Blovky sandstone houses and mills made a town down in the valley. I saw the road I’d accidentally taken the night before and the battered park where the living brown river escaped its banks. The flashing lights of JCBs and council vehicles search-swiped through the black trees there now. Other strobing yellows blinked across the town too – recovery trucks collecting the dead cars, road cleaners, emergency street repairs. It looked as if the whole place was being dismantled to be taken somewhere else.
Beyond the town, the grey spread planes of Manchester.
It started to drizzle. My coat was still wet from the downpour the previous night but I’d worn it anyway. I huddled down, pushed my head deep into the hood and slid my hands up the sleeves. Nothing is ever still, said the wind’s spittley breath over me, there’s no hiding from that.
(Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts p110)
I got to the island eventually. The house was dark. I stood looking at it in the darkness, just aware of its bulk in the feeble light of a broken moon, and I thought it looked even bigger than it really was, like a stone-giant’s head, a huge moonlit skull full of shapes and memories, staring out to sea and attached to a vast powerful body buried in the rock an sand beneath, ready to shrug itself free and disinter itself on some unknowable command or cue.
The house stared out to sea, out to the night, and I went into it.
(Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory p86)
There’s a tendency I’ve sometimes noticed in inexperienced writers – and these are not always young writers – to believe that for effect a novel or story must possess the power to shock, to surprise or alarm or impart deep meaning, and that such power is necessarily achieved through the recounting of horrific acts or happenings, through the revelation of some unspeakable secret, through the use of some genius McGuffin the reader could not have guessed at at the outset. Sometimes in their rush to be original or relevant, these writers neglect the details. They neglect the art of the sentence, of the imagined landscape. They neglect the background to their story. But for the foreground events to be shocking or even believable, the background must shine.
The harnessing of imagic language, in other words. The writing itself. Not just the what, but the how.
Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory is famously shocking. The story grabs you hard and won’t let you go until it’s done with you and in many ways this novel is the perfect debut, shaking the bars of the establishment cage, giving the finger to every nicely tempered, soulfully searching coming of age novel that came before it. But reading The Wasp Factory now – now that it’s been with us for thirty years and the ending is known and every aspect of the violent unravelling that masquerades as plot has been discussed and argued over – what stands out most of all is the writing, the sheer, blistering talent, the imagic reach of a writer who clearly adores the medium in which he is working. The beauty of it, in other words. Banks’s evocation of landscape is the hidden engine that drives The Wasp Factory and you’re so intent on getting where you’re going that on first reading you might only be aware of it as a deep, inner rumbling at the heart of things. But remove it and you’re stranded. Banks’s blinding instinctual writing is the book.
Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts was an instant bestseller. Critics talked a great deal about its conceptual wizardry, about the genius and lunacy of its philosophies, about the daring of even trying to pin such madness to the printed page. They weren’t wrong. But The Raw Shark Texts isn’t just audacious and original, it’s also the lucent and limpid, the undeniably lovely creation of a dedicated wordsmith with the soul of a poet. Hall’s ‘un-space’ lies perfectly rendered, so expertly tailored we feel we can oursleves crawl in behind the bookcase and inhabit it.
(The man clearly understands cats perfectly too, which also helps.)
What I mean is, these guys aren’t just clever, or new, they can also write. That’s not luck or hype, that’s talent. You only have to read a couple of pages to understand that what drives a good writer is just that – the necessity of making good writing, of feeling it unspool itself through the fingers like spider silk, the tension and the weft of it, the passion.
The tightrope act of doing it, of getting to the other side. That’s why Hall and Banks are both Best Young Brits.