Here are two exceptional, and closely related books I’ve read recently – both about cities, both about art – and that have provided matter for reflection and inspiration as I become ever more deeply immersed in my new novel project.
In The Lonely City, Olivia Laing finds herself adrift in New York as what was supposed to be a new life with a new lover is transformed by a single phone call into a period of acute loneliness and personal change. In making her way – cautiously at first, then with increasing confidence – around a city she finds it difficult to pin down as friend or foe, Laing examines the lives of others who have found themselves alone in the Big Apple, and the visionary, sometimes tormented art that has resulted from this experience. Edward Hopper, Henry Darger, Vivian Maier, Andy Warhol and David Wojnarowicz especially become Laing’s subjects but also her companions as she interrogates the idea of loneliness: how does loneliness differ from being alone, and is loneliness, by default, an inalienable part of the creative condition?
In Flaneuse, Lauren Elkin examines the traditionally male pursuit of city-walking through the prism of the various cities she has lived in and the women who have proven by practice that observing and writing the city is not just for men. New York, Paris, Venice, London are revisited and recharted against the backdrop of a novel-in-progress and a disintegrating relationship – is the third point in this triangle actually Tokyo? – as Elkin struggles to decide which is truly ‘home’. In tracking the footsteps of Sophie Calle, Jean Rhys and Virginia Woolf, Elkin reveals the art of ‘street haunting’ as a universal pursuit, a magnetic force that, for those who love cities, has been a guiding inspiration for women even when they weren’t ‘supposed’ to be there.
There are more and more of us out there, writing the bones.
A favourite Booktuber recently posted a video celebrating their ninth anniversary on the channel, marking the occasion by sharing and talking about a favourite book from each one of those years. I always enjoy these personal reflections – as most people who read this will know, I am an incorrigible list person. Watching the video set me thinking about what my own chosen books would be from the years of this blog. At which point, I was shocked to discover that I actually began posting here in 2011, not 2013 as I had thought.
2011 was the year Chris and I started living together, the year I left London and moved to Hastings, the year Chris published his twelfth novel The Islanders. I had not yet published a novel. From my end-of-year post I can see that I spent most of 2011 writing short fiction, stories such as ‘The Elephant Girl’ (which would eventually find its way into The Dollmaker), ‘The Barricade’, and ‘Fairy Skulls’, which remains a favourite (and not least because I can still see the expression on Chris’s face when I told him what the title was).
Reading that end-of-year post brings such predictably mixed feelings. Aching sadness, enormous gratitude, and not a little befuddlement. Fourteen years is nothing, just the flick of an eyelash, but in terms of personal history and when viewed in retrospect it can feel like an epoch. I look at the photograph Chris took of me on Boxing Day 2011, standing outside a model shop in Swanage that had a Dalek in the window. I’m wearing a black corduroy baker boy cap I ended up leaving somewhere on the tube (I am always losing hats on the tube), a three-quarter-length denim coat with a fleece collar and silver quilted lining I loved so much that in the end it grew too ratty (even for me) and I had to let it go. I am laughing now, as I was in the photo, because Chris never did stop castigating me for my nostalgic attachment to Doctor Who, though he was always there with the camera to record me standing next to a Dalek, a Tardis, a life-size cardboard cut-out of David Tennant.
Anybody home..?
I did not begin to keep an ongoing record of the books I read until 2012, and even then it was sketchy – just a bald list of titles. In the years since then, the habit has evolved to become an essential part of my reading practice, such that I now have a document for each year, listing not only the titles I’ve read, but my thoughts about them, the date I finished reading them and an informal score out of ten. Such things are arbitrary and might shift on a whim, but what is genuinely interesting and useful is to look back on the books themselves: what I was reading, when and why, how my interests have shifted and continue to evolve. From around 2015 onwards, my books of the year documents also include lists of books I was interested in reading, together with links to articles I’d found useful or pertinent. To possess this kind of record is invaluable, a window into the past, a distillation of time, evocative as a photo album.
Because I don’t have such a record for 2011, the year this blog began, I am going to choose instead one of the books I highlighted in my end-of-year post, Lila Azam Zanganeh’s The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness, which has never faded from my mind and that now feels all the more relevant to me in terms of what it’s doing, not just in talking about Nabokov (and I repeat, if you are thinking of giving him a go then this is the best introduction to his work that could possibly exist) but in terms of form. I have heard that Lila finally has a new novel in the works – I am sure it will be worth the wait.
For the rest, I am picking one book per year of the life of this blog to date, up to and including 2024. I have tried to make my choices as instinctual as possible – which book sums up its year for me, which still resonates, which still feels relevant to me as a writer from where I am now. One of the strangest things about being a writer is having an ongoing and permanent record of one’s progress through the world. Even though I don’t tend to revisit older work unless I have to, I do like to look at these lists, which show me as much about what has not changed as about what has.
2012: This must have been the year M. John Harrison’s Empty Space was published, because I can see I reread both Light and Nova Swing – the first two parts of the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy – in the run-up to it. Another hugely important book from 2012 was Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn & Child, an anti-police-procedural that has been an ongoing inspiration ever since. But the novel I’d like to put forward as my book of 2012 is Margaret Drabble’s The Peppered Moth. I remember picking it up almost by chance after a spate of particularly disappointing reading experiences and being powerfully affected by just how competent Drabble is at the sentence level, how articulate, how erudite. I still remember the feeling of relief at being in the company of someone who could actually write. Thinking about this book now, Drabble’s approach to fiction within the context of fact – and vice versa – feels especially relevant to my current interests.
