Jonathan Thornton’s insightful and generous review at Fantasy Hive offers an eloquent analysis of its structure and intentions, while Steve Andrews brings his particular knowledge and engagement to our ‘interview-review‘ at Outlaw Bookseller. As always, I hope that readers both familiar with my work and entirely new to it will enjoy discovering their own reactions and responses to a book that was a long time in the making and is to an extent a personal commentary upon the last few years.
Conquest is a novel about truth and post-truth, the familiar made strange, communal crisis and personal epiphany. But on the day that sees the book pass from my hands into the hands of readers, I would like to reflect upon the theme that perhaps most of all provided its guiding inspiration. In one section of the novel, my private investigator Robin remembers how at the age of twelve she fell ill with pneumonia and as a result was absent from school and from her normal life for more than six weeks. Feeling weakened from the disease and with no one to talk to, she listens to Radio 3 for hours on end. This is where, for the first time, she hears the Goldberg Variations, and falls in love with the music of J. S. Bach.
The same thing happened to me, more or less, and I count those six weeks spent listening to music as some of the most formative in my cultural life, a period in which I was able to experience works that might not otherwise have crossed my path until much later. Where I was able to think, in privacy and without interruption, about what music meant, not only in terms of my own emotional reaction to it but in the abstract.
Unlike Robin, this was not when I first heard the Goldberg Variations. I came to know Bach through others of his compositions: through listening endlessly to the violin concertos and playing the flute sonatas, through singing in the B minor mass, a valuable and joyous apprenticeship that meant when I finally did come to know the Goldbergs, in my middle twenties, it felt like coming home.
One of the fringe benefits of my many years spent working in a music shop was the opportunity for listening. I was responsible for our whole stock of classical recordings, which meant I could buy in and test drive anything I wanted to. The effect was similar to being let loose in an enormous playground. One of the lessons I learned from all that listening was that recordings I initially considered my favourites could and often did cede their position to other performances, sometimes in the same day. That the point of studying different recordings is not simply to establish a hierarchy, fun though that can be, but to come to a deeper understanding of a piece of music through its various interpretations.
You would be surprised at the number of times you rub shoulders with Bach – through advertising, through film or game soundtracks, even through lift music – during the course of a single week. Without our consciously realising it, Bach reveals himself to us through an accumulation of encounters over many years, sure proof of his continuing ability to speak directly to millions of people across every conceivable divide of age or culture or background. Bach’s work deepens our relationship with the past, even as it informs our present. Through an intricate interweaving of sound and meaning that seems hardwired into all of us, Bach gives us faith in the future.
I have tried to convey something of Bach’s timeless and magical appeal in my writing of Conquest. I have not felt ready to write at length about music before now, precisely because the subject means so much to me, and also because it is difficult, for any writer, to add anything to what is already present in the music itself. In setting out to explore Robin’s world, and most especially Frank’s, I have found myself constantly in mental dialogue with those writers who have struggled with similar questions, and in so doing provided inspiration of their own. I hope I have added something to the conversation. I hope most of all that anyone reading Conquest who has for whatever reason persuaded themselves that Bach is not for them will throw aside their preconceptions and listen again.
What he is, is greedy and lazy, selfish and a coward but what he also is, is clear and when he gives me a way out, I refuse to take it.
Readers and critics alike have described the unnamed narrator of Sheena Patel’s I’m A Fan as an ‘unlikable character’, one of those Moshfeghian millennial bitches we love to hate. I have problems getting to grips with this designation. To me, she’s simply real. If angry and uncomfortably honest makes you unlikable, I guess that’s just more of the shit we’re having to wade through.
As in Anna Burns’s Booker-winning novel Milkman, with which Patel’s debut shares more than a strand of literary DNA, no one is named. Characters are ascribed a function within the text: ‘the man I want to be with,’ ‘the woman I am obsessed with’, ‘his wife’, ‘my boyfriend’. This is both alienating and strangely intimate, as if we too are engaged in spying on these people, as if we too are complicit with what is going on. As, if you are a woman, you will be. Because in one way or another, you will have been there.
