In The Devil’s Carousel, Jeff Torrington depicts the last
gasps of Centaur, a moribund car plant, with a sardonic energy
amounting almost to rage. This is an angry book whose events comprise
a series of more or less tragic endings. In the opening sequence,
drunken Laker reads his letter of acceptance from Centaur with
its signature like "a pair of serpents either trying to screw
or trying to chew one another", and smashes his watch which
becomes fixed forever at 12.27. Curly Brogan – "if there
really was a spectre haunting Europe then a whiff from either
of Brogan’s armpits would exorcise it" – fakes his own death
to escape the monotony. Henry Wormsley (The Worm) who is forced
by his wife to take a permanent night shift, expires of a heart
attack on a fishmonger’s step, his epitaph a bit of banter from
a duo of "industrial clowns":
‘Why outside a fishmonger’ Hardy wondered aloud.
‘And why was he singing a hymn?’ asked Laurel.
‘A hymn – what hymn?’
‘"Nearer my Cod to Thee," of course,’ said Laurel.
The leaving-do for Twitcher Haskins, a loathed security man and
amateur bird watcher who is suffering the hallucinatory effects
of a blinding migraine, is celebrated with fake sentiment, bogus
reminiscences, and grim ceremony. In contrast, the demise of the
car plant itself – which will transform the workers from "men
of substance into factory wraiths" – is delivered with no
ceremony, the trembling voice of the Convenor full of panic and
pain:
‘Lads they’ve pulled the plug on us… everything’s to go –
lock, stock’n barrel. The whole shebang!’
This is uncomfortable reading, a sustained indictment of the brutalising
effects of late twentieth century factory life. The workers and
management are hopelessly divided, home lives are poisoned by
poor pay and long hours, the factory floor is strike-bound and
fearful of increasing mechanisation. By way of light relief, the
book is punctuated with excerpts from Centaur’s anonymous and
subversive newsletter, the gloriously mis-spelt and wildly surreal
"Laffing Anarkist". The mundane and downright depressing
events at Centaur are transformed in mercurial flights of fancy,
as when the recent deaths at the plant are parodied in an "obitchery":
The death is announced of Sandy McWhussle, the dearly beloved
bit-on-the side of Ella Choppers… long-remembered for his
innovative attempt to introduce oxygen to the Main Assembly Division…
Plans are now being made to launch a McWhussle Fund, with which
it is hope to sponsor any up and coming young alcoholic.
The Anarkist reveals a vein of humour and genuine anarchy in the
downtrodden workforce. But the ultimate irony of The Devil’s
Carousel is the workers’ final acquiescence with the system;
the plant runs like clockwork for its final ninety days when the
men want their redundancy pay-off:
‘A grand in the hand’s better than two feet in the picket line.’
The final morning at Centaur culminates in a tea-mug smashing
ceremony: a painfully futile gesture at the close of a working
life.