2013: What a weird reading year that was. Some very odd (not to say disposable) choices here. Two stand mountains high above the rest, namely Richard House’s The Kills (still one of the most important British novels of the century so far) and – my choice for the year – Gordon Burn’s Happy Like Murderers, the first book of his I read and a defining moment for me.
2014: Another weird one, with again just two books standing out, Howard Jacobson’s J, which I still think about a lot, and Paul Park’s All Those Vanished Engines, which remains a touchstone work for me, a novel after my own heart.
2015: I suppose this has to go down as the year everyone (including me) was reading Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, but while it’s true there’s no forgetting it, it wouldn’t be my book of the year. That would have to be between Rachel Cusk’s Outline – my first encounter with her work – and Joyce Carol Oates’s Carthage, a novel of hers hardly anyone talks about but that has entered my soul and that I’m intending to read again soon.
2016: A lot of horror on here, a situation not helped by the fact that I happened to be judging the British Fantasy Award for best horror novel. But this was also the year that I read Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser (my first encounter with his work and still my favourite), Alasdair Gray’s great Lanark, and John Cornwell’s Earth to Earth, a unique work of true crime that had a hand in inspiring The Good Neighbours and that was a significant step on the journey to where I now am. It was Chris who introduced me to this book – he read it when it first came out and it’s his beautiful first edition that I still have. I am glad to say it is now widely available again, thanks to a recent reissue by my own publisher, Riverrun.
2017: The year of the Shadow Clarke, so a lot of SF here, plus I seem to have overdosed on horror again – don’t know what was going on there. But this was also the year I read the wonderful, wonderful H(A)PPY by Nicola Barker, as well as Katie Kitamura’s A Separation, which I happened to reread last weekend and that seemed even better the second time around. This is everything a mystery novel can be and do and I wish to God I’d written it myself.
2018: Looking down this list I remember the second half of the year especially as a kind of breakthrough, six months in which I read a whole sequence of books that turbo-charged my ambition and changed my whole way of thinking about what I wanted to achieve. Ann Quin’s Berg, Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, Greg Baxter’s Munich Airport, David Shields’s Reality Hunger, Gabriel Josipovici’s The Cemetery in Barnes all bring memories of intense happiness but particularly worthy of mention are Martin Amis’s gleaming amalgam of essays and fiction The Second Plane and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, another perfect short novel that inextricably combines zeitgeist with personal vision.
2019: I can see I read the whole of the Gordon Burn Prize longlist, which as always threw up some good books, most notably Eoin McNamee’s The Vogue and David Keenan’s For The Good Times, which deservedly won. Martin MacInnes’s second novel Gathering Evidence is right in there, too, as is Jeff Vandermeer’s Dead Astronauts. But the back end of 2019 saw me devouring The Topeka School, 10:04 and Leaving The Atocha Station by Ben Lerner, one after the other. What joy I found here.
2020: COVID, and I read loads. I remember early in lockdown reading Martin Edwards’s hugely entertaining The Golden Age of Murder, a history of the Detection Club, which sent me off on a mission to fill some of the gaps in my knowledge of classic detective fiction. I then appear to have read both the Clarke Award shortlist and the Hugo Best Novella shortlist, for reasons that are probably best left unexplored. In amongst all that though I was lucky enough to encounter for the first time Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, Gordon Burn’s Born Yesterday and Helen Garner’s The First Stone, which cemented her for me as one of the most important writers in my life.
2021: Another weird one, best described as diffident. Most memorable for reading David Peace’s Red Riding 1980 and 1983 back to back on an interminable round-the-houses train journey from Preston to Glasgow, and for The Names by Don DeLillo, which I need to reread soon just so I can experience it again.
2022: Difficult still to talk about these years. Starting to reread a lot of Ballard. Stalking the Atomic City by Markyan Kamysh, Souvenir by Michael Bracewell, and Optic Nerve, by Maria Gainza.
2023: In Ascension by Martin MacInnes, Alma Cogan by Gordon Burn, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman and Wish I Was Here by M. John Harrison.
2024: Loads and loads of Ballard. But also Thunderclap, by Laura Cumming, Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck and The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.
What fascinates most about all of this is how mixed each of these years has been in reading terms. Invariably there are those books I have encountered that would not have been top of my reading list – books read for events, or from awards shortlists – as well as those I have succumbed to, unable to resist the hype. A hazier category belongs to those that I enjoyed well enough while reading them, but that faded from memory pretty much as soon as they were read. Some are recognisably great, but not for me. Many are good books, but not world-shakers. But always there are those that remind you of what you are doing here, what you hope to achieve. These are the books that form the structural foundations of the writing life as well as the reading life, the books you are hoping – always – to stumble upon, the books that reinforce your aspirations, or change your mind.
‘Not so long ago this book might have been about Bill Evans rather than Erik Satie,’ Penman writes in his new, strange and cumulatively addictive book. ‘A time when I was lost inside a kind of willed solitude, fenced in by self-destructive habits and unassuageable longings. No visible horizon, everything in lifeless tones, handfuls of soil thrown onto a premature coffin. You come to accept it as just the natural way of things. Longing as a state of being. Saudade gone terminally wrong. A kind of exasperated bliss that becomes unhealthy, stuck, congealed.’
Penman’s 2023 book Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors became for me almost instantly the kind of literary touchstone or lifebuoy that I can only liken to a jagged tooth of rock, offering a handhold in a raging sea. The sense of absolute resonance – especially then – in terms of both how the words were put together and what they said was so intense for me, appropriate to my needs and interests in a way that, as one struggles with one’s own work and doubts, becomes increasingly rare, that I was initially perplexed by this new thing. I almost, dare I say it, felt disappointed. What the hell was it and why had Penman written it? The first part, entitled ‘Satie Essay’, read like I could have written it myself (for me this is never a good sign) and then what on Earth was the point of his ‘Satie A-Z’?
