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Girls Against God #7: I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel and Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex by Oksana Zabuzhko

April 13, 2023 /

What he is, is greedy and lazy, selfish and a coward but what he also is, is clear and when he gives me a way out, I refuse to take it.

Readers and critics alike have described the unnamed narrator of Sheena Patel’s I’m A Fan as an ‘unlikable character’, one of those Moshfeghian millennial bitches we love to hate. I have problems getting to grips with this designation. To me, she’s simply real. If angry and uncomfortably honest makes you unlikable, I guess that’s just more of the shit we’re having to wade through.

As in Anna Burns’s Booker-winning novel Milkman, with which Patel’s debut shares more than a strand of literary DNA, no one is named. Characters are ascribed a function within the text: ‘the man I want to be with,’ ‘the woman I am obsessed with’, ‘his wife’, ‘my boyfriend’. This is both alienating and strangely intimate, as if we too are engaged in spying on these people, as if we too are complicit with what is going on. As, if you are a woman, you will be. Because in one way or another, you will have been there.

If I had been writing about this subject at the time when similar stuff was happening to me, the resulting text’s internal furniture would have been different: street maps instead of Google maps, telephone boxes instead of iPhones, newspaper articles instead of Insta. The sentences would have unfolded differently as a result, more formally structured and punctuated in keeping with the times. But the story would have been the same, or broadly similar. That tortuous tract of time when one’s internal weather is mainly dictated by the narcissistic, self-seeking actions of another person. The madness of knowing that, but still sacrificing one’s agency. The pointless suffering that – with a portion of luck and a fuckton of time – you eventually wrest yourself free of and pick up your life.

What cannot be wrested free of are the adjacent pitfalls, the systemic inequalities of class, race and gender Patel’s unnamed narrator catalogues and interrogates with matter-of-fact, intimate knowledge and brutal precision.

*

No, I would really like for someone to explain to me, why the hell would one come into this world a woman – and in Ukraine, yet! – with this fucking dependency programmed into your body like a delayed-action bomb, with this craziness, this need to be transformed into moist, squishy clay kneaded into the Earth’s surface…

You’re a woman. And that’s your limit./Your moon sleeps like a silver fish lure./Like spices off the edge of a knife/Dependency sprinkled into your blood.

Oh, this book.

So there it was, girlfriend – you fell in love. And how you fell in love – you exploded blindly, went flying headfirst, your witch’s laugh ringing to the heavens, lifted by the invisible absolute power of whirlwinds, and that pain didn’t stop you – although it should have – but no, you cut the juice to all your warning signs that had lit up with their red lights flashing and screaming “meltdown” – like before the accident at the atomic station – and only your poems, which switched on immediately and rushed forward in a steady, unrelenting stream, sent out unambiguous signals of danger: persistent flashes of hell, and death, and sickness.

Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is as much about language as physical intimacy. The vexed and now murderously abusive relationship between Russia and Ukraine, between the Ukrainian language and the Russian language, runs through this novel like a sword, as its true subject matter, the matter of language not so much a metaphor for sexual politics as the other way around.

Zabuzhko’s work contains some of the most thrilling, innovative writing at the sentence level that I have ever read, and I want to give particular mention here to the novel’s translator, Halyna Hryn, who has conveyed the raw force of the original with a facility and passion that keeps English-language readers as close to Zabuzhko’s furious rhythms, her sardonic humour and dextrous word choices as is possible.

The way this novel is freely punctuated with poetry. The way there is no redemption, save the hunger for freedom.

Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is most likely the most important novel I will read all year. The fact that it was written in 1996 should make us all ask ourselves questions about the gaps between the real and the imagined in our attitude to nations, peoples and individuals threatened with existential as well as physical annihilation.

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.

Cat Brushing by Jane Campbell

July 21, 2022 /

Ageing is often presented as an accumulation, of disease, of discomforts, of wrinkles, but it is really a process of dispossession, of rights, of respect, of desire, of all those things you once so casually owned and enjoyed.

So reflects the narrator of ‘Cat Brushing’, the titular story of Jane Campbell’s original, engaging and important collection, out today.

In ‘Cat Brushing’, first published in the London Review of Books in 2017, a retired teacher now living with her son and daughter-in-law feels a bond with her Siamese cat that is a kind of spiritual twinning: the cat is getting on in years now but still feisty, still independent-minded. She enjoys praise and comfort but not at the expense of her personal autonomy. When the cat’s presence in her life is threatened, the story’s narrator senses a further forced reduction in her own sense of self:

So in the absence of being able to please I try to be useful. And not disgusting. The cat got sick yesterday. She does sometimes. She hunts, she has always hunted, but is, I feel, less successful than she used to be. There it is again, the loss. She catches the slower prey, and eats bits of it and it may already be ill or diseased.

