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Women’s Prize wishlist

March 1, 2019 /

With the longlist for the Women’s Prize announced on Monday, I thought I’d give a quick mention to some of the books I would like to see make the cut. I’m feeling excited about the Women’s Prize at the moment, mainly because both the longlist and the shortlist were so strong in 2018. I’d love to see some similarly eclectic and most of all surprising choices coming through this year.

This is not a longlist prediction. If I’m honest, I would be amazed if even one or two of these particular titles made it through. I’m deliberately going for outliers: books I think deserve more attention, books that feel resonant and exciting to me right now, books that do interesting things with language and form. I have by no means read all of these books! In some cases I’ve just sampled them, or read the author’s previous book, or have the book on my to-read list because I think it’s one I’ll respond to.

In terms of the number of books read so far, I’m doing well this year – but already I’m feeling overwhelmed by the number of books I feel I need to read but haven’t got to yet. So just to make things even more complicated, here are some more!

1. VIRTUOSO by Yelena Moskovich. 2. MILKMAN by Anna Burns 3. STUBBORN ARCHIVIST by Yara Rodrigues Fowler 4. CRUDO by Olivia Laing 5. PONTI by Sharlene Teo 6. FRESHWATER by Akwaeke Emezi 7. THE WESTERN WIND by Samantha Harvey 8. KUDOS by Rachel Cusk 9. WOMEN TALKING by Miriam Toews 10. MISSING by Alison Moore 11. ALL RIVERS RUN FREE by Natasha Carthew 12. NORMAL PEOPLE by Sally Rooney 13. MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE by Siri Hustvedt 14. MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION by Ottessa Moshfegh 15. GHOST WALL by Sarah Moss 16. SEA MONSTERS by Chloe Aridjis

I would also have chosen PROBLEMS by Jade Sharma, but I don’t think it’s eligible because it’s published in Ireland. Kind of like Normal People but more out there.

I look at this list of books and feel a thrill of excitement. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a longlist this dynamic and this bold? There is some incredible work being done and that – especially now – is an inspiration.

I hope to be back here next week with a reaction to the actual longlist, whilst reserving the right to pass over it in silence if I am really disappointed!

Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena

February 1, 2019 /

Having concluded his story, he opened the door to the church. Inside were ruins, on which bushes and saplings had sprouted. Through the broken windows we could see a bleak sky. A mute church bell hung above us.

We all looked up.

“See, ” our teacher said, “the bell had its tongue torn out. It can no longer ring.”

Later, by a campfire near the church, over sandwiches and tea, the teacher asked us what thoughts the bell had inspired.

As always, the wunderkind had to be different. He said that the bell had been lucky in a way, because it never had to worry about holding its tongue again.

Everyone, including Teacher Blums, laughed heartily.

“And what do you say?” the teacher asked me.”

Everyone gazed at me in silence. The fire was crackling. The flames and the silence burned my cheeks.

“That bell reminds me of my mother.”

The silence and the crackling grew louder.

*

The unnamed mother and the daughter in Nora Ikstena’s Soviet Milk are more or less the same age as me and my own mother. There are other parallels, too. As a student, I spent three months in the Soviet Union at the same time the daughter would have been in her final year at school. I lived in dormitory accommodation first in Leningrad – where the mother in Ikstena’s novel sets out to study medicine – and then in Kursk, not far from the Russian border with Ukraine. Already at that time there was a marked difference in atmosphere between Russia’s second capital and the moderately sized, provincial city in the heart of the Soviet interior. In Leningrad, people were beginning to engage openly in political discussion – there were demonstrations on the streets, excited gatherings of young people eager to discuss everything from God to McDonald’s.

In Kursk, we were still on Soviet time. The city’s skyline was still dominated by statues of Lenin and Marx and you felt they still meant business. Vast placards at every street intersection shouted Soviet slogans. The young people here had never met British students before. They were excited and beyond hospitable but you could also sense their caution – not at us, but at who might be watching them interact with us.

Most afternoons after our classes we swam in the river, like the mother and daughter and Jesse in Soviet Milk.

Ikstena’s novel is blisteringly beautiful and hauntingly sad but more, far more than that it is tenacious. It tells the story of what half of Europe lived through once they got rid of the Nazis. Reading Soviet Milk reminded me painfully of reading Christa Wolf’s Nachdenken ueber Christa T, which is a book of my heart. When I read Claire Armitstead’s review – ‘its powerful evocation of an era that seems almost unimaginable now’ – I felt sad and somehow cheated. For millions of people, on both sides of the wall and for different reasons, that era forms the spine of their being and is still very present. Would we say that the Thatcher era is almost unimaginable now? Sadly, I don’t think we would.

The mother in Soviet Milk reads Moby-Dick and 1984 – Ishmael and Winston Smith are her comrades in arms. The mother’s refusal to compromise – her inability to live inside a situation that demands compromise on pain of ruin – is tragic yet she is a great soul, a powerful intellect, a modern martyr. The daughter’s contrasting and ferocious desire to thrive – to win freedom – makes her equally so. I loved these two people. I loved the stalwart Jesse, an intersex woman living at a time that denied her very existence. I loved the constantly illuminating presence of the natural world, which sustained these women through their journey – even the cold.

