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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.

Eyes Wide Open: Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza

March 5, 2022 /

When earlier in the week I read Johanna Thomas-Corr’s excellent review in the Guardian of Maria Gainza’s new novel Portrait of an Unknown Lady, I was reminded that I never had caught up with Gainza’s first novel Optic Nerve, published in its original Spanish in 2014 and then latterly in an English translation by Thomas Bunstead in 2019. I remember reading reviews of it, noting it down in my ever-expanding ‘of interest’ file. I even remember, quite clearly, holding a copy of the book in my hand. I was in a big Waterstones somewhere – either Chris or I, I cannot recall now which of us it was, had been asked to come in and sign some books. I remember trying to decide between Optic Nerve and Laura Cuming’s elegantly articulated memoir On Chapel Sands, both books, coincidentally, with a central focus on art.

In the end I chose the Cuming, promising myself I would acquire the Gainza at a later date. But I never did. That morning, its details blurry, feels far away, on the other side of an unspeakable divide, with those books two of the sparsely connecting threads between then and now. Reading Thomas-Corr’s admiring retrospective words about Optic Nerve, I experienced a sudden and intense hunger for it, for that book precisely, no other would do. Not even wanting to wait the time it would take to arrive in physical form, I downloaded it in e-format and started to read it more or less immediately.

Novels by nearest and dearest aside, Maria Gainza’s Optic Nerve – or so it feels to me in this moment – is the most beautiful book I have ever read. ‘It was clear that Gainza, like British authors Rachel Cusk and Claire-Louise Bennett, was opening up new possibilities for the novel as a place of freedom,’ Thomas-Corr writes in her review, ‘where you could blend fiction, memoir, art history and anecdote. She immediately felt like a thrilling discovery.’ I agree with this totally. I agree also with her additional claim that Gainza’s fiction actually ‘has more in common with Roberto Bolaño’s, with its themes of art and infamy, craft and theft.’ There is, as Thomas-Corr maintains, a Bolano-esque depth of field to her ‘stories within stories, each with its own melancholy mood and unsolvable mystery.’

And there is something more, something still greater, a quality of emotional admission, of inclusivity and of risk-taking, of personal involvement – of vulnerability even – that reminds me of the stories and writing of Mariana Enriquez, a passion that dares to reveal, to expose the self in a way that others have not, and that includes myself.

I can say only that I am thinking on this, wondering and struggling with how to address it. I am getting to know the paintings Gainza writes about in Optic Nerve, studying them in detail, reliving the moments of their discovery through the filter of Gainza’s tapestried language, of a knowledge profoundly felt and acutely described.

I am saving Maria Gainza’s new book for the moment, as something to look forward to. To cherish and to rejoice in. We need voices like these, above all, voices that remind us of all that life and art can be and what it is for.

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.

Winter warmers

November 25, 2021 /

A tad late for Hallowe’en, but if you’re looking for a new ghost story to read I can thoroughly recommend Alison Moore’s new novel The Retreat. Moore is an extraordinarily good writer. Each of her five novels to date has been in its own way perfect: not a dud sentence in sight and with the slowly brewing tension deliberately understated. Moore sees no need for shocks or histrionics or forced affect in her work – her deft, spare handling of language, her facility for creating weird situations, above all her intense yet utterly realistic evocation of character are more than sufficient for creating a unique body of work for which ‘unhallowed’ might turn out to be the defining adjective.

Her latest concerns an artists’ retreat, a rather uncomfortable house on a somewhat inaccessible island. Once you’re there it’s difficult to leave without making a scene, without deliberately setting yourself in opposition to your fellows, which is the last thing you want to be seen doing when you’re supposed to be forging a mutually supportive atmosphere of communal creativity. Sandra, a rather disappointed painter, finds her experience of the island falling far short of her expectations. Carol, a novelist in search of sanctuary, finds the ghosts becoming actively beneficial to her work in progress. Who gets out alive? Moore will keep you guessing until the very last page. I loved this book, which is effective and disturbing to a far more potent degree than any number of more deliberate or dramatic haunted house stories. The only problem with being a Moore fan is that the moment you’ve finished reading one of her novels you’re already looking forward to the next – and Moore, to her credit, is a writer who is prepared to give her books all the time they need to come into being.

