Jenny Hval’s prickly second novel turns out to be the perfect place to begin my current reading project, because Girls Against God is a confronting text in every sense. At the surface level, the novel poses as an autofictional account of a young woman growing up in the stiflingly religious, provincial atmosphere of southern Norway. Raging against a society that presents a whiter-than-white face to the world whilst harbouring and nurturing attitudes of racism, intolerance and petit-bourgeois philistinism, our narrator finds a focus for her rebellion through the world of black metal music and its aggressive iconoclasm. Her passionate desire to ‘be in a band’ allies her with two other like-minded young women, Venke and Terese. Together they flirt with various styles of performance and expression, entwining their musical experimentation with the practice of modern witchcraft. They begin to think of themselves as a coven, an irritant in society’s gut, a literal ‘trash stench’.
The timeline jumps between the narrator’s schooldays and her years at college to residencies in London and New England to a moment in the near-present in which an older version of the narrator is engaged in the making of an experimental film. Girls Against God rejoices in filmic imagery and references. Derek Jarman makes an appearance, and Dusan Makavejev’s ultra-transgressive 1974 film Sweet Movie is referenced and analysed before being partially re-enacted in a scene of phantasmagorical weirdness in a school canteen. The Blair-Witch-like film Forest, whose description and analysis forms the third part of the novel, is both a metaphor for the book as a whole and a marvellous act of ventriloquism; Hval is able to translate the elusive visual language of film to the written word with remarkable acuity and power.
There is still more to be had from this book, though. Girls Against God reads almost as a polemic, a manifesto – Hval’s examination of the taboos around women’s self-expression, the persecution of ‘witches’ (and witches) and the authoritarian suppression of individual acts of rebellion and protest is the cold steel, the anger that gives this narrative its resonance. As a piece of weird fiction that places passages of memoir alongside strange slides into hallucinatory otherness and sublime terror, this book is unique, The Craft on LSD. As a record of the slow commodification of Nordic Black Metal, Girls Against God works as a fascinating piece of documentary. As a rebel yell, a scream of protest in the endless white night of Norwegian summer, it is lacerating, eloquent and exhilarating.
The novel goes still further in examining the nature and purpose of writing itself in breaking down atrophied systems and challenging norms. I especially admired Hval’s juxtaposition of the forest interludes with her startling and imaginative use of the electronic sounds (text tones, old dial-up modem sounds, skype calls) that make up the ‘cosmic internet’, a parallel natural history, a modern cosmology.
Impassioned, original and revelatory, Girls Against God is a dense, occasionally stubborn book that rewards the effort involved in reading it. Hval opens up the possibilities of fiction, fusing together music, image and thought in a web of text that is refreshing and inspirational in its integrity. One to keep.
Late last month I happened to be reading an interview/conversation between the American writer Alexandra Kleeman (author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine) and the Norwegian writer and musician Jenny Hval, whose second novel Girls Against God has just been published. Both writers share an interest in transgression, in breaking down genre boundaries and in the idea of literary experimentation. It’s a fascinating piece, and one I found resonated with me a lot, most especially their discussion of how the radical-experimental space in writing has tended to be colonised by men. Helen de Witt in particular has written brilliantly about this, as of course has Rachel Cusk.
My own interest in fragmented narratives, in narratives that push beyond ‘story’ to examine not only the urge to record but also our relationship as both readers and writers with words on a page and especially in our current reality the value of words as resistance, protest, the proposition of counter-realities has become all-consuming of late. This obsession with narrative structures, with the purpose and meaning of the written word has resulted in notable and repeated upheavals in my work-in-progress as well as a renewed focus on and fascination with writers whom I perceive as sharing these ideals – writers whose engagement with language itself is relentless and searching.
The challenge of being a woman in such spaces is a matter of particular fascination and sometimes vexation. With this in mind, I have decided I would like to spend some of this winter exploring works by women writers that I see as radical and/or transgressive. Two years ago I read a series of such works one after the other: Ann Quin’s Berg, Eley Williams’s Attrib, Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, Break.up by Joanna Walsh, Milkman by Anna Burns, All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews, Caroline’s Bikini by Kirsty Gunn, Exposure by Olivia Sudjic and Hell by Kathryn Davis. The effect of encountering these works so closely together, as a concentrated block of ideas, was profoundly energising and remains a touchstone experience, not just in and of itself but for the inspiration it provided, the example set: this is what is possible.
Trying to process this experience, to persuade it to bear fruit – that is the tricky bit. It is also the most exciting part of the work I am attempting to do. I thought it might be useful and interesting to share my thoughts on some of works I am finding most relevant, engaging and challenging at the moment, to discover them on the page, to set down my impressions as they are being gathered. In honour of the interview that inspired it, I am going to call this project Girls Against God, though we may well find as many girls who are pro god as anti. I am not going to set myself a strict timetable for posting, nor even a specific day, though I am hoping to put up something new for you to read roughly once a week.
I plan to start next week sometime with Girls Against God itself. In the meantime, let me commend to you Jenny Hval’s stunning album The Practice of Love, which seems to tie into everything she says in the interview with energy and grace.
Like everyone else, I have spent much of the past week being exhausted by the American presidential election. I didn’t get a proper night’s sleep until Saturday, and still feel on edge because of the dishonourable and disreputable behaviour of much of the Republican party. Seemingly there are those who will continue to give lip service to what they know are lies (because they, unlike Trump himself, are not morons) because it seems politically expedient to do so. When they do, as seems inevitable, begin to peel off in droves, this will not be through any sense of personal honour or desire to uphold the democratic process, but because they fear the damage that might accrue to their own careers through sticking their colours to the burning mast of a despot in the twilight of his reign.
