Dave Langlois

Swarf Dave Langlois

Brothers have long been the grist of novels but most stories reflect bookend cases of sworn enemies or bosom buddies. This one looks at two brothers from the vast middle ground of those who just don?t get on too well. Blood neither binds nor spills. It does sometimes boil a bit, mind. Reciprocal misdemeanours like sleeping with each other?s partner or unilateral crusades like sabotaging the whites-only hiring ploy of the other brother?s sheet-metalwork shop plus one-off gigs like Heathrow jewel heists all tend to pitch them willy nilly into niggling tiffs and fitful fisticuffs. The setting is present-day West London. No, not posh places like Kensington or Bayswater but much further out, more or less where friendly bombs were begged to drop last war, the bit Dickens called ?neither the town nor the country but the worst of both?, or if he didn?t he should have done. Home, as the sheet-metalwork shop-sabotaging brother explains to his sometime girlfriend before she shacks up with his now jobless brother and he with his brother?s estranged but not divorced wife, ?to any industry that needed nowhere special and has crawled as close as it can get to London?. Home too to millions of Heathrow-deafened workers in those industries who are muddling through much the same mess as our middle-ground brothers but perhaps with less slapstick results. The setting is present-day West London. No, not posh places like Kensington or Bayswater but much further out, more or less where friendly bombs were begged to drop last war, the bit Dickens called ?neither the town nor the country but the worst of both?, or if he didn?t he should have done. Home, as the sheet-metalwork shop-sabotaging brother explains to his sometime girlfriend before she shacks up with his now jobless brother and he with his brother?s estranged but not divorced wife, ?to any industry that needed nowhere special and has crawled as close as it can get to London?. Home too to millions of Heathrow-deafened workers in those industries who are muddling through much the same mess as our middle-ground brothers but perhaps with less slapstick results.