Another November miracle comes in the form of Sarah Hall’s new novel Burntcoat. Like The Retreat, Burntcoat is sparse, economical and intense, carrying more emotional weight and resonance than you might expect to find in novels twice its length. Here we follow Edith, a sculptor who has found fame but at an immense cost, whose narrative is conducted during what we understand to be the final weeks of her foreshortened life. Edith’s background is traumatic – her mother Naomi, a writer, experiences a dramatic personality change following a brain haemorrhage when Edith is young. Yet still she drags herself back to life, relearning not only her passion to make art, but also her ability to adequately love and care for her daughter. It is Edith’s relationship with Naomi, as much as her all-consuming love affair with a refugee chef named Halit, which forms the armature of this novel, which in essence is a book about how love transforms us, and what real love means.

Burntcoat takes place against the background of a pandemic. The world is swept by a disease still more deadly than COVID, and with still more destructive implications both for individuals and for society. This is a harrowing firestorm of a book, and as a commentary on what we are currently experiencing, what it costs us to live through such a crisis, I cannot imagine many better ones coming along. As someone who has read most everything Hall has written, I would count Burntcoat as her crowning achievement to date.

Again, I can scarcely wait to see what she has planned for us next. Reading writers this good is always something of a game-changer, an electrical shock to the head, a reminder that the work of art is always worth the effort.

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?

Sharke’s Choice #2: Ghost Species by James Bradley

August 12, 2021 /

In the second of my posts looking at the Clarke-shortlist-that-might-have-been, I want to focus on James Bradley’s Ghost Species, a novel that takes place against a background of climate change, imagining a future we might already recognise, with some additional surprises.

Jay and Kate are geneticists. When they receive an invitation to visit a secret research facility deep in the Tasmanian bush, Kate suspects they are being scammed. When they discover the identity of their host – tech billionaire Davis Hucken – her reservations deepen. The Hucken Foundation is engaged in a series of highly advanced genetic engineering projects of borderline legality, designed to offset the effects of climate change by reverting large swathes of the planet’s depleted ecosystems to their original wilderness condition. Davis reveals that their experiments have entered startling new territory: by using strands of DNA harvested from the remains of long-dead specimens, they have succeeded in resurrecting the Thylacine, the elusive Tasmanian Tiger whose last living relative died in Hobart zoo in 1936. The Foundation is already progressing its plans to revive other species – the woolly rhino, the mammoth – and reintroduce them into the wild.

But these replenished ecosystems would not be complete, Davis explains, without the presence of Earth’s original human ancestors, the Neanderthals. Will Kate and Jay, experts in their field, come on board? Davis insists their pioneering work can help save the planet. Kate instinctively distrusts him – he’s a man too used to getting everything he wants – but Jay is excited, thrilled at the prospect of unlimited resources and the chance to make history.

What follows is the story of Eve, the first Neanderthal child in forty millennia. Still processing her grief over the loss of her own pre-term baby, Kate forms an almost instantaneous bond with Eve that goes against everything the ‘experiment’ demands of her. Eve is not an experiment, she is a person , and Kate is determined that she should be treated as one, that she should receive the personal love and care that is owing to any human child. When she goes on the run with Eve, Kate knows the Foundation will not allow their liberty to extend indefinitely. But her actions have already altered the trajectory of their research, winning Eve the time she needs to grow into her identity.

Although it takes place over a more compressed time period, in the way it is structured Ghost Species is not unlike Bradley’s previous novel Clade, the narrative progressing in discrete chapters, each focusing on a different time period, each moving the action forward by a number of years. Thus we see Eve grow from an infant into a toddler, a pre-pubescent and then a teenager, at which point the narrative point of view shifts from that of Kate to Eve herself. And as Eve grows, the world around her changes, the climate crisis becoming ever more pressing and wide-ranging until the world’s order shifts irrevocably, sliding towards disaster and the end of human civilisation as we currently understand it.

To say that Ghost Species is ‘more’ than just a novel of climate change is something of a misnomer: there is no subject more important than climate change, and James Bradley is among its most passionate literary advocates. There has been a lot of discussion in recent years about how writers should best engage with our current crisis, and if there is any criticism to be levelled at science fiction writers in particular it is that their narratives of climate change have too often been set in some unspecified ‘future’, with over-familiar scenes of mass destruction and fleeing multitudes cementing the illusion of climate change as little more than a convenient set of post-apocalyptic tropes.

