Book review: A Room Above a Shop by Anthony Shapland

Stephen Price

I first came to hear of A Room Above a Shop by Anthony Shapland in late 2024, pulled in as I am by a beautiful cover and the title, at both turns simple and full of intrigue.

After a lifetime of holding back, I’m unafraid to ask for things now, what have I got to lose?

And the more information that kept landing on my desk about this book made the urge to ask for a review copy something I could no longer ignore.

So, Wales being Wales, and creatives in Wales being (for the most part) as human as the next person, I badgered the author himself for a copy.

A thumbed through yellow proof that will forever be one of my most treasured books, and a book that, as a gay man that grew up on the edge of the valleys, in a world now gone, feels so much more than a book.

A doorway is as close as I can describe the utterly unique experience I had reading this book.

A doorway to memories buried deep, to forgotten lives of mine and others.

A doorway to forgotten hurts that remain among my generation and those who came before.

But hurts that made us who we are today, for better or for worse.

‘Tender’

In the small handful of review snippets I’ve read to date, the word ‘tender’ appears time and time again.

And before I’d even read a full page, let alone any other reflection from the book, the word became lodged in my mind.

“Tender. That will occupy the title somewhere. That’s the word!” But now, as apt as it is, it doesn’t feel like it’s mine. But without it, where do I start?

To begin, and not to give away too much, Granta, the book’s publisher, teases: “When two quiet men form a tentative connection neither knows where it might lead.

“M has inherited his family’s ironmongery business and B is younger by eleven years and can see no future in the place where he has grown up, but when M offers him a job and lodgings, he accepts.

“As the two men work side by side in the shop, they also begin a life together in their one shared room above – the kind of life they never imagined possible and that risks everything if their public performance were to slip.

Again, tender. I told you.

From the beginning

As a Creative Writing graduate (as I’m often reminded by those who care to throw stones or to discredit when they take issue with a news item of mine), the first lesson we’re taught is to ‘write what you know’, despite the urge to cloak, to armour, to ramp up the drama.

This is the key to Shapland’s success.. And trust me, this book is a success. He knows.

Tricky’s description of Kate Bush as having no relative came to me as I read A Room Above a Shop.

The Trip Hop music legend told Mojo: “Some of the greatest singers in the world…you can spot their influences. But Kate Bush has no mother or father.”

At no point did I sense another author’s voice besides Shapland’s – an instant weight off his shoulders, and an ability for picky readers such as myself to fall completely under his spell.

Something I did feel, and what I did recall again and again, besides music – a deep love of music, and the boundless expression and poetry of music – was a shared cultural highlight from last year of both mine and Shapland’s; Museum Wales’ groundbreaking exhibition, The Valleys.

Shapland knows this world intimately in a way no outsider could. The valleys are woven in every element of the novel, shaping it to be something it could only ever be in this world that we had no idea was so unique, so small, so fleeting.

And just as I saw myself reflected in a museum, for perhaps the first time ever, despite reading more than my fair share of works by gay authors (my first being a short story collection stolen from Abergavenny library long before I came out which I really should pay for, but 25 plus years of late fees don’t bear thinking about…) I recognised myself, my community, my world of days past in black and white, in the most delicate, dreamlike prose imaginable.

The pub as community hub, generations side by side, the slurs I’ve had hurled at me or said behind my back, the tensions, the shame.

The unbearable, suffocating, shame.

No one, but no one on earth can imagine the shame of being equated with a paedophile and growing up with such spitting, violent hatred bubbling at every turn.

Being made to believe such abhorrence might be unthinkable to many young gay men in Wales today. But believe me, we heard it enough.

So many of us, both alive now and long gone, made to feel the most unimaginable, weighty, unbearable shame.

Shapland’s writing conveys this, but no one but those who were there can feel it, can recognise the conversations and comments, as recollected and ingrained on M’s mind:

‘Men like that are born liars, untrustworthy, against nature, effeminate, weak. Light in their loafers, shirtlifters, nancies, benders. Men like that are a menace. Keep children safe, boys away. Abusers. Corruptors. Perverts.’

So many buried memories sprang to the surface while reading this uniquely beautiful book as I read along, and one particular cluster of memories that I couldn’t put away was of a town elder, a church elder, from my particular valleys town, Brynmawr.

Married, but childless, he was known to frequent the local public toilets with other men.

It was a running joke.

It was unsaid at chapel on Sundays as he handed out the prayer books. But everyone knew.

My nan, with her two living rooms, an uncomfortable smaller one for us, a show room for the minister, knew.

But everyone chose not to know. Not to confront. Not to bring the shame to his wife’s door.

He was one of the lucky ones.

A Room Above a Shop’s 146 honed and honed and honed pages might appear short when first holding the book in your hands, but they contain a world, a lifetime of worlds, in a way a series of books couldn’t.

Shapland’s prose falls like the gentlest of snow, transcending time and place, shifting incarnations of the two protagonists in the most masterful way I’ve ever read. Never confusing, the shifting also transcends genre.

Poetry, pure pure poetry.

Show don’t tell

The second lesson for any creative writer, is, of course ‘show don’t tell’.

In Shapland’s innovative poetic flashes, he doesn’t once tell.

Told perhaps in a manner similar to the workings of our brains, or my multi-thread survival-mode version of one anyway, the vivid recollections appear to happen in real time, as if being enacted and recounted as we read.

We feel the fear, the hunger, the trepidation as B and M meet. This isn’t your usual ‘will he, won’t he’ – the stakes are so much higher. To reveal this love is to be cast out, to have once been arrested… to even be killed.

‘Hesitant steps. B knows how to be with his brothers, with friends, how he used to be with dad. Men with men, mates. He understands how to behave, what to talk of, how far apart to sit.’

Shapland’s razor sharp writing gives us gay men away.

We live alert.

We live masked.

We live guarded.

And it catches up with us.

It exhausts us.

If we’re not careful, it deadens us and we look for any and every way we can to ‘feel’ again, so used are we to killing our feelings and our personhood.

No other book has turned a mirror on us like this, in this way, before.

Omission

Omission is as important to the novel as it is to the lives of the subjects. So many gay men are found out through the unsaid, rather than the said.

‘If his daughter looks, she might find it in his face. The ghost of a lie’

Once the novel, or long form prose poem as it felt to me, finishes unravelling the hidden lives of these two men in love, with its all-too-human fat-chance at a happy ending, the final pages are some of the most devastating I’ve read in any book ever.

There are no big bangs. Shapland is too clever a writer for that.

B’s futile bid for solace brings to mind The Irrepressibles’ ‘In This Shirt’: “In this shirt, I can be you, to be near you for a while.”

‘He tries to bring him back.’

Shown, not told.

Always shown, not told.

This is a book of deep importance to Wales’ hidden histories, most of which we will never know, we will never bring back, and a glimpse at a world – a thrill and a hurting – so few will ever understand first hand.

My version of a standing ovation for books I’ve loved is for them to remain on my shelving, for them to not make it to a charity shop and to be loved again.

This is one I will love again, myself.

This is something very, very special indeed.

Diolch yn fawr iawn, Anthony.

A Room Above a Shop is available now from Granta and other good book shops.