If I had been writing about this subject at the time when similar stuff was happening to me, the resulting text’s internal furniture would have been different: street maps instead of Google maps, telephone boxes instead of iPhones, newspaper articles instead of Insta. The sentences would have unfolded differently as a result, more formally structured and punctuated in keeping with the times. But the story would have been the same, or broadly similar. That tortuous tract of time when one’s internal weather is mainly dictated by the narcissistic, self-seeking actions of another person. The madness of knowing that, but still sacrificing one’s agency. The pointless suffering that – with a portion of luck and a fuckton of time – you eventually wrest yourself free of and pick up your life.
What cannot be wrested free of are the adjacent pitfalls, the systemic inequalities of class, race and gender Patel’s unnamed narrator catalogues and interrogates with matter-of-fact, intimate knowledge and brutal precision.
*
No, I would really like for someone to explain to me, why the hell would one come into this world a woman – and in Ukraine, yet! – with this fucking dependency programmed into your body like a delayed-action bomb, with this craziness, this need to be transformed into moist, squishy clay kneaded into the Earth’s surface…
You’re a woman. And that’s your limit./Your moon sleeps like a silver fish lure./Like spices off the edge of a knife/Dependency sprinkled into your blood.
Oh, this book.
So there it was, girlfriend – you fell in love. And how you fell in love – you exploded blindly, went flying headfirst, your witch’s laugh ringing to the heavens, lifted by the invisible absolute power of whirlwinds, and that pain didn’t stop you – although it should have – but no, you cut the juice to all your warning signs that had lit up with their red lights flashing and screaming “meltdown” – like before the accident at the atomic station – and only your poems, which switched on immediately and rushed forward in a steady, unrelenting stream, sent out unambiguous signals of danger: persistent flashes of hell, and death, and sickness.
Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is as much about language as physical intimacy. The vexed and now murderously abusive relationship between Russia and Ukraine, between the Ukrainian language and the Russian language, runs through this novel like a sword, as its true subject matter, the matter of language not so much a metaphor for sexual politics as the other way around.
Zabuzhko’s work contains some of the most thrilling, innovative writing at the sentence level that I have ever read, and I want to give particular mention here to the novel’s translator, Halyna Hryn, who has conveyed the raw force of the original with a facility and passion that keeps English-language readers as close to Zabuzhko’s furious rhythms, her sardonic humour and dextrous word choices as is possible.
The way this novel is freely punctuated with poetry. The way there is no redemption, save the hunger for freedom.
Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is most likely the most important novel I will read all year. The fact that it was written in 1996 should make us all ask ourselves questions about the gaps between the real and the imagined in our attitude to nations, peoples and individuals threatened with existential as well as physical annihilation.
Apologies for my absence from the blog recently. The work-in-progress is currently in its final stages, and so the bulk of my concentration and energy is being poured into that. I hope to return to more regular posting soon. In the meantime, here is the transcript of a talk I gave yesterday evening to the North Bute Literary Society, which is not entirely unconnected with the novel I’m working on. This was fascinating to research and write, so much so that I have ideas about expanding it into something more substantial at a later date.
*
In a 2010 interview with the American publishing website GalleyCat, the British novelist David Peace talks about how he believes that crime writers, rather than inventing fictional serial killers, should concentrate their minds on interrogating the real events presented in newspaper headlines and police investigations. “I’m drawn to when writers take on history, take on real crimes,” he says. “To me there’s just so much that happens in real life that we don’t understand and we can’t even fathom. I don’t really see the point of making up crimes. I think that the crime genre is the perfect tool to understand why crimes take place, and thus tell us about the society we live in and the country we live in and who we are.”
Peace’s own writing has from the beginning centred itself upon real crimes. The Red Riding Quartet, set against the background of the Yorkshire Ripper murders of the late 70s and early 80s, takes its inspiration from the Yorkshire and specifically the Leeds of Peace’s own childhood and adolescence. His later Tokyo trilogy examines the political and social evolution of post-war Japan through the filter of three real-life crimes that shocked and polarised a nation already traumatised by war and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki through the brutal force of Allied nuclear weaponry.