By contrast, Ghost Species might as well be set right now. The environmental changes Bradley pinpoints have this week been the living subject of media headlines. For those of us – and for that read all of us – who feel an increasing sense of anxiety and helplessness in the face of government and corporate inadequacy the final chapters of Ghost Species are confronting and hard to read, hard to come to terms with. But that’s exactly how they should be. Bradley is unflinching in his approach, without ever resorting to the kind overblown disaster imagery that is in danger of becoming ineffective through over-exposure. And as in Clade, what Bradley has given us is an entirely believable, quotidian story of real people, none more human than Eve.

Eve’s story is the heart of Ghost Species, an examination not only of human rights but of the many and varied ways of being human. We have seen similar discussions and arguments rehearsed through the many narratives of artificial intelligence that exist in science fiction; Kate and Jay’s arrival at the isolated research facility has strong Ex Machina vibes, and there are some clear parallels between what is happening in Ghost Species and the action of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker-longlisted novel Klara and the Sun. But Bradley’s vision is more original than Garland’s, and his competency in imagining a future already with us, his determined and responsible grasp of his subject matter vastly outflanks Ishiguro’s.

Bradley’s extrapolation of research into character – what might a Neanderthal person actually be like, how might she respond to the modern world of Homo sapiens? – is itself a beautiful and, for me at least a highly successful experiment. revealing to us those aspects of our own selves that have been lost through our rush towards progress, and much to our detriment.

Ghost Species is a quietly devastating and immensely affecting novel, wrought with sensitivity and precision, and I cannot get my head around why it does not feature on this year’s Clarke Award shortlist. In many ways, Ghost Species presents an ideal of the science fiction novel, a realistic imagining of the whole through the sum of its parts, the universal via the particular. Where other novels splash about in the comfort zone of derivative tropes, playing games in future worlds that are never going to happen, Ghost Species dives deep into now and tomorrow and next week, asking how we are going to survive and what survival might do to us.

In its humanity and in its willingness to ask difficult questions, Ghost Species has a clear affiliation with the science fiction of Anne Charnock, whose third novel Dreams Before the Start of Time won the Clarke Award in 2018, During the first lockdown in 2020, Charnock and Bradley participated in an online conversation at the Los Angeles Review of Books, focusing specifically on writing fiction in the age of climate catastrophe. It is well worth the read.

My favourite ten books from the past five years

July 23, 2021 /

I was watching Eric Karl Anderson aka Lonesome Reader’s most recent Booktube video this morning, in which he goes through his top ten novel lists from the past five years, before picking out an overall top ten, a sort of master key to his reading experiences over what has been, I’m sure everyone will agree, an unsettling and in many ways game-changing period in our history.

I always enjoy Eric’s videos – he’s a discerning, highly intelligent and curious reader with a taste in books that frequently overlaps with my own. He is also a Joyce Carol Oates fan (if you’ve not seen his Zoom interviews with JCO from last year I would urge you to seek them out) which is one more good reason to follow him so far as I’m concerned. I’ve been making lists and notes of all the books I’ve read for going on ten years now, so I thought it might be interesting, and valuable, to see what my own top ten choices from the past five years would be.

Like many of the personal reference documents on my hard drive, my ‘books read’ files often end up being tens of thousands of words long, as I make notes not just on the books I have read in any given year, but also the books I want to read, that have caught my attention, links to interviews with writers and other critical articles, stuff that might turn out to be useful and that I don’t want to become lost in the ever-expanding labyrinth of emails, bookmarks and reminders that form the hinterland of our online lives. These documents therefore are a kind of reading journal, disorganised and full of loose ends, but always fascinating to look back on. As a record of my passions and compulsions, the way my literary interests have shifted and changed, sometimes looping back in a circle to where I left off, they are irreplaceable.

