You remember the seven basic plots? Rags to riches, overcoming the monster, the quest? There are various iterations of the theory – some will insist there are ten basic plots, or just five, but whatever, Benjamin Wood’s Seascraper falls firmly into the category of stranger comes to town.
We are somewhere on the west coast of England – Southport, Morecambe, Grange-over-Sands? Like his grandfather before him, Tom Flett is a cart shanker – he sets nets for shrimp at low tide, gathering his catch and then selling it wholesale to a local processor who’ll turn it into potted shrimp. Living alone with his mother, Tom makes just enough from his shanking to keep them fed and clothed. But Tom has bigger dreams: a talent for folk-singing he’s kept secret from everyone, a tortured yearning for his friend’s sister Joan, who works in the post office. Into this over-familiar scenario walks Edgar Atcheson, an American film director with a fat wallet and a convenient interest in the local landscape. Will Tom be his guide? Of course he will. There’s a flare-gun thingy turns up in Tom’s nets early on. Will it go off in the third act? You bet.
I don’t want to write too much about this book, because it wouldn’t be fair. Loads of people are loving it, and I can see how its unthreatening, delicately-wrought lyricism, its almost-folk-horror vibe might appeal. But we’re in 1965 – Peter O’Toole, the Beatles, Elvis and even Profumo are all directly or obliquely name-checked – and Tom, heaven help him, is supposed to be twenty years old. Had to leave school at thirteen because shrimping but has nonetheless found it within himself to slog through War and Peace. Mother – no, sorry, Ma – ‘may have piled on the weight a bit’ but in spite of having been completely ostracised for (oh God) having a baby out of wedlock she’s still a canny woman who knows how to scrub a frying pan and play rummy down the Legion with the girls. Actual age: thirty-six. Reads like: some toothless crone out of a Dickens novel.
The lack of any kind of authenticity is – at least for me – insurmountable. If you want to read about working class youth in the 1960s please do yourself a favour and read Alan Sillitoe or Muriel Spark or Stan Barstow instead. Even if you can get past the novel’s insecure grip on the period in which it’s supposed to be set, the lurching from hard-graft-kitchen-sink to ghost story to Whatever Happened to Baby Jane – all within less than two hundred pages – reveals an even deeper confusion about what, exactly, this novel is supposed to be doing.
Could it be a contender?
If you like Lanny by Max Porter you will love this. If you like Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley you will love this, and I mean that sincerely. I am simply the wrong reader for Seascraper, and one for whom its presence on the Booker longlist will remain a mystery.
What exactly is a Booker book? According to the Booker website, the prize is awarded each year ‘to what is, in the opinion of the judges, the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the UK and Ireland.’ A definition that is frustratingly, deliciously and deliberately vague, open to any interpretation a panel of judges – or an individual reader – cares to place on it. That weasel-word ‘best’, which can only ever be subjective, and as mutable as time and literary fashion might allow.
The only answer I can give, then, is bound to be a personal one: what exactly is a Booker book, for me? I would say that what I want to see in a Booker book more than anything is boldness. The voice of an author who, whilst being aware of current literary trends, fashions and discourse, does not allow them to influence their output. Who goes their own way, yet who speaks to readers in their present. Whose work is intensely personal, yet timeless, universal. A novel that takes account of literary history and past excellence yet delivers something new. A novel that is – without question – literary, yet has the power to excite. The page count need not matter, but the true Booker book should be big, a future classic.
Among the lists of winners and nominees I would single out as being ‘true’ Booker books: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea, JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, AS Byatt’s Possession, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, James Kelman’s How Late it Was, How Late, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, JM Coetzee’s Disgrace, Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, Nicola Barker’s Darkmans, Martin MacInnes’s In Ascension, Anna Burns’s Milkman. There are others, of course, plenty of them – I am snatching titles more or less at random. Equally there are so, so many books on those longlists one looks back on and can only think: whaaat?
Why am I going on about all this? Well, because I’ve been thinking about David Szalay’s quietly moving, brilliantly executed and distinctly timely novel Flesh and trying to decide if it truly is a Booker book, for me. In the quality of its writing, sure – it’s flawless. In its relevance to our present moment, again, yes. My hesitation – my inability to answer the question – lies in the sense that this book is – like its protagonist – too private to be a Booker book, too closed in upon itself, too much alone. And I don’t mean any of that as negative criticism. I think this book is superb.
