I’m thrilled to announce that La Fracture – the French-language edition of The Rift – has this past week been longlisted for two of France’s most prestigious and enduring literary prizes: the Prix Medicis, established in 1958 to recognise authors ‘whose fame does not yet match their talent’ and the Prix Femina, established in 1904 and decided each year by an exclusively female jury.
Glancing down the list of past recipients, I feel quite overwhelmed! This year’s longlists can be found here, and here. Finding myself in such company is surreal, to say the least.
I am incredibly pleased for my French publishers, Editions Tristram, who have been staunch and stalwart in their commitment to my work right from the beginning, and doubly indebted to my translator, Bernard Sigaud, without whom none of this would be happening.
They’re all amazing people and these longlist placings belong equally to them. Salute!
A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate enough to catch the writer Rebecca Stott reading her essay ‘On Ghost Cities’ on Radio 4. Drawing on her early childhood, when her family were still part of the Exclusive Brethren, Stott describes her enduring fascination with urban spaces forsaken by their human inhabitants, either through gradual depletion or traumatic change. For Stott, the imagery of cataclysm was not alien, but something she had lived with as a daily reality. I found Stott’s essay beautiful and profound, full of ideas that resonated with me on a personal level. It also served to remind me that I had not yet read In the Days of Rain, Stott’s Costa-winning memoir of her family’s connection with and eventual severance from the Exclusive Brethren. Which is how I came to be reading it on the train this Tuesday as I travelled into Glasgow to attend a live screening of Margaret Atwood’s launch event for The Testaments at the NFT.
In truth, Ada-Louise’s face had come to stand for all those women who’d been shut up or locked up. Not just Brethren women, but all women who’d been bullied or belted by men who’d been allowed too much power in their homes. Her face haunted me. One day when my daughters were a bit older, I told myself, I’d talk to them about that, about patriarchy and how dangerous unchecked male power can be. I’d talk to them about Ada-Louise.
“Mum, you’ve read The Handmaid’s Tale,” Kez said. “You know we can’t ever take feminist progress for granted. They’ll take our freedom away again unless we protect it.”
One of those strange coincidences that feel like more than coincidence, when a particular text falls into your hands precisely at the time you need to be reading it. In the Days of Rain is more than just a memoir. Written when Stott was already mid-career and fully in command of her material, it is a furious and tender examination of faith, credulity, community, scepticism, love, folly and the human propensity for both the numinous and the monstrous. It is also a book about women and the numberless ways in which – then and now – they are set up to act as scapegoats for men’s greedy descent into violence and error.
There’s more, though. While Stott wholeheartedly condemns the psychological and latterly physical and sexual abuse that came to define and ravage the Exclusive Brethren, she remains determined to explore the more surprising truths of what it is like to have one’s formative experiences and imagination shaped by living in what is, in effect, a parallel universe.
What is clearly difficult and sometimes painful for Stott to explain is that not all of these experiences are negative. I found these parts of the book – Stott’s examination of the language, imagery and philosophy of visionary belief – affecting and thought-provoking. As I happen to be in the early stages of work on a novel that deals with some of the same themes I cannot help thinking and wondering about the recent crop of writers – all of them women – who have drawn vital inspiration from their experiences of life in faith communities: Tara Westover, Sarah Perry, Grace McCleen, Miriam Toews. Their work is luminous. The questions they ask are hard questions. Most remain unanswered.- .
Atwood’s interview with Samira Ahmed – witty, mischievous, deeply intelligent and fiercely timely – set a new standard in book events. It was a privilege to be present at its screening, heartening to learn afterwards that the multi-venue livestream topped the UK’s cinema box office takings for that day. Having Rebecca Stott as my literary companion in the hours before and afterwards provided a powerful poetic symmetry. I am still thinking about her book and what I can learn from it. I am still thinking about ghost cities, the many uncanny ways in which the future continues to leak into the present.
Just a quick reminder that The Silver Wind is published today in an expanded and updated edition from Titan Books.
This is not simply a reissue. In fact, I would go so far as it say it’s a whole new book! This edition not only brings the original text together with the previously uncollected, associated stories ‘Darkroom’ and ‘Ten Days’, it also includes a brand new novella, The Hurricane, which delves deeper into the early life and apprenticeship of The Silver Wind’s mysterious mastermind, Owen Andrews.
The Hurricane was always central to my conception of The Silver Wind as a whole. I wrote several versions of it back in 2010, but none of them truly satisfied me and so in the end I decided to go ahead and publish the book as it stood. When Titan approached me last year with the idea of relaunching The Silver Wind I was thrilled, not only because this new edition would introduce the work to a wider audience, but also because I would finally have the opportunity to present the text to readers in a form that more accurately represents my original vision.
The Silver Wind is important to me. Not only do I love these characters and their overlapping stories, they were written at a time when I was actively beginning to get a grip on what I wanted to achieve as a writer. As such, I would count The Silver Wind as my first significant work. It was a joy to finally bring all its constituent parts together, to edit and revise the book as a single entity. I am proud of the result and endlessly indebted to the team at Titan for making this new edition a reality.
