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Another literary figure to watch
I’ve just finished reading Playing Possum by Kevin Davey. It is a new novel, set in Whitstable.
It is an intriguing book, but also quite disorientating as the story keeps fracturing across time and genre in a way that makes it difficult to know where you are.
I suspect this is deliberate. The central character is an American poet, Thomas Stern, who astute readers will quickly recognise as T.S. Eliot.
Eliot’s most famous poem, The Waste Land, was supposed to have been written in a shelter in Margate, and it is to Margate that our fictional character is travelling before his journey is cut short and he finds himself in Whitstable instead.
The year is 1922, the same year The Waste Land was published.
That poem famously made use of overheard conversations and found quotations, and there is a fair scattering of this in Playing Possum too. Part of the pleasure, particularly for students of Eliot, will be in tracing the references.
The novel reads like a series of clues to a story you have to construct in your own head and is full of the most astonishing and vivid writing. It’s almost as if the author is channelling the spirit of the dead directly onto the page, as if he’s fashioned a time-telescope through which we can look in on the scene all those years ago.
Most of the action takes place between the Duke of Cumberland and the Bear and Key and many of the events really did take place. So there’s a film, The Head of the Family, which was shot in Whitstable in the early 20s, and a political rally under a gas lamp between the two hotels, in the place known as the Cross, the forgotten omphalos of the town.
The novel also cuts to scenes taking place in the present, with drunken conversations of the sort you would recognise in any pub.
Our town is currently marking its place on the literary map. Not only do we have Julie Wassmer writing detective novels set in Whitstable, and a thriving literary festival, but there are an ever growing number of writers and artists working here as well.
Kevin Davey is definitely one to watch.
You can buy the book here.
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From The Whitstable Gazette, 29/06/2017
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Whitstable Views 
You did not mention Whitstable writer Lesley Cookman.
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True. There are lots of writers in Whitstable, and I couldn’t mention them all, limited as I am by my word count. Julie Wassmer had to serve to represent the lot.
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