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Faith in the Future

May 11, 2023 /

My new novel, Conquest, is published today.

Jonathan Thornton’s insightful and generous review at Fantasy Hive offers an eloquent analysis of its structure and intentions, while Steve Andrews brings his particular knowledge and engagement to our ‘interview-review‘ at Outlaw Bookseller. As always, I hope that readers both familiar with my work and entirely new to it will enjoy discovering their own reactions and responses to a book that was a long time in the making and is to an extent a personal commentary upon the last few years.

Conquest is a novel about truth and post-truth, the familiar made strange, communal crisis and personal epiphany. But on the day that sees the book pass from my hands into the hands of readers, I would like to reflect upon the theme that perhaps most of all provided its guiding inspiration. In one section of the novel, my private investigator Robin remembers how at the age of twelve she fell ill with pneumonia and as a result was absent from school and from her normal life for more than six weeks. Feeling weakened from the disease and with no one to talk to, she listens to Radio 3 for hours on end. This is where, for the first time, she hears the Goldberg Variations, and falls in love with the music of J. S. Bach.

The same thing happened to me, more or less, and I count those six weeks spent listening to music as some of the most formative in my cultural life, a period in which I was able to experience works that might not otherwise have crossed my path until much later. Where I was able to think, in privacy and without interruption, about what music meant, not only in terms of my own emotional reaction to it but in the abstract.

Unlike Robin, this was not when I first heard the Goldberg Variations. I came to know Bach through others of his compositions: through listening endlessly to the violin concertos and playing the flute sonatas, through singing in the B minor mass, a valuable and joyous apprenticeship that meant when I finally did come to know the Goldbergs, in my middle twenties, it felt like coming home.  

One of the fringe benefits of my many years spent working in a music shop was the opportunity for listening. I was responsible for our whole stock of classical recordings, which meant I could buy in and test drive anything I wanted to. The effect was similar to being let loose in an enormous playground. One of the lessons I learned from all that listening was that recordings I initially considered my favourites could and often did cede their position to other performances, sometimes in the same day. That the point of studying different recordings is not simply to establish a hierarchy, fun though that can be, but to come to a deeper understanding of a piece of music through its various interpretations.

You would be surprised at the number of times you rub shoulders with Bach – through advertising, through film or game soundtracks, even through lift music – during the course of a single week. Without our consciously realising it, Bach reveals himself to us through an accumulation of encounters over many years, sure proof of his continuing ability to speak directly to millions of people across every conceivable divide of age or culture or background. Bach’s work deepens our relationship with the past, even as it informs our present. Through an intricate interweaving of sound and meaning that seems hardwired into all of us, Bach gives us faith in the future.

I have tried to convey something of Bach’s timeless and magical appeal in my writing of Conquest. I have not felt ready to write at length about music before now, precisely because the subject means so much to me, and also because it is difficult, for any writer, to add anything to what is already present in the music itself. In setting out to explore Robin’s world, and most especially Frank’s, I have found myself constantly in mental dialogue with those writers who have struggled with similar questions, and in so doing provided inspiration of their own. I hope I have added something to the conversation. I hope most of all that anyone reading Conquest who has for whatever reason persuaded themselves that Bach is not for them will throw aside their preconceptions and listen again.

Girls Against God

November 12, 2020 /

Late last month I happened to be reading an interview/conversation between the American writer Alexandra Kleeman (author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine) and the Norwegian writer and musician Jenny Hval, whose second novel Girls Against God has just been published. Both writers share an interest in transgression, in breaking down genre boundaries and in the idea of literary experimentation. It’s a fascinating piece, and one I found resonated with me a lot, most especially their discussion of how the radical-experimental space in writing has tended to be colonised by men. Helen de Witt in particular has written brilliantly about this, as of course has Rachel Cusk.

My own interest in fragmented narratives, in narratives that push beyond ‘story’ to examine not only the urge to record but also our relationship as both readers and writers with words on a page and especially in our current reality the value of words as resistance, protest, the proposition of counter-realities has become all-consuming of late. This obsession with narrative structures, with the purpose and meaning of the written word has resulted in notable and repeated upheavals in my work-in-progress as well as a renewed focus on and fascination with writers whom I perceive as sharing these ideals – writers whose engagement with language itself is relentless and searching.