We first meet Istvan at the age of fifteen, living with his mother in a post-Soviet apartment block in their native Hungary. He is like any other teenage boy: recalcitrant, vaguely lazy, finding his level among his coevals. Then an upstairs neighbour – a woman around the same age as his mother – starts paying him extra attention. Istvan is bemused and slightly repulsed, a feeling that soon shifts first into excitement and then attraction. The odd, imbalanced relationship between the two of them has tragic consequences – and the course of Istvan’s life is changed in a single second.
We then follow Istvan through the final decades of the twentieth century, and through the various twists of fate that bring him first into the army and then to London, where his fortunes take an upward turn – or so it seems. Whether rich or poor, married or single, the essential Istvan remains the same: resilient, guarded, resourceful, emotionally withdrawn. He is not lonely so much as alone – even when he is with someone. In Flesh, Szalay shows us modern masculinity in all its contradictions as Istvan’s potential for openness, for self expression and self realisation is stymied again and again by the background hostility of a world that refuses to allow him a seat at the table. Keenly intelligent and almost preternaturally observant, Istvan is patronised by his wife Helen’s rich friends, who automatically assume that a man ‘like him’ – just flesh – will be uncultured and uncouth.
One particularly beautiful sequence sees Istvan showing Helen around the BMW museum in Munich. He has a close-to-photographic memory, and knows everything about the cars: history, make and model. Here, for the first time, we see him animated, openly passionate about something, though for Helen the cars are just cars. Leaving the museum, Istvan guides them to the U-Bahn. He wonders when was the last time Helen found herself having to use public transport.
Flesh is a novel about the fallout of trauma – Istvan’s time in the army and his inability to talk about it is a recurrent theme – but more than that, it is a novel about the tragic mismatch between the male human animal and the world he has constructed for himself. The title of an earlier work by Szalay – All That Man Is – would have fitted Istvan’s story equally. At the surface level, a more different character than Ben Markovits’s Tom is difficult to imagine – but dig a little deeper, and it becomes evident that they share many of the same problems.
At a certain point in the narrative (you’ll know it when you get to it) I found myself comparing Flesh with Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, shortlisted for the Booker back in 2015. The two novels share a broadly similar trajectory, yet could not be more different. A Little Life is all high drama and torrid emotion; Flesh is cool, pared back, reticent. Both novels make an impact through the quality of characterisation – but in terms of its economy, pathos and flawless technical control of the words on the page, Flesh is the better novel, or at least it is for me.
Could it be a contender?
I guess the question is: does this novel feel big enough? The answer will depend on the reader – and of course the judges.
The narrator of Audition is a famous actor. Not Hollywood-A-List-famous, but famous enough to be recognised, by those in the know, in a public place. At the novel’s opening, she walks into a restaurant and is shown to a table where a young man is already seated. The two have not met in person before, yet already there is tension between them. The young man – Xavier – has asked for a meeting, because he has something important to tell her. Xavier believes that he might be her son, a piece of speculation our narrator immediately rejects as being impossible. In the moments following Xavier’s dropped bombshell, our unnamed narrator is shocked to see her husband, Tomas, entering the restaurant. Tomas does not normally frequent this part of town, so what is he doing here? Our narrator is immediately filled with anxiety, that Tomas will see her sitting with Xavier and jump to the wrong conclusion.
Part Two of Audition sees us entering what might be an alternate world, a timeline in which Xavier really is the grown-up son of Tomas and the narrator. The narrator is still a famous actor, with a recent, ongoing success in a feted new stage play. Xavier is working as personal assistant to the play’s director, Anne. Then Xavier asks if he can return for a while to live in the family apartment and everything goes Roman Polanski (Repulsion/Cul-de-sac era) pretty damn quick.
A couple of years ago I reviewed Ian Reid’s third novel, We Spread, in which recently widowed Penny finds herself trapped in a sinister care home whose other occupants appear to have been subsumed into some sort of group identity. To be honest, I preferred Reid’s earlier novel – and its brilliant film adaptation by Charlie Kaufman – I’m Thinking of Ending Things. But We Spread is expertly done, a novel that makes perfect sense on its own terms, tautly imagined and strongly achieved by a writer fluent enough in genre conventions to successfully undermine them. Audition feels as if it’s working from some of the same tropes – fear of stasis, erosion of identity, one’s life being encroached upon and taken over by exterior forces. Are we to intuit that we are all playing parts – accustomed roles – within our own lives, that we are ‘auditioning’ for a part that has been pre-ordained for us? Are we the version of ourselves that we present on the ‘stage’ of public life, or is there a deeper, hidden reality that is only kept within bounds by the forces of convention? Is the whole thing just a play within a play??