This for me does not compute. For me, the worst aspects of Trump have not been his personal loathsomeness, his inane generalisations, his total inability to form any kind of political argument, his racism or his misogyny or his financial malpractice (vile though they all are) but the fact that he has been enabled as President of the United States to stand on a world stage, making statements that are known to be lies by all of those around him and yet still stand unchallenged by the bulk of the party he claims to represent (he doesn’t, as they all know, but that’s a longer argument). I despise him, I loathe his politics but his attempt to dismantle democracy and to erode the infrastructure of democracy has been, for me, an existential horror that outflanks any and all partisan considerations. And this is still going on. There are still those – again, American citizens with intelligence and decades-long political experience – who seem prepared to support him in what now amounts to a toddler’s tantrum, no thought for what is best for their fellow citizens or for the constitution whose ideals they are sworn to serve. These people are more dangerous even than Trump because they know what they’re doing. Seriously, they should go away and read their Hannah Arendt. Personally I won’t breathe easy until he is actually out of the White House.
This past week has been enervating and at certain moments thrilling, a week that has included along with the tension the headiest moments of relief and thanksgiving. There is such a long way to go but this is a hugely important step, for all of us, all over the world. One of the worst aspects of Trump’s ‘presidency’ has been the way his attitudes and actions have been a green light for demagogues, racists and climate deniers everywhere, producing a hothouse environment for hate, intolerance and social division not seen for a century.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are fine people, whose ambitions for their term in office – healing, inclusion, rebuilding and hope – are the only valid reasons to be in politics, basically. May they flourish and prosper.
As an opportunity for partying and dressing up as the Witchfinder General (I really do need that cloak) it looks like Hallowe’en is pretty much cancelled this year. All the more reason then to bake some skeleton cookies and curl up on the sofa with a favourite horror movie or a volume of ghost stories (or indeed both).
Luckily for all of us, there is some wonderful new gothic reading to be had, and as a Hallowe’en treat this year I am delighted to recommend a brand new anthology I’ve just finished reading. It’s called HAG (because of course it had to be) and is subtitled ‘forgotten folk tales retold’. As a concept it is wonderful: ten contemporary women writers offer their own take on some of the more obscure regional folk tales of the British isles. We’re all familiar with retellings of popular fairy tales such as Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast or The Little Mermaid, and there are some superbly innovative interpretations out there. But the stories in HAG are different: obscure and often remembered only in the particular part of Britain from which they originate, they offer microcosms of rural life from the time when they were first being told. The Britain that emerges from these tales is a place of dark magic, eerie transformations, fairy mischief and supernatural retribution. As with so much British weird, landscape often plays a central role in these stories, grounding the magic firmly in a reality that is stark and dangerous to navigate.
The original folk tales that inspired HAG are reprinted in full, together with an introduction from Carolyne Larrington that sets the stories in context, examining the influence of fairy tales on our national literature, then and now. It is this kind of attention to detail that helps to make HAG such a magical book and a genuinely informative one, a project that clearly means a great deal to everyone involved with it. And yet to experience the power of this anthology in its purest form, I would recommend that readers leave the original tales and the excellent introduction to one side until they have finished reading the stories themselves. Each of the ten new stories offers a brilliantly original modern interpretation of an old, old tale, its own world of magic and beauty and occasionally terror. Each one is radically different in style and form, and although it’s a cliche to say it, there really is something here for everyone.
The standout story for me is Daisy Johnson’s ‘A Retelling’, based on the old Suffolk tale ‘The Green Children of Woolpit’. I loved the blend of autofiction and fairy tale, the one segueing seamlessly into the other to create an unsettling yet ultimately transcendent effect. (Reading this story reminds me I really do need to grab myself a copy of Johnson’s new novel Sisters.) Stories by Naomi Booth, Natasha Carthew and Imogen Hermes Gowar (so painful to read but bravo that ending!) offer their own delights, and I deeply appreciated Eimear McBride’s tongue-in-cheek subversion of the entire brief. The wonderful thing about HAG though is that every reader will find their own favourite story. Needless to say, this book, which has one of the most beautiful covers I’ve come across this year, would make the perfect Hallowe’en gift.
Hallowe’en is a time of transformations, and in this light I would also like to recommend Wild Time, a short novel by the writer, artist and performer Rose Biggin in collaboration with her partner Keir Cooper. I know Rose – we have appeared in several anthologies together – and I was intrigued to see what she would do with a longer-form narrative. Rose is boldly experimental in her theatre work, and I am delighted to say her latest project is every bit as daring, not to mention fabulously entertaining.
Wild Time takes as its template what is possibly Shakespeare’s most popular and well known play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. One of the most remarkable aspects of this book is the way it honours its source material: the bawdiness, the humour, the word play, the theatrical chaos – they’re all here, all mined knowingly and inventively and to delightful effect. As in HAG, the reinterpretation of the characters and situations to fit a modern idiom is expertly handled (Titania, Queen of the Fairies, sweeping along the platform at Bank station was a particular highlight for me and a moment I will no doubt remember with affection when I eventually get the chance to visit London again). The authors’ willingness to be bold and innovative in terms of language and form adds extra verve, and their understanding of and appreciation for theatre in every sense of the word results in a work that almost demands to be adapted for the stage. Take note, Wild Time contains some pretty explicit action, shall we say, though the poetry, humour and sheer joy with which these erotic elements are handled is refreshing and beautiful (and may indeed leave some readers opting for an early night :-)) Wild Time is a lovely book, and one that will raise a sorely needed smile as these dark days encroach.
For those daring a walk in the woods this Hallowe’en, let me heartily recommend as a companion to their trip Aliya Whiteley’s The Secret Life of Fungi, an exploration of the kingdom of mushrooms and Whiteley’s first non fiction book.