Peace claims as his most potent inspiration the American writer James Ellroy, who is so intent upon recapturing the atmosphere of the 1970s Los Angeles he writes about that he still uses a typewriter and has never owned a mobile phone.
We tend to think of the current interest in true crime as a modern phenomenon. Whether it be through podcasts like Serial, Netflix productions like Making a Murderer or closer to home, TV series like David Wilson’s Crime Files, which has a specifically Scottish focus, everyone seems to be talking about, watching or reading true crime. Along with popularity comes criticism – what is it about our society today that has led to what some call a prurient obsession with murder and murderers? Many, inevitably, have pointed to social media as the accelerant and you only have to look at the inappropriate and often abusive social media commentary around cases such as the recent, tragic death of Nicola Bulley in Lancashire to understand why.
Personally, I have always resisted the narrative around social media that has cast it as the chief villain of contemporary society. I happen to believe that social media is itself morally neutral, its agenda set entirely by those who use it. I would describe it not as the cause of a set of new and by extension worse behaviours but simply as a tool, a faster delivery system for the information, rumours, gossip, and scandal that has always obsessed us.
Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood was published in 1966 and is often hailed as the first ‘non-fiction novel’. In Cold Blood takes as its subject matter the murder, in 1959, of Herb, Bonnie, Nancy and Kenyon Clutter, a Kansas farming family by small-time criminals Richard Hickock and Perry Smith. The two had recently been released from prison after serving time for robbery. They arrived at the Clutter house expecting to make away with more than $10,000. What they got was $40. Capote took more than 8,000 pages of notes in the course of writing the book, which brings the events to life using the techniques of New Journalism – a personal agenda, imaginative reconstruction and the interleaving of multiple points of view. As the writer Rupert Thomson puts it:
“Capote saw journalism as a horizontal form, skimming over the surface of things, topical but ultimately throwaway, while fiction could move horizontally and vertically at the same time, the narrative momentum constantly enhanced and enriched by an incisive, in-depth plumbing of context and character. In treating a real-life situation as a novelist might, Capote aimed to combine the best of both literary worlds to devastating effect.”
Just two years later, the playwright Emlyn Williams turned a
similar focus upon the Moors Murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in Beyond
Belief, a work that similarly blends hard facts with imaginative reconstruction
and that lays emphasis not on the crimes so much as the social background and
family circumstances that made Hindley and Brady such an appalling influence on
one another.
Both these books were instant bestsellers – and instantly show us that the interest in true crime, for both reader and writer, long predates the advent of the internet. And we can trace that interest back far further than Capote. As early as 1875, the writer Wilkie Collins, perhaps most famous for his fictional mystery The Woman in White, wrote The Law and the Lady, a novel freely inspired by the trial of Madeleine Smith in 1857, a case that also inspired William Darling Lyell’s 1921 novel The House in Queen Anne’s Square. In 1912, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, best known as the creator of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, wrote a freewheeling true-crime account of another Glasgow case, the gross miscarriage of justice against Oscar Slater, falsely accused of murder and whose case was famously taken up by Doyle himself.
In my previous talk for this society, we concentrated upon writers associated with the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction, the period between the wars when the social order was rapidly changing and whose excitement and unease were so inventively tapped by detective writers. We tend to think of the Golden Age writers as spinning convoluted, sometimes fanciful ‘puzzle plots’ – the antithesis of the gutter-level vantage point of true crime narratives. As it turns out, the Golden Age writers were as fascinated and inspired by real-life crimes as any of their grittier modern counterparts.
The Anatomy of Murder, published in 1936, is a collection of essays by Golden Age writers such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Francis Iles and Helen Simpson examining some of the most famous true-crime cases of the era. In his introduction to a recent reissue of the book, crime writer, historian and latter-day president of the Detection Club Martin Edwards talks about the fascination felt by Golden Age writers for real cases, how Detection Club meetings would often feature engaged discussion on the latest theory or new piece of evidence. Nor did they confine themselves to abstract discussions. Novels directly inspired by true crimes were as common and popular then as they are now, with many of them displaying much of the same concern and fascination with the social background to crime and the inequalities within society that is often influential not only upon the causes of crime, but how crime is seen and judged.