I felt a particular gratitude for Peirene Press’s and translator Margita Gailitis’s decision to leave the text of Soviet Milk interlaced with different languages, sometimes in parallel text format: Latvian of course, transliterated Russian, even Old Church Slavonic. The power this brought to the novel as a whole – in terms of nuance, in terms of form – is inestimable and precious.

This morning I listened to a news item about a Saudi government app – now ubiquitous – that allows Saudi men to register their female relatives and receive text messages whenever their wife, daughter or sister boards a plane or passes through some other travel checkpoint. Yesterday I read about a 90-year-old man who is being forced by our government to return to the United States – a country where he has no remaining family or close friends – in order to complete a visa formality that will enable him to remain here in the UK with his wife and family. State oppression is not unimaginable – it is here, and everywhere. Soviet Milk may tell a story set in the second half of the twentieth century but it is a story for all of us, now.

I loved it very much.

The work goes on

January 18, 2019 /

This week saw the announcement of Hannah Sullivan as the winner of this year’s T. S. Eliot Prize for her collection Three Poems. Sullivan is 39, and much of the commentary around her win has been centred on the fact that Three Poems is her debut collection. Prior to its publication, she was a virtual unknown.

One of the delights for me in reading the T. S. Eliot Prize longlist was the realisation of how difficult it must have been to call a winner. The shortlisted collections were radically different in terms of approach, subject matter and background, yet in terms of ability, standard of achievement, originality, depth and above all seriousness of intent there seemed barely a hair’s breadth between them.

Reading work of this standard offers a profound joy, most of all in its confirmation that such work – in the midst of everything writers face in the current climate – is still being done.

This week’s unveiling of the longlist for the Republic of Consciousness Prize – a relatively new award for works published in the UK by independent presses – offered a similar surfeit of joy. Presses like Stinging Fly and Galley Beggar, Carcanet and Charco and Splice are increasingly where the risks are being taken in British publishing, where the work is being done, where the idea of experimentation and revolt is actively welcomed. It is also interesting to note that of the thirteen books listed, almost a third are works in translation.

The work goes on, and that is cause for joy.

The 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize longlist is here. You can hear an interview with Hannah Sullivan at the Guardian books podcast here. I found it inspirational, and Sullivan’s previous book The Work of Revision sounds tremendous.

All Hallows Eve!

October 31, 2018 /

In celebration of Hallowe’en, here’s the interview piece I put together for Black Static #65 about Catriona Ward’s scintillating second novel Little Eve – your Hallowe’en reading, sorted!

*

Little Eve: an interview with Catriona Ward

 When I heard that Catriona Ward had a new novel coming out, I felt nervous as well as excited. Her debut had been exceptional. Set on Dartmoor during the tumultuous apotheosis of the Victorian age, Rawblood was a philosophical drama disguised in the costume of high gothic, exploding on to the British horror scene in 2015 as an instant classic. Rawblood expertly combined elements of the traditional ghost story – the isolated house, the family curse, the doomed quest for arcane knowledge – with a deeply felt social insight that, together with Ward’s expressive, lyrical writing and passion for story, set it apart from other essays in period horror and signalled the arrival of a major talent.

By her own admission, Rawblood was for Ward a passion project. Inspired by the landscapes that defined her childhood and the stories and novels that helped to form her both as a thinker and as a writer, her debut took more than seven years to write and went through dramatic evolutionary changes in the process. The end result reveals none of the doubts, reversals and sheer hard graft that would inevitably have accompanied its journey into print. In terms of its language, style and formal innovation, Rawblood feels so fully achieved it is difficult to believe it is a debut. But there is more to Rawblood than a great story, professionally told: the book also comes across as deeply personal, a genuine culmination of a writer’s vision. This is rarer than you might think, especially in genre fiction, where new writers are coming under increasing pressure from agents and editors to deliver novels that they feel will satisfy market expectations.

Rawblood found considerable success, both with genre aficionados and also with a more mainstream audience, readers who might not normally have felt entirely comfortable picking up a horror novel. I was proud to be a member of the jury that awarded Rawblood the 2016 British Fantasy Award for best horror novel. I was eager to see what Ward would produce next, yet at the same time I felt anxious for her. An author’s first book is written largely in isolation, and in most cases is not subject to a deadline. The follow-up – the ‘difficult second novel’ – is another matter. You won’t normally be given seven years to write it, for a start. And if you’ve done your job properly the first time around as Ward did, you might also have acquired some fans, all excitedly scouring the internet for news of your next publication date. You’re not alone any more – a fact that is deeply gratifying but also a pressure. Suddenly, there is a weight of expectation that, inevitably, some writers will struggle to fulfil.

The good news for all of us is that Catriona Ward has fulfilled it, in spades. Her second novel, Little Eve, is just as good as Rawblood, if not better. I was lucky enough to be sent an advance proof, and am delighted to report that for the six hours or so it took me to read it, I quite literally did nothing else. This does not happen often.

For writers, the increasing tendency to relate to books as text to be analysed, scrutinised and criticised can make it difficult to suspend disbelief, to recapture the pure reading pleasure that characterises our encounters with the novels and stories that made us writers in the first place. While reading Little Eve, I truly felt myself to be a reader again.