Readers familiar with Whiteley’s novella The Beauty (and if not, why not?) will already have more than an inkling of her interest in mycology. The Secret Life of Fungi takes us deeper into her world, unearthing facts and folklore around fungi that will offer something new to even the most seasoned enthusiast. Beautifully written, this book is an intensely personal narrative, tracing Whiteley’s interest in fungi from childhood walks with her father through to her continuing fascination with these mysterious life forms in the present day.
As you might expect from Whiteley, there is some lovely nature writing here, evocations of landscape that will stir a personal response in every reader. Above all, one gains a sense of going on a journey – of accompanying Whiteley both on her walks and in her contemplation. This is a book that throws up more questions than answers and I love it all the more for that. For those who cherish books as physical objects, The Secret Life of Fungi is exquisitely made and conceived and like HAG, would make a beautiful Hallowe’en or even Christmas gift.
As the Scottish winter closes in on us yet again, we take comfort in the fact that we wouldn’t be visiting the mainland much at the moment in any case. Very much on the up side, there’s plenty of reading and writing going on, and I’m hoping to begin a new winter blogging project before the end of November. In the meantime, I hope you’re all doing well and staying safe, and here’s to Hallowe’en, a time of change, transformation, and gratitude for the landscape, artistic creations and people that fuel our imagination. For ourselves, we’ll be settling down tomorrow evening with the 1989 Nigel Kneale adaptation of The Woman in Black. Fondly remembered, unseen for thirty years – let’s hope it holds up!
One of the harsher effects of lockdown for writers has been the narrowing of opportunities to come out of our studies and meet with people – with each other, and also with readers. We’ve all done our best with Skype and Zoom, and the ingenuity and enthusiasm of booksellers and events organisers in making the most of the tools at their disposal has been incalculable. We all know by now though that online meetings are not the same, and even as we enjoy catching glimpses of one another across the internet, there’s nothing like coming together in person to celebrate the announcement of a prize shortlist, the launch of a new novel or simply to compare notes on what we’ve all been reading lately.
This privation has been especially difficult for authors who have had books scheduled to be published in 2020. Even under normal circumstances, there’s a significant gap between completing work on a novel and sending it out into the world. Having to wait an extra six months or even a year before their work sees the light of day has been deeply discouraging. For those writers whose novels have been released this year, there is the sadness of not being able to participate in book festivals, conventions, and all the other events that would normally mark a novel’s rite of passage. As we re-enter a heightened state of lockdown, even the opportunity of celebrating quietly at home with friends has been pushed into an indefinite future. Which makes it all the more necessary for us to gather the resources we do have: to read, to celebrate and talk about the books we love.
Christopher Priest’s new novel THE EVIDENCE is published today. This is Chris’s sixteenth novel to date, which is achievement enough in itself. It is also a fantastically inventive, original and unexpected novel, a true delight to read. The Evidence brings us into the company of Todd Fremde, a crime writer who has been invited to give a lecture at a university some two days’ travel from his home island – for yes, this is a Dream Archipelago novel like no other. On arrival in the icy outpost of Dearth City, Todd finds himself with more than dreary weather to contend with as he is drawn rapidly into a situation that seems increasingly to resemble the plot of one of his own police procedurals.
As Todd struggles to make sense of what is going on around him, he begins to examine the activity of crime writing itself: why are we addicted to it, and what does it actually have to say about the nature of crime? The Evidence is a funny, thought-provoking, thoroughly entertaining book, a crime novel that undermines itself at every turn whilst retaining and honouring all the elements of mystery that make detective stories so satisfying.
I love this book, and I know you will, too. In fact I would go so far as to say it’s a novel that’s perfectly timed to bring some much needed joy and humour to our reading lives. If you’ve never read Priest before, The Evidence might be exactly the right place to start.
Reading James Bradley’s daunting yet powerful essay on climate catastrophe for the Sydney Review of Books yesterday, I was struck most of all by a passage near the end, which seems to speak as much to the current situation with COVID-19 as to the overarching horror of the climate crisis:
Like deep adaptation, radical hope is a psychological practice as well as a political position. It requires us to accept the past is gone, and that the political and cultural assumptions that once shaped our world no longer hold true. It demands we learn to live with uncertainty and grief, and to face up to the reality of loss. But it also demands what Lear describes as ‘imaginative excellence’, a deliberate fostering of the flexibility and courage necessary to ‘facilitate a creative and appropriate response to the world’s challenges’ that will enable us to envision new alliances and open up new possibilities, even in the face of catastrophe.
If only there were more widespread recognition that simply getting back to how we were before should not be our overriding goal, the potential for change that has already been demonstrated could be effectively harnessed. This is a matter not of logistics, but of political will.
Bradley’s essay also chimed eerily with the novel I have just finished reading. Madeleine Watts’s debut The Inland Sea is a short, powerful work that hovers on the boundary between the mimetic and the speculative, combining personal, seemingly autofictional elements with issues of climate change and the embedded aftershocks of colonialism in Australia. The narrator is a writer, looking back from some unspecified time period at the year she spent working as a telephone operative on the 111 (read 999) switchboard, connecting incoming calls with the appropriate emergency service. The calls she has to deal with are acutely distressing, often coming from people in immediate danger of their lives. Yet the narrator is told – encouraged, even – not to engage with callers beyond the basic requirements of her job. The life of the office is conveyed with grim and often hilarious accuracy. Unsurprisingly our narrator frequently questions her suitability for the job, wondering aloud how long she will be able to keep going with it.
