The Spider's House

Nina Allan's Homepage

Author: Nina (Page 4 of 65)

Tár, dir. Todd Field 2022

January 27, 2023 /

I first heard about Todd Field’s new – and now Oscar-nominated – film Tár sometime last year. I was immediately drawn to and excited about it because of its musical theme, and because the trailers looked amazing. The movie has excited controversy from the outset. The first online commentary I came across was written by someone feeling outraged and, as I recall, ‘cheated’ because they discovered after seeing the film that Lydia Tár isn’t a real person. Since then we’ve had claims that the movie is anti-woman, that it’s racist, that it’s working-class-phobic, or something, plus comments from conductor Marin Alsop that the film is ‘offensive’ because it doesn’t portray women conductors in a positive light. I admire Marin Alsop tremendously but confusing one’s own life with that of a fictional character and then being ‘shocked’ that no one thought to tell you about the film sooner? Major eyeroll time. Cate Blanchett’s response to Alsop’s objections is both dignified and intelligent, as one would expect from such a fine actor defending what might just be the greatest performance of her life.

I went into Glasgow to see the film yesterday, and it affected me so powerfully that I kept waking up in the night still thinking about it. Todd Field’s script is brilliant. The film is musically literate to a degree that filled me with relief as well as delight. The history of the Berlin Phil – itself no stranger to controversy over the decades – and the peculiarly oppressive hierarchies of the classical music world are treated with candour and without scruple. Tár’s own musical insights, expressed though they are with brutal disdain for dissenting opinion, are clear-eyed, passionate and musically astute.

But while there has been some intelligent commentary on the film – for anyone interested, this piece stands more or less in alignment with my own views on how the movie relates to contemporary discourse on cultural power structures – what typically has not been talked about anywhere near enough is the film as film. In terms of its narrative, Tár is both a magisterial character study and a brilliant dissection of the corrupting influence of power. The film’s imagery and narrative devices are both extraordinary and richly compelling in conveying these aspcts.

From early on in the movie we are given a sense of the precarious balance in Lydia Tár between power and fragility. Tár’s whole life has come to be about control, not just on the podium but in her personal relationships and in her environment. The pressure of maintaining control is, as the film opens, about to become still more destabilising as the result of the dramatic intrusion of external circumstances. Lydia attempts to control these, too – and it is precisely when her panicked, jumbled, ill-conceived manipulations prove insufficient that the slide towards breakdown begins. We see how Tár’s sleep is repeatedly disturbed, not by noisy neighbours or street traffic but by sounds inside her apartment – a ticking metronome, white noise coming from inside the fridge – so minute they would not even be registered by most people. Tár’s innate vulnerability to these recurrent disturbances serve not only to highlight her sensitivity as a musician, but to indicate her increasing paranoia.

Tár comes increasingly to believe that she is being watched – that the sounds inside her apartment are being deliberately triggered, that someone has stolen her practice score, that books and papers have been moved or misplaced. While there is no overt evidence of this – the film leaves it open – the suggestion that she is being sabotaged comes increasigly to dominate Tár’s mind. The scene in which Tár goes in search of the orchestra’s new cellist, Olga Metkina, gives us a startling and horrific visual snapshot of her crumbling mental reserves as we pass from a normal Berlin streetscene into a dilapidated pre-WW2 back courtyard, piled with rotting mattresses and overflowing rubbish sacks. The sudden shift is both a literal revelation – under what conditions exactly are more junior members of the orchestra forced to exist? – and a metaphorical insight into the reality of Tár’s relationships and aspects of her past she is desperate to keep hidden.

Is Tár really attacked, there in that place? As with the sounds in her apartment, we never find out for sure, though the creeping horror of that particular film sequence comes back to us again and again as Lydia spirals towards her downfall, both public and private. We see how in the toxic mirror-world she has created for herself, the music itself cannot be enough. Separated from the power and influence it has bestowed on her, even the memories of what she once had are no longer real memories but cardboard tokens, literal and symbolic, of the self that has been destroyed.

‘You don’t seem to know who you are or where you’ve come from or where you’re going’, her brother says, as we enter the nightmarish final twenty minutes of the film, a hallucinatory shift in realities so sudden and so brutal I kept expecting it to be revealed as a dream. Here, the film turns to the language of nightmare – dissociation, jump cuts, appalling situations, queasy lighting and a sense of total disempowerment – to entrap us together with Lydia within a world so far removed from where we started out it gives us the sense of having been removed to another planet… And those who have seen the film will understand the ellipsis.