At the heart of each of the thirteen stories in Cat Brushing is an older woman. Some of these women, like the narrator of the title story, have been forced from their own environments into hostile domains. Others have so far escaped the attention of controlling relatives or concerned neighbours, determined to preserve their independence or to stake a new-found happiness on one final and possibly ill-advised throw of the dice.

The subject matter of these stories – ageing, dependency, loss, abuse, regret – is of the kind that will no doubt tempt some critics to describe this collection as ‘heartbreaking’. But while it is true that more than a couple of Campbell’s intensely private, thoughtful tales brought tears to my eyes, I am much more inclined to characterise her work as defiant, subversive, intelligent and singularly empowering. Even in their forgetfulness and physical frailty, Campbell’s women are garrulous, insightful and occasionally duplicitous. They never fail to retain agency over their own lives, even when that agency drives them, ultimately, to refuse what is on offer.

Stories such as ‘Susan and Miffy’ and ‘Lamia’ show older women in active possession of a vibrant sexuality. ‘The Scratch’ and ‘The Kiskadee’ touch on themes of abuse and control, but there are no neat answers, no tidy conclusions as Campbell opts for ambiguity rather than moral outrage. In ‘183 Minutes’, a story that might equally have been dreamed up by Ruth Rendell, the protagonist experiences a stark premonition of her own destruction yet still finds the hope of happiness trumping the fear of risk:

And she turned her face towards the window for she wanted to see if there was a reflection there of the woman she had suddenly become. But in the anonymity of the rushing fields she saw only her body dumped in an alley, at the bottom of a cliff, down a well, and then they flew under a bridge and against the momentary blackness she saw her face again.

Rather than taking refuge in the past, these characters are inhabitants of the modern world, equipped to deal with any challenges the future may hold. In ‘Lockdown Fantasms’, Campbell takes issue with the way older people have been further marginalised and forgotten during the COVID-19 pandemic, the key decisions about their ‘wellbeing’ taken by others. Social media and the metaverse in this story are magical, life-saving resources; in ‘Schopenhauer and I’ the reverse is true, with digital companionship used as a cover for surveillance and control.

How refreshing it is, to meet characters who are not careful about how they express themselves, who say what they think with relish and a crooked smile. The language of Cat Brushing, while spare and unadorned, is never simple. Literary allusions and philosophical experiment take their place alongside landscape writing that is richly imaginative and resonant, where a longing for lost realities is always tempered by mordant wit. The final story in the collection, ‘On Being Alone’, references Chekhov, and in its accretion of significant detail, its elegiac quality it has a distinctly Chekhovian melancholy about it:

As a child I already knew that I needed, craved, bathed myself in solitude. Being alone was my best place. As I grew through my teens I began to understand it better. I narrowed it down to a fear of belonging. Belonging to me meant losing something. not gaining anything. Losing individuality, losing, dare I say, specialness. I was a secretive and isolated child and I feared being identified with any other child as some people might fear the plague.

As so often in Chekhov, you don’t end up where you think you will. The past number of years have seen important conversations taking place not just about representation in literature but about who is doing the representing. While I would staunchly argue that one of the key skills of the fiction writer is imaginative empathy, that for the writer prepared to undertake the creative groundwork, no identity or set of experiences should be out of bounds, it seems equally important that in the portrayal of particular histories, experiences and worldviews we should amplify and pay attention to writers with first-hand knowledge of those situations and communities.

The increasing diversity of our prize shortlists and publishing schedules is both exciting and timely. How discouraging it is then, to see the matter of age so often excluded from these vital discussions, to see writers actively debarred from ‘first novel’ or ‘new writer’ awards or grant applications simply on the grounds of being over forty. On social media especially the increasing tendency is to tell older writers to shut up.

Age is not only the last taboo, it seems, but the last acceptable breeding ground for prejudice as well. For women especially, pressures relating to family and other gender-based expectations have often been contributory factors in narrowing down or closing off routes to publication. I have lost count of the number of post-war women writers I have come across in my reading and research whose careers have stalled or floundered, not through any lack of talent but through lack of opportunity or recognition.

All of which makes a collection like Cat Brushing doubly important. In their power and persuasiveness, their wily transgressions, their willingness to take risks, Jane Campbell’s stories reveal a reality that is relevant to all of us and too often ignored.

Home II

May 20, 2022 /

My new office is the perfect size, by which I mean perfect for me.

The office I had in our previous home was just that little bit too small. Most of my books had to be housed elsewhere in our home, a fact that was somewhat made up for by my magnificent view of the firth and of the ferry terminal, but it gave the room a feeling of incompleteness, and led to the annoying side-effect of having thirty to forty books piled up either side of my computer at any one time.

For someone who prefers their surroundings to have a semblance of order, this was not ideal. The office I had before that, in Devon, had room for my books, which blanketed the back wall like a layer of secondary insulation, but as a space was even smaller, almost a box room. The office I had in Hastings had the opposite problem – it felt too big. I like rooms that feel like burrows, enclosing and human-sized. The large, high-ceilinged rooms of our previous, Georgian home always felt overwhelming to me, as if I were a guest in them, or simply camped out. I never felt we properly owned that house, or ever could.