It seemed to me as if he had picked his subject almost at random then doodled around with it, a strategy that worked, just about, because Penman is a brilliant writer and writers of that calibre can make something of anything. But why?? I kept going because this was Penman and so how could I not. What happened for me was like opening a package, like playing pass the parcel: the exterior layers of ‘knowing’ were really covers for what was inside, Penman’s ‘Satie Diary’.
I had been feeling frustrated with the book for not being personal enough – what had been the trigger? – only to be confronted with what is, in fact, a form of confession.
It is a lovely, lovely thing. The kind of writing one dreams of. It’s – it’s a bit like Satie.
Everything in this book comes in threes, a kind of occult numerology originating – of course – from its source material: ‘Trois Gymnopedies’, ‘Trois Gnossiennes’, ‘Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear.’ Penman describes Satie’s most popular pieces – now so ubiquitous they would be instantly recognisable even to those who have never heard the composer’s name – as sounding like ‘pieces composed by someone who knew there would one day be recording studios, CDs, downloads.’ It’s so startling and so true, like almost everything else you will find here. Penman worries occasionally about his lack of grounding in music theory and all I can say is, you don’t need it, mate. The language of musicology, for the writer, is like most other academic forms: you can slip into it without realising what you’ve stepped in and then spend most of a lifetime trying to get it off your shoe.
Penman’s observations about Satie’s musical influence – Satie = Eno = Glass, Satie = Cage = Feldman – are spot on, the kind that can come only from listening, from the kind of understanding that is alchemical, that cannot be taught.
Again and again while reading this book I had the sense that Penman and I had been journeying towards Satie from opposite directions. He speaks – and I guessed this even before he mentioned it – of his being turned off classical music entirely as an adolescent through the ostentation, the insatiable, overbearing genius of the big beasts of the classical canon, the very idea of Wagner. Huge symphonies, ‘show-off’ piano concertos – they were just noise for him, a teachery view of music that felt not just irrelevant but actively repellent, the language around it – the behaviour – a deliberate act of gatekeeping.
For me at the same age, all that stuff was my safe space, a thing I knew about and could talk about and was therefore protected by. I didn’t hear Bill Evans until I was in my thirties. I listened to jazz at first with a kind of guilt, the sense that I was betraying something essential not only to myself but about myself.
It’s all incredibly personal. My journey in music is as deeply internalised and as intellectually significant to me as my journey in writing, my finding of a subject. But how strange it is, that coming from different directions, Penman and I, we meet in the middle: Tallis and Palestrina, the Goldberg Variations, odd end-of-century minimalism and electronica. Gesualdo. The kind of stuff you hear on Night Waves. Biber’s rosary sonatas.
I’ve just been listening to the Satie three piece suites again. There is something lonely about them. (Because in spite of his capacity for friendship, Satie was lonely – that room of his, stuffed with trash and unopened letters, says it all.) Something chilling – music for the end of time. (Messiaen – he’s another one.) Limpid. Eerie. Excruciatingly lovely. Music that makes me think of Chris Marker’s La Jetee, the stills in the museum. (Penman refs Marker in passing and how could he not?) Music that makes me ache with a sadness that can never be resolved.
I might never feel confident enough to write about Bill Evans or Thelonius Monk or Chick Corea – I don’t have the language yet. I would feel on safer ground writing about Gubaidulina or Saariaho. My feelings about Wagner, now, are too complicated for me to bother trying to unravel and suffice it to say that the man was and is a pain in the arse. I still think Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis is one of the most glorious structures in all of Western music – the sonic equivalent of a cathedral – but it comes from a time we have forfeited, flickering by us in disjointed frames from the Pathe newsreel of history. To an extent at least, the experience of listening to it can only ever be one of nostalgia.
Those little pieces of Satie’s, though. They’re a hundred years old, more or less. But they’re infected with the germ of our own time and that – well, there’s something terrifying about it.
Admirers of Gordon Burn’s true crime writing and of his novels, which tie imagined characters and events to the real-world news cycle with such skill the joins are seamless, are sometimes surprised to discover that Burn also wrote frequently and with equal commitment about contemporary art. Think about it some more though and you’ll see how these two subjects, art and crime, which on the surface would appear to be actively in opposition to one another, form an occasionally uncanny alliance. Artists, like criminals, often stand on the fringes of consensus reality, and it has been said about more than one artist that if they had not found their vocation, their life might easily have unravelled in a darker direction.
More even than that, art will invariably tell us a lot about the society in which it was produced. Writing about art, like writing about crime, is a way of identifying and parsing who we are and where we live.
Reading Burn’s posthumously published collection of essays Sex and Violence, Death and Silence: Encounters with Recent Art (much of it over a seemingly interminable recent train journey to London) has left me so energised and so confounded by the brilliance of his writing and the acuity of his insights I’m finding it difficult, at the moment, to think about reading anything else. In his own introduction to the book, Burn writes about how ‘more than most British writers, I think, I am open to the experience of art as an influence on what I do. … I tend to look to shows, and art catalogues, rather than to mainstream publishing, for stimulation (direction, really) and ideas. I feel that visual artists are consistently ahead of most writers in sensing significant shifts in how we think and see.’
