When the news broke earlier this year that Maureen Kincaid Speller was seriously ill, like all of her friends and colleagues I felt deeply upset. Maureen had seemed still in the very prime of life; she still had so much to offer to the world and to her community; there were so many books and ideas and questions she had still to write about. The thought that she might be leaving us was not one I was ready to dwell on, and still find it hard to come to terms with.
Once the initial shock had subsided I began to think about conversations I’d had with Maureen about assembling a collection of her criticism, a selection of work that best expressed her passion for books and for thinking about books, as well as shining a spotlight upon the particular authors and subject areas she felt most drawn to write about. I knew this was a project close to her heart, one she was eager to see fulfilled so that she could move on to the next phase of her work, uncovering new insights and drawing upon fresh enthusiasms.
When I tentatively suggested to Maureen’s husband, Paul Kincaid, that I would like to help Maureen put together such a collection he was immensely supportive. When I contacted Francesca Barbini at Luna Press and asked her if she might be in a position to provide a home for Maureen’s work, she came on board immediately. And so A Traveller in Time was born. I cannot adequately express my gratitude to Francesca and to Paul for their enthusiasm, for their instant understanding that this needed to happen.
Of course, the original and cherished intention was for Maureen herself to be a part of this process. Time, and Maureen’s illness, were sadly against us in this. But I am happy and glad to know that Maureen knew about the project, that even until a couple of weeks before she died we were planning to meet in person and discuss it. Since Maureen’s death in September, the project has seemed if anything more urgent, more necessary. I am delighted to tell you that I have now completed the bulk of the editorial work, and Luna have scheduled A Traveller in Time for release in September 2023, exactly a year after Maureen died, and in time for launch at next year’s FantasyCon.
We are lucky enough to have secured cover art from the award-winning Iain Clark, who designed the wonderful poster and artwork to launch the bid for the 2024 Glasgow Worldcon. I look forward to sharing that cover in due course – it is truly beautiful.
I am delighted, gratified and very proud that this project is on its way to becoming a physical reality. Maureen was special. The work she did was uniquely her own. In reading her words, we remember her. I hope and trust that we of the science fiction community will be doing exactly that for many years to come.
The winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2022 is Deep Wheel Orcadia, by Harry Josephine Giles.
This book was first on my radar some months before its publication and I ordered my copy from our local bookshop as soon as it came out. A science fiction novel. By an acclaimed Scottish poet. In Orcadian Scots with parallel English text.
This couldn’t have been more up my street if it tried. I was delighted, and amazed, when it turned up on the Clarke Award shortlist, not least because the shortlist as a whole is one of the boldest and most exciting – for me, at any rate – in some years.
I was lucky enough to receive an advance copy of Aliya Whiteley’s Skyward Inn and found it as original and thought-provoking as everything I’ve read from Whiteley, who, I firmly believe, is one of the most important writers working in British science fiction today. With this, her second appearance on the Clarke shortlist, I thought 2022 might be her year. That pleasure still awaits us, but her repeat shortlisting in and of itself is a welcome recognition of her considerable talent.
I wasn’t the hugest fan of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun – I found it bland and sketchily imagined, too reminiscent of the children’s fable it was originally intended to be. But I like Ishiguro. I admire his willingness to experiment with ideas, to keep moving forward. Each new book from him feels meant, as if he’s still considering its challenges even as it’s published. That quality of nervousness means I’m always eager to read his next work, as I will be again. I am glad the Clarke jury picked him out once more for further discussion.
I have not quite finished reading Courttia Newland’s A River Called Time yet – the reason this post is so delayed – but I love the writing, very much, and I was gratified to see the jury make yet another bold choice.
A good year. And what I notice now, as I look down the list of previous winners, is how excellent those winners have been, these past few years. Deep Wheel Orcadia is no exception, and this excites me. When a book like this appears, it throws positive energy back into science fiction, illuminating its possibilities, inspiring fresh approaches. i love it when that happens. Congratulations, Josie Giles, and to the Clarke Award jury, for rewarding a work that so powerfully showcases the radical ambition that will always characterise the best SF.
