Nick Royle novels make train journeys pass more swiftly – fact. I spent most of my seven-hour cross-country haul from Truro to Hastings today reading Nick’s First Novel, which is not his first novel at all, but his eighth. I found it strange and rather pleasurable to note that the last time I made that journey it just happened to be in the company of Regicide, which is listed as Royle’s seventh novel but is actually his first. Odd coincidences like that are part of what First Novel is all about.
The book begins with a man in a room. Paul Kinder, a creative writing tutor with one indifferently received novel to his credit, sits in his office painstakingly deconstructing the Kindle he’s just been given free as a perk of the job. He arranges the innards of the small machine in neat rows on his desk according to size, reflecting that either he’ll be able to put the Kindle back together again, or he won’t. In the event he does not try – he sweeps the whole thing into the waste bin and carries on with his day as if nothing has happened.
There’s something curious, and curiously disconcerting, about all this. Kinder’s dispassionate narrative – delivered in the cool, minutely observational tone of the French Nouveaux Romans Royle is known to admire – is simultaneously alienating and compelling. We follow Kinder willingly enough, because we can’t help wanting to know where he’s leading us – and yet at the same time we’re looking off to the side, wondering what, exactly, we’re supposed to be doing here and where we’ll end up.
First Novel‘s early chapters reminded me very much of the dangerously wayward novels – Blind Date, Cockpit, Steps – of Jerzy Kosinski. They had that same seeming-objectivity, that same eerie amoral intensity. But the book soon twisted itself into something rather different as a multiplicity of narrative threads began to emerge, bewilderingly diverse at first, ultimately thronging together like the strands in a rope, becoming whole, becoming one, yet resisting any simple explanation. Are these storylines – sinister, diverting, affecting – the testimony of a madman, the inspired fictions of talented debutants, the solution to a mystery? They are all of these, and something more, something bigger yet. First Novel takes the concept of the unreliable narrator to a whole new level.
Oh, and it’s so beautifully written. There’s poetry here as well as madness. It’s an amazing novel – a fluid, dark river of a book and I loved it. It marks a new high water mark of Royle’s already considerable achievement as a writer, and if it doesn’t make this year’s Booker shortlist then the literary world is even more insane than we thought.
While I was in Cornwall I finished reading Caitlin R. Kiernan’s The Drowning Girl. It’s very different in tone from Royle’s work – the very opposite of dispassionate – and yet the two share a multitude of similarities: unreliable narrators, buried secrets, suicides and hauntings. I would consider The Drowning Girl to be the finest, most riveting and most actually disturbing evocation of a supernatural haunting I have ever read, and this novel is every bit as achieved, as shattering, as exquisitely rendered as is First Novel, one of those books that makes me anxious towards the end in case the close turns out not to be equal to the rest. In the case of The Drowning Girl, my anxiety proved entirely groundless. It’s a beauteous thing, as near to flawless as any novel could hope to be.
It is very rare indeed to read two such superlative fictions back to back.
Loads seems to have happened while I’ve been away. I had intermittent internet access only, but I did at least get to see the BSFA and Kitschies shortlists on their day of publication. Niall Harrison’s excellent summation is here.