The atmosphere of transience – the sense that the life she is living is already in flux – is compounded by the steady accretion of climate events that are taking place in the background of the narrative: devastating fires (we hear the literal cries for help coming through the switchboard) unnatural floods and violent storms. The narrator’s destructive relationship with a tutor at the university further pushes the unreliability envelope. Significantly, we learn that the narrator’s great-great-great grandfather was John Oxley, a British explorer of the early nineteenth century who spent years in an obsessive search for the ‘inland sea’ he was convinced must exist at the heart of the Australian interior. Needless to say, he never found it. Watts points towards the futility of his quest as a metaphor for the settlers’ mishandling and misunderstanding of Australia generally.
As a chronicle of our current moment, with all its uncertainty, uprootedness, personal and political floundering and disquiet, The Inland Sea forms a fascinating and persuasive argument, a beautifully imagined, hauntingly memorable work of fiction that spoke to me deeply. It’s worth noting that I came to it via this essay Watts wrote about Helen Garner and the relationship between autofiction and lived reality. I loved the essay, both in what it said about Garner (whom I tend to hero-worship, just a little) and its exploration of writing the self as an imaginative act. I segued straight from this piece of non fiction into Watts’s novel and couldn’t have been more satisfied.
It is a comfort at least, to know that important work is still going on.
Today sees the UK publication of the brand new Titan edition of my book Ruby, formerly known as Stardust: the Ruby Castle Stories. (US readers will have to wait a week or two for this release but have no fear, copies are on their way.)
Ruby is a cycle of stories centred around the figure of Ruby Castle, a horror movie actor who ends up in prison following the murder of a lover. Through a series of shifting glimpses, we learn not only Ruby’s story but the stories and intertwined fates of those in her orbit. There’s a circus story, an alternate-Russia story with cosmonauts, an island horror story, a full-on piece of folk horror – in fact you could almost call Ruby a journey through the weird.
This new edition, which has been thoroughly revised and re-edited, also contains an extra story I wrote specifically to celebrate the book’s reissue and that I hope casts extra light on the fate and character of Ruby herself.
This book is very dear to me, for many reasons. I felt deep personal involvement in the stories at the time I was writing them, and the process of reappraising and revising them for new readers has been a real pleasure, offering many moments of surprise and recognition as I renewed my acquaintance with the varied cast of characters.
There’s a distinctly autumnal feel to Ruby – something about carnival in general, I think – and this October publication date feels particularly appropriate. So here’s to Ruby, at large in the world – I hope you grow to love her as much as I do. Huge thanks to Gary Budden, whose idea this was, and to Cath Trechman and the amazing team at Titan who brought the project to fruition.
Hort is described in many ways by these voices, but I can always tell that they are talking about him. Him to me, she or it or they to others, and sometimes there are long pauses as the limitations of language are reached. Hort has been a lover, a murderer, an adventurer, a cataclysm, a God. But to him we have all been the trusty companion.
It wasn’t until I was almost three-quarters of the way through Aliya Whiteley’s new novel Greensmith (published by Unsung Stories on October 12th) that I realised I was reading an extended critique of Doctor Who. Not the show itself – no debating Classic versus New, no wrangling over who is or was the best Doctor here – so much as its moral universe. The lonely alien in the blue box, the scintillating, hyperactive superbeing whose sole mission, or so it seems in the stories, is to keep us – us personally – safe from harm. It is a seductive vision. The number of Who episodes that feature a lonely, chosen child, waiting by their bedroom window staring up at the stars, awaiting the return of the hero only they know exists – we have all been that child at some point, if only at five o’clock on a Saturday evening (apologies to younger viewers but that is still Doctor Who time for me).
What we learn through our time with the show is that all these hopeful children, sooner or later, will be discarded. The moment of parting is always searingly painful – watch any of those episodes again now and inevitably I’ll find myself in tears – and yet we conspire to forget. To believe that next time, for the next companion – for us – the outcome will be different, that we will be the One.
The wonder of myths is in their longevity, their ability to transcend time and place, to become as personal as they are universal. That mythologies can also be harmful – mendacious – is a truth we do not care to examine as deeply as we ought.
Of course, Greensmith is so much more than an extended essay on one particularly popular British TV show, though the plot synopsis does a pretty good impression of a Moffat story from Mat-Smith-era Who. Penelope Greensmith is fifty-three years old. She is a botanist and librarian. More importantly she is the keeper of the Collection, a ‘bank’ of every plant species on Earth, assembled by Penelope’s father with the help of a mysterious invention called the Vice.
When a deadly virus begins decimating all plant life on Earth, Penelope is taken under the wing of a being who calls himself the Horticulturalist, and who claims that together they can discover a way to fight the virus and save the planet. Reduced to a two-dimensional slip of information, Penelope is whirled away into time and space, embarking on a series of ever more fantastical adventures. The further she journeys, the more she begins to suspect that Hort is hiding the essential truth about his identity and his mission.
More so than with any other form of literature, science fiction tends to encourage discussion of what it does and what it is for. Fans talk enthusiastically of newness, of SF’s potential for the exploration of complex ideas, All too often, such potential is disregarded in favour of familiarity. Through the media of games, TV shows and movies as well as books, science fiction is more popular now than it has ever been. We are undoubtedly living through a new golden age of science fiction, with the uncertainty of the present moment providing a mirror to the multitude of fictional universes there are to choose from. Popularity always has a down-side, however, and the demands of an increasing fanbase have in many cases stymied the genre’s progress as a literary form. Readers say they want bold ideas, yet in reality what they prefer are ideas that are brightly coloured and easily digestible.
When science fiction is truly bold, truly ground-breaking, its very boldness can make it puzzling and harder to parse. Ideas that are truly complex take longer to absorb. I would argue that anyone who reads Greensmith and doesn’t find themselves wondering on at least one occasion what the hell they are reading, isn’t reading hard enough.
