The Smiths: A Novella by Michael Bracewell
A review written for Camilla Grudova's new Substack, Ivor Novella
Originally posted here:
Short sentences. Paragraphs averaging two sentences long. Michael Bracewell’s The Smiths has the feel of a pop single, say ‘Hand in Glove’, which he first heard on the radio in 1983. It was love at first listen.
These opening seconds announced a life-changing visitation out of absolutely nowhere. Mysterious, portentous, thrilling, yet profoundly charming. A sudden gale, blood temperature, roaring down an empty street on a summer night.
Forty-three years on, the experience of hearing The Smiths inspired this curious little novella.
And it is little: a mere 17,000 words, short even for a novella. The book’s designers have reduced the line length to ensure it achieves a respectable 110 pages. But it is frustrating to read as my eyes lost their mooring in the broad margins.
Once I got used to the typesetting, the prose is superb — arch, pithy and resonant. It compels the reader to go back to the album and experience the songs with refreshed ears. And while Bracewell’s intoxicated descriptions inevitably pale next to the wounded urgency of the Smiths’ first four albums (The Smiths, Hatful of Hollow, Meat is Murder, and The Queen is Dead), I was grateful for the nudge.
At a time when Morrissey’s reputation sits somewhere between Engelbert Humperdinck and Enoch Powell, writing about The Smiths is a risk. To avoid such issues, Bracewell creates a fantasy autofiction in which he leads the actress Carole Bouquet (That Obscure Object of Desire, For Your Eyes Only) through the London of his twenties. It was a time when Bracewell was stuck working in a menial civil service job:
There was no grade of clerical officer lower than the grade I occupied, and my attitude to the job was that of an overweight ghost assigned to haunt a car park.
The Smiths were his saviour, a glimpse of a world of intelligence and glamour. The litany of icons who inhabit Morrissey’s outsider pantheon —Jean Cocteau, Oscar Wilde, Pat Phoenix, Billy Fury, Candy Darling, Shelagh Delaney — are still strangely unassimilable by the mainstream. Even as queer art becomes hegemonic, such figures, like Morrissey himself, resist commodification.
Bracewell identifies Morrissey as a regional Georgian poet transposed to ‘hinterland estates, dank subways, bank holiday fairgrounds and soot-blackened tombstones, engineering brick and wet precincts.’ How bracing! It is difficult not to be nostalgic for what has been lost, however grim it was at the time.
But this is not a melancholy book. By the end, Bracewell is recalling ‘Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others’ and asking, “How could something so funny be so sad?” And just like The Smiths’ music, this book is both.
The Smiths: A Novella
by Michael Bracewell
128 pp., £14.99, June 2026, ISBN 978 1 399 63860 9
White Rabbit Books,
Here is a playlist I created of songs mentioned in the novella.