The stylistic achievement that marked out Rawblood as something special is equally assured. Ward’s sense of place, her rapturous, almost dream-like evocation of characters in a landscape is immersive and bewitching. But for all its beauty of language, Little Eve works equally successfully as a page-turning thriller. Again, this does not happen often, and Catriona Ward should be congratulated on producing another novel that will be beloved of both seasoned horror fans and more mainstream literary readers – those unfortunate souls who think they don’t even like horror – alike.

 

The action of Little Eve takes place over a period of some thirty years, from the penultimate year of World War One until the immediate aftermath of World War Two. We move some six hundred miles north, swapping the Dartmoor wilderness of Rawblood for the village community of Loyal and the small offshore island of Altnaharra, north of Inverness, in the Scottish Highlands. The island is home to John Bearings, a man who came north in search of sanctuary for himself and his adoptive ‘family’, a group shunned by the local community on grounds of their supposed immorality even as they are pitied for their material poverty. Early on New Year’s Day 1921, a local man, Jamie McRaith, makes a bloody discovery: John Bearings and his acolytes have all been murdered. The one survivor, a young woman named Dinah, insists that the murderer is her adoptive sister Evelyn, known within the family as Little Eve.

As we move back and forth along the narrative timeline, we discover that the story of what really happened on Altnaharra is stranger and more terrible than it initially appears. It is also far less straightforward. Little Eve is compellingly readable and rich in sonorous gothic sensibility. It is also a thought-provoking indictment of the British class system, the position of women in Edwardian society and the wilful blindness and skewed morality of enclosed communities. Ward has created an unforgettable cast of characters. Her vision is unflinching, the story she tells is wrenching and raw, which is not to belie the powerful lyricism of her writing. On finishing the novel, I found myself buzzing with theories and suppositions, alternative trains of thought. I sat down and wrote to Catriona with some questions about Little Eve, which she has been good enough to answer for us here.

 

NINA ALLAN: The first thing we notice about Little Eve is its setting. As with the Villarca house in Rawblood, the island of Altnaharra is an isolated outpost in an already inhospitable location. The Dartmoor of your first novel is a defining presence, and you have spoken many times in interview of the importance of Dartmoor in your personal and in your writing life. Both the village of Loyal and the island of Altnaharra are imaginary, yet the sense of place that permeates Little Eve is as vivid and as vital to the story as the real places of Rawblood. Why did you choose to set Little Eve in the Scottish Highlands, and what came first, the location or the story?

CATRIONA WARD: Dartmoor is deeply embedded in Rawblood, and vice versa. It’s part of my emotional landscape and the setting of many of my dreams. I wanted to infuse the text with that. Longing for and memory of place is such an important part of Rawblood, the novel is an extended hymn to home.

I don’t know the Highlands in the same intimate way. It was a lack of familiarity that Little Eve needed. There’s an unease to the characters’ relationship with their setting. The Children are strangers in Scotland, invaders and also prisoners. Also, Highland place names are so wonderful – some I invented, like Loyal, but others like Tongue, Altnaharra and Ardentinny I merely borrowed. From the first and for all sorts of reasons, the idea for Little Eve was inextricable from the Highlands setting.

NA: As well as the gothic elements, Little Eve also involves some of the tropes of classic golden age detective fiction. In Christopher Black we have the obsessive, ostracised investigator, whose career has been ruined by his relentless quest for the truth about John Bearings and his adopted family. The closed, intimate circle of suspects, the theme of mistaken identity – the spirit of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White hovers over this novel – are also key elements, with the truth about the murders remaining in question right up until the end. Do you enjoy detective fiction, and to what extent did writers like Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allan Poe and even Agatha Christie provide inspiration for Little Eve?

CW: Wilkie Collins is a big inspiration. The Moonstone is both an excellent gothic novel and the original detective story. Detective fiction is the most reassuring genre of all – it provides a problem with a solution and a culprit – an answer. I began Little Eve with a fully evolved detective plot, intending it for a conventional mystery. But you don’t always control what you write. It became something stranger. Agatha Christie meets The Wicker Man, maybe? Crime literature in general has some things in common with the gothic – both genres ask the reader to play detective, to follow a thread to a dark truth. I wanted to draw out some of those commonalities in Little Eve.

NA: The most sinister character in Little Eve is undoubtedly John Bearings himself, yet as readers we always see him at one remove, through the eyes of other, unreliable narrators. Was it a conscious decision of yours, to keep ‘Uncle’ and his monstrous crimes partly obscured by shadow, and if so, why?  

CW: I made a considered decision to deny him a narrative voice. John Bearings doesn’t deserve any time in the light. It’s a feminist act to exclude him from the narrative. Or perhaps I just didn’t want to inhabit him! In the end I found that Little Eve isn’t about him at all, really. It’s about how the women and children under his control suffer and try to survive. It’s about ingenuity, about kindness blooming amidst horror and about faith, though not the kind he peddles.

NA: The position of women in Victorian and Edwardian society is a dominant theme of yours, both in Rawblood and in Little Eve – indeed it could be argued that these novels represent a reclaiming of the gothic for the female voice. Have you ever found yourself frustrated by the way women are portrayed in horror fiction? How far is the balance being redressed now in contemporary works?

