Happy Days

Jason Williamson Happy Days (2018)
Gave up after fifty pages without so much as a sniff of the Fonz...

Possibly in the way of a joke which gets better with each telling, Happy Days inhabits the same territory as Williamson's previous, substantially slimmer collection, but is somehow more convincing, more satisfying - if that's quite the right term. Where Slabs from Paradise was a short and sour belch in the reader's face, but probably in a good way, this one settles in and builds up enough momentum to say something beyond what may initially have seemed like an improbably harrowing version of Tom Sharpe. It's rich in the sort of working class detail that I'm not sure anyone else is bothering to record at the moment, and so much so that I felt as though I'd lived in a couple of these stories, albeit without the cocaine and swingers; and Happy Days goes further, becoming more than just a smellier Mike Leigh, as we see in Dolled Up wherein grown men take to transvestitism specifically for the purpose of getting into fights with dangerous shitheads. I expect Garth Ennis tried something similar at some point, and it would have been rubbish, whereas this is actually weird and amazing.

Naturally, it feels a little like reading Williamson's stream of consciousness from a Sleaford Mods record, but it's nevertheless impressive how well all that bile translates from that medium to this one, still side-splitting, yet still appalling.

Martin and Zanna start fucking as Dolly looks on and tries to remember all the things he thought he would be feeling when he finally got to do this but the fantasy's edge doesn't materialise. The house stinks, the carpet stinks, the sofa stinks and most who are in attendance look way past their best years, with Zanna being the exception.

It seems the title, Happy Days accompanying an image of a graveyard, isn't quite so ironic as it might have seemed at first. These are tales of it being as good as it gets under predictably dire circumstances - Liveable Shit, as the song goes; and somehow the tone is ultimately uptempo, which should be impossible given the details of all that goes on here. I am seriously impressed with this one.