As I went through the lists, I noted down all the books I instinctively felt should make the final cut. The process was strange, and even painful as I found myself scrolling past books I loved at the time and still rate highly yet weren’t mind-altering enough to make it through. What I found most interesting is the way books tended to come in tranches, as I stumbled upon a seam or subset of reading that turned out to be particularly meaningful or useful. (NB: These are books I read during the past five years, not necessarily books that were published during the past five years. Neither did I include re-reads, or ‘pure’ non-fiction. )

This first list numbered thirty-eight titles. My intention had been to trim them down to the final ten before posting, but I have decided to leave them in place, listing them in the order I read them, rather than alphabetically, as this seems more in keeping with what this selection is about. Now I’ve cleared all the year-end lists away, this is what I am left with, the books I have to choose from. What do they say to me and about me, and more to the point, how am I going to whittle them down to only ten?

H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald

Dust to Dust by John Cornwell

The Border of Paradise by Esme Weijun Wang

Infinite Ground by Martin MacInnes

The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson

A Separation by Katie Kitamura

H(A)PPY by Nicola Barker

This House of Grief by Helen Garner

Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor

The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante

Death of a Murderer by Rupert Thomson

Joe Cinque’s Consolation by Helen Garner

When I Hit You by Meena Kandasamy

Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill

Universal Harvester by John Darnielle

Missing by Alison Moore

Falling Man by Don DeLillo

The Second Plane by Martin Amis

Attrib by Eley Williams

Berg by Ann Quin

First Love by Gwendoline Riley

The Cemetery in Barnes by Gabriel Josipovici

Munich Airport by Greg Baxter

As If by Blake Morrison

The Sing of the Shore by Lucy Wood

The Porpoise by Mark Haddon

Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

The Divers’ Game by Jesse Ball

Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry

The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel

Nudibranch by Irenosen Okojie

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

Katherine Carlyle by Rupert Thomson

The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell

Born Yesterday by Gordon Burn

The First Stone by Helen Garner

The Inland Sea by Madeleine Watts

Strange Hotel by Eimear McBride

*

After staring at this list for a long time, I have reached my decision. As for my criteria, I decided in the end to go with the single, simple question: if you could only save ten of these books from a fire, which would they be? An old chestnut yes, but as a question it has a way of cutting right to the chase. Even then, I changed my mind a couple of times, swapping one title out for another at the last minute, and must have spent at least twenty minutes havering over my final choice, simply because I wanted to keep my options open.

But here, in the order I first read them, are my ten favourite books of the past five years (2016-2020):

Infinite Ground by Martin MacInnes

A Separation by Katie Kitamura

Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor

Attrib by Eley Williams

Berg by Ann Quin

Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

Katherine Carlyle by Rupert Thomson

The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell

The First Stone by Helen Garner

I’m sure that on a different day, my choices might be different again. What I know for certain though is that these ten books have been a force for change in my thinking and in my writing, and will continue to exert their influence as we move forward from here.

Weird Wednesdays #17 (with apologies for it being Thursday): Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann

May 13, 2021 /

The first known appearance of the joker-vagrant Till Eulenspiegel in German literature comes with the publication of an anonymous chapbook in 1510, though his origins in folklore and oral storytelling most likely date back still further. Since then, his incarnations have been multitudinous and varied, including operas, comics, novels and films. To get some idea of the importance of Till Eulenspiegel to German culture, a British audience might find it useful to think of the centrality of Robin Hood to our own myth-making and storytelling, most especially in the protean, elusive nature of such a character, neither wholly hero nor villain, always on the move, forever reinventing himself as befits the time and place.

Daniel Kehlmann’s most recent novel Tyll, translated from the German by Ross Benjamin and shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, sets the action at the time of the Thirty Years’ War. Tyll Ulenspiegel is born the son of a miller, Claus, who finds himself a miller more by disagreeable luck than critical judgement. Claus Ulenspiegel’s true passion is for ideas – ideas that, with witchfinders roaming the land and a religious war on the horizon, turn out to be dangerous not only for him but for the entire village. Tyll, who from a young age shows a perspicacity and insularity that sets him apart from other children, is quickly forced to rely on his own resources. Brute twists and turns of fate, combined with Tyll’s mercurial and essentially unknowable nature, make for a picaresque narrative of unexpected happenings and unusual daring.