CW: I am frequently frustrated by how women are portrayed in all sorts of genres! Horror still relies heavily on portrayals of vulnerable women. There’s a prurience to a certain type of horror gaze. But I think the gothic sidesteps that quite cleverly and has always naturally lent itself to the female voice. It’s a knowing, sometimes quite wry genre that illustrates the horror of power, usually male power. I wish that as a society had we had outgrown the need for such fictional mirrors to be held up to life… but we definitely haven’t.

NA: Scientific explanations for supernatural phenomena, and the apparent conflict between faith and rational argument form key plot elements in both Rawblood and Little Eve. This conflict and the instability of its resolution has always loomed large in gothic writing – Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein springs immediately to mind, so does R.L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Do you see horror and science as natural bedfellows, and why might this be?

CW: Horror and science resemble one another so closely, at times. The history of scientific discovery, particularly in medicine and pathology, is truly horrible. James Marion Sims developed pioneering gynaecological techniques still used today – by performing experimental surgeries on twelve slave women without anaesthesia. Only three of the women’s names are recorded – Anarcha, Betsy and Lucy. We should remember them.

The idea of a dialogue between the rational and supernatural, or faith and science, is part of the bedrock of gothic literature, as you say. But these are not discrete concepts. They all bleed into one another – and they are all attempts to circumvent mortality. The gothic recognises that all these strategies will ultimately fail. It looks uncomfortable realities in the face – which is why it’s such a powerful genre. It goes to the heart of things.

NA: What draws you particularly to historical fiction? Do you see horror essentially as period drama, or might you feel tempted to relocate to a contemporary setting at some point in the future?

CW: Historical fiction can serve as a lens, casting a particular light on the now. Period drama helps us parse today. And I feel a need to distance myself from my characters’ situations. Writing is so intimate and the further I remove the narrative from my own external concerns, the freer I feel to explore my protagonists’ inner ones. A good way of doing that is to embed the novel deeply in another time. But I’m trying something new, at the moment – I’m in the midst of my third novel, which is contemporary, and told from the point of view of a serial killer’s cat. I am really enjoying writing as a cat.

NA: You have spoken of your admiration for classic gothic texts such as Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre but who, for you, are the most exciting voices in contemporary horror?

CW: There seems to be horror in all good art – some of the authors I’m drawn to might not be perceived as strictly ‘genre.’ Kelly Link manages a powerful alchemy, mingling magical realism with everyday horrors and using the language of genre. I can never quite work out how she does what she does. Gemma Files is wonderful, as is Michelle Paver, and Lauren Beukes. Justin Cronin’s the Passage saga is epic and immersive – it was a wrench to leave that world, at the end. I was glued to my seat during ‘Get Out’ – what an original idea, brilliantly executed.

 

(Catriona Ward’s Little Eve is published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson)

The Cemetery in Barnes

October 28, 2018 /

One might most fittingly describe this novel as entranced, enchanted, trance-like. As in Alain Resnais’s 1961 film Last Year in Marienbad, there is a deceptive stillness over everything, as we obsessively revisit certain phrases, images, personages in an ever-tightening pursuit of an elusive truth.

The Cemetery in Barnes focuses on an unnamed protagonist, a translator who dwells recursively on three specific periods in his life: in Carlton Drive, Putney, with his first wife (in a flat in a two-storey Victorian house, the text informs us, though interestingly if you look at Carlton Drive on Google Maps you’ll see it’s mainly post-war apartment blocks with a scattering of three- and four-storey Victorian villas. The only two-storey Victorians are in the walk-through between Carlton Drive and East Putney station, Earnshaw Place. Yeah, this book really rubbed off on me…) in Paris, where he lived and worked for some years after the death of that first wife, and the farmhouse in the hills above Abergavenny, where he lived and threw convivial dinner parties with his second wife.  Whilst recalling these places and people, the translator grapples with the intractability of certain issues of translation – Italian to English (Striggio’s libretto for Monteverdi’s Orfeo), antique French to English (du Bellay’s Regrets), English to French (Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis).  An unassuming man, with few material needs. An otherworldly man, above all a self-absorbed man. A harmless man? Perhaps, perhaps not…

Josipovici’s novel is essentially a twisted retelling of Orpheus and Euridice. The protagonist’s first wife dies by drowning, the second by fire, both plunge ‘into hell’. In both cases, the protagonist – this botched Orfeo – is unable or unwilling to save them. What are initially presented as relationships of unswerving devotion gradually reveal aspects of themselves that do not fit. Was the first wife having an affair with ‘the bearded maths teacher, Frederick Aspinall’? How companionable is the continuous ‘banter’ between the protagonist and his second wife, and was this wife similarly being unfaithful with ‘the retired civil servant’, Wilfred?

It is interesting to note that the only people ever named in this novel are Frederick Aspinall, the retired civil servant Wilfred and his wife, the ‘horse-faced’ Mabel – a fact that strongly suggests these people are seminal, important. Is the protagonist actually a murderer? A double murderer? In the cases of both wives, we are offered alternative visions of what actually happened to them: the first wife slips down the river embankment in Putney but is able to scramble out of the water further down. She later dies, we assume, of pneumonia contracted through her immersion in the Thames.  The first wife slips down the embankment, plunging into the water to disappear immediately and permanently from our sight. The police question the protagonist about why he didn’t make any attempt to save her, and by the way, does he need a lawyer?