They ran in a landscape where not a stick was alive, not a floating seed. The air was thick with dust or rain that glinted like cartoon radiation. There were forests of shattered leafless trees and wetlands denuded of vegetation, where the water was thick with plastic trash. In a few clips, a half-city stood on the horizon, a skyline of partial buildings that appeared to have been gnawed by fire. Some places had entirely lost the contours of our world… We understood: this was a future world in which the men had never disappeared. It was the hell to which we would have been condemned, the Earth they would have made.
Lines like these might make you think that what we are dealing with here is a classic alternate world dystopia in the feminist mode. You would be wrong. Sandra Newman’s The Men is a radical departure from tradition, a provocative critique of the feminist utopia and a challenge to easy thinking. If more science fiction were this original, our literary environment would immediately become more interesting, and more dynamic.
Jane Pearson is a damaged person. In her earlier life as a ballet prodigy she was groomed by the mentor she idolised to perpetrate abuse on teenage boys. Demonised by a public hungry for scandal, the life she eventually builds for herself is very different from the one she previously imagined. Married to Leo and mother to Ben, Jane’s inner restlessness is merely a precursor to the bewilderment and incomprehension that is about to destroy her world for a second time.
One evening in late August, at 7:14 precisely every human being with a Y chromosome disappears from the world. Aeroplanes, suddenly pilotless, drop from the sky; patients die on operating tables; factories grind to a halt. Women all over the world find themselves widowed, orphaned, homeless, freed, bereft. In the weeks and months that follow, a new world order begins to assert itself. A key player in the new politics is Evangelyne Moreau, a woman with a remarkable mind whose family were wiped out in an act of brutal police violence. Jane knows Evangelyne from college. The two almost became lovers, but Jane ultimately chose Leo. As the world shifts and changes about her, Jane journeys across the country in search of Evangelyne and the truth of what she felt those many years before.
Meanwhile, something else is happening, something disturbing. Videos are appearing online, a series of cryptic film clips entitled simply The Men. In them, armies of lost men march through a world that turns increasingly strange, increasingly depleted. And for many of the women watching, these are men they know. The Men quickly becomes an addiction, a form of mass hypnosis. But are the men real, or CGI fakes? What do the films mean and what do they point towards? For many women, the disappearance of the men is a chance at a new beginning. For others it ushers in a form of stasis, a reality that is ultimately as discomfiting as the world glimpsed in the violent film clips they are watching online.
For Evangelyne Moreau, The Men is more sinister still, a portent of her own destruction. Once again, she asks Jane to make a choice. But is this truly a choice that is Jane’s to make?
From Herland to The Female Man, from Maul to The Power, feminist utopia has formed an important branch of science fiction, encompassing some of its boldest and most experimental ideas. The Men is an important and brilliant addition to the canon, not least in the way it interrogates what has gone before. The questions Newman poses are difficult to answer: would a world without men truly be more equal, more peaceful, more rational? How much, in the end, would we miss them? What is a man, even, and how much, if at all, does gender determine our identity? How far would we be prepared to sacrifice the safety of others in pursuit of our own desires?
The Men is that rare thing, a novel of ideas that pays equal attention to language, character and form. The eerie surrealism of the video sequences generates a sense of mystery and foreboding that is impossible to shake; like the women permanently hunched in front of their screens, we find it impossible to look away, even as the scenes turn darker and increasingly violent. The raw intelligence of this book, its brutal honesty makes The Men a bracing antidote to the more anodyne brand of supposedly political SF that in reality is little more than crowd-pleasing. Newman handles questions of politics, gender, race and philosophy with skill and compassion without succumbing to the platitudes of fashionable discourse or the temptation of providing comfortable answers.
And she can write. At a sentence level, Newman’s prose is fiery, passionate, poetical – in short, a joy. If science fiction’s core directive is to provoke, to interrogate established assumptions, most of all to re-imagine then it is writers like Newman that prove that science fiction as a mode of literature still has a future.