Yeah, probably. But to my own unbelieving horror, the peerless expertise in undermining the tropes of detective fiction that made Kitamura’s earlier novel A Separation such a landmark text for me is a total no-show in Audition. Even the title – which must for horror fans immediately summon the ghost of Takashi Miike’s brilliant and unsettling 1999 screen adaptation of Ryu Murakami’s 1997 novel of the same name – hints at riches that are never delivered.
In his previously discussed masterpiece One Boat, Jonathan Buckley achieves his desired atmosphere of uncanniness, of underlying doubt through specificity: his diamond-bright evocation of a particular landscape makes its shadows deeper, the narrator’s own ruthless self-examination reveals a grief that may never be fully describable but is nonetheless felt. Audition appears on the surface to be similarly rigorous in its approach, similarly pared-back; in fact it is mushy, non-specific, a woolly, careless mass of might-bes and perhapses. The game-changing cameo role that cements the narrator’s reputation is never described, just as the play she is acting in now remains just a title. What kind of a ‘writer’ is Xavier? Or indeed Tomas? Who did the narrator have an affair with in the hinterland of Part One? In terms of language as well as action, Kitamura falls into the trap that is the undoing of many would-be horror writers in equating vagueness with subtlety. We don’t really know what’s going on here – but worse, we don’t really care.
A couple of days ago, I was discussing with some friends this recent review of Audition by Adam Roberts. Not having yet read the novel, I came out hotly in defence of Kitamura: Adam, I felt convinced, just didn’t get her. Turns out he was right, and I was wrong. Given how much I have loved and admired A Separation and its follow-up, Intimacies, Audition is a significant disappointment.
Could it be a contender?
No, just no. I could waste the rest of the morning listing books that would have been more interesting and worthy additions to the Booker longlist. To put an overused but in this case appropriate question: what were they thinking??
Tom Layward is a lawyer. He didn’t set out wanting to be a lawyer, but in the end it seemed the safest option: easier than following his ambition to play professional basketball, more secure than his other pipe dream, to become a writer. Thirty years down the line, Tom is married to Amy. Their son Michael has left home, their daughter Miriam is about to go to college. Tom has been asked to take a sabbatical from his law firm while a delicate workplace situation is resolved. He has not told Amy, though. Twelve years earlier, Amy had a brief affair with a guy she knew from synagogue. The Laywards’ relationship has been in emotional limbo ever since. After dropping Miri off at college, Tom keeps driving. His plans are vague. Perhaps he’ll go and see his brother, Eric. As for what happens after that, he’s undecided.
The Rest of Our Lives is pure reading pleasure – if it were a car, you’d say it handles like a dream. There are no bad guys in this book (except for the racist, conspiracy-theorist basketball player Tom briefly meets with – and silently rejects – as a possible client) but that’s the point.
I thought, what if I moved in with Jill and became friends with these people, so that the last thirty years of our lives turned out to be just an interruption. Would Katie eventually think of me as her father? The thought made me… It wasn’t even a feeling of guilt, it was a deeper horror than that. (Miri, Michael.) I don’t even mean that it seemed impossible, because this is basically what my dad did. There’s almost nothing you can’t do to yourself, that’s what I thought. And whatever it is, you’ll probably survive and maybe even end up happier than you were before. But that doesn’t make it less terrible.
I don’t often read novels like this these days. But when I happen to stumble upon one as good as this, I feel a quiet, deep-seated joy that there are still writers out there who are capable of this kind of solid, no-frills, intelligent, introspective, perfectly executed, honest, old-fashioned writing. The Rest of Our Lives could almost be a Philip Roth novel, only without the sexism and merciless egotism. Markovits is less biting, less frenetic, possibly because he is more self aware. Certainly more aware of women. Alive and attentive to the world through which he moves.
This book does nothing new. It is just a very good book. I have loved my time with Tom and with Amy, Michael, Miri, Eric, Jill, Betty and Brian, the complex, immersive network of their friendships and problems. The Rest of Our Lives is an engrossing, involving novel of character: restrained, reflective, nourishing, and not a word out of place.
Could it be a contender?
Ideologically, I’d probably argue against it, because it doesn’t challenge. But if Markovits won, I’d say good on him, and be secretly pleased.
It’s a shame, in a way, that I succumbed to the temptation to read this so early in my journey through the Booker longlist. Because I doubt very much that the longlist has anything better to offer me. I doubt I’ll read anything better for the rest of the year.
Jonathan Buckley’s slim novel – poised, elegant, restrained, every word chosen and placed with knowledge and intent – embodies the Platonic ideal of good writing. One Boat also demonstrates the far extremes to which the ‘mystery novel’ template may be stretched, and yet still be successful in promoting a state of enchantment.
