On Friday I went up to London to sign copies of The Silver Wind and collect my author copies. This was my first sight of the book and I’m delighted by the appearance of both hardback and paperback. After I’d done my duty with a chewed Bic biro David Rix and I hopped on the North London Line and shuttled across to Hackney for a celebratory lunch at Cirrik, a friendly and excellent Turkish restaurant just two minutes’ walk from Hackney Central.
I love the North London Line, and this was a perfect North London afternoon. There is something magical and breathless about the city in the embrace of an Indian summer, and yesterday I had the joy of experiencing it again when Chris and I went up to town for the launch of the Solaris anthology House of Fear. We spent the afternoon in Kensington, having lunch near Holland Park and then making our way across to Hillsleigh Road and nearby Peel Street, both once home to the writer Anna Kavan.
It was Chris who first introduced me to AK’s work, and I’m ashamed to say that until I started reading her five years ago I’d never heard of her. Her work is fraught, radical and thrilling, and – as with the stories of Ballard – once I start reading her I find it difficult to tear myself away. Her best-known novel Ice is an acknowledged masterpiece, and its opening sentences send a thrill of anticipation right through me:
I was lost, it was already dusk, I had been driving for hours and was practically out of petrol. The idea of being stranded on these lonely hills in the dark appalled me, so I was glad to see a signpost, and coast down to a garage.
Apart from being so perfect at a sentence level (terse, tight, bleakly poetic) these lines are the epitome of good storytelling. In less than fifty words, Kavan has created an irresistible mystery, a who, where and what? that is immediately enthralling. With its emphasis on the skewed psychology and sometimes impenetrable motivations of its characters rather than the eponymous world catastrophe that threatens to engulf them, Kavan’s Ice sometimes appears to me as the fourth bastard ‘quadruplet’ in the Ballardian cycle of water, fire and brimstone.
The fractured novels Asylum Piece and Sleep Has His House are sorely neglected, but in the intensity of their struggle to present a portrait of the artist fighting for sanity in a hostile world they must rank alongside Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Janet Frame’s An Angel at My Table. A particular favourite of mine though is the novella The Parson, a work found among Kavan’s papers after her death and finally published posthumously in 1995. I love the novella form in any case, and for me The Parson is its perfect exemplar. With its sinister sense of place, its nagging mysteries and pungent unease it’s a work I might kill to have written. Jealousy of this kind can only be healthy though; there’s nothing like reading Kavan for igniting ambition.
Seeing and walking in the places Anna Kavan knew as home – these are moments I won’t forget, that leave me itching to make a start on new writing.
That’s not going to happen this week, though. The House of Fear launch went well and was well attended. Panellists Christopher Priest, Sarah Pinborough, Paul Meloy and Jon Oliver of Solaris entertained a capacity audience with a lively and interesting discussion of the enduring appeal of the haunted house story, and were afterwards joined by fellow contributors Lisa Tuttle, Rebecca Levine, Christopher Fowler, Jonathan Green, Rob Shearman, Stephen Volk, Garry Kilworth and myself for a mass signing and a general chin-wag in the Phoenix afterwards.
Chris and I are in town again tomorrow for the London launch of The Islanders, and then on Friday we set sail for FantasyCon.
I guess it’s just one of those weeks.
Holland Walk
99 Peel Street, Anna Kavan's last home