How could I not think of JG Ballard when I read that? The essays in the first part of the book, on Blake and Hockney (‘You can do an amazing lot without leaving the house,’ Hockney says. ‘Vermeer never left the house, and neither do I.’) and Bacon, are subconsciously reflective of that Ballardian moment, that Ballardian mindset and for me Burn’s writing on Patrick Caulfield, on Caulfield’s (literally) visionary relationship with London especially reads like a Polaroid snapshot of my own feelings about the city. I love Caulfield’s work: standing somewhat in the shadow of Hockney’s, it’s not been written about enough. Burn’s writing about Ian Hamilton Finlay’s trenchant opposition to the modern world is more nuanced and more open-ended than Jonathan Jones’s recent review of Finlay’s sculptures at Victoria Miro and carries deeper insights as a result. (I adore Jones because he knows so much, writes so well and unlike most broadsheet critics these days is prepared to take on the haters from both sides of the fence. His reviews are always a treat – very few on the books pages take such chances, which is a shame. But c’mon Jonesy, one star??)
Burn’s relationship with the YBAs, with what he calls ‘the Britart moment’ as filtered through his friendship and extended conversations with Damien Hirst will and should go down as some of the most engaged and empathetic commentary on the seamier side of Cool Britannia and the new conceptual installations of Hirst, Hume, Lucas, Whiteread, Emin, Landy, Wearing and the other artists whose work shaped the 1990s as much as it was shaped by them. Writing about Hirst, Burn finds a comparison with ‘writers such as Don DeLillo, Richard Powers and others, who have acknowledged the poetic lure of modern jargon from science, sports and Madison Avenue in their fiction. Hirst located an unlikely poetics in the boilerplate prose of the scientific paper and the pharmaceuticals catalogue, and in the disease- and death-tainted artefacts of the mortuary, the pharmacy and the lab.’ He might well have added ‘as well as the crime scene’. Once again, the Ballardian associations are so powerful that it seems almost absurd that the paths of these two writers didn’t cross. Burn interviewing Ballard – one of those significant moments of literary history that never happened. Maybe it’s inevitable that they never met, though: they both preferred the company of artists to that of other writers.
But it is in his essays on the ‘court artists’ commissioned to make drawings for news outlets during high-profile murder trials, and on the German artist Gregor Schneider especially, that Burn makes the closest connections between his most prominent areas of interest as a writer. He opens his chapter on Schneider by revisiting his own work on the West murders, Happy Like Murderers (readers of this volume will already know from the opening conversation between David Peace and Damien Hirst that the original cover for the West book was itself designed by Hirst) before bluntly stating that ‘it is well known that Gregor Schneider has a lifelong interest in scenes of crime. As a schoolboy he obsessively photographed a place in the woods where a female art student had been murdered.’ Burn draws a direct lineage from Schneider back to the post-WW1 German Expressionist painters Dix and Grosz, whose art is filled with traumatic images of wounding, suicide and murder, quoting Schneider as having said that he ‘would love to stop someone getting away one time, but I have never dared to yet. I’m one of those people who live double lives and go out into the park at night and sift through the litter bins and secretly take something home with me. I assume that there are others working at it and I will probably never meet the best ones.’
Is Schneider one of those artists who live dangerously close to the boundary, whose work veers away from self expression towards actual transgression? I’m not so sure of that. John Fowles made similarly outre comments in his diaries when he was writing The Collector and there is a hard line, actually, between art and murder. But in drawing the comparison, in placing certain images, shockingly, side by side (Schneider thinking about his art, Fred West’s obsessive preoccupation with DIY) Burn is showing us something difficult, and difficult to think about. He is showing us what we all – somewhere, somehow – might have within us.
Paul Kincaid wrote recently about his response to a review of his new (and excellent) essay collection Colourfields, and how that review had made him take a closer look at what constitutes ‘his’ science fiction, and what that might say about him both as a reader and as a writer.
It’s a ruminative, almost elegiac post, looking back at a forty-year stretch as a science fiction critic. It includes a lovely anecdote in which Paul approaches Chris at a convention – the first time they’d met – and asks him to sign his copy of Inverted World. Chris, apparently, brushed him off and told him to go and get the book signed by the illustrator instead. Given the thousands of copies of his books that Chris was more than happy to sign in the years following, I can confidently say to Paul that his reaction at that early stage of his career would have been entirely down to feeling overwhelmed and vaguely embarrassed that someone had actually read a novel of his and thought enough of it to initiate contact. Chris was just thirty when Inverted World was published, Paul Kincaid twenty-two. You see what I mean about elegiac.
The deeply considered, wide-ranging and thoughtful review of Colourfields Paul is addressing is by Roseanna Pendlebury, who clearly gained much in the reading and – more importantly – was prepared to engage with the book on its own terms even when those terms diverged from her particular interests. She then went on to write a follow-up essay in which she gave more personal insights into her own version of science fiction. It’s this kind of investigative, text-focused writing that has always characterised the best criticism within SF as well as beyond it, that has been a primary source of inspiration in my own critical practice. ‘My’ SF – both in the kind of writing I’m interested in and the frame through which I view it – is much closer to Kincaid’s than to Pendlebury’s, but it is nonetheless a source of gladness and relief to know that there are younger critics coming down the line with the talent, wit and rigour to continue with the job of building SF’s critical hinterland. (Yes, I am still using that phrase, and yes, said hinterland is still as important as it ever was.)