Greensmith is a backwards hero’s journey that questions the very concept of the hero. It is a novel with a middle-aged woman as its protagonist that actually talks about middle age, about the menopause, about the difficulty of forming relationships when one is fiercely attached to one’s independence. Greensmith is about family ties, loyalty that transcends logic, the love of one’s planet. Most of all it is a book about plants: plants glorious and multitudinous and various, plants that stir the imagination and stimulate the senses, plants that are beings sharing our world as opposed to material to be used by humans as food and shelter.
Greensmith is a novel that is not afraid to talk, at length, about complex ideas. The adventure portion of the novel – the first half – is in a sense simply the set-up for a philosophical argument about existence, eternity and the inherent moral danger in assuming one’s own interpretation of history to be superior to another. It is a novel that refuses to give us the happy ending we humanly yearn for – yet it does deliver another concept of rightness, one it takes time to come to terms with but that is ultimately more satisfying and more durable.
I have heard Greensmith described as a comedy. This judgement may say more about my seemingly irrepressible tendency to cry at Doctor Who than it does about the novel, but I found it to be one of the most poignant, elegiac and spiritual works of science fiction I have read all year.
Aliya Whiteley is a writer of rare originality and inventiveness. Her instinct for new ways of looking at things, her seemingly inexhaustible capacity for intelligent observation, her passion for asking questions and for ideas make her one of the most important writers of speculative fiction working today. That her books are quiet and often uncategorisable, that they require sitting with and thinking about, that they deny easy solutions and trite explanation – these qualities are what make them true to the spirit of science fiction, that will ensure their longevity. What Greensmith means to me will be different from what it means to you – and therein lies its glory.
*
With ten episodes of Corona Crime Spree and sixteen Weird Wednesdays, this post marks exactly six months of weekly blogging – half a year’s worth of essays. It also happens to mark the week in which I completed a working draft of my novel-in-progress. The final chapter was written on the Isle of Mull, where an earlier version of the text was originally set. This gave me the weird sensation of inhabiting a ghost-version of the novel, almost as if the space I was occupying belonged to other characters.
Dervaig, Isle of Mull, September 2020
Completing a version of the book as it now is came as something of a relief, though I won’t really know what I’ve ended up with until I begin work on the second draft, in a few weeks’ time.
At the beginning of lockdown, it seemed important and helpful to post what became in effect weekly dispatches from my desk, charting the progress of my reading and thinking through this strangest of years. It still does feel important and helpful, and although I have decided to be more flexible with my schedule – this will be the last Weird Wednesday in this particular sequence – I intend to keep posting regularly through the autumn and winter.
I’ve spent a great deal of time considering what I want to say about the 2020 Clarke Award overall. If I’d never written a post like this before, the task would not be anywhere near so difficult. I would be able to talk about what I believe the Clarke is for and why it matters without the feeling of deja vu that seems to sweep over me whenever I think about how far this year’s shortlist appears to fall short of that ideal. Such arguments might feel more fruitful if there were more alternative commentary to bounce off, but aside from the initial barrage of tweets praising the shortlist to the rafters and the usual slew of puff-pieces, I have barely seen any. Had it not been for the characteristically even-handed and intricate criticism of Nick Hubble, and the superbly concise and forthright summation from Nandini Ramachandran over at Strange Horizons, I might have believed myself alone in a godless world.
OK, so 2020 has been weird and looks set to get weirder. At the time of writing, the Clarke is running three months late and counting. Normally by the time the Hugos are announced, we already have our Clarke winner. Correspondence between the two awards is traditionally rare. The Hugos are a fan award, with a US-centric voting pool and a different aesthetic – yet in this oddest of years, one part of the general oddness sees a fifty-percent overlap between the Hugo shortlist and the Clarke. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think this has ever happened before. Even in 2010, the last year to see a British writer winning the Hugo Award for best novel (unless you’re counting dual-national Jo Walton in 2012) the shortlists were radically different.
I was hoping to avoid bringing up the whole anxiety-of-American-influence thing because we’ve been there too many times before but this question of the Clarke/Hugo overlap means I cannot escape it. Part of my disappointment with this year’s shortlist lies in the lack of recognition for British talent. The Clarke is a British award, for novels published in Britain. This is one of the valuable and necessary ways it differs from the Hugos. The submissions list reveals a whole battery of British novels – M. T. Hill’s Zero Bomb, Vicki Jarrett’s Always North, Chris Beckett’s Beneath the World, A Sea, Temi Oh’s Do You Dream of Terra-Two, Jane Rogers’s Body Tourists, Ben Smith’s Doggerland, Will Wiles’s Plume, Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein – the presence of any one of which would have raised the overall quality of the shortlist by a substantial degree.
Which makes it all the more perplexing that the one British entry that was chosen by the judges is a journeyman work of genre fiction with no pretensions to innovation or radicalism whatsoever.
And that’s before we even consider the excellent novels not by British writers that were on the submissions list: Last Ones Left Alive by Sarah Davis-Goff, The Migration by Helen Marshall, The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, Black Leopard Red Wolf by Marlon James, From the Wreck by Jane Rawson, Dead Astronauts by Jeff Vandermeer, The Need by Helen Phillips, Everything You Ever Wanted by Luiza Sauma, just for example. The judges had plenty to choose from, so what the hell happened?
In any given year – and again, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time going over the facts – there is at least one dud on the shortlist, a novel that seems so out of step with the others in terms of its quality and ambition that anyone with an interest in the award will find themselves asking what it is doing there. Often there are two such novels, the unfortunate result, one suspects, of disagreements between the judges that remain essentially unresolved even unto the day of the award ceremony.
I’ve been back over all the shortlists since the Clarke was first awarded in 1987 and never have there been three duds on the shortlist – until now. The shortlist that runs it closest is 2012’s – otherwise known as the Priestgate shortlist – but even that was more interesting. By virtue of its insanity maybe, but still more interesting. I would also argue that 2012 offered fewer decent submissions for the judges to choose from.