There is a rightness to my new office that makes it seem like the room I have been waiting to discover all my writing life. From my desk, which is immediately inside the doorway as you come in, I can see the firth, the ferry – more distant now as it ploughs its way to and from the harbour but still present, still essential, still ours – the Cowal hills beyond. My books fill the wall opposite and half of the wall that abuts it, and there is room for them all. Our bookshelves were made for us by a local carpenter. We had them dismantled so we could bring them with us from our previous home, in the first instance because we could not bear to part with them, though as it turns out the escalating price of timber means we would not have been able to afford to replace them, had we left them behind. Lucky.

My office is a warm mustard-yellow, the colour of gorse. It has crept up on me over the years, that yellow is my favourite colour for rooms. I feel enclosed, protected, energised. Warmed by the sun, through even the bleakest of Scottish winter days.

During the twenty years I spent working in retail, I was always aware that in order to write it was essential for me to have the kind of day-job where I could clock off at the end of my shift and not have to think about the work, at all, when I wasn’t there. This inevitably meant low pay, but the up-side – the essential up-side – was freedom of thought. During these past ten weeks of arranging our move and project-managing the renovation of our new house, it has been brought home to me, with bells on, how correct I had always been in this instinctive assumption. The move was timely and right. Giving the house an overhaul has been a landmark experience, a labour of love. But for the life of the mind it has been crushing, and uniquely stressful. The more or less absolute inability to think about anything else – an experience I have been referring to as ‘brain-wipe’ – has taken its toll on me and on those around me.

Thankfully, this mental burden has been lifted. Just a week after moving in, I find myself back at my desk, picking up not where I left off, exactly, but somewhere close to it. The work feels exciting, re-invigorated, above all, possible. Given the state of the wider world, there have been moments these past months when I have found myself wondering if it was in fact possible, if there was a point to it – the kind of feelings I have been lucky enough, for many, many years, to have entirely escaped.

To have felt them again, even for a day or two, has reminded me of what is at stake, if not for me then for thousands of others, daily, hourly.

While I can, I will. While we can, we must.

Thank you for being here. Reading, writing, thinking – it’s who we are.

A Season in Null-Space: Transit by Rachel Cusk

February 28, 2022 /

A book such as Julian’s was far more palatable. It always surprised him, how people lapped it up, extremity, how eager they were to consume what lay far outside the compass of their own experience, their relish for it if anything increased by the absence of the very thing, he, Louis, was abjured for removing – the screen of fiction. People believed that Julian didn’t need to make things up because the extremity of his experiences was such that it released him from that obligation.

Working on my current manuscript, I have been thinking a great deal about the weight we attach to ‘true’ narratives, and how objective truth might be said to differ from experiential truth.

If I say: ‘This happened to me’, is that enough to prove that it really did?

Since 2016, our experience of the world has become fragmentary and unstable, no longer measured in years, but in seasons, weeks and days. As a writer I feel I have become less capable and less desirous of constructing grand illusions. I have instead become obsessed with small details, with exploring the imaginative potential in day-by-day, sometimes minute-by-minute experience, with tracking the potential answers to the question: what really happened? My growing interest in true-crime narratives is both a response to and a driver of this. And precisely because much of the drama of such narratives lies in the mundane.

‘I don’t really believe in character,’ says Rachel Cusk in a recent podcast conversation with Sheila Heti, ‘I believe in moments of truth.’ In the second instalment of her Outline trilogy, Cusk demonstrates how the quotidian, when fully inhabited, can spiral outwards into a poetic hyperrealism, into the fire of language. How daily reality is never banal, but rather the greyish-brown outer crust of the entire luminosity of existence. The dinner party that forms the climax of the novel is, in its own subversive way, as revelatory and as disturbing as the family get-together that forms the subject of Thomas Vinterberg’s seminal 1998 movie Festen. Reading this book, in which ostensibly dull things happen in such a way as to make them seem life-defining, is to see reality, elusive as the leopard, changing its spots before our eyes.

Cusk’s writing truly is superlative. She has not only raised the bar for British literary fiction, she has opened up a new arena for the discussion and contemplation of what fiction is, and how it works.

*

Meanwhile and elsewhere, this marvellous essay by Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky articulates brilliantly the shock, terror and heartbreak of these anxious days.

Cloak and Dagger 2022 – a crime reading challenge

December 31, 2021 /

2021 is a difficult year to describe. 2020 felt fraught, urgent, dangerous and tense. 2021 has felt more nebulous, more fractured, characterised by uncertainty and an increasing sense of restlessness. In terms of personal achievement, I delivered a new manuscript, a book that for me feels very much like the product of 2020, seamed and studded with all the furious contradictions that year brought but referenced obliquely rather than colliding with them head-on. It’s a novel I’m hugely proud of, and one I look forward to sharing with you in 2023.