Tár will not win Best Picture – Oscar typically runs scared of controversy, and a win for this film in that category would no doubt trigger all kinds of ridiculous reactions – but I live in hope that Todd Field might at least win Best Original Screenplay, and Cate Blanchett Best Female Actor. Tár is original, provocative and demanding film-making of a kind all too rarely seen outside the arthouse, and deserves due credit. In a scene early on, Lydia Tár speaks of the orchestral conductor’s ability to halt time, to hold it in abeyance. It says something then, that throughout the film’s 2 hours and 40 minutes’ duration I did not find myself tempted to look at my watch, not even once. Tár undoubtedly takes its time, but it is time marvellously spent.

Turning the page: first thoughts on a new year

January 7, 2023 /

The first book I read this year is John Darnielle’s Devil House, his third novel to date and one I had on my reading list even before 2022 got started. You may remember how much I loved his second novel, Universal Harvester, a book that continues to haunt and inspire me five years on. In some ways, you could almost imagine Devil House as the direct continuation of that book – look what happened to that video store when it started losing business! – though in fact it has no connection at all, save being the next chapter of Darnielle’s incredibly personal literary project. The way in which Darnielle uses the small town canvas to illustrate larger themes and examine important moral questions is laid almost painfully bare in Devil House. Darnielle has said in interview that his third novel took five years to write. It is easy to see why, and we should feel grateful that he allowed himself the time this book required. Devil House has a lot to say, and it says it beautifully.

“It matters which story you tell, it matters whose story you tell, it matters what people think even if it doesn’t matter to the people who needed it before the disaster hit. That’s the thing, those of us on this side of the disaster, we get so dazzled by the fireworks, by the conflagration I want to say, that we don’t see the gigantic expanse over there on the other side of the flames, but, you know. People have to live there.”

The premise of Devil House is simple and – as with Universal Harvester – it can trick you into thinking you know what’s coming. Gage Chandler is a true crime writer. His first book, The White Witch of Morro Bay, was an instant bestseller, and set him up for future successes. When his editor presents him with a new storyline and a novel approach to it, Chandler is initially sceptical – purchase an actual murder house? Go to live there? – but in the end he is unable to resist. He has personal links to the location, and location, above all, has always been intensely important to him. Also, there is a sense that this particular case has been brushed under the carpet.

The book we are reading, Chandler tells us early on, is the book he eventually came up with. It is not exactly the book he set out to write, not the book his regular fanbase might be expecting. Those who enjoy metafiction were always going to love this. Those who like straight thrillers, probably not so much. But what captivated me most about Devil House is the true subject of the book, that is, the problematical nature of true crime literature: why do we read it, should we be reading it and why do these questions matter? They are questions that have been on my mind for a while now, not least because I read and enjoy a lot of true crime literature.

The past eighteen months have taken this one stage further, though, because I have been working with a true crime narrative as part of my novel-in-progress.

It was Darnielle’s own obsession with true crime as a younger reader that kick-started Devil House – he has a lot to say about this here, and it’s a marvellous interview. I think it’s important to remember that true crime has changed and evolved a great deal since the days of the more blood-soaked, sensationalist and killer-obsessed narratives that tended to dominate the genre in the 70s and 80s when Darnielle was first consuming it. In the decades since, we have not only seen the pioneering work of writers such as Gordon Burn and David Peace, novels and creative non-fiction that takes on the subject of crime and particular criminals in a markedly different way, but more latterly the work of writers such as Sarah Weinman, Hallie Rubenhold, Nona Fernandez, Alice Bolin, Selva Almada, Rachel Monroe and Natasha Tretheway have made still further progress in revealing particular events and people more fully within the context of their social and political background.

None of which makes the stories they tell any less compelling. But they do ask us to consider why we are drawn to these narratives, a powerful and necessary question that deserves to be at the centre of any true crime story, no matter who is telling it.

Reading Devil House just as I am starting work on the second draft of what should hopefully be my next novel has been a fascinating, often startling and occasionally sobering experience as I stumble up against a deeply admired writer’s narrative responses to questions I have been asking myself. The story I happen to be working with is almost a century old; realistically speaking, anyone with a personal connection to the case must now be dead, a fact that does make some of these questions easier to deal with, though it does not make them irrelevant, especially as my treatment of the material is unorthodox. I do have other material on my hard drive, a project-in-embryo relating to a much more recent case. I am letting it lie for now, firstly because it’s still far from complete, secondly and more importantly because I don’t think it would be right to publish it yet.

The question of when it would be right is one I am still grappling with. Which is as it should be. All of this stuff comes up in Devil House, which is a huge part of why I love it.

I don’t have a particular plan for my reading in the year ahead. But I would like to steer towards books that feed, that seem to comment on, that feel in tune with my own evolving process and areas of interest. My new novel Conquest, which comes out in May, feels to me like the beginning of a new phase in my work, one I am excited about and challenged by. People have sometimes asked me if writing a book is something that gets easier with time, and there are ways in which it does, or at least it should do. You know you can go the distance, and you know you can always write more sentences about pretty much anything. But in the deeper sense, I would say no, it does not. With time comes the knowledge that writing good sentences is only the beginning. For writing to mean anything, it has to go further, into areas that might not feel comfortable, or easy. You have to make your writing count for something.

