Summat Else

Linda M. Bayley is a freelance writer based in Sudbury, Ontario. She is
the author of Estrangement: Poems.

Unless you have some experience with working-class English idiom, the
world of Enoch Jones—juvenile delinquent and sometime rent boy from
Birmingham—will be foreign to you.

But then, Enoch Jones himself navigates his own world as a foreigner
would, learning every lesson the hard way. He doesn’t understand that
his father can’t read until he humiliates him on a special occasion.
He doesn’t know that he was adopted until around his 18th birthday,
when an incident at his detention centre puts him in the infirmary and
his family’s medical history is called into question. The matter of
his sexuality and the business of becoming a prostitute in Barcelona are
equally difficult threads to unravel. Enoch Jones’s world is a hard
place.

There are soft edges, however. We learn that Enoch’s natural mother
really did love him, and Enoch loves his adoptive mother, in his own
way. These are the things that rise to the surface after the book is
ended and the difficulties of dialect have faded away. If you’re an
average Canadian reader, it might be a couple of weeks from the time you
put down Summat Else before you fully appreciate its beauty.