and tribulations of the aspirant industrial classes, The Night-Soil Men is an eloquent fictional account of both documented and imagined historical events. Both writers are skilled researchers: the old West Riding’s still-burgeoning textile industry and its geographical markers are drawn with extraordinary care and, where doubtful, with cultural perspicacity. And both, in delivery and bravura storytelling, play to the gallery without the accumulations of subordinate clauses and shameless flourishes of Dickensian bathos. Broady’s long narrative, covering the early years of Socialism in Yorkshire, its chief architects and their slow rise to significance in the wider arc of the movement, is beautifully rendered; the sights, sounds and smells of contemporary Bradford, are delivered in accretions and the received effect is profoundly satisfying. A genuine page-turner, Broady’s efforts gird his novel with authenticity and paint a compelling and even-handed picture of industrial foment, of the presence of self-serving agendas alongside sincerity of motive, and of pragmatism determining the direction of political expedience.

One of the novel’s central ‘actors’ – Victor Grayson, politician, roué and unashamed narcissist ...

Where Broady diverges from his mentor is in an astonishing facility for humour, but more pressingly, in a tendency to grapple, in eye-opening detail, with the sexual proclivities of his protagonists. In these senses only, Broady’s book discloses a fuller, more gratifyingly human, account of an era that was as disposed to the blandishments of comedy and sex, as the contemporary literary world – save for the Modernists and other experimentalists – was to denying their existence. In places brutally frank, The Night-Soil Men is a panorama of human motive, an investigation of the ambiguous interior of behaviour as much as of the prevailing cultural terrain, and therefore a more thorough measure of that culture’s propensities. The presence of Freud – his work had become conspicuous by the early part of the twentieth century – shadows Broady if only in the fictive actuation of the former’s theories. One of the novel’s central ‘actors’ – Victor Grayson, politician, roué and unashamed narcissist – is an irrepressible pursuer of the id; his libidinous pan-sexual conquests are no less than extensions of a philosophy of nihilism, whose roots seem to lie in a surreal early sequence of The Night-Soil Men where the fourteen-year-old boy runs away to sea to be impaled in a homoerotic landscape of both servile and proactive abuse.

When in comedy mode – there is humour on every page – Broady can explode the balloon of serious political discourse and class commitment in one well-turned and hilarious paragraph...

Here, we find the tendrils of an explanation, if not an excuse, for the relentless disinterest of a man who, in Broady’s highly persuasive reading, can feel truly alive only in the immediacy of the moment – whilst, for example, being sodomised by a stranger, or committed quite willingly to the iron mercy of the shells of Flanders. And if we can account for the accuracy of Broady’s portrait of this charismatic and complex charmer – my own grandmother heard him speak in Huddersfield before the Great War and would cheerfully have corroborated the likeness – the documentary record of Grayson’s stunning victory for the Independent Labour Party in the 1907 Colne Valley By-Election is a testament both to his eloquence, and to Broady’s assiduous research. Combining wit with acute perceptiveness, the latter’s reading of Grayson’s unprompted priapic urges finds a characteristic joie de vivre in a vicar/early mentor’s absurd equation of a standing erection and religious good sense:

‘”The virile member points upwards to Heaven, Victor, not downwards to Hell. Think of it as God’s fingerpost, exhorting you to rise, not fall.”’

The equation would be irresistible to Grayson: this Joe Orton of the political universe who was as manifestly unsuited to the demands of his successive posts as the latter was to fidelity, is never less than a mirror to his own reputation. Marrying the bohemian, and similarly outspoken, bisexual figure of Ruth Nightingale, Grayson finds comfort, most, in her amoral and left-field insouciance, a kind of facsimile of his own. Amongst the deflections of humour and ribaldry, Broady traces the rise of populism and fascism in the snake-oil charlatanry of Grayson, who charms the knickers, and occasionally underpants, off his audience members. He has little affiliation beyond the application of public speaking and foreshadows the arrival of the preening political turncoat, Oswald Mosley, who makes a minor appearance in the story. There is a baseline honesty to Grayson’s shows of braggadocio; he is venal, self-serving and brilliant but he is no hypocrite in Broady’s rendering, and makes no apology to a working class that is delusional in its adherence to the idea of true equality. Whatever Broady makes of the man who became a cause célèbre when he, in some ways fittingly, disappeared in 1920, his reading is seductive but profoundly unflattering, a triumph, perhaps, of fictional licence over historical accuracy. When in comedy mode – there is humour on every page – Broady can explode the balloon of serious political discourse and class commitment in one well-turned and hilarious paragraph, here reducing an imagined, but typically inebriate, Grayson to an inert, priapic nothing, against the backdrop of a rally:

‘Muzzy with cognac and camphor he would dimly hear the crowd roaring as his right honourable member rose to orate. It would wax and he would wane so that, at the last, all that would remain of Victor Grayson would be a six-foot talking cock, spouting nonsense.’