Perhaps the most written-about criminal ever is Jack the Ripper, whose true identity, ironically, remains unknown unto the present day. Anyone who suspects that behaviours such as trolling and the spreading of ‘alternative facts’ are the product of the internet age might do well to take a look at some of the spurious letters, communications and false rumours that deluged down upon the heads of officers charged with investigating these brutal murders in the Whitechapel of 1888.
More than a hundred years later, crime writers, podcasters and film makers are still writing and talking about the unidentified serial killer. One of the very first novels to take the Whitechapel murders as their key inspiration is The Lodger, written in 1913 by Marie Belloc Lowndes, the sister of the poet and satirist Hilaire Belloc. Sometime in 1910, Marie Belloc Lowndes attended a dinner party where she heard from the painter Walter Sickert of how the landlady of his then apartment in Mornington Crescent first showed him the rooms, telling him that she was sure a previous tenant had been Jack the Ripper. Sickert famously painted the room as ‘Jack the Ripper’s bedroom,’ drenching the scene in his characteristic umber light, producing an ambience of dingy notoriety. Belloc Lowndes drew just as much inspiration from the tale, which inspired a short story published in McClure’s Magazine in 1911, a story that proved so popular with the readership that Lowndes decided to expand it into a novel.
The Lodger tells the story of Bunting and his wife Ellen, who keep a lodging house on the Marylebone Road. The Buntings meet while they are both in service, Bunting as a manservant and butler and Ellen as a maid. They work in good houses for generous employers, eventually acquiring enough money to set themselves up on their own. However, a series of disappointments and unforeseen accidents have left them without an income and as Lowndes’s novel opens they are desperate. Lowndes makes a point that might well have been missed by modern readers otherwise, that had the Buntings been either poorer to begin with, or more middle class they would have been more certain of finding help within their community. As things stand, they belong to no class, and so are thrown back on their increasingly depleted resources.
When
a mysterious stranger presents himself looking for lodgings, Ellen feels his
presence almost as a divine intervention. Mr Sleuth, she is certain, is ‘a
proper gentleman’. A touch eccentric yes, but quiet, decent and god-fearing, a
teetotaller like herself. His needs are simple, and if his habits seem strange
then the money he offers in return for his rooms is ample compensation. For the
first time in many months, the Buntings see the possibility of a new start. But
when a series of gruesome murders becomes the talk of the neighbourhood, Ellen
Bunting begins to notice an uneasy correspondence between the scenes of the
crimes and her lodger’s nocturnal rambles. As the body count rises, Ellen’s
imaginings take on the quality of nightmare.
The Lodger is a fascinating social document, evoking a world in which class is still absolutely the most defining factor in society. In spite of mounting evidence to the contrary, the police find themselves unwilling, almost unable to believe that crimes of such a violent and sordid nature might be the work of a ‘gentleman’, and Lowndes is astute in demonstrating how their blinkered approach actively hampers their investigation. Lowndes’s portrait of Ellen Bunting is the most nuanced, revealing her increasing fascination with the crimes and the ways in which her insights lead her into places and behaviours that would previously have been unthinkable. A romantic subplot involving Bunting’s daughter from a previous marriage dovetails neatly with the main action when Daisy finds herself falling for a detective constable involved with the murder investigations. The Lodger is plainly written, unostentatious in terms of its literary style but Lowndes is an honest craftswoman with a nose for a good story and her descriptions of a London caught up in murder fever are given extra life by her knowing references to other real-life crimes of the period and her professional insights into tabloid journalism and the public thirst for sensation and especially for true crime. Bunting’s clandestine pursuit of his murder fixation in the Evening Standard will raise a knowing smile from all modern day podcast junkies:
Thanks to that penny he had just spent so recklessly he would pass a happy hour, taken, for once, out of his anxious, despondent, miserable self. It irritated him shrewdly to know that these moments of respite from carking care would not be shared with his poor wife, with careworn, troubled Ellen.