Which is terrifying, but entirely as it should be.

2022: a year in review

December 28, 2022 /

This is traditionally the time when I look back over my year’s reading and post a list of the books that most impressed me, resonated with me or stayed with me through the previous twelve months. I find myself resisting the traditional format this year, firstly because the number of books I read is somewhat lower than usual – this is mainly down to the fact that the first half of 2022 was dominated by our house move – and secondly because it has been such a weird year in general.

A lot of my headspace has been overtaken by the war in Ukraine, an outrage and a tragedy I cannot come to terms with and am still finding difficult to articulate. The eruption of this horrific, destructive and totally unnecessary war has made writing difficult at times – not the accustomed activity, but the moral sense. As with all the major events that have altered and shaken our world these past number of years, the effect for a writer, for anyone who makes or thinks or creates art, is to provoke the most searching questions about what kind of an artist you are, what kind of an artist you want to be, and the inevitable gap in between. This holds equally true for reading: which books are most urgent, most inspiring, most constructive? It goes without saying that the answers will be different for everyone, and for differing reasons.

In terms of my own work, once the house move was out of the way, I quickly re-immersed myself in the writing of my next novel, a project I began in the summer of 2021 and that has proved the most challenging assignment I have set myself to date. I felt exactly the same after finishing Conquest – now frighteningly close to publication in May of next year – and so I count this sense of difficulty as a good thing, an indication that I am pushing my ideas and my capacity to express them as far as they will go.

I am happy to report that I completed a first draft of that novel at the end of October. I am pleased with what has been accomplished, and looking forward to beginning work on the second draft in January. As with Conquest, the book I have in front of me is fascinatingly different from the book I set out to write. This tendency for works to evolve beyond their original remit has always been a part of my process, something I have come to accept as inevitable. In the case of these two most recent novels, the shift in identity has been even more radical. Once again, I think this is a good thing, a direct response to changing circumstance and the anxiety surrounding that.

What pleases me most about Conquest and its successor is how connected they feel. Not in terms of subject matter so much as intention. Conquest was decisively shaped by the lockdowns and by their impact on society; this new book is unquestionably a product of these past twelve months in particular.

Writing nurtures and protects and supports me. I struggle constantly with the need to be better, to be clearer about my direction and intent, to match the reach of my ambition with quality on the page. There is no contradiction in those two statements – indeed I believe and hope they are one and the same.

My book of the year is Red Comet, Heather Clark’s monumental and masterful biography of Sylvia Plath. I have read a lot on Plath – she is very important to me – but Red Comet is something else, something special, the biography Plath has always deserved. Finally we have a work that considers Plath on her own terms – as a poet first and foremost – and that while it never seeks to sideline the life, never underplays or undervalues the work, either. A superlative effort, a book for the ages.

Hot on its heels comes Hanya Yanagihara’s To Paradise, a novel that enthralled and excited me through every one of its 800 or so pages, delighted me with its structural complexity and satisfied me completely in terms of the ways in which it explored and articulated some of the more dangerous and destabilising elements of our current times. What I love and appreciate most in Yanaighara – aside from her marvellous storytelling ability – is her independent-mindedness, her disregard for fashionable rhetoric and her steely curiosity about the world and people as they actually present themselves. She is that rare thing, a novelist who is brave enough to experiment, and with each of her three books to date, she has set out to achieve something new. Where she’ll take us next, I have no idea.

One of my most gratifying reading experiences of 2022 has been my re-reading of JG Ballard’s first three novels, for an essay on Ballard’s approach to science fiction that is scheduled for publication as part of a new anthology in 2023. The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World formed my own first encounters with Ballard’s work, which is why I decided to concentrate my attention upon them in particular. In terms of both their language and their approach, their uniqueness and brilliance remains undimmed. Coming into contact with Ballard’s work always leaves me on a high, with the sense that no other writer is as inspirational or as provocative. Writing about him, thinking about him is both a challenge and a privilege, the only danger being that it’s difficult to move on again afterwards.

Other books that have proved important to me this year include Speak, Silence by Carole Angier, Souvenir by Michael Bracewell, The Paper Lantern by Will Burns, Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza, Stalking the Atomic City by Markiyan Kamysh, Red Pill by Hari Kunzru, The Instant by Amy Liptrot, Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel, The Men by Sandra Newman and Delphi by Clare Pollard.

I am still thinking about my reading aims, hopes and aspirations for 2023 – I’ll hopefully have a little more to say about them next week.