In the Brecon Beacons, the protagonist and his second wife watch as firefighters try to extinguish a blaze that is consuming a barn. The blaze burns out of control and the firemen are ordered to retreat. In the Brecon Beacons, the protagonist watches the farmhouse he shared with his second wife burn to the ground, unable to believe the ‘charred bodies’ he is shown were once people.

Indeed, the protagonist’s only quantifiable reality resides in words, the intricacies of language, the effect and difficulties of rendering one language into another. We have no idea if our translator truly ‘regrets’ anything – everything we learn about him sounds false or questionable to a degree, and we are reminded that the French words for translation and betrayal sit uncomfortably close together. An insistent reference to Emily Dickinson’s poem A Narrow Fellow in the Grass earlier on in the text comes back to haunt us – a snake in the grass, then, who is the narrow fellow?

I also could not refrain from asking myself: was this man ever actually married to either of these women or were they just a stalker’s fantasies? Read, read between the lines, see what you think. Whatever you come to believe, the stalker theory is certainly a possibility.  Beloved horrors, indeed. Well might our traducer dwell upon them. A further oddity I kept dwelling on was how persistently this novel brought to mind the equally beguiling and disturbing book The Life Writer, by David Constantine, also a translator…

Josipovici’s use of language and metaphor is as close to perfect as any writer might dare to imagine: unadorned, understated to the point of nihilistic, clear and limpid as a mountain stream, coursing invisibly through a cleft in the Black Mountains above Abergavenny. No extraneous words and few adjectives, the repetition of certain phrases and images take on the affect and mechanism of poetry. And so meaning is fashioned.

This is the kind of novel often referred to by detractors as ‘plotless’. It numbers fewer than a hundred pages. Just sit with it awhile, let it reveal itself. Once revealed, it is unforgettable, and a masterpiece.

Time and the Milkman

October 17, 2018 /

Last night was Booker night. We watched the highly enjoyable BBC Four documentary celebrating fifty years of the Booker before segueing more or less immediately to the announcement of the 2018 prize itself. When Anna Burns’s name was read out for Milkman, I found myself overcome with emotion in a way that has not happened to me during the thirty-five years I have taken an interest in the prize. I started reading Milkman at the end of last week. When people asked me what I thought of it, I had replied ‘I think it’s brilliant, but there’s no way the judges are going to let it win – it’s too experimental’. Rarely have I been over-the-moon happier to be proven wrong.

Milkman was the novel on the Booker shortlist that no one was talking about.  In almost every online discussion of this year’s Booker, Burns’s was the book that was seen as an also-ran, almost an irrelevance in the betting stakes, actual or theoretical, that always accompany this most visibly contentious of UK book prizes. In those moments where it has been discussed, commentators have reached invariably and somewhat lazily for the adjective ‘Joyceian’,, yet MIlkman is not Joyceian in any truly comparable sense. Burns’s use of language is less joyous stream of consciousness than careful construction, a coded letter home from dystopia, an eloquently guarded articulation of the unsayable.

Nor is Milkman just – simply, dismissably – ‘about the Troubles’, though particularly in these farcical weeks and months of Brexit insanity there are many – way too many – who would do well to think more about the Troubles than they apparently are doing.  Milkman explores the ways in which not just armed paramilitaries but common or garden bullies, the bigot next door, can and will thrive during those times when democracy is in abeyance. It speaks eloquently to #MeToo, yes, but also to the way in which all minorities are sidelined, silenced and abused while those not directly affected turn a blind eye. It speaks, even, of what it is like to yearn for higher expression, to yearn to read books in a place and time where that activity is seen as somehow suspect – isn’t it always? – and to have that yearning twisted dangerously against you.

Most of all, Milkman is conspicuously, triumphantly, the work of a writer in mid-career, a writer who spends her days doing what she does, committed to what she does regardless of fashion or favour, regardless of what is going on out in the literary establishment. She clearly never saw Milkman as her ‘breakthrough’ – it was just her next novel.

This year’s Booker judges have been similarly committed, and courageous, right from the beginning. The longlist this year was outstanding, and the shortlist – unlike so many – did not contain one stick of dead wood. As I’m sure must be the ideal of every judging panel, any of the six books they chose had behind it a solid argument for its being the winner. That the judges carried the courage of their convictions right through to this most fitting of conclusions is not just unexpected, it is an affirmation of what literature – and the Booker Prize – should be about. What greater proof of this could there be than what Val McDermid said about her experience of being on the jury:

‘It has provoked a restlessness in me. I am thinking about how I can push my own writing in different directions and not do the same things again and again and again. If you’re a writer, everything you read gives you pause: You’re always looking for something you can steal or something you want to avoid. This has really taken me outside the usual tramlines of what I read.’

In the words of this year’s Booker chair of judges, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Milkman ‘is enormously rewarding if you persist with it. Because of the flow of the language and the fact some of the language is unfamiliar, it is not a light read [but] I think it is going to last’.

I think it is going to last. This should surely be the statement against which all potential Booker winners should be tested. Congratulations to Anna Burns, and well done those judges.

Holy Smoke!