So that’s two firsts for 2020 – a fifty-percent overlap with the Hugos, a fifty-percent dud quotient. I could say I’m baffled by this year’s shortlist but that would be putting it too kindly. I’m sorely disappointed by the judges’ choices because for me they represent nothing less than a catastrophic failure of imagination, the kind of failure no amount of duct tape is going to fix.
The most positive thing I can say about this shortlist is that it (sort of) represents where the genre is at commercially, what kind of narratives are currently popular, how much contemporary science fiction is being influenced by other media. The books that have been chosen also centre a range of political and socioeconomic topics that are very much at the forefront of discussion within the community: most prominently empire and colonialism but also the power of the military, alien intelligence, the role of technology, bodily difference, race, gender and climate change. Exploring these issues and more is very much a central tenet of science fiction and that such themes are raised and discussed in the shortlisted novels is to be welcomed. But as I have suggested in previous posts, having the ideas present is not enough. So much of a novel’s effectiveness depends on subtlety, characterisation, depth of field. Though the list does feel highly contemporary in terms of topics covered, in terms of literary achievement it is pretty thin gruel.
So what does the 2020 shortlist tell us about today’s science fiction as a mode of literature? I am sorry to say that going by four out of the six books, the message seems to be that SF is derivative, repetitive, and mostly burned out. What this shortlist tells us most of all though is something we know already: the quality of an awards shortlist is entirely dependent on the process and critical standards employed by the award jury. From the evidence on display, I am forced to conclude that both have been sadly lacking in 2020. It’s been that kind of year.
Given the uncanny similarity between the two award shortlists, it would seem appropriate to score the Clarkes as I would the Hugos. The Last Astronaut is a sensationalised and pointless retelling of Rendezvous with Rama. The City in the Middle of the Night is a pallid YA science-fantasy peopled with excruciatingly annoying characters. Cage of Souls is a derivative prison-break drama played out against a dying Earth background that could have been plucked from any one of a dozen game scenarios. For me at least, these three novels would all fall below the No Award line. I’m sure they have given readers pleasure, but that isn’t the point. The point is that in terms of their originality, innovation and all-round execution, none of them has any reason whatsoever to be considered the best science fiction novel of the year. As I have argued in my previous posts, the idea is preposterous, and what these books are doing on the Clarke Award shortlist, heaven only knows.
A Memory Called Empire has already won the Hugo Award for best novel and well it might. It wears its heart on its sleeve, it shows its working, it makes use of familiar forms and tropes to tell a story that lies close to the interests of fandom at this given moment – it’s a very Hugo kind of book. It’s also tightly plotted and written with care and attention to detail and with a seriousness of intent that raises it above more run-of-the-mill widescreen space fantasy. It is nonetheless still core genre, still very much of the field rather than challenging it, and I would consider it a very boring choice to win the Clarke.
Which leaves us with two wildly differing books that are both good novels. Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift is, I think, a great novel, though how it ended up on this year’s Clarke shortlist is almost a big a mystery to me as the presence of The Last Astronaut: by my reckoning, any judge who pushed for the latter would be likely to abandon reading the former halfway through, while any who championed the former would probably resign from the jury rather than allow the latter on to the shortlist. Oh to be a fly on the wall.
Kameron Hurley’s The Light Brigade, by contrast, seems likely to have been the one book all the judges agreed on pretty much immediately: it’s highly contemporary yet fruitfully in dialogue with earlier works, it makes use of a traditional form – MilSF – yet renders it new and exciting, it’s progressive in outlook, adventurous in form, thrillingly alive. It is also well written, strongly characterised, with a feel for language and dialogue that serves the idea and the audience equally well. It is the best kind of genre SF: written with insight and knowledge of what has gone before yet never subsumed by it. It’s a great story, well told. For all these reasons, The Light Brigade would make a worthy Clarke winner – and with any luck one memorable enough to block out any recall of the shortlist as a whole.
That’s what my head says, and I’m fine with that. My heart though belongs to Serpell. The Old Drift is everything I look for in a novel: challenging, difficult, beautiful, heartbreaking, surprising, innovative and timeless. Of the six works shortlisted, this is the one I would personally point to as representing ‘my’ science fiction. I loved this book with heart and mind. I feel privileged to have read it. This is the kind of novel that reminds us not only of why we write, but of everything science fiction can be and do and imagine. I hope next year’s Clarke shortlist will be more like this all round: bolder in form, more adventurous in conceit, more out there in terms of what it offers us on the page. The writers are doing the work, creating the worlds. Looking for them in less well-trodden places would be a good start.
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And the winner is… THE OLD DRIFT, by Namwali Serpell! To say I’m delighted would be an understatement. Of all the book prizes awarded in 2020, I doubt there will be another that pleases me so much, or feels as significant. What a marvellous surprise. Bravo!
Earlier this month, Chris and I spent a number of days away, exploring our neighbouring islands of Islay and Jura. The trip had originally been booked for the end of June, to coincide with the summer solstice and the longest day. The summer nights up here are very precious to me, the quality of light is extraordinary and I wanted to experience that on Jura, a place that was special to us already without having seen it for reasons of its literary legacy. It is well known that George Orwell went to Jura to find the seclusion he needed to work on his final novel, unarguably his masterpiece. I knew it would be difficult for us to gain access to the house itself but I was determined to try.
Port Ellen, Isle of Islay, September 2020
As things turned out, we did not get to see Barnhill; neither did we get to spend the summer solstice on Jura. That we were able to reschedule our trip and almost get to Barnhill seems something of a miracle, given the circumstances. Staff at the hotel where we were staying made enquiries about us taking a boat trip down the coast so we could glimpse the house from the water but on our one full day in Jura, the weather was ridiculously inclement (always a possibility when you’re in Scotland) and the boatman was having trouble making even his scheduled trip across from the mainland.
