The Spider's House

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All Hallows

October 31, 2024 /

Samhain, the end of autumn and the beginning of winter. Memories of Hallowe’en when I was a child, the dozens of paper demon faces I would cut out and colour, slipping them between the pages of books, under tea mugs and into cupboards, so that even months into the new year they still turned up unexpectedly, little ghosts from the past.

Memories of my grandmother, who would make up a new Hallowe’en story for me every year, then on the morning of the 1st of November I would hear her in the kitchen, putting on the kettle and singing the hymn for All Saints Day, her voice her one extravagance, that and her storytelling, my twin inheritance from her.

It has felt difficult to write here, lately. How many times can you say that you miss someone without the words becoming shadows of themselves?

Samhain.

Samhuinn.

Sauin.

Some of you will know that I have been contracted to complete the biography of JG Ballard that Chris was working on before he died. Our book, as we came to think of it, has been a source of comfort, consolation and huge satisfaction to me through this difficult year. This is without doubt the most demanding and challenging project I have yet undertaken, for all kinds of reasons, but I am happy to say it has been going well and is getting closer to completion. Coming to know a writer’s work in such intimate detail is both a privilege and an inspiration. Chris and I talked about the project endlessly. He knew that this is how I would be spending the year, basically, and knowing that he knew has been a strength and continues to be.

My thoughts are turning also to what will come next. I have ideas, and they excite me, which I know is a good thing. Samhain is all about return, reappraisal, reconnection. Lighting the fire.

Going home

August 30, 2024 /

Today I waved goodbye to Chris’s literary archive – thirty-two boxes of manuscripts, correspondence, photographs and notebooks covering the whole of his life and career – as they began their journey from our home on Bute to their new one at the British Library. The archive will in due course be open to readers, researchers, scholars and fans. Chris knew this was the plan, and I know he would be delighted to see that plan fulfilled. He would have been delighted also by the great care that has been taken by the archivists at the BL who have been dealing with the acquisition. Their sensitivity, expertise and appreciation have been extraordinary, and a great comfort. It is wonderful to know that Chris’s papers are in such safe hands.

Glasgow 2024

August 14, 2024 /

Chris knew there would be a memorial for him at the Glasgow Worldcon and I know he would have been delighted and touched to see so many people gathered together to celebrate his life and writing. The event was everything I hoped it would be, and I want to offer my heartfelt thanks to everyone who came along. Thanks especially to Meg MacDonald, who was such a support to me in the run-up and who made sure everything happened, basically. How she managed to fit this in alongside everything else she had to do will remain forever a mystery, but the event would not have been the thing it was without her commitment, understanding and energy.

Birthday wishes

July 14, 2024 /

Today would have been Chris’s eighty-first birthday. How I wish he were here to see it.

Isle of Bute, October 17th 2018. Mary Turner/Panos Pictures

It is a perfect July morning here on Bute, the hills reflected in the waters of the firth, truer likenesses of themselves than you might see on more unsettled days. Reading Sarah Gristwood’s piece in the Guardian about her recent bereavement – her husband the film critic Derek Malcolm died last year – I find much that resonates. Like Gristwood, reading the words of other writers who have been here before me has been both incredibly helpful and strangely reassuring.

I find it difficult to say the word ‘widow’; the photograph above still feels truer to me than most things about the current situation. I have been luckier though than many of the writers Gristwood talks about in that work – writing – has been an unerring support to me. Some of you may know that Chris had been working on a biography of JG Ballard, a project he had very much hoped to complete but sadly did not. It was agreed between us before Chris died that I would finish the book, an undertaking we very much saw as our way of continuing to be together.

As the practical tasks that follow in the wake of a death are gradually completed, so I have been able to transfer more of my time and energy to working on the book. At times this still feels surreal but for the most part it is energising, life-giving. I know Chris would be pleased with how it is going.

Reading also continues to be a constant. At the moment I am finding great pleasure in rereading Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley, a novel I discovered with wonder and joy in my late twenties, the first Highsmith I read. On rereading it is if anything even better – darker and more Machiavellian. I am certainly finding it less funny this time around!