Though the books Kincaid and Pendlebury list and discuss as best examples of what constitutes their personal science fiction are markedly different and say equally different things about SF, one thing I noticed about both critics’ posts was that they each made reference to a book that precipitated a radical change in their understanding of science fiction, what it could do and how they related to it. For Pendlebury it was her reading of Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, ‘the hinge upon which all this turns’, and which happened to coincide with ‘a shift in my own awareness of genre, where I began to genuinely pay attention.’ For Kincaid, it was his encounter with Keith Roberts’s Pavane, the novel that switched him on to science fiction as a mode of literature with an identity all its own.
Kincaid mentions also a period of childhood illness that necessitated him spending several weeks at home in bed, away from school and outside of his normal routines. It’s interesting, how many writers share this experience. Chris wrote more than once about a cycling accident at the age of fourteen, which left him with a concussion and a two-week ‘memory gap’. He often cited this sudden insecurity around the subject of memory as the germ of all his future fiction. Versions of the accident itself – or enforced periods of absence from school – crop up in several of his novels. In a recent interview on Radio 4, the novelist Maggie O’Farrell speaks eloquently of a serious childhood illness that led to her being hospitalised for several months, territory she has previously explored through her 2017 memoir I Am I Am I Am. Her premature awareness of the nearness of death, together with the physical separation from others of her peer group, completely altered her view of the world and pushed her to examine her thoughts and emotions through the medium of writing. When I was twelve, I unexpectedly developed pneumonia, and was away from school for most of the Easter term. I was already a compulsive reader, but this period of enforced isolation had a significant effect on me. My English teacher sent me a package of reading material that included Alan Garner’s The Owl Service as well as other books I might not have come across otherwise, or at least not then. This was also when I first started listening to Radio 3, hour after hour of ‘secret education’ that laid the groundwork for all my future interest in classical music.
There was something else about that time, though, something less immediately identifiable or tangible but profound in its effects. Time to think and time to be. Time to reflect and form opinions. Time to get to know oneself and one’s opinions as distinct from the crowd. I have heard others say similar things about a week at a writers’ retreat, a religious retreat or even just time away in a different location.
It is easy to become locked into patterns, into established ways of thinking, and most especially in the compilation of lists of significant books! I have made so many of these during my life as a writer. I enjoy creating them and I find them interesting – other people’s as much as my own. It’s no secret that I’m a lists kind of person. But in recent years especially an element of doubt has begun to creep in. Either my choices seem pre-ordained – books I have chosen before, and so gravitate immediately towards, as one might automatically assume the same position on a well-used mattress – or they reflect nothing so much as the most recent shift or enthusiasm in my current reading and writing. Not that this is uninteresting or without value, but looking at it from the inside it can be laughably predictable.
Which books have really, really changed me? I know that Chris’s A Dream of Wessex did. It was the first book of his I read, on a recommendation from a friend. This was in my middle twenties, and I had not yet started writing seriously for publication. I had not heard of Christopher Priest either, and before reading A Dream of Wessex I had no idea that this kind of science fiction was even possible. I wanted more of it – more especially of books by Christopher Priest. This was long before Amazon or Abebooks and getting hold of titles not currently in print was a much more difficult, some might say a more exciting challenge than it is today. It was mostly a matter of stumbling across them – in second hand bookshops, in the local library, both of which I made use of in my search for Chris’s backlist. Each new find was a source of delight and minor celebration. By the time Chris and I actually met, I had read everything of his with the exception of Indoctrinaire, which was impossible to find. In an echo of his earlier equivocation around signing Inverted World for the young Paul Kincaid, it was some time before I finally persuaded him to give me a copy.
(And of course I found it remarkable, his portrait of the artist as a young man.)
I had a similar experience reading Mike Harrison a number of years later. Signs of Life was the first book of his I read – it had not long come out – and I knew instantly that Mike would be an ‘auto-buy’ writer for me from now on. But it was his short fiction collection Travel Arrangements, published in 2000 and more or less at the exact time I first began sending my own stories to magazines, that opened up a new awareness of what one was allowed to do in fiction, if one had the gall to try. These strange, elliptical stories had no easily definable narrative – yet they immediately felt like a part of me, of what I understood to be the meaning and function of writing as a vocation. Their effect on my ability to read was similar to what had happened to me with Eliot’s The Waste Land, some fifteen years before.
There are three writers in particular whose whole oeuvre has cemented itself in my consciousness as indispensable to the way I see not so much the world at large but the business of being a writer who lives in that world. Iris Murdoch always wrote in the knowledge that ‘the mundane’ is a kind of myth, removed from the miraculous by the narrowest of margins. This, to me, has always seemed self-evident, and it is probably for this reason that Murdoch is a writer I can always drop everything else to read and then for however long I choose to linger in her world find it difficult to pay attention to anyone else. Vladimir Nabokov was a life-changer for me, the summation of my love affair with Russian literature but also my mentor and my guide. For Nabokov, writing was the thing, the only end, the life choice. Critics tend to get so wrapped up in his mastery of language that they often fail to mention how many of his novels are encoded autobiographies, the story of himself, told in different voices, the ultimate autofiction.
Chris and I discovered Roberto Bolano together and fell equally in love, which is its own set of memories, but Bolano for me – like Priest, like Harrison – opened a door into a new way of writing, and thinking about writing. His apparent looseness of style, his discursiveness – the polar opposite of VN – which is really a diversion, a unique construct through which Bolano approaches his subject matter, which is writing, writing, always writing. His repurposing of generic archetypes – the science fiction story and in particular the detective story, both of which he loved – to suit his own ends, which are invariably tied up in his obsession with form.
I always used to say to Chris, that if I were stuck on a desert island with only books by Murdoch, or Nabokov, or Bolano then they would definitely keep me going until I was rescued.