In the months since completing that book, I have begun inching my way towards the next work, a transition that has felt more complex and troublesome even than usual. The times we are living through throw up searching questions; as a writer, it does not seem altogether surprising if those questions end up being framed around the process of writing, not just the how but the what and the why. There is never any doubt in my mind that writing – art – has value, that whatever trauma is being addressed, the practice of reflection and analysis, of creative re-imagining inherent to all art is intrinsic to the experience of being human.

Such knowledge should not prevent us from being robust in our seeking out of our own best practice. I count myself fortunate in that this period of not-knowing – familiar in its outline, yet different in its particular details every time – has always felt energising to me. I never quite know how I will come out of it, or what will result. If I can feel certain of anything, through this time as all times, it is the joy I find in the power and the talent of other writers. Discovering new works, new directions, new attitudes, visions and modes of expression – the excitement and the gratitude never lessens.

By this same time last year, the document on my hard drive entitled ‘Books 2021’ was already filling up with upcoming works of fiction and non-fiction I was eager to read. Many of them were books whose publication dates had been postponed, pushed over from 2020 into 2021 in the hope that by the time they were released, in-person events and book festivals would be happening again. This turned out not to be the case, and on the far side of 2021, I cannot help noticing that the number of books on my ‘Books 2022’ list is considerably smaller. There is a sense of uncertainty affecting all of us: what shall we be reading, what shall we be writing? There is an eerie sort of silence.

Here also, there is opportunity. Not knowing – feeling less sure of what I’m going to be reading leaves more space for new discoveries. It also leaves space for me to go back and read more of the books I did not manage to get to in 2021. A year of regrouping, maybe. A year of finding out what is important.

I enjoy reading challenges because they give my reading a focus. This can be especially valuable if the challenge is related in some way to a problem or question that has a bearing on my work in progress. I also enjoy reading challenges because they provide me with a framework for talking to readers. With all of this in mind, I have created my own crime reading challenge for 2022. As regular readers of this blog will know by now, I am always on the lookout for original, challenging and imaginative approaches to genre archetypes, with the mystery archetype foremost among them. For pure reading pleasure, there’s nothing to beat a mystery. There is also no stronger template for withstanding the often punitive process of literary experiment.

I have created thirty prompts, some of them leaning heavily towards my particular interests, others designed to take me into less familiar territory. Thirty seems like a good number – big enough to make the challenge interesting, not so huge that it becomes burdensome, squeezing out all other reading. The individual challenges can be completed in any order, and can be based around any aspect of crime writing: fiction, true crime, journalism, history or memoir can be considered and included for any of the prompts. I am hoping to have completed and blogged all thirty by the end of the year. Here are the prompts. Let’s see how we get on:

  1. Published in 2022
  2. By a debut author
  3. Translated from the French
  4. Translated from the German
  5. Translated from the Italian
  6. Translated from the Spanish
  7. Translated from the Japanese
  8. Set in South America
  9. Nordic
  10. Set in Australia
  11. By an author based on the African continent
  12. By an African-American author
  13. Historical mystery
  14. Experimental published since 2000
  15. Experimental published before 1980
  16. Published by an independent press
  17. Classic noir
  18. Neo noir
  19. Golden Age
  20. Nineteenth Century
  21. Published before World War 2
  22. By a Scottish author
  23. Legal thriller
  24. Financial or military
  25. With a speculative element
  26. Award-winning
  27. Has been adapted for the screen
  28. Woman detective
  29. Based on real events
  30. Any crime but murder

I have some ideas already for how I might fill some of the categories, books I have been wanting to read for a while and now have the perfect incentive to tackle. Others I have not yet started to think about. Mainly I am hoping to be surprised. Surprised and inspired. Here’s hoping we can all find something of the same in 2022.

Happy New Year, everyone.

The End of the Whole Mess: the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2021

September 27, 2021 /

“People keep claiming we’re trying to be the Booker, but they’re wrong. If there’s any prize we’re looking at right now, it’s probably the Turner. I wanted to counter a perceived wisdom about how the Clarke Award harboured a not-so-secret ambition to defy the gravity of its own genre and head out for loftier, more literary stars.”

These are the words of Tom Hunter, the current director of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, in an essay he wrote recently for Parsec magazine on the subject of his first fifteen years in office. He jotted the words down on impulse, he says, as a handy comeback to the kind of question he might get asked at a science fiction convention. And yet, Hunter insists, the lines have stuck with him, ‘copied from notebook to notebook’, because they hold ‘an accidental grain of truth’ about how he views the Clarke, especially with regard to the open-ended brief it sets itself each year, to select the ‘best’ science fiction novel of the preceding twelve months.

“It’s that slippery definition of science fiction that reminds me of the equally heated debate that surrounds the art world,” Hunter continues, “with Frieze art fairs standing in for our own conventions, and the definitions of science fiction and contemporary art forever shifting in a way I would suggest the Booker Prize doesn’t.”

