Keiran Goddard is a poet and novelist whose debut novel, Hourglass, was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott prize in 2022. His second novel, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, is a worthy successor. A multivocal narrative focusing on a working-class community in Birmingham, it follows Rian, Patrick, Shiv, Oli and Conor as they grow up and grow apart. Rian has left Birmingham and got rich, more or less by accident, playing the stock market on his laptop; the other four stayed behind. As Goddard observes in a striking opening sentence, “And then none of it happened.” Life came at them fast, and none of their dreams has come true. Patrick works as a takeaway delivery biker, and has two children with Shiv; Oli is a drug dealer too fond of his own supply; Conor has a chaotic home life, and a plan to make things better.

At the beginning of the novel, these childhood friends get together for a night out, and Conor asks Rian if he can borrow money to embark on a construction project. By the end of the book, they’ve gone through a tragedy that seems to have cut them off definitively from their past.

There’s a subtly radical treatment of narrative here. Rather than kinetic or dynamic storytelling, what Goddard offers as he switches between the voices of his five main characters is a series of tableaux and character studies; internal monologues presenting the latest state of affairs, while the plot goes on seemingly just behind the text, reported to but not exactly witnessed by the reader. At its best, the technique is reminiscent of Jon McGregor’s most successful novels, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things and Reservoir 13; voices and images succeed one another, accumulating into a composite portrait of people becoming unmoored from youth.

It’s not always entirely satisfying, as the technique dispenses with the pleasure of pure, live storytelling, one thing flowing into another. There’s little vocal differentiation, and so without conventional dramatic scenarios in which the characters can extensively interact, the text sometimes becomes a monochrome reading experience. There is also a slight tension between the book’s close focus on a small friendship group and its occasional gestures towards having something larger to say about Birmingham, or even England.

Goddard’s characters each feel isolated within their own lives, and remain isolated from the wider world when they get together; what the novel studies is a friendship group, not a wider community. Many great writers about work, from Robert Tressell to David Storey and right up to Boiling Point on the BBC last year, have sought to dramatise the hustle and bustle of a workplace; the building site at the heart of Goddard’s novel is only really seen and overheard from a distance.

However, these are caveats that do not obscure the success of a moving and highly successful character portrait. The cliche goes that second novels, like second albums, are tricky to navigate; having had the whole of their lives to get the first ones right, writers sign contracts giving them 18 months or two years in which to repeat the trick. It’s a lazy reading of how artists develop. Whether they succeed or not, second novels are the moment when a new way of seeing the world, announced with the writer’s debut, begins to develop and grow – the single book gives way to the multifaceted career, and the writer’s direction of future travel begins to emerge. This novel left me eager to follow Goddard’s work as he continues to develop.

About the author

“Blood and Lightning is a stellar and vivid depiction of an industry that has long been mythologized in popular culture. Kiskaddon’s memoir offers a candid perspective on both the business and creative sides of tattooing. As it dives into a cultural rite of passage, Kiskaddon’s work also excels as a character study.”

—Booklist

“In Blood and Lightning, we don’t just enter the silent and physical spaces within the world of tattooing, instead the spaces are lived, examined, and connected to our humanity. Kiskaddon shows how tattoos, like history and storytelling itself, can evolve depending on the body or the world they occupy.”

—Devin Katayama, Senior Produce for NPR’s Throughline

“Written in an easygoing style, Kiskaddon’s narrative ends up as much a workplace memoir as an anthropological study, where the work being documented is both tattooing and ethnography itself, with frequent references to taking field notes and finding ways to get interviews (paying for a tattoo turns out to be the best way to get a tattoo artist to talk for two hours). It’s a charming and thoughtful slice of life.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Blood and Lightning is an illuminating peek behind the doors of a tattoo shop, digging into the realities, ethics, and philosophy of altering the bodies of strangers.”

—Ashley Holstrom, Foreword Reviews

“Kiskaddon’s sensuous ethnography takes us behind the scenes in the mecca of tattooing—Oakland, California. His richly detailed prose sings as he describes his apprenticeship: learning the right touch, both needle-to-skin and with other members of this ‘cool’ shop. More than any other ethnography I’ve read, this one breathes on the page: we inhale the sharp snap of isopropyl alcohol and the tang of sweat, while early Black Flag pumps out the speakers, thumping over the hum of machines, phone calls, and pain-filled exhalations of the clients. “

—Jennifer C. Lena, author of Entitled: Discriminating Tastes and the Expansion of the Arts

“In this book, Kiskaddon covers ground that few researchers have been willing to traverse. Moreover, he is a scholar/tattooist, a combination rarely seen in the serious literature about tattooing.”

—David C. Lane, author of The Other End of the Needle

“Very thoughtful and knowledgeable; pulled me in right from the start.”

—Stephanie Tamez, Tattoo Artist and co-owner ofThis Time Tmrwprivate studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn NYC

“Blood and Lightning is a landmark study of the craft of tattooing that is consistently compelling and rewarding.”

—Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books