I have now been writing professionally for twenty years. My relationship with reading has changed, or rather, it has evolved, becoming both more urgent and less innocent. It is impossible simply to read; as a writer, one reads with the unspoken question: how is this done and what can I learn from it? And yet those high-wire moments of joy are no less forthcoming. I still think most days about Maria Gainza’s novel Optic Nerve, which I happened to turn to during a moment of acute foreboding. It showed me what could be done with fact inside fiction and through its discussions of art literally gave me back my sense of why I am on this planet. I think all the time about Emlyn Williams’s great, great true crime novel Beyond Belief, the darkest of subject matter set against the most brilliantly evoked urban landscape of lived reality, the ultimate masterclass in what this kind of writing should be and why it is necessary. Reading Gordon Burn’s Sex and Violence, Death and Silence and loving how he wrote about art as urgently and as brilliantly as he wrote about the subjects he is best known for. Seeing how such apparent contradictions are a continuum, how knowing this is important, especially to me. Understanding, every time I pick up a book by Helen Garner, that I will never come close to her naked and unflinching deployment of the pronoun ‘I’. Having to try and find my own way around that, but feeling through each moment of reading her an overwhelming and dizzy gratitude to be sharing space-time with this extraordinary writer.
‘What is it we’re reading for? I mean, why do we keep reading and rereading a particular novelist? When I think about Bolano – and I think about him often – invariably I find my way to the conclusion that what I’m primarily in it for is friendship.’
‘I read The Dispossessed when I still suspected that my anarcho-punk friends might be right about everything. While the novel rammed home the ways in which capitalism mutilates us, life in the anarchist ‘utopia’ of Anarres – hard labour, dust and aggressively policed mediocrity – made me wonder if capitalism wasn’t the best of a bad lot.’
‘Although I sometimes tantalise myself with the idea of moving to London again, I don’t need Heraclitus to remind me that you can’t step into the same river twice. The London where I lived no longer exists, any more than a dream exists upon awakening – a dream in which you were happy, in which life lived up to its promise.’
‘PROBLEMATIC: A judgement generated by the demand that art avoid describing what is and express what ought to be, and that we admire only art that issues from a stainless soul and a clean rap sheet. Everything in the human being that is messy, vital and interesting; everything shadowy, unconscious, offline.’
‘London Fields failed to make the 1989 Booker Prize shortlist, cock-blocked by two feminist judges who disapproved of the depiction of women. Even if you feel they had a point, can we nonetheless agree that in its architectonic splendour, visions of megacity entropy and unrelenting lingual charisma London Fields stands damn near the summit of modern novelistic achievement?’
‘Ballard was such a superb commentator on his own fiction, one wonders whether the fiction was needed at all. Might he not have simply pretended it existed, then given us books of pure ideation?’
*
In 2019, Rob Doyle was commissioned to write a weekly books column for the Irish Times, a ‘year of rereading’ that would be a journey back through the novels that had meant the most to him. There were two rules: books chosen were to have been published no later than the year 2000 and each column would run to a maximum of 340 words. Within three months of the final column being published, the COVID lockdowns began. With previous plans put on hold, Doyle found himself reflecting on the wider implications of his fifty-two book columns. What had his choices said about him, both as reader and writer? And what did such choices mean, precisely now?
It would be wrong to call Autobibliography a diary of the pandemic, though it sort of is, just as it is also a partial memoir of Doyle’s progress to date. What it is mostly though is a declaration of allegiance to the practice of art, an impassioned defence of a particular kind of writing – ‘the kind of novel with as much essay in it as narrative, the kind you can read with a pen in your hand’ – and why such writing matters.
Doyle loves Houellebecq, Cioran, Nietzsche, Dyer, Mailer, Didion (sort of), Carrere, Bolano, Lispector, Sarraute, Markson. His choices are eclectic, but with a certain unity. The commentary on the books themselves – like Doyle’s always brilliant reviews – rise far above the practised, easy argument it is so easy to fall into when you’ve a limited word count. The passages of memoir and reflection woven between offer a commentary upon that commentary, an autobibliography, a portrait of a writer in fifty-two books.
It’s also very funny. If you enjoyed Mike Harrison’s Wish I Was Here then you will probably love this book, too. That I am in sympathy with Doyle on most of what he says here is beside the point. Thank goodness there are writers writing who write like this, writers who understand what the gig’s about, who have the courage and talent to put that knowledge to practice, who are still young.
The Eden Book Society is back – and I am delighted to announce my involvement with it! For more details, check out the EBS Kickstarter campaign here, where you can learn more about the Eden family, meet the Archivist, and claim your rewards.
I have been reading Andrew O’Hagan’s work for more than twenty years. In a strange and roundabout way, it is partly because of O’Hagan that Chris and I came to live in Scotland. I first visited the Isle of Bute after having recently read O’Hagan’s debut novel Personality, which follows the life of a young woman from a Scottish-Italian family with a talent for singing that overturns her life as much as it defines it. The precocious young singer in Personality is based on Lena Zavaroni, who was born and brought up in Rothesay. I fell in love with O’Hagan’s book, which is as much about the Scottish-Italian experience in general as about the unforgiving and often exploitative nature of the entertainment industry, and, when I happened to be visiting Glasgow in the late spring of 2003 I was determined to make the trip to Bute as well. There is a photo of me on the ferry, sailing into Rothesay harbour – this was before the new ferry terminal was opened in the late 2000s and we still had the smaller, ‘streaker’ ferries. I remember sitting eating an ice cream in Zavaroni’s ice cream parlour on the esplanade and feeling as if I had made some sort of pilgrimage. I never forgot my trip to Bute, and when I told Chris about the island, its milder climate and unique atmosphere, there was clearly something in what I said that caught at his imagination.