This is the perceived wisdom about the Booker Prize, that it’s a staid and immovable behemoth, churning out endorsement after endorsement for establishment-approved worthies, upholding the literary status quo forever and ever amen. But repeating an untried thesis does not make it true. By sheer coincidence, the beginning of Tom Hunter’s reign as Clarke Award director roughly coincides with the time when I first began taking notice of the award, not just in a casual way but as a framework for considering the state of science fiction more generally alongside other arbiters of literary quality such as the Booker. I remember fifteen years ago being thrilled at M. John Harrison’s Clarke win for Nova Swing, and looking back at the 2007 shortlist now, we see it comprises three books of genuine and lasting stature, together with a further three interesting choices from authors of note.

When we look at the Booker shortlist and especially the longlist from 2007, what we notice most of all is a shift towards progressiveness yes, but a continuing uncertainty about how, exactly, progressiveness might be defined. The Booker’s speed of evolution towards a genuinely inclusive mindset whilst developing a more adventurous attitude towards literature generally has been both fascinating and marvellous to witness. 2021 might actually see a science fiction novel winning the Booker for the first time – a pretty radical shift, given that the chair of the Booker judges Richard Cobb went so far as to veto JG Ballard from winning back in 1984.   

But what of Hunter’s notional pairing of the Clarke Award with the Turner Prize? As a writer who was passionately interested in both contemporary art and experimental forms of literature, there is no doubt that Ballard would have been keen to affirm such a brave comparison – if only it were true. From its inception in 1984, just three years before the Clarke Award, the Turner has been one of the most progressive, contentious, radical, no-fucks-given arts prizes out there, certainly in the UK. The Turner is constantly pushing boundaries, questioning not only the nature of art but the nature of art criticism, promoting the value of art for society and campaigning for increased access and diversity at every level. Rather than shying away from controversy, the Turner has courted it, embracing its role as the enfant terrible, the award that actively encourages disagreement. It is only later – sometimes years later – that as a society we come to understand just how prescient, how far ahead of the curve an earlier shortlist selection actually was.

“It is unfortunate, of course, but science fiction has become indelibly identified with interplanetary travel, time machines, Star Trek and Star Wars, that sort of Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon school,” said JG Ballard in a 1988 interview with James Verniere for The Twilight Zone. “I have my lonely struggle trying to get a broader definition of science fiction, a definition that incorporates Gulliver’s Travels, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson, on through H. G. Wells, on to that great genius William Burroughs, who uses huge elements of science fiction in his novels because it’s part of the air we breathe.”

To have a Clarke Award that bears legitimate comparison with the Turner Prize? That would be Ballard’s dream come true – and mine. As things stand, we have reached a point where for the second year running, the Clarke Award shortlist is fifty percent dead wood: books that should never have reached the shortlist either because they are badly written, derivative, insufficiently challenging or, in the case of two titles from last year’s shortlist, all three. As in 2020, the remaining three novels form a sadly curtailed line-up of the book that should win (The Animals in That Country), the book that could win (The Vanished Birds) and the book you could construct an argument in favour of but would make for a disappointingly trad-SF outcome if it did win (Vagabonds). Hardly enough to form a decent shortlist on their own.

The only valid comparison with the Turner Prize would be if the Turner judges unaccountably decided to shortlist a group of salon-approved genre painters rehashing popular bucolic scenes from the last decades of the nineteenth century. Only if they did, we could be sure they were being ironic. This year’s Clarke shortlist is anything but.

All this might be forgivable – understandable even – if the radical, ground-breaking work in science fiction were not being done, or remained the province of one or two pioneering souls like Ballard, fighting a losing battle against the forces of reaction. It would be understandable – forgivable even – if the Clarke Award submissions list did not include works of sufficient calibre to draw up a quality shortlist. That the work is both being done and being submitted for the consideration of the Clarke Award jury can only provoke the question of why the most interesting, certainly the best written science fiction novels of the year are being ignored in favour of derivative genre works that are inconsequential in the present, and certainly won’t be remembered fifteen years hence.

I am not going to comment on individual titles from recent Clarke shortlists. The authors of these works did not ask to be shortlisted, and do not deserve criticism or censure for celebrating their success. That their novels have been read and doubtless enjoyed by a large number of people is not the problem, indeed the quality of particular novels is not the point. What bothers me is the quality of critical discourse, not just on the part of the Clarke judges but within the larger confines of the science fiction community. If the overall quality of the shortlist is this poor, not just once but time and again, and there is no sustained wider discussion of that fact, this would suggest not only that the process of reasoning by which the shortlist is arrived at is substantially flawed, but also that the majority of readers primarily interested in science fiction are satisfied that journeyman works – back-slapping space operas, cute science fantasies and indifferently written post-apocalypse novels – are properly representative, the high point of achievement, the ‘best’ that science fiction has to offer.