The challenge of being a woman in such spaces is a matter of particular fascination and sometimes vexation. With this in mind, I have decided I would like to spend some of this winter exploring works by women writers that I see as radical and/or transgressive. Two years ago I read a series of such works one after the other: Ann Quin’s Berg, Eley Williams’s Attrib, Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, Break.up by Joanna Walsh, Milkman by Anna Burns, All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews, Caroline’s Bikini by Kirsty Gunn, Exposure by Olivia Sudjic and Hell by Kathryn Davis. The effect of encountering these works so closely together, as a concentrated block of ideas, was profoundly energising and remains a touchstone experience, not just in and of itself but for the inspiration it provided, the example set: this is what is possible.

Trying to process this experience, to persuade it to bear fruit – that is the tricky bit. It is also the most exciting part of the work I am attempting to do. I thought it might be useful and interesting to share my thoughts on some of works I am finding most relevant, engaging and challenging at the moment, to discover them on the page, to set down my impressions as they are being gathered. In honour of the interview that inspired it, I am going to call this project Girls Against God, though we may well find as many girls who are pro god as anti. I am not going to set myself a strict timetable for posting, nor even a specific day, though I am hoping to put up something new for you to read roughly once a week.

I plan to start next week sometime with Girls Against God itself. In the meantime, let me commend to you Jenny Hval’s stunning album The Practice of Love, which seems to tie into everything she says in the interview with energy and grace.

The far north

August 3, 2018 /

When I won the Kitschies Red Tentacle earlier this year, I decided I would spend the prize money on making some forays into the Scottish landscape, seeing places that were new to me and generally getting to know this country a little better. I spent some time in Edinburgh back in June. Other than one brief lunch hour between trains, this was my first visit to the capital and it was a memorable experience, not least because I was lucky enough to catch a screening of Alien at the Filmhouse while I was there – talk about excellent timing! In terms of its architecture, history, culture and overall vibe, Edinburgh is so very, very different from Glasgow, and I came away with the sense that my understanding of Scotland as a nation had been increased substantially.

In July, Chris and I visited Arran, our nearest island neighbour. We took the longer, three-ferry route via  Claonaig and Lochranza, a spectacular approach, especially under piercing blue skies. Arran is a marvellous place in every respect and we will certainly be back (I need to climb Goat Fell…) Then at the beginning of this week I undertook what turned out to be my most memorable rail journey since taking the sleeper train from Leningrad to Moscow in 1987., when I boarded the Far North Line to Thurso.

There is no better reminder than this of how big Scotland actually is. After travelling the three hours from Glasgow Queen Street to Inverness – a spectacular stretch of railway extending right through the Cairngorms – there are still another four hours of journey time to go, all accompanied by far-reaching views of the northern Highlands and the strange, vast interior of Caithness, the unique and environmentally important peat bog known as the Flow Country.

The journey will forever be characterised in my mind by the acreages of fireweed – rosebay willowherb – that daubed bright pink along the whole length of the line, in full and vivid bloom on my way up, just beginning to go over on my way back. Strangest of all though was the fact that I happened to be reading Michel Faber’s Under the Skin, a powerful and original work very different from Glazer’s film, and travelling through places – Dornoch, Tain – almost in the very moment that I was reading about them.

In the Caithness Horizons museum in Thurso, they have Pictish stones, whose elusive, unreachable mysteries move one to tears. They also have the original 1950s control room equipment from the Dounreay nuclear power station. You can sit in the seat where the controller would have sat – a cup of tea and a bourbon biscuit on the side lend a particularly grounding touch of realism – and lift the telephone they would have used in the event of an emergency. You can see and touch the SCRAM buttons. It really is quite something.