As is usual and ever-delightful with Daniel Kehlmann, the story does not proceed in a straightforward fashion. Instead, we are offered a series of discrete snapshots, shuffled like a deck of cards, dropping us in and out of Tyll’s life and times at irregular, non-linear intervals, so that even as we reach the end there are still gaps that can only be filled by our own imagination. As in a painting by Bruegel, certain figures dart forward to capture our attention, before sloping off into the background, making space for someone else. And the story is as much about the troubled social and political landscape in which it takes place as its eponymous hero. The Thirty Years’ War left many thousands dead, and was responsible for the deaths of millions more through the poverty, displacement, disease and starvation that it inflicted. One of the most powerful effects of the COVID pandemic, for me, has been the way in which it has revealed our residual closeness to events that previously seemed quite distant. Hilary Mantel has been brilliant at evoking the strong political parallels between our own time and the time of the Tudors. In Kehlmann’s hands, history is similarly pliable, similarly present.

Most of all, it is Kehlmann’s deft and original approach to the fantastic that illuminates this novel, that lends it the timeless allure and magical slipperiness of its jester protagonist. The land our little troupe travel through is alive with spirits and goblins, witches and will o’ the wisps, with hunches and premonitions, with gods and monsters that are as much the creatures of a nation’s troubled psyche as of her boundless forests, things only half-seen that still cannot be unseen because we know they are there. Kehlmann’s evocation of a magical landscape is nothing more and nothing less than the conjuring of a time in which magic and religion, alchemy and science mixed freely among the crowds, sowing their own brands of dissent and chaos, of healing and treachery among the people of a world – as continues to be proven – not so very different from our own.

In his refusal to provide answers or pass judgments, Kehlmann proves himself as tricksy and light-fingered as his shadowy hero. Tyll is a distillation of wonderland, a casket of ambiguous treasures. Beware his Midas touch – it may leave you with asses’ ears.

Beyond Good and Evil: a Golding symposium

April 9, 2021 /

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of taking part on an online symposium on the work of William Golding, organised by Arabella Currie and Bradley Osborne, under the aegis of the University of Exeter (nice to be back there, if only via Zoom!) This turned out to be one of the most inspiring and energising events I have yet taken part in, with engaging contributions from everyone involved and some excellent discussion. The artwork and storyboarding shown to us by Adam Gutch, who is developing an animated movie of The Inheritors, left us all feeling more than a little eager to see that project come to fruition. And the paper on the science fictional sensibility of Golding’s sea trilogy from poet and scholar William Stephenson was another highlight in a day that was all highlights. I had not realised Exeter boasts such a rich treasure trove of original Golding material, and the wonderful presentation from head of heritage collections Christine Faunch made me determined to visit the archive personally in the future.

My own part in the proceedings came soon after lunch. You might remember how my interest in Golding was reignited by the Backlisted podcast’s discussion of The Inheritors last year, in particular the contributions from Una McCormack on Golding’s place in the history of British science fiction. It was a real joy to be able to carry on those discussions with Una in person during our joint presentation, ‘Beyond Gaia: Golding and Science Fiction’. Una gave a fascinating talk on how Golding kicks away the genre scaffolding and dives deep into the heart of speculative ideas, and I followed this up with my own short paper on what some have claimed to be Golding’s most enigmatic novel, Darkness Visible, the full text of which is below.

I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to everyone involved in making our event such a success – organisers, speakers and audience – and here’s hoping we can someday meet again in person for more discussion and fruitful sharing of ideas.

*

Alien Country: William Golding’s Darkness Visible and the anatomy of the strange

In his review of Darkness Visible for the London Review of Books in 1979, the Oxford scholar and critic John Bayley summoned the spirit of Borges to describe Golding’s fiction:

“Borges​ has written that the writer is like a member of a primitive tribe who suddenly starts making unfamiliar noises and waving his arms about in strange new rituals. The others gather round to look. Often they get bored and wander off, but sometimes they become hypnotised, remain spellbound until the rite comes to an end, adopt it as a part of tribal behaviour.

A simple analogy, but it does fit some novelists and tale-tellers, preoccupied in the midst of us with their homespun magic. They are not modish, not part of any literary establishment. Nor is there anything of the showman about them: Dickens was a magician in another sense, the sense that goes with the melodrama and music hall, and tribal magicians are not creators as Dickens and Hardy were. Their appeal has something communal, as the Borges image suggests, and the shareability of a cult. America lacks this type of magician – the shamans there are grander, more worldly, more pretentious – and the German-style version of Hesse or Grass is too instinctively metaphysical, not homespun enough. Richard Hughes was one of Britain’s most effective local magicians; John Fowles has become one; William Golding has had the status a long time.”