Machir Bay, Isle of Islay, September 2020
We drove instead, as far as we could – twenty-five miles along an increasingly tenuous strip of road and into a landscape I had scarcely imagined. I knew in my head that Barnhill farmhouse was isolated and inaccessible, but it wasn’t until we were in the landscape that I was able to appreciate just how much. I think I’d been imagining a bumpy track along the coast, something like the farm roads we were used to in Devon. In fact, the road turns inward, away from the coast and into the vast, moorland interior of the island. Stags leap across the road in front of the car. Mist sweeps in like bolts of gauze. The colours – those quintessentially Scottish colours of ochre and sage and grey, contoured with purple. The heather – at its finest when I travelled north just a fortnight before (another trip, another story) – was still in evidence, still everywhere. That particular purple, with that particular grey – glorious, favoured, northern.
Craighouse, Isle of Jura, September 2020
In the end we reached the point where the road seemed so precarious it would have been foolhardy for us to continue. Chris parked, or rather, brought the car to a standstill overlooking the valley. I left him listening (appropriately enough, given my work-in-progress, but more of that another time) to Science Stories on Radio 4 while I got out and walked for an hour, up to and past the signpost that indicates the end of the public road with still four miles to go until you reach Barnhill. It was raining pretty hard but I was singing at the top of my voice into the wind. I felt utterly alone, and yet utterly seen, utterly alive. It might sound like a leap too far to say I felt Orwell’s presence – yet I think anyone who travels there must feel that they do. The spirit of the book has somehow become enmeshed with the spirit of place: not the grimness of the book’s contents, but the wildness, the intellectual courage, the poetic insight that enabled its creation.
I am determined to return to Jura, sooner rather than later, so I can walk the whole distance, so I can reach the moorland ridge (I have seen it in photographs) from where you can look down and see the white, elongated block of Barnhill crouched in the valley below, the glistening sea beyond. But for now the immense privilege and joy of being in that place, of seeing and smelling and tasting the landscape that Orwell knew and loved, that acted as a spiritual counterweight to the unrelenting harshness of the work he was composing – these are the memories I want to carry out of this year, a counterweight to the increasing instability and grimness of this time in all our lives.
The Paps of Jura, Isle of Jura, September 2020
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The book I took with me to read on this trip was Dorian Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth, subtitled ‘a biography of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four’. Lynskey’s aim in this book is to provide a biographical and cultural analysis of Orwell’s masterpiece, showing how the book came to be written, and the independent life it has gone on to lead in the absence of its author. Lynskey is at pains to stress that Nineteen Eighty-Four came as the culminating achievement of what, in a parallel universe, might have been just the first part of Orwell’s career. Orwell’s experience in the Spanish Civil War set in motion a period of intense thinking, reading and conversation that funnelled itself into the creation of what is, in effect, the summation of Orwell’s ideas on totalitarianism and political ideology. As a foundation stone of twentieth century literature, we can count ourselves lucky that Orwell lived long enough to complete it.
In the second half of his study, Lynskey examines the impact of NIneteen Eighty-Four on both literary and popular culture: through the years of austerity and McCarthyism, the later years of the Cold War, the post-Thatcher crises in unemployment and national identity, right up to the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump. Lynskey reveals how Orwell’s masterpiece – like all truly great works of literature – reinvents itself for each successive generation. Orwell drew his original inspiration primarily from his experience of Stalinist communism, Trotskyite international socialism and the acts of blind obeisance committed by both the British government and the British Labour and Communist parties in effectively eliding the atrocities committed in the name of socialism. But Nineteen Eighty-Four is too big and too brilliant to remain associated with one specific time period alone; it’s a shape-shifting, mutable text, Lynskey argues, the major proof of which resides in the fact that it has been called into service by every shade of political opinion, often at one and the same time.
I was so excited and so energised by The Ministry of Truth I couldn’t stop thinking about it, couldn’t stop talking about it. Lynskey’s work is informative, original and addictively readable, one of my books of this year for sure. What it also does – as well it should – is drive you back to the original text. I first read Nineteen Eighty-Four when I was around fifteen years of age and still at school. I read it at least twice more over the following decade – but that was thirty years ago now and although I’ve thought about and referenced the book as often as anyone else, I haven’t reread it. I finished Lynskey’s book with a hunger to put that right – and I’m so glad I did.
When I first read Nineteen Eighty-Four, it was in the context of a lot of other dystopias. The novel that is closest to Orwell’s in terms of its genesis and overall impact is Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, which I read at almost exactly the same time (it changed my life, but that’s another story). However, my young-adult self never thought to bracket those two books together: in my mind, Koestler’s book was a historical text specifically about the Soviet Union, whereas Orwell’s was a ‘true’ dystopia, set in the future (only a couple of years in my own future by the time I read it, but still) and built around concepts that seemed undeniably science fictional. It felt more natural to me to bracket Orwell’s work with other similarly science fictional novels: Zamyatin’s We, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, even Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day, which no one else seems to have read but I was obsessed with at the time.
Rereading Nineteen Eighty-Four as a mature adult reveals how I was both right and wrong: Orwell’s novel is both horrifyingly realist, and one of the most perfect exemplars of the science fictional argument we have to draw on. Save for the unavoidable absence of computers, this novel could have been written yesterday. The fact that Orwell was not in a position to imagine the kind of digital infrastructure that would come to define our world is, in the context of this book, unimportant.