In the meantime, a huge thank you to everyone who stops by here, and wishing you happiness, peace and good fortune in the year to come.

Stalking the Atomic City

December 13, 2022 /

Even the floors in the houses are ugly. Old boards were ripped out to be used as construction materials, and you have to try hard to find a place where you can jump into your sleeping bag, zip up, and zonk out. The locals burned all the villages next to the wire with the enthusiasm of the thugs from Toretsk who dragged fragments of the downed Malaysia Airlines Boeing to local scrapyards – like a carcass, a mammoth, prey, whatever.

In 1972, a novel was published that is arguably one of the most influential science fiction stories of all time. Roadside Picnic, by the Russian writer-brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, tells of a world forever altered by a chance visitation. As readers, we never get to see the aliens – if there were any aliens – but we are offered glimpses of the things they leave behind. Objects saturated in mystery whose purpose is unknown, whose effects can be lethal, whose wider influence on Earth’s history and culture is incalculable and lasting. The contaminated zones are forbidden territory, fenced and guarded; for the stalkers who risk their lives and their sanity to penetrate these zones, they are something in the nature of an addiction.

In 1979 came Stalker, the film adaptation of Roadside Picnic, scripted by the Strugatsky brothers and directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. In the years since, the Zone has continued and deepened its hold over the imaginations of games developers, film makers, musicians, artists and writers. Especially writers. M.John Harrison’s 2007 novel Nova Swing, the second book of the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy and winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, is an open letter to Roadside Picnic; Jeff VanderMeer’s bestselling Southern Reach trilogy equally so. There is something in the premise that seems uniquely magnetic and eerily mystifying, a postmodern spin on the trope of the ‘lost domain’ as first made explicit by the French writer Alain-Fournier in his 1913 classic Le Grand Meaulnes. Roadside Picnic offers a vision that is both beautiful and cruel, prosaic in its essence – some aliens do a pit stop, dump some trash – and yet shimmering with a sense of wonder that can never be extinguished or fully explained.

I first read Roadside Picnic in the early eighties and it has remained a touchstone text for me ever since, one of those few works of science fiction that I read – eagerly and indiscriminately – as a young person that has followed me into my life as an adult writer. I have read it half a dozen times and love it almost beyond reason. I need only to open its covers to fall immediately back under its spell. For me, it is the way in which the prosaic is enmeshed with the seemingly miraculous – with the vexed and corrosive nature of those miracles – that makes the novel so special for me. Add to that the unconventional manner of its storytelling, its moral ambivalence, the fact that it is a classic of Russian literature.

I also love Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which I approach as an entirely separate work, an adaptation of the Strugatskys’ novel in the true sense of the word, that is, a wholly new artistic endeavour inspired by an original. Tarkovsky does not really do characterisation – the people in Stalker are archetypes, a point underlined by the fact that the cast list does not give them names but designates them simply as ‘writer’, ‘professor’, and of course ‘Stalker’. It is the atmosphere of the film that compels, the mingled sense of beauty and threat, captivity and unbounded freedom that offers a hyper-real visual translation of what the Strugatsky brothers convey through the written word.

Anyone who comes into contact with Roadside Picnic seems to grasp instinctively that the book is important, that it offers a commentary on human existence, on the danger and pain and wonder of being alive. What then can I say about Stalking the Atomic City, a book that is as much a naked homage to Roadside Picnic as Stalker or Nova Swing but that has the distinction of being a work of non-fiction?

The book’s author, Markiyan Kamysh, is a Ukrainian writer. His father was a nuclear physicist and one of the ‘liquidators’ who risked their lives in order to clear up and lock down the exclusion zone surrounding the Chornobyl nuclear reactor following the catastrophic explosion and meltdown in 1986. Kamysh’s father died in 2003. Kamysh describes himself as ‘a writer who represents the Chornobyl underground in literature’. He might equally be called a stalker, one of the many dozens of adventurers, thrill-seekers, scrap metal looters, tour guides and misfits who since the turn of the century have been venturing into the exclusion zone, hiking and mapping, photographing and itemising its vast and hazardous spaces, often at risk of ruining their health, both physical and mental.

Most of them, perhaps predictably, are men; there is an element of stalking that seems to be little more than a dangerous and elaborate form of cock-measuring contest. There is more to it than that, though. There is poetry and there is horror. There is a vitality, a rawness, a sense of contact with an utterly new and uncharted space, a enclave of strangeness that might as well be an alien planet. There is, above all, the freedom that comes with casting off the directives of a world too heavily circumscribed by outside command.