On my second day in Thurso I made the crossing to Orkney on the Hamnavoe, leaving from Scrabster and landing in the old port of Stromness, whose history has been shaped equally by the herring industry, Arctic exploration and WW2. Travel logistics made it impossible to stay on Orkney more than a few hours on this occasion, enough time at least for me to gain a sense of the place, to climb up to the heather moorland behind the town and look down towards Scapa Flow. The Hamnavoe ferry’s route takes her right past the Old Man of Hoy, and as we passed by on our return journey – our captain made an announcement that orcas had been sighted alongside us, but in spite of our rushing immediately on to the decks, none of us passengers were lucky enough to catch sight of them – it seemed inevitable that I would think of Peter Maxwell Davies, the life he made on Orkney and his perennially lovely and timeless Farewell to Stromness.

Holy Isle from Lamlash Bay, Arran

Piers, Stromness

Main street, Stromness

Above Stromness

Simple twist of fate

October 16, 2016 /

I’ve always credited T. S. Eliot with opening my eyes to the possibilities of pure language, but really it was Bob Dylan.

I’ve always been obsessed by song lyrics, in that they have always mattered to me, as much as the music itself. Many a superb melody has been ruined for me – for good – on my becoming aware of the banal or derivative nature of the words that have been set to it. Whereas few things are as spontaneously thrilling as a poem of powerful originality and linguistic invention that happens to have musical notes of equal intelligence and loveliness attached.

When I first read T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land at age 14, it felt and sounded like music to me, and that was how I understood it, that was how I began to learn that words could exist outside of their literal meaning. Being driven from one place to another in the back of my father’s car – we did a lot of driving as a family – and hearing Bob Dylan (though I didn’t know who he was at the time, not at the beginning) on home-recorded cassette tapes had a similar effect. Though I wasn’t able to analyse it like that, I just knew his words obsessed me. Frightened me even – some of the stuff he was singing about seemed pretty dark. When I didn’t perfectly understand what he was singing about – which was most of the time back then – I made up my own interior movies to run alongside the lyrics.

I made sense of his stories by creating stories of my own.

Bob Dylan is a poet and he defines our century. I remember back when I was an undergraduate, there was a big debate raging in academe about whether the lyrics of Bob Dylan should have a place on the ‘A’ Level English syllabus. I remember feeling doubtful – could Dylan stand with Eliot, with Pound, with Plath? Should he be allowed to? How foolish was I.

Dylan is our conscience, our fire, our life-changing road trip. No one puts words together and breaks them apart quite like he does, and most likely never will again. He understands the raw stuff of words as well as he understands what words can say. Dylan also has the distinction of being the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature who has most likely touched more people, in more countries of the world, than any other recipient of that honour to date.

Good call.

Dann sind wir Helden…

January 11, 2016 /

My first encounter with David Bowie’s music came in 1975, when my brother and I purchased the single of ‘Space Oddity’ with our joint pocket money. My brother was seven, I was nine. We had this thing where we would sing and act out the lyrics. He was always Major Tom. I was Ground Control, and the background narrator. The helmet was a washing up bowl. We played the song endlessly. It was a game for us, a sort of party piece we would perform for our parents (who I’m sure became tired of it far more quickly than they let on).

It was something else too, though. From a very young age, I was obsessed with song lyrics (Middle of the Road’s ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’, which I thought was about a baby bird who had lost its mother, used to fill me with horror even as I enjoyed singing along to it) and the story told by Bowie’s song was a source of dread and wonderment to me.  I know there are theories that the lyrics are actually code for taking drugs (aren’t all song lyrics?) but for me it was always simply about this astronaut, this internationally feted yet infinitely lonely man who was left floating in space, knowing he was doomed to die and yet was somehow OK with that. ‘And I think my spaceship knows which way to go’ – the line seemed unutterably sad to me.

I never spoke of these feelings. The song still seems both heroic, and unutterably sad.

I didn’t think much about David Bowie after that until the early eighties, when someone – I can’t for the life of me remember who it was – played me ‘Life on Mars’ as part of a compilation tape they’d made (remember those?) and that song has remained part of my personal lexicon ever since. Something about the chord changes, the aching swings from major to minor, and of course those lyrics. For me, the lyrics seemed to sum up everything about the nineteen eighties, even though I could never have said precisely what they meant. If I happened to hear the song playing on the radio I’d stop what I was doing to listen. When I hear it now, it seems to speak of a past I know we can never recapture.