A wide river, smooth, with long flights of bright stone steps on both banks, and people processing down to the water. Overhead, large low-flying & slow-flying birds, one per person, as if each person has a designated escort. At the river’s edge, the people do not pause. They walk down the steps, which extend a long way into the water, and when the people are in the water they continue to descend, untroubled. I take my place in the procession.
Nine years after the death of her mother, a woman returns to a seaside town in Greece to mourn the loss of her father. Teresa, who works in contract law, claims not to be a writer but makes notes constantly: her impressions of the town and how it has changed, the people she meets (and has met before), even her dreams. On her previous visit, she had recently separated from her husband, Tom, a split that brings back memories of her own parents’ divorce, to which it bears similarities. Nine years later, Teresa’s memories of Tom have taken on a more abstract quality, and it is the town itself – and a story she was told when she was there before – that preys on her mind and may even be having an impact on her future.
Some days, he told me, he argued with himself, making the very same points that I had made, ‘if not so eloquently’, but reasonableness could never prevail. The fire is never completely extinguished. He had come to think that people never change their minds because they’ve been persuaded to. If they change their minds, it’s because they want to. The door only opens if it’s already unlocked… He smiled as he shook my hand, but his eyes, I noted later, made me think of a man going into exile – to his execution, even.
Though it is a fraction of its length, the book that kept coming to mind as I read One Boat was John Fowles’s The Magus. The Greek setting, of course, but more than that – the nature of mortality and the aftershocks of violence, the sense of a deeper mystery buried. Of a clear-eyed narrator from whom truths remain hidden, of histories that turn on the result of a single decision. Buckley reveals how much of the art of the mystery lies in making a virtue of the unresolved, of the unresolvable. Of the art of fiction itself, and how it is finally inextricable from the conflicted, exterior fact of the writer’s life.
If you like Chris Priest’s novel The Glamour, you will like this. If you like Alain Resnais’s film Last Year in Marienbad, you will like this, too.
There will be a particular tranche of readers who will rise up in opposition to the final chapter, complaining about having the rug pulled, about being ‘thrown out of the narrative’. This book was not written for you, it was written for me.
With his previous – and equally brilliant – novel Tell shortlisted for last year’s Goldsmiths Prize, it is wonderful to see Jonathan Buckley finally getting some of the recognition he has long deserved.
Could it be a contender?
What was it John Banville said the year he won? It would be nice to see a work of art winning the Booker Prize. Going by the current state of things, it’ll probably not make the shortlist…
The Booker longlist was announced on Tuesday. This is a moment I always look forward to as I love the discussions about books, prizes and literature in general that invariably arise during Booker season. As to the actual list, after the initial rush of discovering who is actually on it, I often find myself feeling disappointed. I don’t think there’s ever been a year where there hasn’t been at least one book that snags my interest, that feels like a choice I myself would have made – some years, that book might even go on to win! And maybe that’s the point of the Booker, that it showcases a whole spectrum of literary styles, attitudes and concerns, that the longlist really does provide ‘something for everyone’. Fair enough – that’s not a bad mission to have. But as someone notorious for enjoying a ‘statement’ prize list, a shortlist that coheres around a particular vision, the Booker longlist has often felt a bit flabby, a bit medium, dominated by books that are ‘about’ something but that don’t do anything exciting at the level of text.
This year’s longlist, I was delighted to find, feels rather different.
Not only did it include books by two of my favourite writers – Katie Kitamura and Jonathan Buckley – but it also included a generous handful of other books I have been genuinely interested in reading. Books and writers that push the boundaries a little, that do stuff with form and that take a few risks. I like this longlist. And so I’ve decided to try and read as much of it as I can before the shortlist announcement, and post my findings here. First up is…
UNIVERSALITY by Natasha Brown
I still haven’t got round to reading Assembly, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity to discover Brown’s work. My initial impressions weren’t great. But this book won me over. I love it when that happens!
Universality opens with what purports to be a piece of longform journalism investigating an act of violence at a farm in Yorkshire. An experiment in ‘intentional living’ seems to have gone badly awry, culminating in a clash between two would-be eco-warriors that leaves one of them in hospital with a severe concussion. The weapon? A gold bar, net worth half a million and current whereabouts unknown. Is what happened at Alderton Farm a microcosm of society’s wider conflicts, or just some stupid fight?
