North Shields-born and bred Tony Bianchi is of Italian descent but learnt Welsh so well that he took the major Fiction prize in Welsh, the Daniel Owen Memorial Prize, in 2007, as well as being nominated twice over for the Welsh Book of the Year for his novels in the language.
He also taught himself the strict poetic metres and was the 2007 judge for Welsh entries of the Ireland-based International Poetry Competition, Féile Filíochta, which he himself won in 2004. The son of a policeman, he spent most of his career as Literature Director at the Arts Council of Wales. Bumping, published in May 2010, is Bianchi’s first novel in English.
The first two of Bianchi’s Welsh novels explore with great sensitivity the compromises and realignments experienced by old people needing care and their families. Inspired by his father’s memories of his Merchant Navy days in wartime America, Bumping also takes age as a major theme in his portrayal of narrator eighty-six year-old Tom, struggling to adapt to life in a care home and the way his memories and thought trails are about quarter of an hour out of synch with everybody else’s (indeed, John Williams, author of Cardiff Dead and Malcolm X, praises Bumping for this quality of slippage, “A wise and tender portrait of ordinary lives slipping slowly out of kilter with the brave new world around them”.) Tom is only one of three main narrators, however, making this a novel with truly wide readership appeal across the generations, as well as one of distinctive contemporary colloquial Tyneside voices.
Bumping interweaves three stories: each presents a character whose obsessions and attachments become magnified through chance encounters, leading to unforeseen and ultimately catastrophic results. The ‘bumping’ of the title conveys something of these random processes, as well as one character’s passion for recreational lock-picking. The stories are told in a number of voices: middle-aged way leave officer Frank; teenagers Nicky and Barry, and the heart-breakingly confused and ever-optimistic elderly Tom. The themes include relationships with home and place, male preoccupation with mechanisms and systems, moral evasion, and the tyranny of random events. Bumping is also a novel about youth and old age, delusion, lock picking and Californian ladybirds.
The author explains the meaning of the title and the impact of Tyneside on his writing,
“People bump into each other – as simple as that. The novel turns around a number of chance events. All of the characters believe that order, even contentment, are just an arm’s-reach away. If only they can get over the next hurdle, explain themselves a little better, show that they are worthy of love… then all will be well. But the pattern of their lives is much more random than they can ever allow.
“’Bumping’ also means ‘lock-picking’. You need to read Barry’s story to find out why this is significant. This is what he does, what he can do, it is his own, personal attempt at controlling a little bit of the world.
“Among the books that have influenced me is Ciaran Carson’s The Star Factory. I’d love to do for Tyneside what Carson did for Belfast in that book, and perhaps I’ll work up to it. It needs doing. But it needs to be elliptical, full of the unexpected, the awkward, the plainly barmy!”
Tony Bianchi is currently a freelance writer and translator, living in Cardiff.