I had a 12″ single of the German version of ‘Heroes’. My mum found it for me in our local record store. Even now when I think of that song, it’s the German lyrics I think of first.

Chris and I were talking about Bowie only last week, when we were driving back from doing the weekly shop and I was telling Chris about a glorious ranty send-up I’d heard somewhere or other, of the lyrics to ‘Starman’. (‘He’s come all this way, he has the power to cure global warming and cancer but what comes top of his list of priorities? Let the children boogie.’) Although I was never anything more than the most casual Bowie fan, when I turned on the radio first thing this morning and heard the news of his death I found myself harbouring the fleeting hope that it was all a hoax. David Bowie was one of those artists who seem timeless, who we come to think of as almost immortal. Then they are gone, and the world is, somehow, just a little bit changed.

Hab’ mir’s gelobt…

May 22, 2014 /

Take a look at this YouTube footage of  the Irish mezzo soprano Tara Erraught, talking about her experiences of performing at a gala concert, and proving in just a few short moments of onstage coverage that a more stunningly vivacious, intelligent and communicative singer would be hard to find. The desire, as she puts it herself, to ‘tell stories’ through her music just explodes out of her. Her singing voice, it goes almost without saying, is effortlessly sublime.

To think of a musician of such high calibre and such obvious personal charisma having to read reviews of her recent Glyndebourne performance as Octavian in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier and see herself described – and this in the broadsheets – by people who are considered to be some of this country’s top music critics, variously as ‘a chubby bundle of puppy fat’ (Andrew Clark, FT), ‘a dumpy girl’ (Michael Church, Independent – only there’s no point in my linking to that review, because it has since been reworded), and ”unbelievable, unsightly and unappealing’ (Richard Morrison, The Times), is utterly shameful. ‘It’s hard to imagine this stocky Octavian as this willowy women’s plausible lover’, insists Andrew Clements of The Guardian.

As Jessica Duchen says in The Independent, ‘why shouldn’t the women in [Octavian’s] life be attracted to personality rather than height? Richard Jones’s production offers a bright, sassy, postmodern approach, ditching every one of its tradition’s sacred cows – Octavian included.’ She goes on to point out that ‘opera’s men do not face the same problem. Take the eponymous hero in Wagner’s Siegfried. Like Octavian, he is probably meant to be about 17. But we don’t generally hear complaints about the hefty Heldentenors who sing him not looking like petulant adolescents. Consider this at leisure.’

The sexist abuse – because I’m afraid that’s what it is – handed out to Erraught is distressing to read. It also highlights the continuing problem of sexism in classical music generally. It’s only a couple of months since we heard Vasili Petrenko, chief conductor of the RLPO, insist that ‘when women have families it is difficult to be as dedicated as is required in this business’ and ‘a sweet girl on the podium can make one’s thoughts drift towards something else’. There’s something seriously rotten in the fabric of the classical music world when a musician in such a senior role – and in all other respects immensely talented – feels that it’s normal and OK to express opinions that, had he actually stopped for a moment to think them through, he would surely have realised were not only offensive but poorly informed.

Similarly, I felt upset and dismayed when, just a couple of days ago, I happened to pick up a classical music magazine from a station news stand and the first thing to strike my eye was a double-page photo of the trumpet player Alison Balsom, in a gold off-the-shoulder dress, reclining on a sofa, hugging her instrument. Balsom is an amazing musician. Why then is she being marketed as a sexual commodity? Why are things like this still happening in classical music, not just occasionally but as a general rule?

Is classical music turning out to be one of the last bastions of this kind of conservatism, an arena in which it’s still perfectly permissible to criticise a woman for being too old, too heavy, not photogenic enough? As someone for whom classical music has been a hugely important part of her life since the age of twelve, I find that thought profoundly appalling. If classical music wants to stop being thought of by most of the world as a weird, stuffy, outmoded culture where everyone speaks in plummy accents, where you have to know all the secret passwords to gain access, and that no one under the age of sixty is even remotely interested in anyway, then it’s time for its movers and shakers to damn well wise up.

John Tavener R.I.P.

November 12, 2013 /

So sad to hear that the composer John Tavener has died, at just 69 years of age.