Anyone
reading The Lodger when it was first published would have been acutely aware of
its realworld resonances, and accordingly thrilled.
Lowndes was a prolific writer and journalist, active in society and constantly on the lookout for material suitable for adaptation into the hugely popular novels that, essentially, supported her family. The writer of our next book, Elizabeth Jenkins, was of a very different temperament. Shy and something of an introvert, she was an intensely private woman, who chose her subjects carefully and who expressed her opinions obliquely within her writing. Margaret Elizabeth Jenkins was born in 1905, and lived into our current century, dying at the age of 104. Jenkins studied English and History at Newnham College, Cambridge, and worked variously as a teacher and civil servant before becoming a full-time writer after WW2.
Her most popularly successful novel, Harriet, was published in 1934 and was awarded the Prix Femina, beating both Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and Antonia White’s Frost in May. Harriet is based on the infamous Penge murder trial of 1877, fully ten years before the Ripper crimes but a case that excited at least as much attention at the time.
Jenkins, who often insisted she needed the firm armature of a real-life incident to inspire her best writing, first learned about the case when her brother David, who was a solicitor, gave her a copy of The Trial of the Stauntons by JB Atlay, one of the volumes in the Notable British Trials series. David thought the peculiarly enmeshed, secretive family relations at the heart of the case might be of interest to Elizabeth, and he wasn’t wrong. She quickly found herself becoming obsessed with the Stauntons – or the ‘Cudham quartet’ as they became known – and decided to write a novel about them. This of course was Harriet, which in Jenkins’s own words was to be “one of the very earliest instances – if not the earliest – of a writer’s recounting a story of real life, with the actual Christian names of the protagonists and all the available biographical details, but with the imaginative insight and heightened colour which the novelist exists to supply’.
Harriet Woodhouse – Harriet Richardson in real life – lives in London with her mother and stepfather, her birth father, a well-to-do clergyman, having died when Harriet was twelve. As well as a generous settlement from her father’s will, Harriet has been left a sizeable sum of money by an aunt. Harriet has learning difficulties, and although she has a lively and curious nature she depends heavily upon her mother, who has always been determined that her daughter should gain as much life experience as possible within a safe environment.
Harriet is in her early thirties when she first comes into
contact with the significantly younger Lewis Oman at the house of a near
relation. Lewis, an auctioneer’s clerk, is a good looking young man, and when
he starts paying special attention to Harriet she quickly becomes infatuated
with him. When he proposes marriage, Harriet’s mother realises immediately that
he has no real affection for her daughter, but very real designs on her money. She
attempts to have Harriet certified as a lunatic in order to prevent the marriage
and protect her daughter, but the family doctor is quick to warn her that this
plan will probably fail:
‘You must see,’ said the doctor, ‘that what she’s doing now is done by hundreds of young women who to all intents and purposes are as sane as we are: alarming her friends by wanting to throw herself away on a worthless young man.’
The horror of Harriet’s eventual fate is equalled only by the bizarre network of relationships and lies that enable it. Elizabeth Jenkins’s abiding interest as a writer is centred upon human relationships – between men and women, between families – and her understanding of the characters at the heart of this story is acute and brilliantly rendered. She enters into the mind and heart of each person equally, whether they be innocent, guilty, or a little of both. Her descriptive writing has immense power, as we see here in her description of Lewis, standing at the London dockside not long before his devious plan goes into operation:
Hoarse cries sounding from the water, unintelligible words ceaselessly filling the ear, the perpetual hurrying to and fro of figures in the gloom, made an atmosphere so enthralling that hours passed unnoticed; and as Lewis stood amidst this stir he knew that a power was coming to him, too, that he was about to enter the sphere of those who moved the world by their activity; that whole tracts of his own being were waking to life which had lain stagnant in the routine of poverty and restricted labour.
