The Arena of the Unwell

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Ranting on a mountain) Bastards! You'll all suffer! I'll show the lot of you! I'm gonna be a sta-a-a-a-ar! I often wonder where Norman is now. Probably wintering with his mother in Guildford. A cat, and the rain... Vim under the sink, and both bars on. But old now, old. There can be no true beauty without decay. I mean everyone is trying their best - and admittedly Diana Davidson has lovely hair - but it's just not enough to make any of it in any way interesting. Our narrator is Noah, a 22-year-old gay man who lives in London. He works in a record shop, shares a place with his best friend, and spends most of his nights exploring North London’s indie music scene, getting increasingly drunk at venues and pubs. He’s seeing a counsellor but knows that his NHS allocated hours are running out and soon enough he will be left alone to cope with his debilitating self-hatred and depression. His two closest friends are not only together romantically but they have a band together, and Noah, feeling that he’s being left behind, spirals into self-destructiveness. Apart from the laughs, the fabulous dialogue and the countryside misadventures the pair navigate their way through including fishing with a twelve bore and “narrowly avoiding a buggering”, it is the film’s emotional drive which sees us through to the end. The two have a fractious, complicated yet extremely close relationship which is in danger of falling apart forever as one of them gets a sniff of success while the other sinks into obscurity. But essentially Robinson’s production, partly bankrolled by George Harrison’s Handmade Films, is a sharply written study of a lost age.

Tea Shop Proprietor: The police, Miss Blennerhassett. Just say there are a couple of drunks in the Penrith tearooms and we want them removed. Marwood: There's a man over there that doesn't like the perfume, the big one. Don't look, don't look! We're in danger, we've got to get out.A really notable element of the book is the depiction of queerness in the indie scene, whether that's Noah trying to navigate the fact all the bands are singing about women they think wronged them, his repeated belief that he can't fit into any gay world because he doesn't fit in, or the hints of how the music scene shown has more space for guys who are apparently straight but maybe down for something with a guy than actual queer people. Queerness is just part of the novel, and that feels refreshing and not something I've seen in this kind of genre (though, admittedly, I'm not sure what kind of genre it is—music scene novel?). As their bizarro romance blossoms over talk of trashy novels and dead parents (no really) more and more folk are falling foul to the mysterious killer loose in the city, from sewer workers to roller skaters, no-one is safe.

But though Withnail, deliciously bought to life by Richard E Grant appears to be a malevolent twisted mirroring of Elwood’s humanity, he is also not afraid to reach into the depths of his soul to betray his more secretive reflections even if he has to disguise them as an impromptu performance of Hamlet “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a God! The beauty of the world, paragon of animals; and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dusk. Man delights not me, no, nor women neither, nor women neither.” LK: I’m not sure, to be honest. With The Appendix I wanted cis people to know that transness wasn’t misery, and trans people to know that there was hope, but The Arena of the Unwell is just a story. I hope it’s a good one, and that it connects with people and makes them feel things, but I’m not trying to teach anyone. There’s no moral. People can take what they need from it. LK: Noah’s voice is very conversational. It’s like a long monologue really, so it was sort of an extension of the dialogue. There’s a sense of humour, which helps to stop people from throwing the book aside for being too bleak, but the self-consciousness, that second-guessing, is dialled way up. I just tried to hold all those emotions in mind and think about how someone experiencing them all would talk. He’s falling and trying not to show it, even in the narration.LK: The way I write is quite auditory I think – I hear the sentence or dialogue in my head first, before I try to write it down. I don’t mean that it ‘just comes to me’ as if from an external force or god or whatever, just that I lean on rhythm when deciding whether a sentence works or not. So listening to music is out. It distracts me too much – not just from the words themselves, but also from the physical act of sitting down and actually doing something. If I have music going, I spend more time skipping songs and looking for something to listen to than I do working on the thing I’m meant to be working on.