I was listening to him only yesterday on Radio 4’s Start the Week, together with Jeanette Winterson, Andrew Marr and John Drury in a most fascinating discussion on the subject of art and faith.

The sense he had, of living on borrowed time after coming ‘back from the dead’ following a series of unexplained heart attacks, reminded me of another favourite composer, Alfred Schnittke, who died still more prematurely at the age of 64.

I just found this wonderful interview Tavener gave to Tom Service at the Manchester International Music Festival in July:

His physical burdens seem to disappear the moment he starts talking about music, though: his face beams as he tells me about the epiphanies he had while listening to Mozart and Stravinsky at the age of 12. “They made me want to write music,” he says.

As an artist, Tavener has much in common with composers such as Gorecki, Kancheli and Silvestrov, who began their careers as modernists but later found expression in a looser, more overtly expressive style that might be described as ‘lyrical minimalism’. It’s so interesting to read how he was beginning to find renewed inspiration in the more intellectually rigorous late works of Beethoven and Elliot Carter.

Britain has been blessed with whole generations of incredibly gifted composers throughout the twentieth century. Tavener’s special gift lay in touching so many who previously believed they couldn’t understand or find a way into contemporary music.

Sleep well, John. And thank you, so much.

John Tavener in 2005 phoyo by Clestu

Black Static #29

July 20, 2012 /

Just received my copy of the latest Black Static, and can’t resist sharing the wonderful artwork, by Ben Baldwin, that accompanies my story ‘Sunshine’.

I think it looks great! I also really like the new format for the magazine. It’s smaller, but there are more pages. The interior looks cleaner and crisper and with the slightly larger font size it’s actually much easier to read. The whole production has a very pleasing ‘journal-like’ feel to it and I’m delighted to see ‘Sunshine’ included in its pages. There’s plenty of other good stuff in there too that I’m looking forward to catching up with, including a novelette by Ray Cluley and an interview with Nicholas Royle.

You can find more details and subscription links here.

Currently reading: Denis Johnson’s Angels, which is pretty astounding.

Currently listening to: Kathryn Williams’s Dog Leap Stair. I’ve had the album for ages, but suddenly rediscovered it again and have been playing it over and over again this week. I find it almost impossible to listen to music when I’m first-drafting, but when I’m second-drafting and if things are going well it’s sometimes OK. What tends to happen is that I’ll find an album that fits with my rhythm, that seems to complement my thoughts rather than interrupting them, that fuses into a kind of weird symbiosis with the story itself. The two works – the story and the album – often remain inextricably linked in my mind. Considering what I’ve been writing about this week, its relationship with Kathryn Williams seems totally bizarre, but that’s the way it sometimes comes out.

Anyway, it seemed to work, because that story’s done now. Pleased with that. Now to begin a read-through of the first draft of my novel…..

Lincs & Lancs

May 20, 2012 /

We’ve spent most of this past week in Lincolnshire. Now well into his second draft of The Adjacent, Chris suddenly decided he really needed to visit the WW2 bomber bases at Coningsby and Scampton, territory that formed one of the main settings for The Separation and that features strongly again in the new book. And so we set off. I always derive huge benefits and excitement from visiting parts of the country that are new to me, and when the relatively simple act of travelling to somewhere unknown is combined with such weird and arresting experiences as sitting in the pilot’s seat of an old Canberra B6 or standing beneath the windows of the room where Guy Gibson and his squadron received their mission briefing for the Dam Busters raid, then these happenings pass from memorable to significant.

‘Bomber County’ is quietly, unassumingly beautiful, a place for hiding out and holing up. But reminders of what you might even call the bombing industry are everywhere here, and make thoughts of war and anger over it inescapable. Wandering around the vast hangars filled with historic aircraft and crash site excavations trying to get my own take on everything I came back again and again to the thought that once a war has been fought what we are mostly left with is twisted and rusting machinery and the stories, which become legends, of the courage and forbearance of those individuals who fight or suffer war’s oppressions and privations. The rest – the politics and rationale behind every war – is ultimately proved mendacious or misguided.

An intense and intensely valuable couple of days, not least because for a writer it’s impossible not to want to respond on some level. Trips like this yield stories, inspirations that are often different from those that seem more immediately discernable.