We might choose to quibble with Borges’s use of the term ‘primitive tribe’; we might equally dispute Bayley’s summary dismissal of American and German novelists as purveyors of magic. What makes Bayley’s review of Darkness Visible interesting to me – aside from the fascination of reading a piece of criticism contemporaneous with the novel itself – is how closely it coincides with my own view of Golding as one of what I have come to think of as the maverick strain in British fiction: novelists who, though seldom regarded as such, reveal a secret stratum of the fantastic amidst a literary geology more commonly described in terms of its obsession with novels of social mores, its tendency towards mimesis.  

When American critics talk about the genealogy of science fiction they present us with a lineage that begins with the pulp magazines of the 1920s, that pays homage to the holy trinity of Campbell, Asimov and Heinlein. Fantastic literature written earlier – or that does not accord with a set of fuzzy and increasingly spurious set of definitions – is too often dismissed as ‘proto-SF’ or ‘not really SF at all’. Long before I had ever heard the name of Hugo Gernsback, or had any inkling that science fiction was supposed to adhere to any specific set of arbitrary man-made criteria, I was beginning to discover for myself a more home-grown, or to echo John Bayley homespun genealogy of the fantastic that appeared to have grown up organically, not from any pre-determined magic spell but from the independent-minded, endlessly curious and – yes – maverick spirits of the writers themselves.

I didn’t know Beowulf then but I did know Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights and The Woman in White. I knew H. G. Wells and his Time Machine, Aldous Huxley and his Brave New World, John Wyndham and his Kraken. As I grew older and read more widely I was delighted to discover echoes and resonances of these elder gods in the work of George Orwell, Iris Murdoch, Rumer Godden, Mervyn Peake and JG Ballard, John Fowles, Doris Lessing and Christopher Priest. These writers, it seemed to me, offered me a view of my native landscape and cultural background that seemed to accord more closely with my imaginative experience than either American science fiction writers – mostly aliens! – or the British mainstream literary canon.  

An early and immediately beloved discovery in this hierarchy of misfits was William Golding. I would not like to guess at the number of times I read Lord of the Flies between the ages of twelve and twenty – I can only say that the story horrified, bewitched and inspired me in equal measure. I quickly went on to read Pincher Martin, equally wondrous and, to use a Golding word, weird. I have not counted Golding’s uses of the word weird in Darkness Visible; perhaps I should have done, given that no other word seems as apt to describe it.

Darkness Visible is thought of by many as the most enigmatic of Golding’s novels, which is interesting, given that it is unarguably the most modern. Published in 1979, Golding actually began writing it in 1955. In its first, tentative incarnation it was actually a science fiction story entitled Here Be Monsters, set in the future amidst a landscape of accelerating nuclear proliferation. It is famously the one work of his he consistently refused to discuss. It tells the story of Matty, an orphan child who stumbles from a burning bomb site at the height of the London Blitz, Sophy Stanhope and her twin sister Toni, prodigiously intelligent yet morally adrift, and Sebastian Pedigree, a paedophile teacher who is both disparaged and sheltered by the institution that employs him. The action centres upon the town of Greenfield, a suburb of London situated on the fault-line of post-war austerity and modernising, multicultural Britain.

Matty’s origins and parentage are never discovered – his constantly misplaced surname is used to symbolise the mystery of his fiery origins. As he grows towards adulthood, the facial scarring he incurred as a result of the bombing is a constant visual reminder of his apartness. Yet Golding leaves no doubt that Matty’s essential separateness from his fellows runs much deeper than physical appearance.

Matty’s vision of the world is as a mysterious other, a realm in which good and evil fight for supremacy, symbolised for him in the perfect shining roundness of the spherical glass paperweight in the window of Goodchild’s Rare Books. When he becomes unwittingly drawn into the simmering conflict between Sebastian Pedigree and the school’s headmaster, the fallout is tragic, impacting itself not only on Matty’s immediate future but ultimately on the fate of every character in the novel. 

By contrast, the Stanhope twins Toni and Sophy view the world through a lens of cynicism shading to nihilism, the fruits of parental neglect combined with an innate surfeit of self-awareness. Toni runs away from home at the age of sixteen, quickly becoming involved with a terrorist group perpetrating outrages in Europe and the Middle East. Sophy’s spiritual rebellion appears more subtle, yet its end results are scarcely less disastrous. In literary terms, Matty and the twins are opposing devices; the scarred outcast Matty touched by the divine, the preternatural physical beauty of the Stanhope twins standing in pointed contrast to their moral vacuity.