Reading Kamysh’s book – part ballad, part Bildungsroman, part psychogeographical investigation – has offered me my most uncanny reading experience of the year, because it appears to reflect a version of reality first described in a novel of the imagination written fifty years ago, first lived by a film director who died from the cancer caused by the toxins that pollute the site of his most famous movie. The layers of literature contained within it – for Stalking the Atomic City is both a wholly new homage to Roadside Picnic and a demolition of it – now find themselves cloaked in a new, still more terrible reality as the zone itself has become part of a new battleground, a frontline in the war launched by Putin’s forces against the people of Ukraine.

Stalking the Atomic City reads as a dirty love poem to Roadside Picnic, just as Roadside Picnic reads as a shuddering premonition of Atomic City. Each seems to contain the other – not just in the likeness of the experiences they describe but in the beauty and intelligence of their language, their radical vision, the correlation of the word ‘stalker’ with the word ‘writer’.

The war in Ukraine is grounds both for anger and for deep grief. In its own impassioned, mysterious way, Stalking the Atomic City is an expression of that anger and that grief, as well as an undaunted assertion of Ukrainian identity. This book thrilled me and chilled my blood, even as I fell helplessly in love with it. I hope Markiyan Kamysh is doing OK, and that he is writing.

Announcing A Traveller in Time

December 1, 2022 /

When the news broke earlier this year that Maureen Kincaid Speller was seriously ill, like all of her friends and colleagues I felt deeply upset. Maureen had seemed still in the very prime of life; she still had so much to offer to the world and to her community; there were so many books and ideas and questions she had still to write about. The thought that she might be leaving us was not one I was ready to dwell on, and still find it hard to come to terms with.

Once the initial shock had subsided I began to think about conversations I’d had with Maureen about assembling a collection of her criticism, a selection of work that best expressed her passion for books and for thinking about books, as well as shining a spotlight upon the particular authors and subject areas she felt most drawn to write about. I knew this was a project close to her heart, one she was eager to see fulfilled so that she could move on to the next phase of her work, uncovering new insights and drawing upon fresh enthusiasms.

When I tentatively suggested to Maureen’s husband, Paul Kincaid, that I would like to help Maureen put together such a collection he was immensely supportive. When I contacted Francesca Barbini at Luna Press and asked her if she might be in a position to provide a home for Maureen’s work, she came on board immediately. And so A Traveller in Time was born. I cannot adequately express my gratitude to Francesca and to Paul for their enthusiasm, for their instant understanding that this needed to happen.

Of course, the original and cherished intention was for Maureen herself to be a part of this process. Time, and Maureen’s illness, were sadly against us in this. But I am happy and glad to know that Maureen knew about the project, that even until a couple of weeks before she died we were planning to meet in person and discuss it. Since Maureen’s death in September, the project has seemed if anything more urgent, more necessary. I am delighted to tell you that I have now completed the bulk of the editorial work, and Luna have scheduled A Traveller in Time for release in September 2023, exactly a year after Maureen died, and in time for launch at next year’s FantasyCon.

We are lucky enough to have secured cover art from the award-winning Iain Clark, who designed the wonderful poster and artwork to launch the bid for the 2024 Glasgow Worldcon. I look forward to sharing that cover in due course – it is truly beautiful.

I am delighted, gratified and very proud that this project is on its way to becoming a physical reality. Maureen was special. The work she did was uniquely her own. In reading her words, we remember her. I hope and trust that we of the science fiction community will be doing exactly that for many years to come.

Arthur C. Clarke Award 2022

October 26, 2022 /

The winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2022 is Deep Wheel Orcadia, by Harry Josephine Giles.

This book was first on my radar some months before its publication and I ordered my copy from our local bookshop as soon as it came out. A science fiction novel. By an acclaimed Scottish poet. In Orcadian Scots with parallel English text.

This couldn’t have been more up my street if it tried. I was delighted, and amazed, when it turned up on the Clarke Award shortlist, not least because the shortlist as a whole is one of the boldest and most exciting – for me, at any rate – in some years.

I was lucky enough to receive an advance copy of Aliya Whiteley’s Skyward Inn and found it as original and thought-provoking as everything I’ve read from Whiteley, who, I firmly believe, is one of the most important writers working in British science fiction today. With this, her second appearance on the Clarke shortlist, I thought 2022 might be her year. That pleasure still awaits us, but her repeat shortlisting in and of itself is a welcome recognition of her considerable talent.

I wasn’t the hugest fan of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun – I found it bland and sketchily imagined, too reminiscent of the children’s fable it was originally intended to be. But I like Ishiguro. I admire his willingness to experiment with ideas, to keep moving forward. Each new book from him feels meant, as if he’s still considering its challenges even as it’s published. That quality of nervousness means I’m always eager to read his next work, as I will be again. I am glad the Clarke jury picked him out once more for further discussion.

I have not quite finished reading Courttia Newland’s A River Called Time yet – the reason this post is so delayed – but I love the writing, very much, and I was gratified to see the jury make yet another bold choice.