Broady’s reading of documented history is, as ever, cheerfully manipulative, tracing, like Hilary Mantel, motive in the subtle architecture of speculation

.A dangerously seductive maverick in the words of Dolores, an ingénue and life-model for the sculptor Jacob Epstein, Grayson is conspicuous in absentia. A necessary tool for helping Labour to seize power, the latter’s relationship with the novel’s other two major protagonists – the physically infirm but potent firebrand, Philip Snowden, and the stolid, class-committed Fred Jowett – is ambivalent: admiration for Grayson’s brilliant rhetorical skills is tempered by trepidation as to the uncontrolled nature of his urges.

Two of those figures - the exquisitely drawn, mercurial Snowden and his fiercely intelligent, if preternaturally idealistic, wife Ethel - create a narrative counterpoint upon which hangs a wealth of near-satirical comedy, at the expense of Ethel’s lunatic pursuit of human contentment through the arch of ‘Universal Love’, and as an inverse reflection of her husband’s good-humoured pragmatism. The permanently crippled but mentally robust character who is hoisted onstage at a rally in a brilliantly developed scene at the beginning of the story keeps his audience guessing in anticipation, much as the later Snowden, in a turn as Chancellor, confounds his Socialist colleagues, and the country at large, with a counter-intuitive line in fiscal providence. Broady’s reading of documented history is, as ever, cheerfully manipulative, tracing, like Hilary Mantel, motive in the subtle architecture of speculation. For the Snowden presented here is wonderfully elusive, and invested with sufficient insight to plant a boot firmly in each of the class camps to whose polarised attitudes he is successively endeared, with the chameleonic ease of Mr Yorke of Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley.

Measured, again in the manner of Mantel, through the eyes of his major protagonists, the bit players in this early twentieth century drama are shadowed vicariously, by the attitudes and opinions of those actors: Ramsey MacDonald is returned as a handsome, if effete and generally ineffective, PM with little interest in reform, Keir Hardie as a Scots windbag, and David Lloyd George as a highly intelligent but deeply flawed appeaser. The single fixed point in a narrative of hardship, social change, and the limitations of power in a landscape of privilege – George V’s liking for Snowden is exercised within the parameters of an unassailable class divide – is the character of Fred Jowett. Fixed because his modus remains consistent throughout; this sympathetically drawn figure, reared in poverty in Victorian Bradford, and haunted all of his life by the image, and smell, of faeces scraped from the middens of back-to-back terraces by the eponymous night-soil men, never loses sight of the extremity of the working class condition through the prism of shit:

‘All Fred’s childhood memories – happy or sad – were pervaded by the smell of excrement.’

If we were to cavil at the length of Broady’s brilliant reconstruction of a time and a place – it comes in at 471 pages – any criticism is mercilessly sundered in the reading.

Broady’s terse sentence is telling: the image of the night-soil men, their inescapable smell and turgid nocturnal labours, becomes, as the novel progresses and by olfactory transfer, a metaphor for both a downtrodden class of people, and for Fred Jowett’s unequivocal determination to promulgate the betterment of those who labour thanklessly for little. And without equivocation, Jowett is the steadiest of Broady’s representations, a narrative anchor to Grayson’s wilder excesses, and an ideological counterpoint to Snowden’s calculated pragmatics. The presence of several night-soil ‘ghouls’, redolent of the leprosy of their occupation, at an early Keighley rally, embodies the narrator’s clearest indication yet of Jowett’s oxymoronic affliction of altruism and discomfort.

And it is in the presence of Jacob Epstein, and in a later visitation by Grayson’s apparition, that Jowett finally resolves the cognitive dissonance of ideological hope and corrupted Socialism into an epiphany: the first, in a new recognition of the value of modernist art to a thought process dominated by politics and suffering; the second, in the salutary reminder of an Augustinian epithet, as recalled by the ghost of Grayson. Here, Grayson’s papraphrase – ‘Inter faeces at urinam nascimur’ (‘Between faeces and urine we are born’) – provokes a retort whose significance, in the context of the midden, travels beyond the social levelling of Augustine’s intention to underwrite Jowett’s own sense of common humanity and ambition:

‘But being born between…urine and…faeces…doesn’t mean that we have to spend the rest of our lives there.’

If we were to cavil at the length of Broady’s brilliant reconstruction of a time and a place – it comes in at 471 pages – any criticism is mercilessly sundered in the reading. The failure of any of the large publishing houses to acquire The Night-Soil Men is immeasurably to Salt’s gain.


The Night-Soil Men is published by Salt (2024)

More information here.

*https://richardowainroberts.substack.com/p/bill-broady-thoughts-and-interview