Either that, or the very idea of engaged criticism, of substantive textual analysis as opposed to unexamined positive reinforcement has become so much an anathema within the science fiction community that the discourse around the literature has been irretrievably corroded. (On this point it is discouraging to note that for the first time in more than a decade there has been no long-form review of the Clarke Award shortlist at Strange Horizons.)

Of those works submitted for consideration for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2021, a generous handful is of outstanding quality, novels that demonstrate a rigorous engagement with a wide range of ideas and a level of literary ability that changes minds and attracts new readerships. Were a novel as original, urgent and brilliantly achieved as Martin MacInnes’s Gathering Evidence to lose out on a shortlist place in favour of a novel of equal originality and brilliance I’d have no complaints, but that is not what has happened. I have alas not yet had time to finish Rian Hughes’s monumental debut XX, but I have read enough of it to appreciate how deftly it riffs off much older scientific romances – The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle is the book that springs most immediately to mind – in pursuit of a whole new way of imagining science fiction, a novel in which the printed word itself becomes a speculative, dangerously mutable commodity. Given what did make the final cut, how this ambitious, formally innovative colossus was knocked out of the running beggars belief.

But to reiterate, I do not want to harp on the virtues or deficiencies of individual books so much as point to a wider deficiency in the overall discourse. When I was writing about Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country last week I quoted from an interview she gave on the subject of what makes speculative fiction both relevant and attractive to her as a way of thinking about the world and about writing. “I thought my next novel was a gritty realist story,” she said. “But the problem is if you write gritty realism now (in the way we usually think of realism), you’re writing historical or at least nostalgia fiction; and anything that used to be speculative is now realist. So what I’m working on has become rather speculative. I keep using that term – it’s not my favourite, but it’s what we have to describe what I think of as sideways fiction.”

There will be more than a few writers of sideways fiction who have felt so blindsided by the pace of social and political change in the last decade and since 2016 especially that the idea of writing about ‘the future’ has come to seem not just redundant but escapist. Like any other form of creative expression, for science fiction to survive and remain relevant as literature it needs to evolve, and the truth is that many of the traditional ways of framing science fiction, of imagining the future have become outmoded, derivative, decadent, a kind of comfort food. You can alter the baseline demographic of a starship crew all you want, but it’s still a bloody starship crew, travelling FTL into a vision of the future that might as well be a fairy story. Twiddling with the edges of things does not make them radical, does not render them any less risible than the Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon school Ballard was fulminating about thirty years ago.

The real future is very much with us, and its demands are urgent and frightening. They need a literature, and a critical hinterland, that is capable of seriously engaging with the questions we face, both as individuals and as a society. When Ballard claimed science fiction as the true literature of the twentieth century, he would have known the requirement he felt for literature to reinvent itself would only become more pressing in the twenty-first. I do not think he would have been surprised to see a rapidly increasing awareness and acceptance of speculative ideas among mainstream critics, a demand and enthusiasm for speculative ideas among the reading public, because this is what is happening, right now. It is a discomfiting fact, but one we are increasingly having to accept, that much of the most challenging and innovative work in science fiction – the ‘best’, if you like – is being published outside the genre imprints. Would Ballard have been surprised by this? Given that he understood the innate tension between science fiction and the science fiction community better than most, I doubt it.

Sharke’s Choice #4: The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay

September 22, 2021 /

“I thought my next novel was a gritty realist story. But the problem is if you write gritty realism now (in the way we usually think of realism), you’re writing historical or at least nostalgia fiction; and anything that used to be speculative is now realist. So what I’m working on has become rather speculative. I keep using that term – it’s not my favorite, but it’s what we have to describe what I think of as sideways fiction. ” (Laura Jean McKay, Write or Die November 2020.)

Jean works as a guide in an animal sanctuary. She is what might best be termed a tough cookie, battered by life, abandoned by her husband Graham and a barely functioning alcoholic. There are two things in life that keep her going: her passion for animals, and her love for her young granddaughter, Kimberley. Those, and her general bloody-mindedness. As this remarkable novel opens, Jean’s instinctive rapport with animals and her capacity for survival are both about to be tested in ways she could never previously have imagined.

There is a new disease sweeping the country, the so-called zooflu, a strain of influenza that clears up quickly but that leaves those infected with the ability to understand and intuit the thoughts and language of animals. Unlike simple hearing, this new form of understanding is bone-deep, felt in the skin and in the brain. For some, it takes on the aspect of a new religion; for others – many others – it is the gateway to madness. Driven insane by the ceaseless communications of insects, birds and fish, the worst afflicted resort to extreme measures to keep the psychic white noise out of their heads.

When Jean’s errant son Lee goes on the run with Kimberley, Jean is determined to find them and bring them home. She travels in the company of Sue, a dingo bitch she rescued as a pup, and who is capable of tracking Kimberley from hundreds of miles away. Ahead of Jean lie many obstacles, not least the toxic fallout from her own inner demons. But for once in her life, she is determined not to cock up.