As a younger reader, the parts of Nineteen Eighty-Four that impressed themselves upon me most forcefully were those that were most outwardly expressive of the dystopian mode: the telescreens, the Thought Police, Winston’s hidden diary, the imprisonment and torture. Though my memory of the text proved near-photographic in places, I was astounded to discover on rereading that aside from casual mentions of hangings, and of course the ongoing war with Eastasia/Eurasia (take your pick) there is no overt violence in Nineteen Eighty-Four until someway past the halfway mark. What you get instead is an accumulation of circumstances, a portrait of postwar Britain, with all its griminess, everyday privations and grim sense of stasis that, although seventy years in the past now, will feel immediately resonant and present in our pre-Brexit reality to anyone born in Britain in the analogue age.
There are also minor yet touching details that draw directly from Orwell’s personal circumstances: the way Winston ‘hated using his hands, and he hated bending down, which was always liable to start him coughing’, for example, a detail that reminds us instantly of how the author was suffering from TB at the time of writing, and edging closer to death.
Orwell’s attention to detail extends even to minor characters, Winston’s neighbour Parsons for example, the exemplary Party man who ends up being denounced (for absolutely nothing) by his own daughter. We have all met someone like Parsons, nodded hello to him on a Sunday morning as he washes his car. He’s the kind of man who votes UKIP, the kind who sticks a note through his neighbour’s letterbox during lockdown, warning them that he’s seen them taking an extra exercise session and feels inclined to report them for it. Orwell doesn’t demonise Parsons – he just shows him like he is, pathos included. I especially admired his characterisation of Syme, the passionate stickler who works alongside Winston at the Ministry of Truth, a man whose intelligence has been corrupted into the service of a monstrous master yet whose obsessive interest in his work still makes him interesting to talk to:
In an intellectual way, Syme was venomously orthodox. He would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of helicopter raids on enemy villages, the trials and confessions of thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of the Ministry of Love. Talking to him was largely a matter of getting him away from such subjects and entangling him, if possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on which he was authoritative and interesting.
‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words,’ Syme asserts, before discoursing on the essential redundancy of synonyms and antonyms. ‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?’ he says. ‘In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.’ What struck me most profoundly on reading the novel this time around was how its subject, more than any other, is the importance of language, not only in resisting tyranny but also in maintaining any kind of personal integrity. Anyone who cares about language and words will find Syme’s proposition for the shrinking and coarsening of language literally shiver-inducing, especially as we are already bearing witness to such a transformation across large segments of political and online discourse. One need barely ask what Orwell would have made of phrases such as ‘alternative facts’ and ‘the reality-based community’. If it weren’t so appalling it would be funny. Reading Syme’s words, I also found myself thinking of the ways in which Anglophone culture has forcibly suppressed indigenous languages, gaslighting, devaluing and at the worst extreme obliterating the identity and means of expression of entire peoples.
If I were to pass a negative comment on any aspect of Nineteen Eighty-Four, I would have to say that Orwell is not particularly imaginative in his portrayal of women. Winston’s estranged wife Katherine is referred to as ‘stupid’ and moreover ‘too stupid to detect the unorthodoxy of [Winston’s] opinions’. Wherever prole women are mentioned – and with the exception of an elderly man Winston talks to in a pub the proles described by Orwell are all women – they are invariably described as ‘enormous’, or ‘monstrous’. The idea that these women might have inner lives is never contemplated, and it is only shortly before his arrest that Winston is able to connect a prole woman’s singing with the idea of beauty..
The main female character Julia is bright and bold and courageous but again Orwell seems at pains to stress her physicality. “You’re only a rebel from the waist down,” Winston says to her – Julia is above all a sensuous being, showing no interest in the intellectual reasons behind her rebellion or the life of the mind generally. ‘She hated the Party, and said so in the crudest words, but she made no general criticism of it. Except where it touched upon her own life she had no interest in Party doctrine.’ In spite of his love for Julia, Winston remains fundamentally alone in his search for answers about the nature of the Party and its hunger for power. The idea that women might be equal partners in counter-revolution seems barely to occur to him. Considered on the terms we are offered, Julia is excellently characterised: a warm-blooded, vital creation with a life force that is pivotal within the novel as a whole. Orwell clearly has a blind spot when it comes to feminism, which is a shame. In this respect it is interesting to compare Nineteen Eighty-Four with Zamyatin’s novel We, in which the male protagonist is schooled in the concepts of revolution and intellectual independence by a woman.
Though it might seem incongruous, there are many moments of illuminating beauty throughout Nineteen Eighty-Four, moments that are not often mentioned or remembered but that form a crucial and definitive counterweight to the horror. Winston’s dreams of ‘the Golden Country’ for example, passages that in a sense represent the heart of Orwell’s vision, the necessity of ‘staying sane’ as an act of resistance. There is also much discussion to be had around the ending of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Certainly when I first read the novel all those years ago I had no doubt that Winston’s final assertion, that he loves Big Brother, was a statement of utter defeat, that every last scrap of his integrity had been torn away. This time, I’m not so certain. ‘White always wins’, Winston says, as he moves chess pieces across the board in the Chestnut Tree Cafe, and I had the sense that it was this assertion about the ultimate triumph of good over evil that held the most weight, a coded message almost, even at the last: Winston says he loves Big Brother, but does he truly?
We cannot know – or at least we can only know the answer that feels most true for us. What I do know is that Nineteen Eighty-Four is and remains a landmark work that deserves its fame and status. Not only in its prescience but in its historical acuity, not only in its polemic but in its literary assurance and raw beauty, this is an elegant, complex, mature work of fiction that rewards the reader’s attention on every level. Reading it again brought me not only intellectual satisfaction; I was equally excited to discover how well it has stood the test of time, how relevant this book still feels, precisely today. It also brought me uneasy dreams, a sense of being on the boundary between the known world and the most perilously unstable of futures. To share one’s fear with a like mind in this way is not merely a consolation, but a reason for hope.