I hope new readers enjoy accompanying Martin Newland on his journey(s). To those who read and liked the original version, please do consider investing in a copy of this new and definitive edition. I would never normally encourage book duplication just for the sake of it, but in this case I’m trusting you will find the outlay worthwhile.
If Julia Lloyd’s magnificent cover art isn’t enough to tempt you, I don’t know what is!
Taking on the King so publicly might have been daunting had it not been so interesting. Reading and reviewing his latest book encouraged me to contemplate – more even than usual – what exactly it is about this particular author that provokes such fierce reactions, be they of fanatical loyalty or chilly contempt. More even than that, what does King mean to me?
I have a long history with King, but that history is unusual in that it begins much later than is apparently the norm for most King devotees. I did not read him at all as a teenager – I remember pouring scorn on my brother’s dog-eared copy of Pet Sematary, and on my brother for reading what I ignorantly insisted must be trash – and it wasn’t until I was in my mid-thirties, and becoming a writer myself, that I began to understand for myself some of the many qualities that make King’s work unique in the speculative canon.
Two things happened more or less simultaneously: first, a record company rep I knew began passing on to me the promotional copies of King audiobooks he had taken to reading on his regular driving routes. Then, as a beginning horror writer eager to learn everything and then some about the field, I stumbled across King’s personal history of horror in the 20th century, Danse Macabre.
That book changed my life. Not only did it help to bring a semblance of order to my thoughts about horror, not only did it introduce to me a bunch of important writers previously unknown to me, it revealed to me also how well King writes, how uncannily closely his imagination and intellect are in tune with one another. Most of all, how his voice is, quite literally, inimitable. I remember listening to Rose Madder on audio while decorating my living room, thrilled by how completely I had become immersed in the intricacies and detail of that story. That King was one of the narrators of that particular audiobook no doubt affected the way I read and hear him to this day. His emphasis on particular phrases, often repeated, his ear for dialogue, his understanding of and love for certain tropes. All of this spoke to me powerfully, because it convinced me more or less in an instant that King knew what he was doing, not just in a narrative sense but in an ironical, metafictional sense. That his approach to fiction went way beyond story and deep into Story.
I fell in love. Rose Madder is not a popular work among King’s Constant Readers, but I am fiercely protective of it, still. My journey as a King fan had begun.
I raced through much of the back catalogue at that point. I loved what the King commentariat think of as the core works – I think Salem’s Lot is a classic of the twentieth century, I’m still spasmodically arguing with Chris over just how great Misery is (again, it’s classic) still regretting the presence of ‘that one stupid chapter’ in the otherwise masterfully epic IT. Already though my personal preferences were becoming tinged with unorthodoxy. I am one of the possibly three people who believe that Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining is actually deeper and stranger than King’s original. I prefer Four Past Midnight to Different Seasons. I like From a Buick 8. My favourite King work ever is Hearts in Atlantis.
No one who knows my writing will be surprised to discover the affection in which I hold the paired Bachman/King novels The Regulators and Desperation. But I know I’m going to lose company with all of you when I confess that for me, King’s scariest novel to date has been (yes, I’m going to say it) The Tommyknockers.
Second-favourite King novel? The Gunslinger, which contains some of his finest writing ever.
Favourite King short story? ‘Dolan’s Cadillac’. (I laughed right along with him.)
Favourite King-on-screen that isn’t The Shining? Storm of the Century (I’ve watched it four times and counting).
Most recent almost-masterpiece? Revival, which is destroyed, and I mean destroyed, by a denouement that might as well have been cribbed from a rejected screenplay of ‘The Rats in the Walls’. (Honestly Steve, there are times you break my heart.)
Unlike so many, I did not read King young, but I read him at a time of huge importance in my life, and I am in no doubt he has left his mark on me as a writer in ways I am only partially aware of. It is King’s sense of the possible, most of all, that marks him out, his eye for the marvellous, which exists everywhere, and often makes itself known when you least expect it. His sense of the numinous. His love of stuff. The way he’ll over-pad a novel till it strains at the seams and yet still make you feel obsessed by whatever he’s talking about.
As readers and as writers, King offers back to us the world we live in, subtly changed and ripe for exploration. My favourite parts of The Institute? The irrelevant bits, of course: Tim Jamieson’s convoluted route to becoming a night knocker deep in the boonies, Luke’s escape and epic train journey, which reminds me of Rosie’s flight from her killer cop husband all those years ago. King’s plots may be propulsive, but it is the details that make them compelling, the detours and sidetracks, the moments that stick in the mind like authentic memories.
I’m often critical of King – because he writes too much too quickly, because he falls back too willingly on generic tropes where more subtle and elusive solutions would prove more satisfying, because he too often breaks his own rule and lets us see the monster. My dissatisfaction with certain aspects of his work, sometimes with entire novels (Lisey’s Story, I’m looking at you) never detracts from my enjoyment of his achievement as a whole, my pleasure in the very fact that it exists. There are not so many writers whose privilege it is to leave such a lasting impression on us, or to excite such debate. It’s good to have him around.