Chris was never particularly interested in Lena Zavaroni, but he greatly admired O’Hagan’s 2017 book The Secret Life, in which O’Hagan explores through three extended essays themes of identity, conspiracy, and secrecy within the context of the digital revolution. These essays – the most famous of which tells the story of what happened when O’Hagan was hired to ghost-write the autobiography of Julian Assange – are superb, risk-taking, compulsive reading, and one of the things I have come to admire most about O’Hagan is his equal facility with fiction and non-fiction. I revisited his first book, The Missing this week, and found it still more powerful and more original than I did the first time I read it a decade ago, firstly I think because I am now living so much nearer to Glasgow, where a good chunk of the book’s focus lies, and secondly because the themes it interrogates are in such close alignment with my own literary interests.
The Missing begins in the east end of Glasgow, where O’Hagan was born, and with the sudden loss of his grandfather Michael, whose ship was torpedoed by a German U-boat in the second world war. His wife Molly receives a telegram telling her that Michael is missing in action, believed drowned. But there is no proof, no body, no certainty. ‘He was missing,’ the young O’Hagan learns. ‘I’d never seen him, and I was born twenty-eight years after he disappeared at sea. … My granda Michael looked like Glasgow: a place that felt far away by then, that sounded old and big and always in the dark.’
Growing up on one of the new housing estates in the coastal town of Irvine, O’Hagan always felt that he ‘couldn’t get over’ his grandfather’s missing-ness, a state that both defined him and erased him. As a lad, O’Hagan ran wild with the other kids on the estate, participating in the kind of rough play and minor acts of vandalism that can sometimes tip over the edge into something darker. When a toddler goes missing on the estate, that harsh duality is further underlined. O’Hagan eventually grows away from his beginnings, discovering new possibilities and freedoms through the world of books. But it is not too great a leap to imagine that it is these early experiences of someone being missing that lie behind his continuing preoccupation with the subject as a writer. The landscape of trauma and unanswered questions. The different ways in which a person can go missing, or fall into the kind of social invisibility that ceases to be a choice and becomes a prelude to tragedy.
O’Hagan recounts his visits to homeless shelters, his interviews with those who take refuge there – some of them listed as missing who do not want to be found – and with the staff at the National Missing Persons Helpline who work tirelessly to establish links between those who are searching and those who are lost. Mary, who is one of its founders, ‘always looks busy, almost too busy to stop.’ O’Hagan describes Mary’s pragmatic attitude: she is not overly concerned with why people go missing, with what their missing-ness might mean on an existential level. She is interested in practical solutions, to finding people and – if possible – helping them back on to a more secure footing. O’Hagan admires her strength of purpose and practical approach, whilst freely admitting that for him, this is only half of the story. That story, in fact, is what obsesses him, what keeps him coming back. ‘Kids had been snatched off the street, while other kids played around them, and adults went on their way. Those who notice the missing will say, now and then, that nothing could ever be the same again. And neither it could, not for anyone. We must accept that we can be changed by things we don’t understand.’
The Missing concludes with O’Hagan’s recollections of the West case, with the incredible scenes he witnessed in 1994 as police began excavating the gardens and cellar of 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, with neighbours of the Wests charging journalists hundreds of pounds to rent rooms with a view of the garden, ‘£1 to use the toilet, £3 for a bacon sandwich.’ The atmosphere around these events is as thick with horror and disbelief as ever, yet even at the time, O’Hagan becomes increasingly preoccupied with the fact that for all their understandable fascination with the case, most journalists were far more interested in ‘what happened’ than in who it happened to. For the most part, the women who had been killed by the Wests remained faceless, ‘victims’ rather than people. O’Hagan does everything he can to remedy this, teasing out information about the women’s stories and personal backgrounds. His account of the years Fred West spent living in Glasgow, where he made a living driving an ice cream van, takes on a quality of the uncanny that is scarcely bearable: it turns out that West began his career of abuse just down the road from where O’Hagan was born.
Perhaps the most shocking moment in this long chapter comes when O’Hagan interviews Liz Brewer, one of the many transitory young women who spent part of their youth living in the West household and whose best friend at the time, Shirley Anne Robinson, was one of the nine whose remains were discovered at 25 Cromwell Street. For Liz and the other women like her, the West household was chaotic and often unstable but was perceived by them at the time as safer than the places they had escaped from. ‘You know something,’ Liz said, ‘I would say that some of my years in Cromwell Street were among the happiest of my life. The stuff that’s come out has wasted those years. People have said, “How could you live there?” but you know, if you were someone who’d been on the road, someone who was a bit lost, it could be like a security. Many of us wanted to belong to this, an extended family.’
No words could better convey the contradictions and cruel complexities of a situation that had as much to do with the failings of wider society as with the Wests themselves. Liz Brewer’s words are impossible to forget, all the more so because the lesson that is in them has still to be learned.
While she was still a student at Harvard, Becky Cooper was told about a 1969 postgraduate student of archaeology, Jane Britton, who was found murdered in her apartment after failing to present herself for her General examinations. Traces of red ochre found at the scene seemed to suggest that Jane’s killer might have an association with the Archaeology department itself, that in all probability she had known her attacker.