I had a hard time getting to know Jean. She’s damaged, often illogical, a slave to her addiction. She’s also smart and ruthlessly determined, and by the time I reached the end of her story she and I had reached a better understanding. The fact that I found Jean difficult to like, not to mention bloody annoying at times, I count as testament to the skill of the author in creating a uniquely human, porous, breakable and thoroughly believable character. There are thousands of Jeans, and they won’t all make it. McKay does a magnificent job of fleshing out the why. Jean is unforgettable, though even more affecting is McKay’s imaginative rendition of animal thought-language, a feat of literary virtuosity that for me is the absolute highlight of this book, a form of rough, driven poetry that is as luminous as it is convincing.

The scenes with the pigs and cows. The Animals in That Country – the title is drawn from a poem by Margaret Atwood – would be necessary reading for those passages alone.

I suppose in that respect I am this novel’s natural audience. The ways in which the animals expressed themselves, hinting at sentient lives and independent consciousness beyond and apart from the human sphere, an alien realm in our midst did not seem at all unlikely to me. Rather, the thought-speech felt utterly right, an act of translation rather than imagination. (I guess I’m there with the spider.)

In talking about the novel’s use of speculative materials, it’s all in that quote from McKay that I’ve posted above, really. She has taken the threads of the life we are in the midst of and twisted them, just a little, to reveal the hidden trajectory of our realworld predicament. This, for me, is exactly what science fiction should be about, especially now. McKay wrote and sold Animals long before we knew what 2020/1 had in store for us; when she talks about the wearing of masks, the disinfecting of whole environments, the division of communities, the sudden, indelible shift in perspective that crisis brings, there is an extra frisson of the uncanny, a looming prescience that will colour and shape our understanding of her work.

It is this kind of prescience – a deep reading of the musculature of society, rather than a fixation on surfaces, on ‘stuff’ – that, again, makes The Animals in That Country radical and innovative science fiction. Its politics – a terse and unsparing examination of social and environmental inequalities – is integral to its being, its warp and weft. Not grafted on as a ‘theme’, but realised through keenly observed characterisation and active inter-character relationships.

This novel is as daring in its literary experimentation as in its speculative premise; proof, if any were needed, that no element of literary excellence need be sacrificed in the pursuit of science fictional innovation.

If only we could have seen James Bradley’s Ghost Species sitting alongside Animals on this year’s Clarke Award shortlist. And what is it about Aussie SF right now that seems to put it so far ahead of the curve?

O Brave New World 2: Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

March 30, 2021 /

(NB: HEAVY SPOILERS AHEAD for Klara and the Sun.)

We could choose to speculate on why it is that two of the 1983 group of Best of Young British Novelists – frequently singled out by critics and commentators as the golden generation – happen to have brought out novels about artificial humans less than two years apart. Most likely it’s just one of those things: coincidence, a communal grappling with new ideas that are, as it were, simply around. Less to be debated is the fact that, in science fictional terms at least, the idea at the heart of the most recent novels by both Ian McEwan (Machines Like Me, 2019) and Kazuo Ishiguro (Klara and the Sun, 2021) is not new at all. Those who share an interest in such things mostly agree that the ‘threat’ from AI has much less to do with robot uprisings than with coporate data harvesting and the gradual shift within the workplace from human to artificial labour, with the seismic changes and potential inequalities this would and will bring. The idea of human beings coming under existential threat from actual AI replicants? Not going to happen. That both Ishiguro and McEwan have spent hundreds of hours and hundreds of pages heading down this particular ‘what if?’ rabbit hole brings us face to face yet again with the weird propensity of mainstream literary writers for reinventing the science fictional wheel.

A good part of the reason for this is that writers like McEwan and Ishiguro probably don’t read much SF. Most mainstream consumption of science fiction is through TV and cinema, which tends to lag behind the curve of science fiction literature by several decades. There is also the fact that McEwan especially has a habit of straining for topicality through battening on to shouty headlines and received opinion. Machines Like Me seems more interested in denouncing Brexit than in exploring AI; it is a weird novel, mostly irrelevant as science fiction and with a curiously old fashioned feel. Reading Klara and the Sun is a similarly confounding experience, though for different reasons. Ishiguro never chases after ‘relevance’ the way McEwan does, and in many ways this new novel feels uncannily similar to the seven that precede it. From the beginning of his career, Ishiguro has been singularly preoccupied with themes of appearance and reality, and so in Klara and the Sun we enter the land that is Ishiguro-world: a calm, apparently stable version of reality in which interactions proceed with courtesy and a certain caution. The surface reality of Ishiguro-world is unruffled, almost stagnant, yet beneath this surface we intuit hints and then increasingly larger glimpses of a scarier truth.