Yesterday we learned the terrible news that our dear friend Maureen Kincaid Speller had passed away. Maureen was diagnosed with cancer back in March, but she had made remarkable progress and at the beginning of the summer her prognosis looked a great deal better. Her death on Sunday came as a bitter blow. Death is always difficult to come to terms with, but in the case of Maureen it seems doubly so. She had so much more still to give. Her indomitable spirit, her keen intellect, her wicked sense of humour and the all round pleasure in being in her company – these things make her loss all the more painful. I don’t think I will ever get used to the knowledge that she is no longer with us.
I will value in particular the memories of our many discussions of science fiction – its definition and relevance, its unique contribution to literature, the state of the field. So much laughter and so much passion. I was delighted when Maureen was made senior reviews editor at Strange Horizons, because I knew how much she would relish this challenge and how much support and experience she could offer to newer writers. I will treasure especially the time we spent together immersed in the Shadow Clarke through most of 2017. Maureen wrote some excellent criticism – because of course she did – but there was also all the stuff behind the scenes, the free exchange of ideas and opinions, the joy in thinking.
Maureen’s work as a critic and commentator has been a lifelong commitment and I will have more to say about that in the coming months. For now, I just want to say Maureen, your loss to us is incalculable. We love you with all our hearts, and will miss you forever. Our sincerest condolences to Paul, Maureen’s beloved husband, and our beloved friend. Our thoughts are with you.
At the Clarke Award ceremony 2017: Paul Kincaid, Nick Hubble, Victoria Hoyle, me, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Helen Marshall. Photo by Will Ellwood – thanks, Will!
They opens with what at first glance appears to be a gentle slice of English pastoral: a house in the country, a house that is described as ‘rather splendid’ and that from the roof enjoys ‘a full sight of the sea.’ The scene, with its seabirds and confluence of rivers and quiet conversation between friends, appears idyllic. And yet even here, in the first paragraph of this remarkable short novel, threats hover in the margins, not so much in the action as in the author’s choice of words:
A natural bird sanctuary, one was conscious of flight as part of the landscape.
What follows is a gradual winnowing away, a gleaning, as Dick puts it, of every freedom, of every unguarded action, a pushing back of life into its own dusty shadow. We find ourselves in a world in which artistic expression has been deemed unnecessary and dangerous for society. A growing band of human surveillance drones – the ‘they’ of the title – move through district after district, destroying artworks and burning books and banning music. Artists themselves are not harmed unless they physically resist or offer verbal objections, at which point reprisals are swift, brutal and unequivocal. Unless they appear at the beginning of a sentence, they are never capitalised. We have no idea if they are government-sanctioned, or self-appointed. Artists seek sanctuary in out-of-the-way places, rural enclaves and coastal settlements where the worst of the new laws have not yet come into effect.
We sense that it is only a matter of time before there is nowhere left to retreat to. As more and more places become unsafe, acts of defiance become smaller and more internalised. As time passes, it is not only creative work that is deemed inappropriate but more or less anything that speaks of individual, quiet enjoyment: living alone, walks in nature, the companionship of animals. Bands of ‘sightseers’ follow the gleaning parties, despoiling the landscape, holding rowdy gatherings and revelling in the bloodshed and censure meted out to dissidents. When they are not out on the streets looking for a bit of civil unrest, they are walled up inside their family homes, watching television.
I have seen some commentary on this book that suggests Dick’s vision of dystopia is simplistic and highly selective, that her characters are privileged and – ah yes, that weasel word again – elitist. I would argue that such protestations entirely misjudge the purpose and tone of They, which is a small masterpiece, the finest and most penetrative kind of allegorical SF. It is always tempting with literary dystopias, to demand that they be literal, to want to draw comparisons with one’s own time and place. There is no shortage of these in They, for which one could cite recent instances of drones spying on lone walkers in the Pennines, neighbours reporting on neighbours having a cup of tea with other neighbours, the equating of journalists with organised crime, the media trashing of impartial news broadcasting and the withdrawal of government support for English Literature as an academic discipline. The violent sanctioning of any form of personal expression in the name of spiritual appropriateness when it is in fact a blatant exercise in social control is happening to Afghan people and in particular Afghan women right now under the Taliban.