Jane’s story was told to Cooper almost as a warning – that Harvard was not always a safe place to be, especially for women. Jane had been a singular individual, someone who made an impression on everyone who came into contact with her. There had been people in her life who thought she sailed too close to the wind. Others who nurtured unspoken jealousies. Jane’s murder was shocking, but more shocking still was the silence that seemed to descend in the wake of it. Friends stopped talking about her. Her family were too distraught and divided amongst themselves to discuss what had happened. Following the initial inquiry, the police had drawn a blank. Though there were whispers and rumours among the students who had known Jane and studied with her, no one was ever charged with her murder. The police refused to divulge Jane’s records, even though no work had been done on the case, seemingly, for decades.
The more Cooper’s questions multiplied, the deeper her obsession with the case became. She felt a personal connection to Jane that was hard to define but that would not let go of her. Determined to unravel the web of clues, false leads and tenuous connections that had confounded the police, she sets out on a journey to discover what she can. Ten years later, and just at the point where it seems the truth of Jane’s life and death might never be known, new evidence comes to light that throws all previous assumptions into confusion.
We Keep the Dead Close is a book in which the personal and the political are in perfect alignment. Cooper never loses sight of the story – what really happened? – but she is thorough and unstinting too in her pursuit of wider questions: how are women treated by the academic world? How far must women comply with the norms society expects of them in order to stay ‘safe’? What can we ever really know about another person, especially a person who is no longer around to speak for themselves?
Cooper’s writing is tactile, evocative and powerful in its arguments, above all because Cooper takes the risk of allowing herself to become a part of the story. Anyone who doubts the importance and social relevance of true crime writing might begin their reading here.
Like much of McNamee’s work, his new novel is set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The bureau of the title is a ‘bureau de change’, where the shopkeepers and business owners who trade either side of the Irish border can exchange currency. This is only the surface layer of what goes on there, however. The bureau’s main business is in laundering the profits made from the less salubrious smuggling enterprises that form part of the natural ecosystem of the borderland, anything from cigarettes and alcohol to unlicensed diesel to human beings. The men who run the border trade are in permanent danger of death both from each other and from more serious criminals higher up the chain. The women involved with these men – whether wives or lovers – are on a hiding to nothing.
‘My writing has always been concerned with real events and making novels around them,’ McNamee says. ‘In this book, for the first time, they aren’t just public events but events specific to me and my family.’ Brendan McNamee is a solicitor. He opened the bureau after being struck off for embezzling funds. The clients he serves now are not the kind of people you would want to cross and it is not just Brendan who will be in the firing line if he oversteps his mark. On the other side of the counter is Paddy Farrell, who dreams of living ‘a sophisticated life’ in Florida or in Dublin, but who is unable to escape the pull of the border and the shadow life he lives there. Lorraine, a young woman whose intense and morbid spirituality seems at odds with her passionate physical desire for Paddy, longs for a time when the hostilities and underlying trauma of the border years will be behind them – except they never will be.
The events McNamee is writing about happened long before most newspapers began to be digitised and so to properly align fact with fiction you would have to consult the archives of the regional papers, as McNamee quotes them, or know your sources first hand, as McNamee does. If you’re as into this kind of literary mapping as I am, you can at least give yourself a virtual tour of the novel’s locations, glimpse the tracery of minor roads that are the back-ways across the border, see the hills and the forest laybys where deals were transacted, the churchyards, streets and houses where these people lived and died. The distance between Newry and Dundalk is about twenty miles via the main border crossing; in terms of what those miles once represented they span two different worlds.
The border is a liminal space, an uncanny valley between the two.
But The Bureau is not a history book, it is a novel; it’s interesting to wonder about the armature of facts on which this novel is based, but it’s by no means essential. Any book must stand or fall on its own internal merits, on its value as text, and it is as text that The Bureau shines brightest, that it lives in the mind. The Bureau is a poem in prose. From start to finish it holds the reader in a state of tension, of uneasy apprehension of what they know from the opening pages will be the final deadly outcome. Yet there is rapture, too – the inspiration and satisfaction one draws from being in the presence of a great work of art.
They drove away from the hospital, rain driven across the rear window as Owen looked back through the rain-tossed branches of the boundary trees, the hospital locked down for the night, Brendan not sleeping, the father in him awake and abroad in the corridors and hidden spaces, abroad in the vagrant dark. Picking his way through memory the way you’d pick your way through the streets and avenues of a burned-out city.
The vagrant dark. The streets and avenues of a burned-out city. The power and beauty of McNamee’s image-making so in tune with his subject matter. His grasp of darkness and of weather, both internal and external.
You want to place other people in the room. Shadowy figures. This was the era of shadows. This was the time when people disappeared without warning. This was the time of unexplained shootings, of clandestine alliances, zones of subterfuge, zones of dread. This was the border. There were set-ups, double-crosses, betrayal. Subterfuge was the currency, the game seen far into the future, the deep tradecraft.
It is often tempting to think of history as having moved on, but it is never that simple. Echoes remain, ripples spread, and in any case, history is not linear but cyclical. When someone asks what writing is for me I speak about my fear of time passing, my obsession with nailing memory into place and this would seem to be McNamee’s mission, too. To not forget. To say: this is how it was, this is what we went through. This is what we remember.
The novel that kept resurfacing in my mind while I was reading The Bureau was Death and Nightingales, by Eugene McCabe. Because both seem equally perfect, equally poised between rapture and terror, equally haunted. McCabe’s novel is set a hundred years before The Bureau and acts almost as a foreshadowing. The sense of place, so much an active element of both novels, is another point of union between them.
Reading a novel like The Bureau reminds me of what I am doing, or at least attempting. Writing as good as this is hard to find, but when you do, you feel grateful, you feel replenished. This is what’s possible, this is what it’s about. You know you’ll never be as good but you’re determined to try.