A good year. And what I notice now, as I look down the list of previous winners, is how excellent those winners have been, these past few years. Deep Wheel Orcadia is no exception, and this excites me. When a book like this appears, it throws positive energy back into science fiction, illuminating its possibilities, inspiring fresh approaches. i love it when that happens. Congratulations, Josie Giles, and to the Clarke Award jury, for rewarding a work that so powerfully showcases the radical ambition that will always characterise the best SF.

Weird Wednesdays #20: The Men by Sandra Newman

September 28, 2022 /

They ran in a landscape where not a stick was alive, not a floating seed. The air was thick with dust or rain that glinted like cartoon radiation. There were forests of shattered leafless trees and wetlands denuded of vegetation, where the water was thick with plastic trash. In a few clips, a half-city stood on the horizon, a skyline of partial buildings that appeared to have been gnawed by fire. Some places had entirely lost the contours of our world… We understood: this was a future world in which the men had never disappeared. It was the hell to which we would have been condemned, the Earth they would have made.

Lines like these might make you think that what we are dealing with here is a classic alternate world dystopia in the feminist mode. You would be wrong. Sandra Newman’s The Men is a radical departure from tradition, a provocative critique of the feminist utopia and a challenge to easy thinking. If more science fiction were this original, our literary environment would immediately become more interesting, and more dynamic.

Jane Pearson is a damaged person. In her earlier life as a ballet prodigy she was groomed by the mentor she idolised to perpetrate abuse on teenage boys. Demonised by a public hungry for scandal, the life she eventually builds for herself is very different from the one she previously imagined. Married to Leo and mother to Ben, Jane’s inner restlessness is merely a precursor to the bewilderment and incomprehension that is about to destroy her world for a second time.

One evening in late August, at 7:14 precisely every human being with a Y chromosome disappears from the world. Aeroplanes, suddenly pilotless, drop from the sky; patients die on operating tables; factories grind to a halt. Women all over the world find themselves widowed, orphaned, homeless, freed, bereft. In the weeks and months that follow, a new world order begins to assert itself. A key player in the new politics is Evangelyne Moreau, a woman with a remarkable mind whose family were wiped out in an act of brutal police violence. Jane knows Evangelyne from college. The two almost became lovers, but Jane ultimately chose Leo. As the world shifts and changes about her, Jane journeys across the country in search of Evangelyne and the truth of what she felt those many years before.

Meanwhile, something else is happening, something disturbing. Videos are appearing online, a series of cryptic film clips entitled simply The Men. In them, armies of lost men march through a world that turns increasingly strange, increasingly depleted. And for many of the women watching, these are men they know. The Men quickly becomes an addiction, a form of mass hypnosis. But are the men real, or CGI fakes? What do the films mean and what do they point towards? For many women, the disappearance of the men is a chance at a new beginning. For others it ushers in a form of stasis, a reality that is ultimately as discomfiting as the world glimpsed in the violent film clips they are watching online.

For Evangelyne Moreau, The Men is more sinister still, a portent of her own destruction. Once again, she asks Jane to make a choice. But is this truly a choice that is Jane’s to make?

From Herland to The Female Man, from Maul to The Power, feminist utopia has formed an important branch of science fiction, encompassing some of its boldest and most experimental ideas. The Men is an important and brilliant addition to the canon, not least in the way it interrogates what has gone before. The questions Newman poses are difficult to answer: would a world without men truly be more equal, more peaceful, more rational? How much, in the end, would we miss them? What is a man, even, and how much, if at all, does gender determine our identity? How far would we be prepared to sacrifice the safety of others in pursuit of our own desires?

The Men is that rare thing, a novel of ideas that pays equal attention to language, character and form. The eerie surrealism of the video sequences generates a sense of mystery and foreboding that is impossible to shake; like the women permanently hunched in front of their screens, we find it impossible to look away, even as the scenes turn darker and increasingly violent. The raw intelligence of this book, its brutal honesty makes The Men a bracing antidote to the more anodyne brand of supposedly political SF that in reality is little more than crowd-pleasing. Newman handles questions of politics, gender, race and philosophy with skill and compassion without succumbing to the platitudes of fashionable discourse or the temptation of providing comfortable answers.

And she can write. At a sentence level, Newman’s prose is fiery, passionate, poetical – in short, a joy. If science fiction’s core directive is to provoke, to interrogate established assumptions, most of all to re-imagine then it is writers like Newman that prove that science fiction as a mode of literature still has a future.

Maureen Kincaid Speller

September 20, 2022 /

Yesterday we learned the terrible news that our dear friend Maureen Kincaid Speller had passed away. Maureen was diagnosed with cancer back in March, but she had made remarkable progress and at the beginning of the summer her prognosis looked a great deal better. Her death on Sunday came as a bitter blow. Death is always difficult to come to terms with, but in the case of Maureen it seems doubly so. She had so much more still to give. Her indomitable spirit, her keen intellect, her wicked sense of humour and the all round pleasure in being in her company – these things make her loss all the more painful. I don’t think I will ever get used to the knowledge that she is no longer with us.