To coincide with rereading the book, I am finally catching up with Steven Zaillian’s TV adaptation on Netflix, and what a thing of terrible beauty it is. I love the 1999 Minghella adaptation – Chris always said it was too long, but it’s in my Top 25 films of all time for sure – but Zaillian’s vision keeps more of the novel’s cruelty, its sense of unease. If anything, Minghella’s film is too beautiful, too – dare I say it – joyous? Maybe I’m placing too much emphasis on that incredible jazz sequence with Guy Barker but whenever I think of the Minghella film, in spite of the horrible things that happen in it I feel bathed in the endless sunshine of Positano. The black-and-white cinematography of the Zaillian adaptation is equally masterful but it lends to everything it touches – intentionally – a sense of the end-times, of dissolution. Andrew Scott is a more sinister, more morally bankrupt Ripley than Matt Damon, whose portrayal I love, I think, precisely because it allows me an emotional insight into the character. There’s no coming to terms with Scott’s Ripley; he is cold, selfish, opaque – exactly as Highsmith intended.

The Talented Mr Ripley happened to be the last of Highsmith’s novels Chris read. ‘How is this so good!’ he kept exclaiming. He had been looking forward to the new series. I think it would have gone down very well.

Summer’s lease

June 29, 2024 /

Today I finished checking the proofs of my next novel, A Granite Silence, which will be published next spring. The book reads well, I think. It feels ready to go.

The months since Chris’s death have been overwhelmingly busy but I am making progress with work, which still is the thing that feels most normal for me to be doing, as well as the most sustaining. I will be speaking more about my current project in due course.

I am also looking further ahead, trying to figure out exactly where I am with my work right now, what kind of writer – more difficult, at the moment, than it sounds. As always when I’m asking myself these kinds of questions I turn to other writers for insight and inspiration. At the moment I am reading John Banville’s The Book of Evidence as a kind of corollary to Mark O’Connell’s very excellent A Thread of Violence, which I read last year. O’Connell’s book is a true account of the life and crimes of Malcolm MacArthur, a ne’er do well aristocrat who committed two apparently random and senseless murders in 1982. Banville’s 1989 novel, inspired by these events, takes us deep inside the mind of a gifted man whose fatal capacity for self-delusion brings about his downfall.

I first read Banville when he won the Booker – I loved that thing he said about it being good to see a work of art winning the Booker Prize! Since then I’ve read more than half of everything he’s written and it’s always a relief, to spend time with someone who seems incapable of writing a bad sentence. What I’m paying particular attention to in The Book of Evidence is the relationship between fiction and fact. What is Banville’s relationship to this story? What is in it for him?

Other recent reads of note include Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, which I was delighted to see win the International Booker and that felt to me almost like a chapter of my own life. This was not a comfortable feeling, a fact which made me appreciate the novel all the more. I also loved Ia Genberg’s The Details, and Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren, luminous and profound and so well written. The way Enright is able to make convincing use of modern idioms and still write like an old master is deeply impressive. The poems, too, are small miracles.

Last week I spent a few days in the Lake District with my very dear friends the writers Helen Marshall and Malcolm Devlin and their little son Davey. We had some wonderful conversations, and they were wonderful to me. I was also deeply moved to visit Dove Cottage for the first time, to look out across the same view that would have been familiar and beloved to William and Dorothy Wordsworth, two hundred years ago. One of the TV programmes Chris and I most enjoyed watching last year was the Wordsworth and Coleridge Road Trip on Sky Arts, in which Frank Skinner and Denise Mina explore the turbulent relationship between the two poets, whilst visiting the locations in which they lived and which inspired their writing. Dove Cottage was one. I know Chris would have loved being there. He would have thought it was fantastic.

At Cautley Spout, near Sedbergh

Spring and Fall

May 19, 2024 /

We are not idealised wild things.

We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all…

I remember despising the book Dylan Thomas’s widow Caitlin wrote after her husband’s death, Leftover Life to Kill. I remember being dismissive of, even censorious about, her ‘self-pity’, her ‘whining’, her ‘dwelling on it.’ Leftover Life to Kill was published in 1957. I was twenty-two years old. Time is the school in which we learn.

(Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking.)

Time and the Hugos

March 30, 2024 /

I am delighted to announce that A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller has been shortlisted for a Hugo Award in the Best Related Work category.

With news like this comes the accompanying sadness that Maureen herself is not here to share in the excitement and to take her rightful place as nominee. But there is joy too in knowing how pleased she would be – in fact, knowing Maureen, I think the word would be gobsmacked!

I am especially pleased for Maureen’s husband Paul Kincaid, who has been so supportive throughout the process of bringing the book to publication, and for Francesca Barbini of Luna Press, who immediately came on board to give the book a home. I am looking forward to seeing both of them at the Hugo ceremony at the Glasgow Worldcon in August.

Huge congratulations of course to all other Hugo nominees and especially to Iain J. Clark, who so kindly gave permission for his beautiful artwork ‘Path’ to be used as the cover for Maureen’s book. You can find a complete list of Hugo finalists here.