Reading this, I was finding it difficult to understand why someone would spend time satirising the kind and class of people who write opinion columns for The Spectator. I was also becoming wearied by the multiple iterations of the words ‘late capitalism’ – we have opinion columns in the Guardian for that. But the deeper I dived into this book, the more I found myself smiling, raising my eyebrows in delight and admiration. Universality is relentlessly satirical – not always my bag – and it is, relentlessly, about a certain milieu, and relentless in a way that risks tipping over into caricature. The fact that it does not – quite – is a measure of Brown’s confidence as a writer, her passion for her subject and her adept handling of her material. She is showing us a particular stratum, the place where a lot of soft power lies and where, deliberately or arbitrarily, decisions are taken about ‘what we think’ and how ‘opinion’ and thus society will be steered.
The ending, for me, was genius. And that moment between Richard and Claire is proof that the book has a beating heart beneath its corporate sheen.
It is a smart book, and it is a funny book. But it’s more than that. There’s muscular writing, some genuinely wonderful sentences, entire flocks of acute observations. It is a disturbingly accurate portrait of Britain today – or at least some parts of it. Universality is a slim novel – less than 200 pages – but it does plenty of heavy lifting. Hats off.
Could it be a contender?
It’s pertinent. It’s relevant. You know, I really think it could.
M. John Harrison is eighty today. For an overview of his life and work, I would recommend this recent video from Steve Andrews, aka Outlaw Bookseller, who guides us through the chronology of Mike’s novels and stories with the help of his gorgeous collection of first editions.
The first story of Mike’s I read was ‘The Ice Monkey’, in a 1980 anthology called New Terrors 2, edited by Ramsey Campbell. I stumbled across this little paperback in a second-hand bookshop somewhere, and bought it primarily because it contained a story by Chris – ‘The Miraculous Cairn’ – that I had not yet read. This would have been in the late 1990s or very early 2000s, before Chris and I met and before I sold my first story.
Anthologies are strange beasts, their importance (or otherwise) becoming clear only with the passage of time. Looking down that table of contents now, ‘The Miraculous Cairn’ and ‘The Ice Monkey’ shine out clearly as flecks of gold in a pan of river gravel. When I first happened upon New Terrors 2, my own journey as a writer was barely begun. I kept rereading both stories obsessively, Chris’s scintillating ‘episode’ in the Dream Archipelago sequence as an internal, foundational lodestone and Mike’s gritty hyperrealism as a way of writing – of putting words together – that I’d been searching for without knowing it existed. I’d heard his name but not read his work. This story – the twisting of an ostensibly familiar urban landscape into something more liminal, less knowable – seemed to offer something of my own anti-mimetic apprehension of the mundane, realised in a language I responded to on a gut level but could not dream of emulating.
Since then, I’ve read everything he’s written, more or less. I’ve made some progress as a writer, but the importance of Mike’s achievement has never lessened for me. I still love ‘The Ice Monkey’, which remains – as it does in the story – a kind of talisman, a single image that is simultaneously the embodiment of an entire oeuvre.
We are very lucky to have a new MJH novel to look forward to in 2026. In addition to that, Serpent’s Tail are reissuing his 1992 masterpiece The Course of the Heart in just a couple of weeks’ time.
Here are two exceptional, and closely related books I’ve read recently – both about cities, both about art – and that have provided matter for reflection and inspiration as I become ever more deeply immersed in my new novel project.
In The Lonely City, Olivia Laing finds herself adrift in New York as what was supposed to be a new life with a new lover is transformed by a single phone call into a period of acute loneliness and personal change. In making her way – cautiously at first, then with increasing confidence – around a city she finds it difficult to pin down as friend or foe, Laing examines the lives of others who have found themselves alone in the Big Apple, and the visionary, sometimes tormented art that has resulted from this experience. Edward Hopper, Henry Darger, Vivian Maier, Andy Warhol and David Wojnarowicz especially become Laing’s subjects but also her companions as she interrogates the idea of loneliness: how does loneliness differ from being alone, and is loneliness, by default, an inalienable part of the creative condition?
In Flaneuse, Lauren Elkin examines the traditionally male pursuit of city-walking through the prism of the various cities she has lived in and the women who have proven by practice that observing and writing the city is not just for men. New York, Paris, Venice, London are revisited and recharted against the backdrop of a novel-in-progress and a disintegrating relationship – is the third point in this triangle actually Tokyo? – as Elkin struggles to decide which is truly ‘home’. In tracking the footsteps of Sophie Calle, Jean Rhys and Virginia Woolf, Elkin reveals the art of ‘street haunting’ as a universal pursuit, a magnetic force that, for those who love cities, has been a guiding inspiration for women even when they weren’t ‘supposed’ to be there.
There are more and more of us out there, writing the bones.