We will always find plenty of examples to choose from – that we cannot help doing so points to the fact that Dick’s novel is not out of date, as some have intimated, but timeless – but we should resist such simplistic reductionism. What we have in They is a powerful philosophical argument, a refutation of the will to power per se, an upholding of reason and personal liberty in the face of prejudice, of groupthink, of the unexamined urge to censure what is different. They stands also as a metaphor for itself: Dick, a queer writer who faced rejection and condescension as a daily reality, saw her work repeatedly belittled and sidelined, with They being described as ‘menopausal’ by a male reviewer in a national broadsheet.
And yet, its final words are hopeful; words of quiet yet determined resistance:
‘Hallo love’, I said, greeting another day.
It is important to point up Dick’s landscape writing as a salient feature of They. For Dick, noticing and valuing the natural world, as an essential source of spiritual renewal yes, but equally in and for itself, is not just prescient but an act of subversion, one that places They in its rightful place alongside other works of roughly contemporaneous and distinctly British science fiction such as Anna Kavan’s Ice, Christopher Priest’s A Dream of Wessex, Keith Roberts’s Pavane and Richard Cowper’s The Road to Corlay.
The story of how They was rescued from oblivion by a literary agent who happened to pick up a rare second hand copy in a Bath charity shop is beautifully told by Sam Knight in an article for The New Yorker, and elaborated upon by Dick’s champion Lucy Scholes in the Paris Review. The inspiration we can draw from Dick and from her writing – sparse, bold, direct, resolute and impassioned – is substantial, and I would recommend They to anyone who wants to learn more about how science fiction can still be ground-breaking and resonant without so much as a mention of new technology or alien planets.
We are lucky to have this book readily available to us again.
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.
I
feel I’ve been lucky with Hanya Yanagihara, in that I happen to have read her
in the right order. When I first started to hear about her debut novel The
People in the Trees, it was a book few people seemed to have come across, let
alone read. I went into it with no preconceptions – and came away mesmerised. I
would still count that novel – a hard-hitting, tightly-wrought, highly
individual and sometimes contentious piece of speculative eco-fiction – as a
steel-bright masterpiece, the kind of confident, original writing not often
encountered in a debut and that leaves you both eager and impatient to see
where the author will go next.
Where
Yanagihara went next, of course, was A Little Life, that steaming juggernaut of
a novel that for bizarre reasons of its own became that year’s literary
sensation and is still one of the most divisive books of the decade. I
rollocked through A Little Life; I found the story unputdownable, even though I
never entirely saw the point of it, how it made sense as a follow-up to The
People in the Trees. And I worried about Yanagihara as a writer. When a book is
that successful, it can have a detrimental effect on a career, bending it so
badly out of shape, leaving so little privacy or room for future experiment,
that it is sometimes impossible for the writer to fully recover.
There was a part of me that wondered if we would hear from her again, and so when I learned, sometime last year, that her third novel was imminent I felt both delighted – she was back after all! – and intrigued. What were we going to get this time, and how were the Fanyagiharas going to react to it? I knew going in that the book was speculative, which excited me; I knew also that To Paradise was bound to be one of the literary ‘big beasts’ of 2022, which excited me in spite of myself. As another 800-pager, would it be worth my reading time, and how could it possibly live up to the hype that was already erupting?
The
answer is yes, and yes. Just hours after finishing To Paradise, I find myself
in mourning for it, a book that gave me for the first time in a long time that
kind of reading experience one remembers from childhood: the sense of living
inside a world, of being on a journey with characters who will continue to
journey with you for the rest of your life. More than that, though, one could
argue that To Paradise is not so much book of the year as book of this year, that it belongs precisely and
inimitably to now, that it is an important piece of political fiction that will
remain as a guiding landmark in the literary landscape.
I
loved this book, which thrilled me and made me feel vindicated and left me
fearful for our future. It also helped me to understand where A Little Life
fits into the scheme of things, Yanagihara-wise, how her literary project
appears to be unfolding. In terms of her craft, where Yanagihara excels most is
in her storytelling, a fluidly compelling, deceptively easy style that keeps
her thousands of readers turning pages even when the narrative brings up
difficult subject matter and draws ambiguous conclusions. Such was the mass
appeal of A Little Life; To Paradise is equally readable but I would say
meatier and more challenging, even as it demonstrates how Yanagihara’s works are
not just great stories, they are about story.