Some books

March 17, 2024 /

When I reviewed Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things for Strange Horizons back in – my goodness – 2015, I described it as ‘unendurably slow’ and wrapped my arguments in a slew of niggles about ‘is this good SF??’ and suchlike, questions I seemed genuinely concerned with at the time but that now seem irrelevant. I think I knew even then that at least a portion of my apparent dislike of the book was rooted in the discomfort I felt while reading it. Not because of ‘bland characterisation’ or ‘wrongheadedness’ but because that novel really got to me. The unknowable alienness of the planet Oasis was something I experienced as a terrible homesickness, the sense that we were destroying our own world while fully aware of the fact that there was nothing better out there and no way back.

I find it mysterious and barely explicable and utterly right that The Book of Strange New Things, no matter its weight or size or unlikability, has survived every book cull we enacted in the years since, and there have been a few.

I think about Faber’s novel more or less every day now. Not just because of the subtext about his wife Eva, but because it seems clearer and clearer to me that the books that stay with you, that provide fuel for the onward journey, are so often those you have to fight to understand and come to terms with. The books that confound and confront you. The books that pick away at your insecurities and that feel most difficult.

Just about a month ago I finally bought and read Undying: A Love Story, the cycle of poems Faber published in 2016 about the death of his wife, the artist Eva Youren, from cancer.

I cannot now imagine a book coming closer to me than that one.

Other books I have been reading these past weeks include:

The Iceberg by Marion Coutts

Ti Amo by Hanne Orstavik

In Love by Amy Bloom

A Scattering and Anniversary by Christopher Reid

The other day on the train on my way back from Glasgow I found myself picking up Strange Loyalties, the third book in William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw trilogy. It seemed like something I wanted to read just then and I didn’t know until I began it that it too was about grief. Jack Laidlaw is seeking the truth about what happened to his brother Scott, who has been killed in a hit-and-run, because seeking the truth – what he does for work – is the only way Jack Laidlaw can deal with his grief. It is a wonderful novel – well wrought, honestly told, so keenly alive and for me at least perhaps the best of the three.

Somewhere around halfway through, I was knocked to the ground by the following passage, in which Jack speaks with the dying mother of one of his suspects:

She had a face like a handful of bones and those pilgrim eyes of the dying. Most of the essential luggage of her life had gone on ahead and here she was waiting at a wayside station among strangers who had other business. The living are all strangers to the dying. It’s just that they’re too polite to tell us so. They are kind to our crass familiarities that mistake them for someone else. They do not tell us that we are the bores who have crashed a party for one, seeking company for our own terrified loneliness we have suddenly recognised in their eyes. The dying arrive at true politeness. Even if they scream, they only scream in so far as it is necessary. For who else can establish the rules for what is theirs alone? They cannot be unkind to us, for they leave us alive when they are not. She was kind to me.

I am working. I am doing OK.

The voyage out

February 15, 2024 /

This morning at 7 o’clock, Chris set sail from our island for the final time. I ran down to the quayside to see him off. Playing on my headphones was Fairport Convention’s ‘A Sailor’s Life’, which seemed fitting to mark the beginning of a limitless journey through the Dream Archipelago, and dovetailed well with Sandy Denny’s ‘Like an Old-Fashioned Waltz’, which was played at our wedding. The committal music Chris chose was the second movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No 7 in A Major.

We decided not to have a funeral. Neither of us could bear the thought of it, and the imposition it would have placed on people, to travel up to Scotland in the middle of winter, made the decision easier for us to take.

There will instead be a memorial event for Chris at the Glasgow Worldcon in August, a chance for us to come together and celebrate Chris’s life, work and legacy. Much more our kind of thing.

Christopher Priest 1943 – 2024

February 2, 2024 /

My beloved Chris passed away this evening. He was completely peaceful, and surrounded by love.

Ceremonies for Candlemas Eve by Robert Herrick

Down with the rosemary and bays,
Down with the misletoe;
Instead of holly, now up-raise
The greener box, for show.

The holly hitherto did sway;
Let box now domineer,
Until the dancing Easter-day,
Or Easter’s eve appear.

Then youthful box, which now hath grace
Your houses to renew,
Grown old, surrender must his place
Unto the crisped yew.

When yew is out, then birch comes in,
And many flowers beside,
Both of a fresh and fragrant kin,
To honour Whitsuntide.

Green rushes then, and sweetest bents,
With cooler oaken boughs,
Come in for comely ornaments,
To re-adorn the house.
Thus times do shift; each thing his turn does hold;
New things succeed, as former things grow old.

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