For me though, Golding resists such simplistic analysis, and Darkness Visible is infinitely more complex, more ambiguous. Matty is morally good, but he is not a freethinker. He ‘does not get the code’ and so his goodness is rather like that of Frankenstein’s Monster: an innate innocence that is also rigid, shaped by and subject to the rules and rhetoric of organised religion and with a similarly unexamined outcome. Sophy Stanhope is a symbol not of evil but of existential disenchantment. She struggles within the bonds of existence as it is, strains towards something greater, a larger meaning to everything. She seeks in a way that Matty cannot – because she comes from a place of larger understanding, of participation in the world.

As a writer who veers instinctively towards the multi-stranded narrative, I find Darkness Visible to be a miracle of construction, its strands linked together not just through the reappearance of familiar characters but through the interacting perspectives of those characters. Hence we are told that Matty first encounters Sophy and Toni Stanhope as ‘two enchanting little girls’ gazing into the window of Goodchild’s Rare Books, or that Sebastian Pedigree’s return to Greenfield after his first spell in jail coincides with their mother Muriel Stanhope’s leaving.

Golding’s breaking of the fourth wall is a subtle thing, a slipping glimpse of postmodernism rather than a full immersion, yet it is a beautiful thing nonetheless and contributes significantly to the novel’s weirdness.   

Darkness Visible takes place in the real world and has a sharp realworld awareness of contemporary politics and changes in society. Though the novel does contain turns of phrase and outdated usages that come across as dated and paternalistic in a modern context, Golding’s desire not only to reflect but to understand a rapidly changing world is powerfully apparent. The disenchantment and disillusion felt by the novel’s younger characters – with time on their hands and aching for purpose – seems both echo and indictment of the realworld violence perpetrated by European fringe organisations of the time, such as the Red Brigade in Italy, the Baader Meinhof gang in Germany, and the IRA in Belfast and on the British mainland. Sophy is an astonishingly vivid character, and Golding’s portrait of an exceptional woman is still something out of the ordinary. Similarly, his portrayal of Pedigree – ‘the sort of man whom a policeman feels in his bones should be moved on’ – is as shockingly direct as Nabokov’s depiction of Humbert Humbert in his masterpiece Lolita.

Yet Golding’s central literary purpose seems a million miles from social commentary. There is a mythic, interior quality to his narrative that renders it timeless. Sophy’s ‘desire to be weird’, her ‘hunger and thirst after weirdness’ is both an invigorating necessity and a deadly curse.  Both Sophy’s narrative and Matty’s come suffused with the ‘homespun magic’ of which John Bailey speaks in his 1979 review. Even Frankley’s ironmongers – ‘a fine old establishment’ – has a feel of Steven Millhauser about it, or the porcelain showroom in Richard Adams’s ghost story The Girl in the Swing. Its infinite spaces, its cavernous lofts, its cobwebby rooms stacked with useless treasures seem suffused with the ability to become or to conceal a whole world, a snow-globe cosomorama of a life long past. Eventually, symbolically, we see the Frankley outbuildings being demolished in the novel’s Part 3.

The trajectory of the narrative – the overall story arc – is finally an affirmation of the novel’s weird nature, the fulfilment of its own prophecy. Edwin Bell, retired teacher and former colleague of Sebastian Pedigree at Foundlings School, believes Matty to be some sort of prophet, a Delphic oracle for our troubled times. Sim Goodchild, the proprietor of the bookstore whose business is failing, believes no such thing. For Goodchild, modern life is all hard logic. And yet we cannot help remembering Matty’s encounter with an official who tried to help him during his earlier ill-fated sojourn in Australia, a man who treated Matty as an equal, whilst at the same time warning him that his sacred message – his prescient foreboding of a planet in crisis – would forever be doomed to fall upon deaf ears.

The secretary takes Matty’s gestures seriously, yet stands apart from them. When he asks Matty if he has the second sight, if he ‘sees’, Matty replies: ‘I feel!’ an impassioned declaration that works equally as a vindication of the novel as a whole.

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