I will value in particular the memories of our many discussions of science fiction – its definition and relevance, its unique contribution to literature, the state of the field. So much laughter and so much passion. I was delighted when Maureen was made senior reviews editor at Strange Horizons, because I knew how much she would relish this challenge and how much support and experience she could offer to newer writers. I will treasure especially the time we spent together immersed in the Shadow Clarke through most of 2017. Maureen wrote some excellent criticism – because of course she did – but there was also all the stuff behind the scenes, the free exchange of ideas and opinions, the joy in thinking.

Maureen’s work as a critic and commentator has been a lifelong commitment and I will have more to say about that in the coming months. For now, I just want to say Maureen, your loss to us is incalculable. We love you with all our hearts, and will miss you forever. Our sincerest condolences to Paul, Maureen’s beloved husband, and our beloved friend. Our thoughts are with you.

At the Clarke Award ceremony 2017: Paul Kincaid, Nick Hubble, Victoria Hoyle, me, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Helen Marshall. Photo by Will Ellwood – thanks, Will!

Weird Wednesdays #19: Treacle Walker by Alan Garner

September 14, 2022 /

I have frequently been surprised, these past couple of weeks, by the way in which even seasoned literary commentators still slip into the habit of referring to Alan Garner as a children’s writer. I am sure I’ve said this somewhere before, but I continue to think of my first encounter with Garner’s work – The Owl Service, which I first read when I was around twelve – as among my most significant primary encounters with adult themes in literature. I found the book utterly compelling – but if you had asked me then what it was about I would have found it hard to answer. There was simply a feeling I had, a palpable sense of having touched something mysterious, timeless and possibly dangerous. I experienced the same feeling, albeit with a greater understanding of what was going on, both in me and in the book, when I belatedly caught up with Red Shift, some years ago.

As regards the Booker commentators, what on Earth is wrong with saying that Alan Garner is a writer who often centres young protagonists?

Which is exactly what he does in his 2021 novel, Treacle Walker, recently shortlisted for the Booker Prize, a fact that has made me feel more personally excited about the award than I have done since Anna Burns won it for Milkman back in 2018. The Booker has become generally much more innovative, inclusive and interesting in recent years, and I follow the annual discussion surrounding it with great enjoyment. Garner’s shortlisting though speaks to me personally. It counts, for me personally,. This is simply a feeling I have.

Treacle Walker tells the story of a boy, Joseph Coppock. Joe has recently been ill, and seems to spend a lot of time alone. Are his parents at work? Who looks after the house? We are never told. We live, for the duration of this short novel, entirely inside the world and mind of Joe as he encounters a mysterious rag-and-bone man, Treacle Walker, and falls into a daunting adventure that will alter his universe.

Treacle Walker speaks to Joe in riddles, an affectation he clearly finds simultaneously annoying and compelling. He is eager to learn the secrets the old man wants to impart to him, at the same time impatient, as any boy might be, to set his own stamp on the world, to interpret its signs and wonders in his own language. Most of the dialogue in Treacle Walker is conducted in the dialect of Garner’s native Cheshire, and one senses keenly Garner’s desire not to confuse or obfuscate but to set down, to save this unique language from annihilation in the twenty-first-century rush to refute the past. There is also a fierce feeling of privacy being accorded, the boy and the man who were always meant to come together sharing knowledge neither could fully fathom, until now.

It is notable that in the moments of highest tension and drama, the two cease with their mutual ragging and speak in terse, plain English. In these exchanges, it is almost as if the two are of a similar age and level of understanding.

As with all of Garner’s work, the action takes place against a vividly described, living landscape. One might almost say that Garner’s writing becomes the landscape, revealing it in all its aspects: peace, seclusion, discomfort, joy, alienation and terror:

But night was in the room, a sheet of darkness, flapping from wall to wall. It changed shape, swirling, flowing. It dropped to the ground and ruckled over the floor bricks; then up to the joints and beams of the ceiling; hung, fell, humped. It shrieked, reared against the chimney opening, but did not enter. It surged through the house by cracks and gaps in the timbers, out under the eaves. There was a whispering, silence, and on the floor the snow melted to tears.

This passage speaks to me particularly, both in its heady choice of words and in the symbols they carry. There have already been suggested many possible and plausible explanations of Treacle Walker’s meaning. For me, it is a book about the rising tide of chaos that accompanies change, the corresponding forces of growth and new imaginings that bring about progress. People have spoken of this novel as Garner’s last hurrah, a gathering together of his familiar themes, a farewell coda. It may be all of these things. Yet it is equally a work of bold experiment and dynamism, a book that makes use of ancient fable to speak to us in our own time with uncanny acuity.

