RATMEN BY STEVE ELY, A REVIEW

It’s the light luxury brown of Blackheath Books Independent Artisan Publishing and Printmaking with stamped square Picasso whirl and the heft satisfies.  Ratmen – title is short and hot clear, cover an icon rattrap with pointed blood silhouette, red popped-out eyes.  Steve Ely it says over red bars; Ratmen. 

     West Riding Steve Ely in the back in a pic holds a sweet velvet black dog, stares at the camera full on.  Outdoors, dressed for it, ready for war.

     Limited edition is stamped inside then frightening quotes of rat cunning and rat paradox by Gunter Grass and Phil Drabble and Ted Hughes.

     Man and Boy; the Ratmen, no names, why would there be?  This is a book about a war not about Environmental Health Officers.  ‘You’re a Holy Warrior boy, don’t you know that?’ says the Man, page 30.  The Boy, escaped dead end drek of the poor, the North, of everywhere by luck by serendipity by calling – it’s his journey that keeps the pages turning and the chapters coming, that and the inventive fascinating practical frontline tactics of the kill/cull of the rat enemy.

     I followed the boy, his growth and learning and risks into the expanding rat world; he ‘doesn’t want to become a beast’ - and loving the unmadness and zeal of the Man, a Nazirite, a teacher letting slip hints and rules, his nurture rough.  ‘Don’t be showing me up’, he says as more ratmen enter the picture in old vans and the jobs become larger, more important and globally crucial; domestic gardens and frightened wives to new developments of chain restaurants to commercial breweries to India, Karni Matta, the Rat King . . . and slowly we learn about the dark enemy, its arrival, secrets and dumb abettors, its transmigratory soul – the only other like man.

     ‘I couldn’t get a proper shot’ the Boy apologises on his first rat job, then later, ‘A conspiracy?’ in disbelief, till he cries, ‘We’ve got to tell the world!’

     Ratmen is a war story and an expose, colourful suburbia vividly painted via allotments and dogs and perversion and crucifixion and 4 x 4’s meeting on A Roads, Gulf War chemicals tied down in the back.  A dangerous necessary underbelly; simple maintenance becomes the tip of a serious apocalypse iceberg.  Ignorant habits and willful collaboration will tear our world of iPods and plump lonely pierced Goths with pet-sore mouths and compassionate do-gooder charity animal-niks suddenly from our office soft hands.

     Local history document and world warning, Ratmen is a thought inducing slow-scarer leaving this reader baffled as to his next step, his very place in the old order and grateful to the silent soldiers with the willfully filthy hands he has never met.

http://www.blackheathbooks.org.uk/46.html