Etruscan Books publishes John Healy’s novel, The Metal Mountain

John Healy’s second novel promises to be every bit as electric as his first and as his astonishing and award-winning autobiography.

London is a city of ruins and rubble: in fighting against a police state Britain has become almost a police state itself.

Rationing is still in place, the black market is thriving, medical shortages have resulted in antibiotics being watered down. 

New arrival seventeen-year old, Bridget Kelly, dreams of a world where everyone is equal. “There is no cause more dangerous” warns one council official as she sets about the task of
trying to make her dream come true. She is courageous and determined and in terrible danger.

Meanwhile, her nephew Michael schemes and plots to win the metal mountain, a gothic edifice, a treacherous Hades, a fabulous kingdom of iron.

A perverse grand tragedy with an edge of iron.

 

John Healy was born on Armistice Day 1942, the firstborn of five children, of an Irish family in Kentish Town, North London. He was a teenage boxing champion; although he won many amateur titles, he was already an alcoholic. Pressed into the army in 1959 he went AWOL. On capture Healy got transferred to a penal battalion.  he then spent fifteen violent, destitute years living rough at a time when begging carried an automatic prison sentence.
During one incarceration his cellmate Harry the Fox taught him to play chess. At the age of thirty Healy would win ten major British chess tournaments, forcing a draw from the Soviet grandmaster Rafael Vaganian, then graded the second best player in the world. Healy was able to play four games simultaneously while wearing a blindfold.

In 1986 living on a council estate at King’s Cross he wrote his ‘savage masterpiece’ The Grass Arena, (now a Penguin Modern Classic), which won the J. R. Ackerley Prize in 1989 for autobiography. The following year The Grass Arena was made into a film directed by Gillies Mackinnon. This won the Michael Powell Award for Best British feature film. The book and the film of the book have gained between them over a dozen major national and international awards.

In 1991 The Grass Arena was published in France by Gallimard as L’Arène. His first novel Streets Above Us was published in 1990.

In 2008 a documentary about John Healy Barbaric Genius by Paul Duane, was nominated for the Grierson Award. In 2010 his Coffeehouse Chess Tactics was shortlisted for the Guardian Chess Book of the year.

The Metal Mountain is John Healy’s second novel, published 30 years after The Grass Arena.

Posted on March 6, 2019