The trick is to wait.

Returned to the news that Dietrich Fischer Dieskau has passed away. I can scarcely believe it.

A wonderful book with a very personal take on WW2 is Daniel Swift’s Bomber County, the story of one man’s search for his lost grandfather and the lives and experiences of the Allied airmen as revealed through poetry. I really can’t recommend this highly enough.

Fischer Dieskau is probably most famous for his interpretations of Schubert, but his repertoire was vast, his knowledge and understanding of the German Lied completely unique. Fortunately we’ll be able to go on treasuring this and drawing on it through the legacy of his recordings. I’ve been listening to him this morning in a recording of ‘Firnelicht’, a song from a little-known Lieder cycle called Berg und See by Othmar Schoeck. The song is about a Friedrichian ‘Wanderer’ as he thrills to the strange radiance, the particular light of the mountains. Thinking about Fischer Dieskau today, the words of the last verse seem particularly appropriate.

What can I do for my country before I go to rest in my grave? What can I give that will outrun death? A word perhaps, perhaps a song. A still, small Shining.

(The words are by Conrad Meyer 1825-98.)

Was kann ich für die Heimat tun,
bevor ich geh im Grabe ruhn?
Was geb ich, das dem Tod entflieht?
Vielleicht ein Wort, vielleicht ein Lied,
ein kleines stilles Leuchten!

Going Dutch

November 2, 2011 /

I think it was seeing Lars von Trier’s Tristan-infused masterpiece Melancholia (for anyone who’s interested, my full write-up will be posted on the Starburst website on the 14th of this month) that reminded me I was long overdue for a Wagner fix. By happy coincidence Der fliegende Hollaender had just opened at the Royal Opera House and I was lucky enough to snag a ticket for just £13. I see that some reviewers have been complaining about the lack of an interval in this production but I couldn’t disagree with them more. To my mind, there would have been nothing worse than to have the taut, emotional and thoroughly mesmerising performance I saw last night disturbed by the aimless chatter and shifting about that an interval seems to encourage. What’s the point of it? There’s not even enough time to get to the bar. The only complaint I would make about the timing is that the slightly late start meant that instead of luxuriating in that unique post-Wagner glow I had to leap out of my seat and dash like buggery up the Strand in order to avoid missing my train.

I’d say that Dutchman is undoubtedly the most readily approachable of Wagner’s operas, and the one I’d recommend to anyone wanting to have a stab at getting to grips with him. What’s less often said but that came home to me again and again last night is that the Dutchman is also the opera for fans of things gothic. The story is chilling enough to give you goose bumps, as insanely impassioned as a novel by one of the Bronte sisters. The opera contains drama, magic and monstrousness in such concentrated potency that the two hours of its duration seem compressed into a single bright ball of manic energy. It’s hard to pick a favourite moment when the whole thing was so sstisfying, but the ‘duelling chorus’ between Daland’s jolly sailor boys and the Hollaender’s ghost mariners was something that will rise to haunt me many times as I walk along the seafront this winter I am sure.

The greatest Dutchman of all time would have to be Hans Hotter, a singer I have loved so long I can still barely come to terms with the fact that he is no longer with us. But Egils Silins’s performance last night was delivered in that same spirit of natural musicality and utter commitment to the role. And Anja Kampe’s radiant Senta did much to remind me of her great near-namesake in the role, Anja Silja.

Travelling home on the train, I found myself wondering why ghost ships haven’t featured more in film. For a subject so rich in symbolism and mythology it’s sad that recent attempts to capture something of the Dutchman ambience – Ghost Ship, Triangle – haven’t done more than brushed at the surface.  It came to me then that the closest modern art  has to offer in replicating the terror and splendor of a voyage on the Wagnerian high seas may well be Wolfgang Petersen’s WW2 drama Das Boot, another German epic in which doomed sailors endlessly circle the ocean, imprisoned in a hell not easily imagined by others, fated never to land, never to truly rejoin the society they left when they signed on with their mad captain…..

Is The Flying Dutchman a story of war then, after all? The war of the self against the other, the heart against the mind?

Anyone who can should get a ticket.

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