*
There
are plenty of synopses of To Paradise available online, so I will refrain from rehashing
the plot here, except to say that the novel is divided into three ‘Books’, the
first set in 1893, the second in 1993, and the third Book, which occupies half
the novel’s page count, is a split narrative, alternating between the book’s
end-point in 2093 and decreasing intervals from fifty years before that. Much
has been made of Yanagihara’s use of names in To Paradise, with some readers
enjoying the repeated appearances of the same set of names throughout the three
parts of the book, with others finding the device confusing, pointless,
pretentious or all three.
Names
have always held immense significance for me in my own fiction, and as a writer
who has previously made use of devices not dissimilar to Yanagihara’s, I find
her latticework of repeating names affecting, powerful and structurally
significant, an anchoring weight that helps to give the sprawling, multiple
timelines shape and direction, and offers the reader a guiding light on their
way through the story.
As
a fuller and more detailed explanation of what Yanagihara is doing, I find a
musical analogy works best: think of To Paradise as a symphony, and the
repeating names and situations as musical subjects and leitmotifs, and her purpose
becomes instantly clear. The first movement, 1893, is an exercise in classic sonata
form, a propulsive allegro, strongly melodic and in a minor key. With its
clearly articulated conflicts, reversals and sense of jeopardy it appeals instantly
to our emotions. In this section we meet our three dominant melodic subjects, ‘David
Bingham’, ‘Charles Griffith’, and ‘Edward Bishop’, alongside their secondary
subjects and recurring leitmotifs, ‘Peter’, ‘Eden’, ‘Adams’, ‘Nathaniel’ and
others. We learn how David is an outsider, prone to mental illness and a sense
of alienation, how he is guided towards an anchoring stability in the form of
Charles, how his own passionate desires propel him towards uncertainty and possible
disaster in the form of Edward. As a background continuo we have a pandemic,
and the theme of the house, of Washington Square, an enveloping, grounding
presence that is also a cage.
The central movement’s twin elegies are stories of farewell, the first a ballet in which David vacillates between safe, rich Charles and his penniless but beautiful servant, the second is a lament, a letter written by the ghost of David’s troubled father. The extended final movement has alternating first and second subjects that gradually become interleaved in a mighty fugue. In this complex finale, we encounter leitmotifs familiar from the previous movements. As in a symphony, this accumulation of themes, our sense of recognition as we re-encounter them works to intensify our experience, reminding us of what has gone before and why it matters to us, which themes and persons are of greatest significance to the composer. The effect is magnificent, unified, cathartic.
Reading
To Paradise bears comparison with listening to Wagner, in that anything
approaching true understanding can only be encompassed by making the whole journey,
by seeing the thing through to its end, and that is part of its joy. Before
starting out, I had seen Book One described as Jamesian – its title, Washington
Square, is a pretty major clue – and so while I found Yanagihara’s storytelling
as addictive as ever, I could not avoid a feeling of disappointment either. Although
I could see where readers were coming from in their comparisons with Henry James
and Edith Wharton, the prose felt too smooth, too directed, too easily
consumable, more James-pastiche than true Master, too much like a fairy tale. As
with A Little Life, I was struggling to see the point. It is not until some
hundreds of pages later, and the feather-light recapitulation in Book Three,
that it becomes obvious that this atmosphere of fairy tale is no accident, that
this has been Yanagihara’s secret intention all along.
In
Yanagihara’s 2093, the US has become a kind of simulacrum of North Korea: while
elements of community, friendship, humanity and even pleasure remain, life as
we know it has become heavily circumscribed. The idea of individual choice has
become eroded, opportunities for self-expression are negligible to nil. In such
an atmosphere of oppression, the role of the Storytellers – in a world where
books are forbidden, those who used to be writers are allowed a limited outlet
through the oral tradition – becomes doubly important, the idea of story itself
as an agent for change takes on a new intensity,
That
some commentators have complained that the ‘letters’ within the text do not
read like real letters, that the repetition of names and situations is an
artificial construct seems like a red herring to me, an ignoring of the fact that
all novels and stories are constructs, and that the idea of literary verisimilitude
is a construct also. Yanagihara is not trying to write like Henry James – to write
like James is not simply a matter of aping a style, but of feeling the weight
of opinion and tacit knowledge and the relationship to history that comes with
having lived through James’s time. For us, now, ‘writing like James’ can never
be anything more than an act of ventriloquism. What Yanagihara does in Book One
is to tell a story; Yanagihara’s
Washington Square is not a serious attempt to replicate James’s approach, but a
nod towards a form. Wika’s letter in Book Two cannot exist, because Wika is
dead, but within the house of cards that all novels are, how can that matter?