Four people stood trial for Harriet’s murder: Lewis himself, his brother Patrick, Patrick’s wife Elizabeth and Lewis’s lover Alice. They were sentenced to hang, a judgement that was commuted to a pardon for Alice, and life imprisonment for the others just forty-eight hours before the executions were due to be carried out. Patrick died in prison just a couple of years later. Elizabeth and Lewis were released twenty years later in 1897. Lewis finally married Aliceand the couple emigrated to Australia. Elizabeth went on to run a boarding house, where the rumours surrounding her never entirely subsided.
Elizabeth Jenkins did venture into true crime again with her 1972 novel Dr Gully, based on the affair of Dr James Manby Gully, his affair with Florence Bravo and the consequent suspicious death of her husband Charles. Jenkins claimed Dr Gully, published in 1972, as her favourite among her own works.
The third of our spotlighted books was published in the same year as Harriet, though the case that inspired it has remained much closer to the centre of public consciousness, quite possibly because, for one of those who stood trial at least, the eventual outcome represents one of Britain’s most horrific miscarriages of justice, one that even at the time led to vociferous calls for the abolition of the death penalty. The case of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters, popularly known as the Ilford murder, took place in 1922. Edith, unhappily married to the rather staid and predictable Percy Thompson, became passionately attached to Bywaters, a young and handsome merchant seaman who was originally a friend of both the couple, so much so that Percy Thompson offered him lodgings in their house in Ilford.
When
Bywaters stabbed Percy Thompson to death in the street in October 1922, he
claimed he never set out to kill him, wanting only to confront Thompson in an
attempt to resolve the situation between the three of them. Edith played no
part in the murder and had no idea Freddy was even in the vicinity. She was
arrested solely on account of the love letters she wrote to Bywaters, found in
his room after his arrest and filled with tirades against Percy and fantasies
about possible ways to get rid of him. The two were jointly convicted according
to the ‘rule of common purpose’, and in spite of a million-strong petition pleading
for mercy, they were hanged at the beginning of January 1923.
Edith’s case has generated a substantial amount of both fiction and non-fiction over the years and the horror of her execution – the hangman in question, John Ellis, later took his own life – has continued to generate discussion as a standing argument against the death penalty. One of the most interesting fictional treatments of the case is Fryn Tennyson Jesse’s 1934 novel A Pin to See the Peepshow, which is as much an exploration of the background and particular character of Thompson herself as an account of the crime and of the trial. Jesse, a writer and journalist who was the great-niece of the poet Albert Lord Tennyson, had a longstanding interest in criminology and the law. She edited and introduced several volumes in the Notable British Trials series, most notably the Madeleine Smith case and the John Christie case. In 1924, she published the investigative volume Murder and its Motives, positing the theory that there are six main categories of motive that might lead to murder: Gain, Revenge, Elimination, Jealousy, Conviction and Lust of Killing.
In contrast with the rigorous, fact-based approach taken by Elizabeth Jenkins in Harriet, Jesse tells her story using characters and situations more loosely inspired by the real people involved. A Pin to See the Peepshowfocuses on the young Julia Almond, an intelligent, articulate and highly imaginative young woman from a lower middle class family who makes a dull marriage and soon wishes herself out of it. From the very beginning, we observe Julia’s love of romance, her desire for excitement and for a life beyond the ordinary suburbs of her upbringing. Her tendency to daydream, to fantasise is beautifully captured by Jesse, not least in the passage that gives the novel its name. Here we see the sixteen-year-old Julia, who is minding a class of younger pupils while their teacher is absent, confiscating a home-made ‘peepshow’ box from the nine-year-old boy who, a mere ten years later, is to change her life forever:
Then she picked up the box. A round hole was cut into each end, one covered with red transparent paper, one empty. To the empty hole was applied an eye, shutting the other in obedience to eager instructions. And at once sixteen year old, worldly wise London Julia ceased to be, and a child, an enchanted child was looking into fairyland. The floor of the box was covered with cotton-wool, and a frosting of sugar sprinkled over it. Light came into the box from the red-covered window at the far end, so that a rosy glow as of sunset lay over the sparkling snow. Here and there little brightly-coloured men and women, children and animals of cardboard, conversed or walked about. A cottage, flanked by a couple of fir trees, cut from an advertisement of some pine-derivative cough cure, which Julia saw every day in the newspaper, gave an extraordinary impression of reality and of distance. This little rose-tinted snow scene was at once amazingly real and utterly unearthly. Everything was just the wrong size – a child was larger than a grown man, a duck was larger than a horse; a bird, hanging from the sky on a thread, loomed like a cloud. It was a mad world, compact but of insane proportions, lit by a strange glamour. The walls and lid of the box gave to it the sense of distance that a frame gives to a picture, sending it backwards into another space. Julia stared into the peepshow, and it was as though she gazed into the depths of a complete and self-contained world, where she would go clad in snow-shoes and furs, and be able to tame savage huskies and shoot bears; a world of chill pallor, of an illimitable white sky, both only saved from a cruel rigour by the rosy all-pervading light.