A favourite Booktuber recently posted a video celebrating their ninth anniversary on the channel, marking the occasion by sharing and talking about a favourite book from each one of those years. I always enjoy these personal reflections – as most people who read this will know, I am an incorrigible list person. Watching the video set me thinking about what my own chosen books would be from the years of this blog. At which point, I was shocked to discover that I actually began posting here in 2011, not 2013 as I had thought.
2011 was the year Chris and I started living together, the year I left London and moved to Hastings, the year Chris published his twelfth novel The Islanders. I had not yet published a novel. From my end-of-year post I can see that I spent most of 2011 writing short fiction, stories such as ‘The Elephant Girl’ (which would eventually find its way into The Dollmaker), ‘The Barricade’, and ‘Fairy Skulls’, which remains a favourite (and not least because I can still see the expression on Chris’s face when I told him what the title was).
Reading that end-of-year post brings such predictably mixed feelings. Aching sadness, enormous gratitude, and not a little befuddlement. Fourteen years is nothing, just the flick of an eyelash, but in terms of personal history and when viewed in retrospect it can feel like an epoch. I look at the photograph Chris took of me on Boxing Day 2011, standing outside a model shop in Swanage that had a Dalek in the window. I’m wearing a black corduroy baker boy cap I ended up leaving somewhere on the tube (I am always losing hats on the tube), a three-quarter-length denim coat with a fleece collar and silver quilted lining I loved so much that in the end it grew too ratty (even for me) and I had to let it go. I am laughing now, as I was in the photo, because Chris never did stop castigating me for my nostalgic attachment to Doctor Who, though he was always there with the camera to record me standing next to a Dalek, a Tardis, a life-size cardboard cut-out of David Tennant.
Anybody home..?
I did not begin to keep an ongoing record of the books I read until 2012, and even then it was sketchy – just a bald list of titles. In the years since then, the habit has evolved to become an essential part of my reading practice, such that I now have a document for each year, listing not only the titles I’ve read, but my thoughts about them, the date I finished reading them and an informal score out of ten. Such things are arbitrary and might shift on a whim, but what is genuinely interesting and useful is to look back on the books themselves: what I was reading, when and why, how my interests have shifted and continue to evolve. From around 2015 onwards, my books of the year documents also include lists of books I was interested in reading, together with links to articles I’d found useful or pertinent. To possess this kind of record is invaluable, a window into the past, a distillation of time, evocative as a photo album.
Because I don’t have such a record for 2011, the year this blog began, I am going to choose instead one of the books I highlighted in my end-of-year post, Lila Azam Zanganeh’s The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness, which has never faded from my mind and that now feels all the more relevant to me in terms of what it’s doing, not just in talking about Nabokov (and I repeat, if you are thinking of giving him a go then this is the best introduction to his work that could possibly exist) but in terms of form. I have heard that Lila finally has a new novel in the works – I am sure it will be worth the wait.
For the rest, I am picking one book per year of the life of this blog to date, up to and including 2024. I have tried to make my choices as instinctual as possible – which book sums up its year for me, which still resonates, which still feels relevant to me as a writer from where I am now. One of the strangest things about being a writer is having an ongoing and permanent record of one’s progress through the world. Even though I don’t tend to revisit older work unless I have to, I do like to look at these lists, which show me as much about what has not changed as about what has.
2012: This must have been the year M. John Harrison’s Empty Space was published, because I can see I reread both Light and Nova Swing – the first two parts of the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy – in the run-up to it. Another hugely important book from 2012 was Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn & Child, an anti-police-procedural that has been an ongoing inspiration ever since. But the novel I’d like to put forward as my book of 2012 is Margaret Drabble’s The Peppered Moth. I remember picking it up almost by chance after a spate of particularly disappointing reading experiences and being powerfully affected by just how competent Drabble is at the sentence level, how articulate, how erudite. I still remember the feeling of relief at being in the company of someone who could actually write. Thinking about this book now, Drabble’s approach to fiction within the context of fact – and vice versa – feels especially relevant to my current interests.
2013: What a weird reading year that was. Some very odd (not to say disposable) choices here. Two stand mountains high above the rest, namely Richard House’s The Kills (still one of the most important British novels of the century so far) and – my choice for the year – Gordon Burn’s Happy Like Murderers, the first book of his I read and a defining moment for me.
2014: Another weird one, with again just two books standing out, Howard Jacobson’s J, which I still think about a lot, and Paul Park’s All Those Vanished Engines, which remains a touchstone work for me, a novel after my own heart.