As with the Storytellers in Washington Square Park in Book Three, we should not
expect ‘facts’ from Yanagihara, so much as emotional truth.
*
What
makes To Paradise important as political fiction is that in this time of huge
uncertainties, Yanagihara is brave enough and independent-minded enough to take
on massive questions without feeling the need to provide easy or comfortable
answers. Whether within the context of an oppressive class structure, the toxic
legacy of colonialism or the dangerous malleability of scientific fact, what
Yanagihara is most concerned with is our propensity to ignore an empirical
truth in favour of jumping on a community bandwagon, our preference for
judgement as opposed to analysis, our championing of a strident black-and-white
argument over the more muted shades of grey in which reality manifests.
Book
Three of To Paradise contains some of the most pointedly urgent and questioning
analysis of our current reality that has so far appeared, a depiction of a
world teetering on the brink of multiple catastrophes, spurred on by ill luck,
bad judgement and conflicting interests. There are doubtless many more novels
still in progress that attempt to deal with the questions arising from the COVID-19
pandemic, to depict its corrosive material and intellectual effects on the
world we inhabit, but I am going to stick my neck out and say that To Paradise
will hold its ground, that it will come to be seen as an era-defining novel,
not because it is realistic in the way a nineteenth-century novel is deemed to
be realistic – it is not trying to be – but because of the risks it takes,
because the questions it dares to ask will still seem relevant.
As with all great novels, To Paradise is important because of the way in which it uses the particular to illuminate the universal, the times to reveal the timeless; in her endlessly circling reiterations, her multiplicity of time frames, Yanagihara shows how much of the terror and frustration of history is enshrined in the fact that it is all but impossible for one generation to learn from another, how in order to progress, each needs to experience for themselves how the world is, all too often with disastrous results. Seeing the timelines converge in Book Three, watching as the characters move from living a life we ourselves would recognise towards a darker state of being entirely, I felt an aching sadness, all of the time, and that feeling of living through a before-times, as we are ourselves.
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.
Earlier this summer I had the great joy and privilege of creating a piece of work based around an interview with the disaster risk engineer Josh Macabuag. The resulting story, ‘Forces and Loads’, is now live as part of the Inventive podcast initiative from the University of Salford, which places writers together in creative collaboration with workers in STEM.
I found Joshua’s interview and the insights it gave me into his work to be instantly inspiring, and I hope I have conveyed some sense of the power of his story through my own interpretation of it. ‘Forces and Loads’ runs in Episode 2 of the second series of Inventive, and you can listen to that episode here.
I am hugely grateful to Anna Scott-Brown and Adam Fowler of Overtone Productions for their help and expertise in making the experience so enjoyable and of course to Josh himself for allowing me an insight into his world. As I say in my own portion of the interview, I found enough material here for an entire novel and ‘Forces and Loads’ is a story I might well find myself revisiting in the future.
“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.” (Matthew 10: 29.)
As we patiently wait for this year’s Clarke season to get underway (we have been reliably informed this will happen soon) I have been travelling back in time to revisit some older works of science fiction, some of them past winners of the Clarke, some of them now ascended to the status of classics. I like to do this periodically because I enjoy it, because I have never failed to find it instructive and fascinating. The field of science fiction is now so big and so diverse it would be impossible to encompass all of it in a single lifetime; nonetheless, there are certain works that keep cropping up, works you hear about so often there is often the sensation of having absorbed them by osmosis. Which cannot compare with having actually read them, a fact illuminated for me this week as I finally caught up with Mary Doria Russell’s landmark novel of first contact, The Sparrow.