To end with this passage seems particularly appropriate,
because Jesse demonstrates so well in her writing how fiction has an important
part to play not just in bringing information about true-life crimes to public
awareness, but in digging deeper into the personal psychology, historical
background and possible motivations that might have had an impact on the case.
The glorious thing about fiction is that it sets you free to imagine beyond what
is already known.
As a final postscript, Edith Thompson’s heir and executor, Rene Weis, who has long petitioned for an official pardon for Edith, finally had his application referred to the Criminal Cases Review Commission in March of this year. I hope that it succeeds. Nothing can make amends for the horror of her execution, but I like to think at least that Edith – imaginative, romantic, adventurous Edith – would be pleased to know that a century after her death, she is a poster girl for women’s justice as well as a figure of inspiration for writers and film makers. Edith Thompson was unjustly killed, dying well before her time, but she has ended up becoming immortal and of that we can be glad.
I first heard about Todd Field’s new – and now Oscar-nominated – film Tár sometime last year. I was immediately drawn to and excited about it because of its musical theme, and because the trailers looked amazing. The movie has excited controversy from the outset. The first online commentary I came across was written by someone feeling outraged and, as I recall, ‘cheated’ because they discovered after seeing the film that Lydia Tár isn’t a real person. Since then we’ve had claims that the movie is anti-woman, that it’s racist, that it’s working-class-phobic, or something, plus comments from conductor Marin Alsop that the film is ‘offensive’ because it doesn’t portray women conductors in a positive light. I admire Marin Alsop tremendously but confusing one’s own life with that of a fictional character and then being ‘shocked’ that no one thought to tell you about the film sooner? Major eyeroll time. Cate Blanchett’s response to Alsop’s objections is both dignified and intelligent, as one would expect from such a fine actor defending what might just be the greatest performance of her life.
I went into Glasgow to see the film yesterday, and it affected me so powerfully that I kept waking up in the night still thinking about it. Todd Field’s script is brilliant. The film is musically literate to a degree that filled me with relief as well as delight. The history of the Berlin Phil – itself no stranger to controversy over the decades – and the peculiarly oppressive hierarchies of the classical music world are treated with candour and without scruple. Tár’s own musical insights, expressed though they are with brutal disdain for dissenting opinion, are clear-eyed, passionate and musically astute.
But while there has been some intelligent commentary on the film – for anyone interested, this piece stands more or less in alignment with my own views on how the movie relates to contemporary discourse on cultural power structures – what typically has not been talked about anywhere near enough is the film as film. In terms of its narrative, Tár is both a magisterial character study and a brilliant dissection of the corrupting influence of power. The film’s imagery and narrative devices are both extraordinary and richly compelling in conveying these aspcts.