2015: I suppose this has to go down as the year everyone (including me) was reading Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, but while it’s true there’s no forgetting it, it wouldn’t be my book of the year. That would have to be between Rachel Cusk’s Outline – my first encounter with her work – and Joyce Carol Oates’s Carthage, a novel of hers hardly anyone talks about but that has entered my soul and that I’m intending to read again soon.
2016: A lot of horror on here, a situation not helped by the fact that I happened to be judging the British Fantasy Award for best horror novel. But this was also the year that I read Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser (my first encounter with his work and still my favourite), Alasdair Gray’s great Lanark, and John Cornwell’s Earth to Earth, a unique work of true crime that had a hand in inspiring The Good Neighbours and that was a significant step on the journey to where I now am. It was Chris who introduced me to this book – he read it when it first came out and it’s his beautiful first edition that I still have. I am glad to say it is now widely available again, thanks to a recent reissue by my own publisher, Riverrun.
2017: The year of the Shadow Clarke, so a lot of SF here, plus I seem to have overdosed on horror again – don’t know what was going on there. But this was also the year I read the wonderful, wonderful H(A)PPY by Nicola Barker, as well as Katie Kitamura’s A Separation, which I happened to reread last weekend and that seemed even better the second time around. This is everything a mystery novel can be and do and I wish to God I’d written it myself.
2018: Looking down this list I remember the second half of the year especially as a kind of breakthrough, six months in which I read a whole sequence of books that turbo-charged my ambition and changed my whole way of thinking about what I wanted to achieve. Ann Quin’s Berg, Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, Greg Baxter’s Munich Airport, David Shields’s Reality Hunger, Gabriel Josipovici’s The Cemetery in Barnes all bring memories of intense happiness but particularly worthy of mention are Martin Amis’s gleaming amalgam of essays and fiction The Second Plane and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, another perfect short novel that inextricably combines zeitgeist with personal vision.
2019: I can see I read the whole of the Gordon Burn Prize longlist, which as always threw up some good books, most notably Eoin McNamee’s The Vogue and David Keenan’s For The Good Times, which deservedly won. Martin MacInnes’s second novel Gathering Evidence is right in there, too, as is Jeff Vandermeer’s Dead Astronauts. But the back end of 2019 saw me devouring The Topeka School, 10:04 and Leaving The Atocha Station by Ben Lerner, one after the other. What joy I found here.
2020: COVID, and I read loads. I remember early in lockdown reading Martin Edwards’s hugely entertaining The Golden Age of Murder, a history of the Detection Club, which sent me off on a mission to fill some of the gaps in my knowledge of classic detective fiction. I then appear to have read both the Clarke Award shortlist and the Hugo Best Novella shortlist, for reasons that are probably best left unexplored. In amongst all that though I was lucky enough to encounter for the first time Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, Gordon Burn’s Born Yesterday and Helen Garner’s The First Stone, which cemented her for me as one of the most important writers in my life.
2021: Another weird one, best described as diffident. Most memorable for reading David Peace’s Red Riding 1980 and 1983 back to back on an interminable round-the-houses train journey from Preston to Glasgow, and for The Names by Don DeLillo, which I need to reread soon just so I can experience it again.
2022: Difficult still to talk about these years. Starting to reread a lot of Ballard. Stalking the Atomic City by Markyan Kamysh, Souvenir by Michael Bracewell, and Optic Nerve, by Maria Gainza.
2023: In Ascension by Martin MacInnes, Alma Cogan by Gordon Burn, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman and Wish I Was Here by M. John Harrison.
2024: Loads and loads of Ballard. But also Thunderclap, by Laura Cumming, Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck and The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.
What fascinates most about all of this is how mixed each of these years has been in reading terms. Invariably there are those books I have encountered that would not have been top of my reading list – books read for events, or from awards shortlists – as well as those I have succumbed to, unable to resist the hype. A hazier category belongs to those that I enjoyed well enough while reading them, but that faded from memory pretty much as soon as they were read. Some are recognisably great, but not for me. Many are good books, but not world-shakers. But always there are those that remind you of what you are doing here, what you hope to achieve. These are the books that form the structural foundations of the writing life as well as the reading life, the books you are hoping – always – to stumble upon, the books that reinforce your aspirations, or change your mind.
‘Not so long ago this book might have been about Bill Evans rather than Erik Satie,’ Penman writes in his new, strange and cumulatively addictive book. ‘A time when I was lost inside a kind of willed solitude, fenced in by self-destructive habits and unassuageable longings. No visible horizon, everything in lifeless tones, handfuls of soil thrown onto a premature coffin. You come to accept it as just the natural way of things. Longing as a state of being. Saudade gone terminally wrong. A kind of exasperated bliss that becomes unhealthy, stuck, congealed.’