Treacle Walker is tired, and Joe is ready and waiting to claim his future. As the two change places, or become one another, they mirror the unquiet yet seamless passing of one season to another.

Weird Wednesdays #18: They by Kay Dick

August 31, 2022 /

They opens with what at first glance appears to be a gentle slice of English pastoral: a house in the country, a house that is described as ‘rather splendid’ and that from the roof enjoys ‘a full sight of the sea.’ The scene, with its seabirds and confluence of rivers and quiet conversation between friends, appears idyllic. And yet even here, in the first paragraph of this remarkable short novel, threats hover in the margins, not so much in the action as in the author’s choice of words:

A natural bird sanctuary, one was conscious of flight as part of the landscape.

What follows is a gradual winnowing away, a gleaning, as Dick puts it, of every freedom, of every unguarded action, a pushing back of life into its own dusty shadow. We find ourselves in a world in which artistic expression has been deemed unnecessary and dangerous for society. A growing band of human surveillance drones – the ‘they’ of the title – move through district after district, destroying artworks and burning books and banning music. Artists themselves are not harmed unless they physically resist or offer verbal objections, at which point reprisals are swift, brutal and unequivocal. Unless they appear at the beginning of a sentence, they are never capitalised. We have no idea if they are government-sanctioned, or self-appointed. Artists seek sanctuary in out-of-the-way places, rural enclaves and coastal settlements where the worst of the new laws have not yet come into effect.

We sense that it is only a matter of time before there is nowhere left to retreat to. As more and more places become unsafe, acts of defiance become smaller and more internalised. As time passes, it is not only creative work that is deemed inappropriate but more or less anything that speaks of individual, quiet enjoyment: living alone, walks in nature, the companionship of animals. Bands of ‘sightseers’ follow the gleaning parties, despoiling the landscape, holding rowdy gatherings and revelling in the bloodshed and censure meted out to dissidents. When they are not out on the streets looking for a bit of civil unrest, they are walled up inside their family homes, watching television.

I have seen some commentary on this book that suggests Dick’s vision of dystopia is simplistic and highly selective, that her characters are privileged and – ah yes, that weasel word again – elitist. I would argue that such protestations entirely misjudge the purpose and tone of They, which is a small masterpiece, the finest and most penetrative kind of allegorical SF. It is always tempting with literary dystopias, to demand that they be literal, to want to draw comparisons with one’s own time and place. There is no shortage of these in They, for which one could cite recent instances of drones spying on lone walkers in the Pennines, neighbours reporting on neighbours having a cup of tea with other neighbours, the equating of journalists with organised crime, the media trashing of impartial news broadcasting and the withdrawal of government support for English Literature as an academic discipline. The violent sanctioning of any form of personal expression in the name of spiritual appropriateness when it is in fact a blatant exercise in social control is happening to Afghan people and in particular Afghan women right now under the Taliban.

We will always find plenty of examples to choose from – that we cannot help doing so points to the fact that Dick’s novel is not out of date, as some have intimated, but timeless – but we should resist such simplistic reductionism. What we have in They is a powerful philosophical argument, a refutation of the will to power per se, an upholding of reason and personal liberty in the face of prejudice, of groupthink, of the unexamined urge to censure what is different. They stands also as a metaphor for itself: Dick, a queer writer who faced rejection and condescension as a daily reality, saw her work repeatedly belittled and sidelined, with They being described as ‘menopausal’ by a male reviewer in a national broadsheet.

And yet, its final words are hopeful; words of quiet yet determined resistance:

‘Hallo love’, I said, greeting another day.

It is important to point up Dick’s landscape writing as a salient feature of They. For Dick, noticing and valuing the natural world, as an essential source of spiritual renewal yes, but equally in and for itself, is not just prescient but an act of subversion, one that places They in its rightful place alongside other works of roughly contemporaneous and distinctly British science fiction such as Anna Kavan’s Ice, Christopher Priest’s A Dream of Wessex, Keith Roberts’s Pavane and Richard Cowper’s The Road to Corlay.

The story of how They was rescued from oblivion by a literary agent who happened to pick up a rare second hand copy in a Bath charity shop is beautifully told by Sam Knight in an article for The New Yorker, and elaborated upon by Dick’s champion Lucy Scholes in the Paris Review. The inspiration we can draw from Dick and from her writing – sparse, bold, direct, resolute and impassioned – is substantial, and I would recommend They to anyone who wants to learn more about how science fiction can still be ground-breaking and resonant without so much as a mention of new technology or alien planets.

We are lucky to have this book readily available to us again.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2025 The Spider's House

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