Worthless Men

Cowan's fourth novel is slow burning. Its long sentences evoke the prose of an earlier era. Appropriate, given the book is set in 1916, in a small industrial town, at a time of upheaval.

Walter is an underage soldier, back from the trenches for one stifling day. He revisits the squalid riverside alleys where he grew up, son of a drunken father and a mother who repeatedly buys abortion pills from the pharmacist. A man revolted by the sexual incontinence of his customers, this pharmacist corresponds with factory owner Montague about eugenics.

Invalided out of the war and paralysed by trauma, Montague considers himself a worthless man. He seeks solace with the pharmacist's daughter, whom Walter loves.

The squeals and smells of animals herded to the abattoir next to Walter's home are a metaphor for the slaughterhouse he's come from in France, where barbed wire criss-crosses no-man's-land, snaring those ordered to advance through it. Barbed wire also links Walter with Montague, his commanding officer, whose family amassed wealth manufacturing it.

Cowan's novel may be slow burning, but it's scorching in its indictment of Britain's class machinery and that sense of superiority that views poor men, and women, as worthless. Worthless Men reads as convincing social history and its portrayal of historical attitudes to the poor raises questions for today.