Ishiguro also has a penchant for not so much unreliable as partially informed narrators, people who are very much embedded in Ishiguro-world but who never fully understand it. In Klara and the Sun, our guide is Klara herself, an Artificial Friend who possesses the computational abilities of an advanced AI, whilst exhibiting a view of the world that is curiously child-like, unformed. AFs are in some respects similar to the Kentukis in Samanta Schweblin’s (much more interesting) novel Little Eyes: a consumer fad, the kind of expensive consumable you purchase for your kids, who then quickly become bored with it. In other respects, Ishiguro’s AFs are more complex and more sinister. We first meet Klara as she stands with her fellow AF Rosa in a shop window, hoping to attract the attention of potential customers. She is eventually purchased as a companion for a teenage girl, Josie, who lives with her mother outside of the city and who is suffering from an unnamed illness.

Klara has been specifically designed to serve and protect the child that chooses her. She never questions the world she inhabits, nor her role within it. As a solar-powered machine, she has a reverence for the sun, which for her is imbued with an almost god-like power. Throughout the entirety of the novel, we see only what Klara sees, go where she goes, though as her understanding and experience increases, so does ours. Through Klara’s immaculate recall, we get to overhear conversations between the adults in her orbit – Josie’s mother Chrissie and Josie’s father Paul, Chrissie’s friend Helen and her former lover Vance, the ‘artist’ Capaldi. Through these conversations, we come to learn that this is a deeply divided society, one in which genetically engineered or ‘lifted’ humans are offered every advantage in terms of education and prospects, with unlifted humans consigned to mass unemployment and more or less barred from higher education.

The ifs and buts around these issues remain unexamined. We come to understand that lifting carries some sort of extreme medical risk. Chrissie has already lost one child to the process – Josie’s older sister, Sal – though this has not dissuaded her from opting for the same treatment for Josie, and the mainstream acceptance of the dangers of lifting means that – presumably – death is now seen by society at large as preferable to not being lifted. There are tiny glimpses of hardship – a minor character called Beggar Man, a drab part of the city with a lot of barbed wire and boarded-up shopfronts, Chrissie permanently tired out from long hours at her job – though the characters we spend the most time with all live in spacious accommodation far from such deprivation and we never learn what Chrissie’s job actually entails. There is a depressingly facile passage about racially segregated outsider, i.e unlifted communities, though again we never get to meet any of these people other than Josie’s father. Paul is an engineer, and supposedly a man of uncommon intelligence, though that doesn’t prevent him from getting sucked into a preposterous scheme to cure Josie’s illness, a plan that should be patently absurd to anyone but Klara.

I was recently in the audience at an online event where Ishiguro described Klara and the Sun as the positive counterpoint to his darkly themed 2005 novel Never Let Me Go. I would go further, and say this book is Never Let Me Go, except with AIs instead of clones, eugenics instead of organ farming. There is even a wincingly uncalled-for repeat of Never Let Me Go’s central, fairy-tale premise of True Love offering a path to safety in a hostile world. Why Ishiguro considers the outcome of this new novel to be happier is a bit of a mystery, given what happens, and I’m not just talking about Klara’s ‘slow fade’. The conversations that take place between the adults in Klara and the Sun are conducted as a theatrical grotesquerie, using the kind of megaphone dialogue you might find in a particularly awful 1950s film, miles distant from what people might actually say to one another in real life. I have paused to wonder if such ineptitude might not be intentional, a kind of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt. This at least might have been interesting, though unhappily and going by past experience I think it’s more likely that writing dialogue is an aspect of his craft that Ishiguro simply does not much enjoy

I am the last person to criticise a writer for choosing a close focus approach to science fiction. I mostly find wide-screen SF unutterably dull; books in which warring factions subject each other to offensively unrealistic acts of violence in their efforts to uphold or upend ‘the system’, in which characters spend pages spouting political rhetoric at each other or acting out social archetypes in a depressingly two-dimensional way can all go straight to Netflix so far as I’m concerned. The science fiction that interests me is centred upon convincingly drawn characters in imaginable situations, provocative ideas, life as it might actually be lived, together with the kind of literary articulacy we find in books such as the aforementioned Little Eyes. What I equally expect from this close focus approach though is difficulty, not in the sense that a book should be wilfully obscure, but that it should present us with complex moral choices and genuine dilemmas, conflicted characters, a level of narrative ambiguity that challenges the intellect.

On the surface and in outline description, Klara and the Sun might appear to possess such qualities. In the reading it is a series of evasions, perplexing only in the question of why so much attention will inevitably be lavished upon a text that is so deeply flawed. Klara and the Sun is a swift, easily digestible, stylistically pleasant read, but therein lies the problem. A novel that lays claim to themes of social exclusion, state-sanctioned eugenics and enforced mass poverty should not be pleasant, it should be confronting. At the very least, it should make some attempt to examine the questions it purports to ask.

And as for the ending? It’s Toy Story 2. Tell me I’m wrong.

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