While a picture of a cat has to look like a cat, the word bears no such relationship to the animal named. Language therefore poses an enormous problem for anyone who wishes to locate meaning in individual subjectivity. In order to express our personal views and emotions we have to use a medium which is social and arbitrary.Kress’s arguments to get round this obstacle verge on the bizarre. Talking about the German word for tree (Baum), he speculates on its etymological root in the verb “to bend” and suggests that in the Southern steppes of Russia some 4,000 years ago the most striking fact about a tree was that it bent in the wind.

But even if we were to accept that etymological origins were motivated, this does not allow us to escape the arbitrary nature of contemporary language.The only way to make sense of Kress’s argument is to view the current state of language as a form of alienation that in some other society might be overcome. There are hints that this is exactly what Kress does believe, and that what he sees promised by the multimedia future is a world freed both from the arbitrary sign and the alphabet, in which pure subjectivities would exchange their emotions in motivated images. Such a Romantic vision would have been all too happily recognised by that doyen of educational progressives, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.Independently of the question of whether this view is sense or nonsense (and both Freud and Wittgenstein would suggest nonsense), it is profoundly dangerous. Access to the multi-media world of the future is controlled in the present by those who have mastered the written language. Kress writes eloquently about the bleakness of the increasingly divided society that we are becoming. An education system that does not place traditional literacy at the centre of its concerns will accentuate these divisions, as the world will divide into those who can actively use the new communications technology and those who will merely consume it.It is true that the schools must engage much more actively with the new technological forms and media. But that engagement must include an emphasis on traditional literacy, which remains ever more central to power and authority as it becomes less central to entertainment and leisure..

Tyneside has undergone a massive reconstruction in recent years, but it is nothing compared to its literary reinvention at the hands of Paul Magrs. The landscape remains bleak (rubbish-strewn streets and acrid- smelling civic centres) and the climate of casual violence bleaker still (arson attacks on schools and children dancing round dead dogs), but Magrs bathes it in a festive glow – as though the street lamps have been replaced by fairy lights. He sets Does it Show? (Chatto, pounds 9.99), his second novel, on a rundown council estate in his own hometown of Newton Aycliffe. It is an area so deprived that even the teachers come from one-parent families, but Magrs endows his characters with a resilience and a determination to transcend their circumstances which is most manifest in the vitality of their language. By the time that a police inspector asks if a family is “a problem family”, the reader knows that the question is meaningless.

So-called problem families have as complex and comical lives as everyone else.
Magrs first novel, Marked for Life – with its bisexual father and lesbian grandmother – saw the dysfunctional family come of age. His second also invokes respect for a group of people who would make every one of Anne Atkins’ immaculate hairs curl: a gay teacher; a transvestite father who passes as a mother; a grandmother who prefers to have sex with disabled men and is looking for an amenable dwarf. And yet, although the new novel’s canvas is broader, its focus is less sharp. The gay lovers are less well integrated into the book’s scheme.Magrs – whose writing is reminiscent of Patrick Gale, Angela Carter and, in particular, the Frank Clarke of Letter to Brezhnev – is developing a style that might best be described as magic soap opera.

In Does It Show?, the magical elements, which centre on the visionary schoolgirl Penny, are less pronounced than in Marked for Life, but the soap-operatic ones more so. This is due to its council-estate setting and episodic structure (the book might well be subtitled North-East-Enders) but, above all, to its concern with the everyday problems of women.In Playing Out, his newly published collection of short stories (Vintage, pounds 5.99), Magrs writes of one of his characters that “He knew the kind of things women said together, he could imagine those. Men frightened him because his imagination ground to a halt with them.” It is tempting to apply the remark to the author. The gay lovers excepted, men are either inadequates – bullies, drunkards, absentees, amputees – or else fantasy figures, such as Cliff, the hunky bus driver (more Heath-than Richard), while the women are, in every sense, powerful presences.Magrs is clearly so confident of his fictional territory, with its mildly subversive but reassuring customs, that he is already becoming self-referential. Mark Kelly makes a brief reappearance from the first novel, “his tattoos sinister in the gloom”, while several of the new novel’s female characters reunite in “Judith’s Do Round Hers”, one of the funniest short stories.The stories are somewhat uneven and samey (all the non-working class characters are either writers or academics), but the finest (“Anemones”, “My Labrador, his puppy”, and “Bargains for Charlotte”) show Magrs’ talent at its best, their vivid dialogue, wonderfully weird characterisation and moments of transcendence making up for the lack of any larger statement. All Magrs now needs is a subject to match his style and setting, for his immense promise to be fulfilled.