October 1, 2018 /

I finished reading Simon Ings’s latest novel The Smoke last night. By coincidence, this morning’s Start the Week programme on Radio 4 featured a 45-minute interview with the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. Anyone with an interest in writing science fiction – or anything, really – should listen to the Harari interview, and then follow it up with a reading of The Smoke, in which Ings appears to explore an alternate future whilst actually detailing the same unfolding rupture in our realworld present that Harari describes.

I will be writing about The Smoke in greater detail soon. For the moment I just wanted to point out that this is one of the must-read science fiction novels of 2018, and that Simon Ings is one of the most original and accomplished science fiction writers working today. I would also highly recommend Jonathan Thornton’s interview with Ings for Fantasy Hive, packed with important and insightful thinking on The Smoke, the science fiction community and writing generally.

Notes from the roadside

September 19, 2018 /

Autumn in Scotland is possibly even more difficult for me than it always has been. I love the light of spring and summer in the north so much, when even at midnight there is still a residual brightness in the sky. I like to encourage myself by thinking of all the work I need to get done between now and next March! I’ve been rereading Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic this week, for a non-fiction project I’m working on, and I could feel my heart rate increasing as I turned the first page.

There are certain novels – and I’m sure it’s like this for every science fiction reader –  from which you only need revisit a couple of pages to be reminded of why it is that you’re crazy about science fiction. Novels that churn up memories so powerful they bring  tears to your eyes. You know there are no novels quite like this in mimetic literature, that in some incalculable yet inarguable way they articulate what being a reader and being a writer is about. Resistance to consensus. Provocation. The opposite of what Don DeLillo has called the corporatisation of the writing classes.

It could be something about the story itself, or the form the novel takes, or a combination of both. A rawness of purpose and of expression, a determination to say something unexpected and necessary, together with the urgency of saying it. Touchstone novels, the ones you would give a friend to read if they came to you with the question: why SF?

“The sidewalk was coming closer and the boot’s shadow was falling on the bramble. That’s it. We were in the Zone! I felt a chill. Each time I feel that chill. And I never know if that’s the Zone greeting me or my stalker’s nerves acting up. Each time I think that when I get back I’ll ask if others have the same feeling or not, and each time I forget.”

The same feeling I experienced the first time I set off with Will on his journey to the White Mountains in John Christopher’s Tripods trilogy, or sat down with the doctor and teacher to watch that first extraordinary demonstration of a new technology in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine.  That sense of apprehension and excitement that says the world is not, or not entirely, what we think we perceive.

Home to Roost

August 24, 2018 /

I don’t think it is any coincidence at all that we are living through a new golden age of horror fiction. In a recent review of Jac Jemc’s well-nigh perfect work of rural unease, The Grip of It, I recalled the horror boom of the seventies and eighties, kick-started by the publication of Stephen King’s debut novel Carrie in 1974, spluttering to a halt in the 1990s through massive grunge overload. The ultimate effect of this boom-and-bust on horror writers was pretty disastrous, leading as it did to an extended period – twenty years, more or less – during which it was practically impossible for even the best writers to sell a horror novel.

Looking back on that period now, we can observe how horror did not actually go away, but rather evolved. The Stephen King brand of horror – let’s call it baby boomer horror – focused closely and brilliantly on small town anxieties, childhood trauma, the undermining of common decency through unholy powers. It reflected the anxieties of its age, in other words – the violent overthrow of old certainties, the dawning of new perils in a post-Hiroshima, post-Vietnam world. We see this clearly in the American horror cinema of the time – John Carpenter’s Halloween, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, George A. Romero’s zombie movies – which closely parallels the themes and style of King’s fiction. Much has been written about how the 70s boom degenerated into splatterpunk and died – for more on this do read this excellent essay by Steffen Hantke on the Dell Abyss series (and please read Kathe Koja’s The Cipher if you haven’t already) – but what actually happened, eventually, was that 70s horror and its small-town ambience bifurcated into urban fantasy on the one hand (think Buffy, Twilight, Neverwhere) and the serial killer thriller on the other. While both these trends are still very much with us, they have done what trends do and become established, therefore comfortable. We know what to expect from them and – continue to enjoy them as we might – in terms of what is new now in horror fiction they have little to offer.

In the wake of the splatterpunk implosion, horror literature became a no-go zone for mainstream publishers. You could still buy King and Koontz, but everyone else interested in writing horror fiction was pushed back into small press imprints, most with poor distribution and close to zero visibility in the marketplace. Writers will keep writing though, and while many of the authors who enjoyed a precarious overnight success during the boom years disappeared from the field (thank God) with equal rapidity, in the pages of the Year’s Best horror anthologies, a new generation of writers were coming to prominence.

Perhaps inevitably, much of the new horror fiction of the early noughties chose to discard the shiny excesses of shopping mall horror, returning instead to older certainties and classic themes. The Elder Gods were much in evidence as writers such as Caitlin R. Kiernan and Laird Barron opened the eyes of a new generation to the vast and eerie possibilities of Lovecraftian cosmic horror. The literature of the ‘bad place’ – the haunted house novel, in other words – also began enjoying a renaissance, and it is here that we begin to see the first manifestations of the horror literature that is now enjoying its own boom in the 2010s and, we would hope, on into the 2020s.

