In retrospect, the 1970s and early '80s look a bit weird. A time of fantastic pop music, scratchy man-made fibres and cold war - talk about the good, the bad and the ugly. Those who lived through it may have noticed a sense of the sinister and supernatural that permeated popular culture. But while the rest of us moved on - perhaps with a sigh of relief - the people of the enigmatic northern town of Scarfolk appear to have chosen a very different path...
'Discovering Scarfolk' by Richard Littler is a work of fiction (we hope), based on 'evidence' compiled by Dr Ben Motte as he pieced together the story of his missing university friend, Daniel Bush. Bush and his two sons, Joe and Oliver, were travelling north to start a new life when a stop in Scarfolk changed everything. Joe and Oliver vanished, leaving behind nothing but a mysterious cloud of stationery. A panicked Daniel seeks help from the locals, who are at first unresponsive, then evasive and finally downright weird...
Very dark but also laugh out loud funny, 'Discovering Scarfolk' is a quintessentially British satire of a time long gone and a place that might still exist in some remote corner of our island. Graphic artist Littler includes some eye catching parodies of public information posters and other ephemera that are so realistic I had to remind myself that they weren't real. Not even the book about practical witchcraft. The skilled blurring of fact and fiction just adds to the simultaneous unease and feeling of familiarity that pervades the book. 'Discovering Scarfolk' is an uncanny valley for the UK in the 1970s.
The only weakness here is the plot, but it hardly matters. It's the idea of the time and place which is the star and the villain of the piece, and how Littler uses all the media at his disposal to teach us a thing or two about growing up before social media posts and digital photography allowed us to record every moment, making remembering anything almost unnecessary. On every level, this is a book about memory and the tricks it can play.
'Discovering Scarfolk' is a book for people with a 'League of Gentlemen' sense of humour (unsurprisingly, Mark Gatiss is a fan), especially those who grew up in the '70s. I'm sure there are many references this generation will get that I missed.
In Scarfolk, the past is a foreign county. They do things very differently there.
For more information, please reread this post.
Related Links
The Scarfolk Blog