The Sparrow won the Clarke Award in 1998, the same year Mary Doria Russell was awarded the Astounding Award for Best New Writer and the BSFA Award for Best Novel. She had already won the Tiptree Award in 1996, The Sparrow’s year of (US) publication. A big winner then, a big hitter. Looking at the 1998 Clarke Award shortlist now and in the light of having just read The Sparrow, Russell’s win seems obvious, a no-brainer. Reviews at the time universally praised the novel for its humanity, its depth of vision, its refusal to provide the reader with easy answers. I would describe The Sparrow as absolutely classic second-wave, social SF, as close to the Le Guinian ideal as you could get without actually being Le Guin. Reading it was enough to make me fall hopelessly back in love with this kind of close focus, unironic, problem-based science fiction, to remind me not just of the point of it but the sense of urgency it can carry, especially in our current times.
The Sparrow is a deep, dense, difficult novel that stands equally as a classic of political fiction, philosophical fiction or social commentary. Yet the question that nagged at me most persistently during my reading was as to whether The Sparrow would get published today, in its current form, by a science fiction imprint?
The Sparrow is the story of Emilio Sandoz, a young Jesuit priest from a poor background in Puerto Rico who has experienced trouble and violence throughout his childhood. His talent for languages has taken him into many other disadvantaged communities all over the world, and when the SETI program at Arecibo begins to pick up verifiably alien radio communications, Emilio is stricken with the passionate desire to travel to their source, to meet the aliens for himself and come to a greater understanding of God’s purpose.
The mission to Rakhat, organised under the aegis of the Jesuit Society, seems at first to be astoundingly successful: Emilio and his comrades make a safe planetfall, soon coming into contact with peaceable rural hunter-gatherers called the Runa. Through a series of increasingly complex interactions and misfortunes , the travellers become aware that they have barely scratched the surface of the planet’s culture and reality. When Emilio eventually returns to Earth, he is not at all the same man who left. The novel offers a tense and thrilling chronology of what really happened; it equally examines the question of whether Emilio will ever be able to come to terms with that.
Commentary on The Sparrow tends to focus on the question of faith: what is it, and can it be maintained in the face of one’s own error, wrongdoing or personal suffering? Mary Doria Russell was brought up a Catholic, though she later declared herself an agnostic before converting to Judaism. Matters of faith and the nature of the religious experience have preoccupied her throughout her writing life and the delicate, empathetic, wholly non-judgmental way these issues are handled in The Sparrow makes for a profound and thought-provoking reading experience. The novel is equally a powerful meditation on the erroneous and damaging assumptions of ‘enlightened’ colonialism, the harm that can be done to others simply through ignorance; the humans contaminate the ecology of Rakhat simply by being there, and their uninvited presence in the lives of the Runa community has ramifications they cannot even guess at. That Russell introduces these questions without seeking to apportion blame makes The Sparrow doubly powerful and three times as interesting.
For The Sparrow is, above all, a novel of character. The first third of the novel is spent exploring the lives and complex histories of the principal characters, their relationship to one another and how they came to be involved in one another’s fates. There is an intricacy here, a willingness to sit down with people and learn about them, that is absolutely central to the success and impact of the novel as a whole. If I were to draw a comparison, it would be with the densely layered character work undertaken by Emily St John Mandel in Station Eleven: without the complexity and detail of the sections set before the Georgia flu pandemic, Station Eleven would be just one more post-apocalyptic ‘band of brothers’ novel. It is Mandel’s centring of character, of individual psychology that lifts it above and beyond, that makes the book extraordinary. So it is with The Sparrow, and I can only hope that if a new writer were to produce a comparable work today, they would meet with the kind of editor prepared to fight for the book on its own terms, rather than conceding to a commercial pressure that certainly exists, to ratchet up the tension, to keep the action moving, to get to the point.
In the very best fiction, the journey very often is the point, what it reveals about a set of characters in a particular environment. You could argue that science fiction especially is precisely about that. The Sparrow is a magnificent achievement. Russell’s novel is now a quarter of a century old, yet feels timeless in its storytelling. It absolutely did make me fall back in love with this idea of science fiction, and I would like us to see more of it.