What makes this time different from the last time? I would argue that this new horror is more adult, more serious in intent, and therefore more durable. In their stories of urban decay and alienation, horror writers now are not content merely to reflect social anxiety in their fiction, they want actively to engage with it. Horror archetypes, it seems, are among the most useful and flexible for the purposes of quantifying what is going so badly wrong with the way we live now. But what most differentiates this new horror from the pop horror of the 80s and 90s is, above all, its tenacious sense of place.

The very mention of sense of place lends an impression of solidity, fixedness. We speak also of ‘spirit of place’, a concept infused with the numinous, an identification with the ancient ineffable that writers of the first wave of weird fiction – Machen, Blackwood, Bierce, even M. R. James – would have us believe is somehow ‘in the blood’. Later writers such as Aickman, while masterfully reinforcing the notion that places are strange, also went some way to exploring how slippery and, yes, dangerous such concepts can be, how close to delusion and the kind of mythmaking that foregrounds exclusion and demonises difference. The ground beneath our feet, ironically, has never been as threatened as it is today. As ambient, ever-present anxieties over climate change, plastic pollution, the wholesale destruction of species and ecosystems become – as they should – ever more the substance and spirit of our horror fiction, we should equally remember that our nostalgia for place and time is not bound up with blood, but with personal memory. These places are special to us not because we ‘belong there’ so much as because we were born there, lived there, read stories from there, watched them concrete there over. Which is to say, we all belong wherever there might be, whether we possess an old daguerreotype of our great-great-great-grandparents posed carefully in the living room of the house down the road, or whether we moved in next door only yesterday.

How can we truly belong if we do not protect – which is to say, protect everyone, every species? Even as it is in our nature as writers, humans and chroniclers to cherish our relationship to a particular time and place, to maintain that the arbitrarily defined patch of land we like to call our own is any more ‘special’ than any other is a specious luxury we cannot afford. Even as we croon the old songs, our places are being destroyed. The Elder Gods are close and they are hungry. Horror writers know this. The new horror is a literature not so much of nostalgia as of exposure.

Which brings me, finally, to the point of this essay in drawing attention to a new anthology, which I believe may come to be seen as a landmark in the field. This Dreaming Isle, edited by Dan Coxon for Unsung Stories, brings together a group of writers whose work is intimately concerned not only with sense of place, but with the increasing pressures being brought to bear on our notion of self and belonging – the very concepts that form the core of contemporary horror fiction.

Ramsey Campbell has been writing about this stuff for forty years. A writer who pretty much defines what modern horror is, he was one of the worst affected, in publishing terms, by the collapse of the horror market in the 1990s, yet this has never deterred his output, or damaged his phenomenal ability to plumb the darkest recesses of our crumbling society.

Aliya Whiteley was also hit by shifts in publishing at the beginning of her career. Undaunted, she worked her way back up through the pages of the speculative fiction magazines and anthologies, before publishing two novellas – The Beauty and The Arrival of Missives – that have set a benchmark for quality in new horror fiction and ensured Whiteley’s place as one of the most original voices in the field today.

With the phenomenal success of his debut novel The Loney – a novel of place if ever there was one – Andrew Michael Hurley could be deemed responsible for helping to kick off the new horror boom in the first place. Following closely in his footsteps and with seemingly effortless ease, Catriona Ward has written two back-to-back New Gothic novels rich in geographical specificity, and as good as any that have been published in the past two hundred years. (For more of my thoughts on Cat’s new novel Little Eve, see the next issue of Black Static.) Jenn Ashworth, recently and deservedly named as one of the Royal Society of Literature’s Forty Under Forty, is a phenomenal writer who has never been afraid to utilise horror in talking about class inequality, family, and of course place, while Jeanette Ng, with her 2017 novel Under the Pendulum Sun, has created one of the most imaginative dark fantasy debuts I have ever read, a bold questioning of aspects of faith and belief as well as a provocative and knowledgeable inquiry into the life and work of the Bronte sisters. Co-founder of Influx Press, Gary Budden has been directly instrumental in raising the profile of psychogeography, new weird and strange fiction within a distinctly British context. His own stories, recently showcased in his debut collection Hollow Shores, engage with place, class and memory at a gut level, seeming to morph into something else even as we encounter them.

I would like to reserve a special mention for Alison Moore. Well known in the horror and weird community for some years, Moore was brought to wider public attention in 2012 when her debut novel The Lighthouse was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her novel appeared on the shortlist alongside Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home, which like The Lighthouse was notable for being published by an independent press. Deborah Levy has since entered the mainstream, a pioneer of the new autofiction and a regular subject of broadsheet author interviews and think pieces. Moore has continued in her own quiet way to produce novels of striking power, originality and literary achievement, but to far less fanfare. I have made no secret of how much it galls me, that Moore has thus far received only a fraction of the appreciation that is her due. To my mind, Moore’s novels are amongst the most assured and potentially durable in English fiction now. Moreover, they are distinctly less London-centric than Levy’s, portraying ordinary people living ordinary lives in a way that reveals how extraordinary we all are, how unstable and unnerving the times – and the places – we live in. Her most recent book, Missing, is her best yet.