Penman’s 2023 book Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors became for me almost instantly the kind of literary touchstone or lifebuoy that I can only liken to a jagged tooth of rock, offering a handhold in a raging sea. The sense of absolute resonance – especially then – in terms of both how the words were put together and what they said was so intense for me, appropriate to my needs and interests in a way that, as one struggles with one’s own work and doubts, becomes increasingly rare, that I was initially perplexed by this new thing. I almost, dare I say it, felt disappointed. What the hell was it and why had Penman written it? The first part, entitled ‘Satie Essay’, read like I could have written it myself (for me this is never a good sign) and then what on Earth was the point of his ‘Satie A-Z’?
It seemed to me as if he had picked his subject almost at random then doodled around with it, a strategy that worked, just about, because Penman is a brilliant writer and writers of that calibre can make something of anything. But why?? I kept going because this was Penman and so how could I not. What happened for me was like opening a package, like playing pass the parcel: the exterior layers of ‘knowing’ were really covers for what was inside, Penman’s ‘Satie Diary’.
I had been feeling frustrated with the book for not being personal enough – what had been the trigger? – only to be confronted with what is, in fact, a form of confession.
It is a lovely, lovely thing. The kind of writing one dreams of. It’s – it’s a bit like Satie.
Everything in this book comes in threes, a kind of occult numerology originating – of course – from its source material: ‘Trois Gymnopedies’, ‘Trois Gnossiennes’, ‘Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear.’ Penman describes Satie’s most popular pieces – now so ubiquitous they would be instantly recognisable even to those who have never heard the composer’s name – as sounding like ‘pieces composed by someone who knew there would one day be recording studios, CDs, downloads.’ It’s so startling and so true, like almost everything else you will find here. Penman worries occasionally about his lack of grounding in music theory and all I can say is, you don’t need it, mate. The language of musicology, for the writer, is like most other academic forms: you can slip into it without realising what you’ve stepped in and then spend most of a lifetime trying to get it off your shoe.
Penman’s observations about Satie’s musical influence – Satie = Eno = Glass, Satie = Cage = Feldman – are spot on, the kind that can come only from listening, from the kind of understanding that is alchemical, that cannot be taught.
Again and again while reading this book I had the sense that Penman and I had been journeying towards Satie from opposite directions. He speaks – and I guessed this even before he mentioned it – of his being turned off classical music entirely as an adolescent through the ostentation, the insatiable, overbearing genius of the big beasts of the classical canon, the very idea of Wagner. Huge symphonies, ‘show-off’ piano concertos – they were just noise for him, a teachery view of music that felt not just irrelevant but actively repellent, the language around it – the behaviour – a deliberate act of gatekeeping.
For me at the same age, all that stuff was my safe space, a thing I knew about and could talk about and was therefore protected by. I didn’t hear Bill Evans until I was in my thirties. I listened to jazz at first with a kind of guilt, the sense that I was betraying something essential not only to myself but about myself.
It’s all incredibly personal. My journey in music is as deeply internalised and as intellectually significant to me as my journey in writing, my finding of a subject. But how strange it is, that coming from different directions, Penman and I, we meet in the middle: Tallis and Palestrina, the Goldberg Variations, odd end-of-century minimalism and electronica. Gesualdo. The kind of stuff you hear on Night Waves. Biber’s rosary sonatas.
I’ve just been listening to the Satie three piece suites again. There is something lonely about them. (Because in spite of his capacity for friendship, Satie was lonely – that room of his, stuffed with trash and unopened letters, says it all.) Something chilling – music for the end of time. (Messiaen – he’s another one.) Limpid. Eerie. Excruciatingly lovely. Music that makes me think of Chris Marker’s La Jetee, the stills in the museum. (Penman refs Marker in passing and how could he not?) Music that makes me ache with a sadness that can never be resolved.
I might never feel confident enough to write about Bill Evans or Thelonius Monk or Chick Corea – I don’t have the language yet. I would feel on safer ground writing about Gubaidulina or Saariaho. My feelings about Wagner, now, are too complicated for me to bother trying to unravel and suffice it to say that the man was and is a pain in the arse. I still think Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis is one of the most glorious structures in all of Western music – the sonic equivalent of a cathedral – but it comes from a time we have forfeited, flickering by us in disjointed frames from the Pathe newsreel of history. To an extent at least, the experience of listening to it can only ever be one of nostalgia.
Those little pieces of Satie’s, though. They’re a hundred years old, more or less. But they’re infected with the germ of our own time and that – well, there’s something terrifying about it.
