Last Days of the Cross, Joseph Ridgwell, Grevious Jones Press 2009“An autobiography is only to be trusted” George Orwell once wrote, “when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” With Last Days of the Cross, Joseph Ridgwell, bastard son of Arturo Bandini and the Artful Dodger, admirably rises (or perhaps sinks) to the challenge. It’s with a mix of bleak authenticity, lunatic ambition but above all self-deprecating charm that Ridgwell creates a gem of a book that will horrify the more faint-hearted of the cognoscenti (but, frankly, to hell with them).The rich seams of misery and near-ruin have long been mined for literary Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, W. H. Davies’ The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp. Long is the list of those who’ve sought out enlightenment amidst lives led below the breadline (whether through choice or necessity), using the force of will to survive and somehow prosper through the grimness. In the Last Days of the Cross, there are barrel-loads of misery. Rail-trucks full of it. There’s so much it has its own factories and Five Year Plans with Ridgwell a veritable Stakhanov at the coalface. Misery, debauchery, destitution, thwarted dreams and the burning resolve of the damned. Last Days of the Cross has it all in abundance. It is also one of the funniest books you’ll read this year.The book recounts the trials and adventures of young Joseph having departed the shores of Blighty, bound for the care-free beaches of Australia and literary greatness. Instead our hero finds himself living in a dosshouse amidst the ramshackle decadence of Sydney’s red-light district, falling in love with a junky aborigine girl called Rosie who robs him blind and periodically leaves him to wallow lovelorn amongst bottles of rot-gut wine, porn cubicles and peeping toms. The twin struggles of finding love and writing his masterpiece propel the book through picaresque encounters with addicts, lecherous spinsters and the eternal evils of the landlord and the boss.For a writer like Ridgwell who has carved out a reputation as something of a literary pugilist (never ceasing to stir up trouble, intentionally or not), Last Days of the Cross is a surprisingly freewheeling story, being hilariously self-deprecating and quixotic. Unlike many of the hipster free-verse disciples of Bukowski, Ridgwell has learned the old bard’s most valuable lesson; it’s not believing in some sense of smug deadbeat cool that counts, it’s being aware of and utterly honest about your own innate ridiculousness. Last Days… is funniest at its most triumphant and its bleakest (often these moments are indistinguishable); “No longer would I be Joseph Ridgwell, the Bard of Kings Cross but Joseph Peanut King!”For all the bravado that you fear may come with its subject matter, it’s an astonishingly open-hearted book in an age when literary games, trickery and dislocation seem paramount, a tender, even gentle, carouse through the gutter. There’s even an openness to the world that marks Ridgwell out as a romantic. Sure enough there’s something in here to offend everyone, with the narrator throwing out casual insults and non-PC remarks continually along the way but it’s done with a disarming charm and more importantly the redeeming fact that Ridgwell fully includes himself in the sorry morass of humanity.For a book which concentrates on the folly and freedom (to starve) of the aspiring bohemian, there is, not surprisingly, a great deal of focus on the act of writing itself or rather the lack of. Seeking Li Po’s long-vacated poetic throne, Ridgwell soon finds himself at war with the blank page or in this case the blank screen, raging against his laptop and the Microsoft logo “which kept moving in diagonal directions” and which mocks his inactivity (“So you think you can defeat me, eh? You inanimate technological object! You think you can get one over on the world’s greatest living poet, ha, you mug. Can’t you see the odds are stacked against you?”). He labours to write odes inspired by the prostitutes viewed from his window or nature or, in one case, a museum painting. Ridgwell “Poet of Clouds,” Ridgwell “the Brick Poet.” He fails, initially at least, at each.With an honesty that avoids worthiness, Ridgwell tries to write an epic about “the street kids, drunkards… the lost, the lonely, the marginalised and the dispossessed” in the comically-superior hope his “childhood home” will be “turned into a museum and shrine by the Ridgwell Appreciation Society” and “there would be guided tours of the Cross – Ridgwell drank in this bar, sat on that very stool.” He emerges, it has to be said, with a genuinely great poem Kings Cross at 6AM but conquering art is one thing. Conquering life is not as easy.The course of love never runs smooth a...