These are just some of the writers who have contributed stories to This Dreaming Isle, which is kickstarting now. Fully funded in less than twenty-four hours, the anthology will be officially launched at this year’s FantasyCon in Chester. I’m looking forward to picking up my copy, and would encourage anyone, anywhere who is interested in new horror, folk horror, the strange and the weird to back it now – we want to see those stretch goals met, after all!

For anyone who might be wondering, Dan Coxon did invite me – several times – to contribute to This Dreaming Isle, but in the end I had to decline due to lack of time available. I do have a story half-written that may yet surface at some point in the future. In the meantime I have written this essay, to show how much I wanted to be a part of this project, and to encourage you to be a part of it too. This is going to be good.

 

On alien shores

August 13, 2018 /

From what I’ve read about her, Jane Rawson would seem to be one of those writers – like Aislinn Hunter, like Claudia Casper – who sometimes struggle to be heard amidst the tumult of overhyped debuts and routine praise for more established voices. Her novels are defiantly uncategorizable – her own debut was named Austrailia’s most underrated book – mixing and leapfrogging genres with scant regard for marketing categories. Well, the good news is that Picador have acquired UK rights to Rawson’s most recent book, the haunting and marvellous speculative novel From the Wreck, making her work available to a wider audience in 2019 and Clarke-eligible in 2020.

From the Wreck takes real historical events and bends them to its own ends in a manner I’ve not seen before, an imaginative leap that truly exemplifies the nature of radical speculation. On August 6th 1859, the steamship Admella (named for the ports she regularly sailed between, Adelaide, Melbourne and Launceston, Tasmania) was wrecked on Carpenter Rocks, South Australia. Although multiple efforts were made to reach the stranded survivors, foul weather made a rescue attempt impossible and of the 113 souls on board, only twenty-four ever made it back to shore. One of the survivors, cabin steward George Hills, was Rawson’s great-grandfather. The only woman survivor, Bridget Ledwith, disappeared from public view soon after the tragedy, making her identity a matter of mystery and speculation.

I was personally fascinated to discover that the Admella was built in 1857 by Lawrence Hills & Co, of Port Glasgow, on the Clyde. It is interesting to note that yet another Mr Hills – or more accurately Hill – has a part to play in this story: the painting Wreck of the Admella by Charles Hill hangs in the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.

What Rawson does with these established facts – with her own family history – is really quite extraordinary. George Hills returns home after the wreck. Traumatised by his experiences, he finds himself unable to forget the woman who he believes saved his life in the days spent clinging to the remains of the stricken vessel:

“She was a sea creature. He knew that. She had come into the boat from the ocean and she looked and smelled and felt all over like a human woman, but he was damned sure she was not.” 

So begins George’s obsessive search for Bridget Ledwith. Yet ‘Bridget’ may be closer to home than he realises. In the shapeshifting alien’s symbiotic relationship with George’s son Henry, other human-alien relationships come swiftly to mind – I was reminded especially of John Wyndham’s Chocky – and yet there is something tender and fragile and edgy that sets Rawson’s work apart:

“And not right then but soon after, when this ocean floor is settled, when all of the fat is gone and the bigger of the things with teeth dispersed, when we’ve remembered that yes it is possible to be even lonelier than you are when you are feeding on wet, rotten fat with the cousins of some crazy lantern-heads, then. When we remember that it is one thing to be in a world all ocean when that world is your own and quite another to be in a world all ocean when no one down there gives a holy damn about you and the only one who does on the whole bereft and stinking planet is some skinnylegged filthy-fingered swollen-hearted little upright on some dusty island up there where the sun is hot and the air is dry, well, then. That’s when we go. Then.”

The three key players in the drama – George, Henry, and the alien – are caught in a strange sort of love triangle that comes close to destroying them all, but the key to this novel is surely its ending, wise and beautiful and blessed because it is earned, arrived at through genuine struggle and personal cost. This is the opposite of the kind of artificially opposed positions we have seen in certain recent works of escapist SF, where real pain and danger are largely absent through being contained within a strictly codified set of markers, and resolution is swiftly arrived at because the conflict was only ever there in the first place to provide the satisfaction of a risk-free resolution. The relationships in From the Wreck are messy and ambiguous, holding the potential for real damage. Rawson’s ending is won through grief, through tragedy, through humility. and love that is as imperfect as it is genuine. From the Wreck provides perhaps the most positive view of humanity in relation to the alien I’ve read in a while, hinting at the innate ability of all parties to transcend boundaries, to learn, to find a safe common ground in spite of mutual ignorance and fear.

Other characters in the narrative are no less well drawn. The character of Bea in particular offers us a wonderful portrayal of a woman who simply will not fit the mould society has prepared for her. Her rebellion and personal victory are quiet yet determined, a refusal to be broken that does not exclude concern for others.

From the Wreck is informed by Rawson’s strong environmental concerns, her deeply sympathetic fascination with other life forms, and above all her sensitivity and skill as a writer, her fearlessness in seeking out new ways to tell stories and new stories to tell. From the Wreck is genuine ‘what if’ science fiction, exploring the possibility of first contact in a manner that does not give humans sole charge of the encounter. Rawson is fully aware that we are the strangers here, that the description of ‘alien’ is only ever a matter of perspective.

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