We Pretty Pieces of Flesh
Colwill Brown
This novel, which tells the story of three best friends growing up in Doncaster in the nineties and noughties, is full of energy. Brown loves repetition and knows how to use it to good effect, creating striking and forceful images. At one point, she tells us that ‘words rolled into Shaz’s mouth like marbles, heavy, clinking against her teeth. Words livid, barbed, friendship-ending. Words she’d crack her molars on if she bit down, choke on if she tried to swallow.’ This image, like many in the book, is visceral and physical.
In particular, the novel is unabashed, and often very funny, in its exploration of the bodily changes of puberty and of teenage sex. One of the novel’s two narrators, Rach, tells us ‘we memorised where word went in a sentence, and built us sentences wi care around it, med sure we sounded like we knew how to use it. We learned so many words this way. We learned “fingering” and “blow job” and “cunt”’. This description made me laugh with startled recognition – Brown reminded me perfectly of the false knowingness my friends and I employed when young and which I’d long forgotten.
We Pretty Pieces of Flesh is also astute about adolescence’s contradictions, especially as they pertain to women. She observes that the ‘line between frigid and slag wut slimmest border, near invisible’ and ‘a Donny lass had to learn how to sink superhuman volumes of booze and how to act as if she hadn’t’. The three girls, inevitably, trip over these contradictions; the narrative becomes darker when they do.
Thus, behind the novel’s humour (or, rather, woven into it – it would be hard to separate the two), is a fury about injustice – both gender inequality and the inequalities of class and geography. The novel paints an unflinching, but also affectionate, portrait of Donacaster, telling us that the three friends ‘dint know that t’skills they’ll acquire to survive this place aren’t transferable, that you can’t parlay advanced levels of cheek, banter and surliness into a management post wi a competitive salary’. This single sentence captures what I most admired about this novel – its ability to be funny, sad and defiant all at once. I won’t forget the boldness of Brown’s novel, or its characters, easily.
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