From early on in the movie we are given a sense of the precarious balance in Lydia Tár between power and fragility. Tár’s whole life has come to be about control, not just on the podium but in her personal relationships and in her environment. The pressure of maintaining control is, as the film opens, about to become still more destabilising as the result of the dramatic intrusion of external circumstances. Lydia attempts to control these, too – and it is precisely when her panicked, jumbled, ill-conceived manipulations prove insufficient that the slide towards breakdown begins. We see how Tár’s sleep is repeatedly disturbed, not by noisy neighbours or street traffic but by sounds inside her apartment – a ticking metronome, white noise coming from inside the fridge – so minute they would not even be registered by most people. Tár’s innate vulnerability to these recurrent disturbances serve not only to highlight her sensitivity as a musician, but to indicate her increasing paranoia.
Tár comes increasingly to believe that she is being watched – that the sounds inside her apartment are being deliberately triggered, that someone has stolen her practice score, that books and papers have been moved or misplaced. While there is no overt evidence of this – the film leaves it open – the suggestion that she is being sabotaged comes increasigly to dominate Tár’s mind. The scene in which Tár goes in search of the orchestra’s new cellist, Olga Metkina, gives us a startling and horrific visual snapshot of her crumbling mental reserves as we pass from a normal Berlin streetscene into a dilapidated pre-WW2 back courtyard, piled with rotting mattresses and overflowing rubbish sacks. The sudden shift is both a literal revelation – under what conditions exactly are more junior members of the orchestra forced to exist? – and a metaphorical insight into the reality of Tár’s relationships and aspects of her past she is desperate to keep hidden.
Is Tár really attacked, there in that place? As with the sounds in her apartment, we never find out for sure, though the creeping horror of that particular film sequence comes back to us again and again as Lydia spirals towards her downfall, both public and private. We see how in the toxic mirror-world she has created for herself, the music itself cannot be enough. Separated from the power and influence it has bestowed on her, even the memories of what she once had are no longer real memories but cardboard tokens, literal and symbolic, of the self that has been destroyed.
‘You don’t seem to know who you are or where you’ve come from or where you’re going’, her brother says, as we enter the nightmarish final twenty minutes of the film, a hallucinatory shift in realities so sudden and so brutal I kept expecting it to be revealed as a dream. Here, the film turns to the language of nightmare – dissociation, jump cuts, appalling situations, queasy lighting and a sense of total disempowerment – to entrap us together with Lydia within a world so far removed from where we started out it gives us the sense of having been removed to another planet… And those who have seen the film will understand the ellipsis.
Tár will not win Best Picture – Oscar typically runs scared of controversy, and a win for this film in that category would no doubt trigger all kinds of ridiculous reactions – but I live in hope that Todd Field might at least win Best Original Screenplay, and Cate Blanchett Best Female Actor. Tár is original, provocative and demanding film-making of a kind all too rarely seen outside the arthouse, and deserves due credit. In a scene early on, Lydia Tár speaks of the orchestral conductor’s ability to halt time, to hold it in abeyance. It says something then, that throughout the film’s 2 hours and 40 minutes’ duration I did not find myself tempted to look at my watch, not even once. Tár undoubtedly takes its time, but it is time marvellously spent.
The first book I read this year is John Darnielle’s Devil House, his third novel to date and one I had on my reading list even before 2022 got started. You may remember how much I loved his second novel, Universal Harvester, a book that continues to haunt and inspire me five years on. In some ways, you could almost imagine Devil House as the direct continuation of that book – look what happened to that video store when it started losing business! – though in fact it has no connection at all, save being the next chapter of Darnielle’s incredibly personal literary project. The way in which Darnielle uses the small town canvas to illustrate larger themes and examine important moral questions is laid almost painfully bare in Devil House. Darnielle has said in interview that his third novel took five years to write. It is easy to see why, and we should feel grateful that he allowed himself the time this book required. Devil House has a lot to say, and it says it beautifully.
“It matters which story you tell, it matters whose story you tell, it matters what people think even if it doesn’t matter to the people who needed it before the disaster hit. That’s the thing, those of us on this side of the disaster, we get so dazzled by the fireworks, by the conflagration I want to say, that we don’t see the gigantic expanse over there on the other side of the flames, but, you know. People have to live there.”
The premise of Devil House is simple and – as with Universal Harvester – it can trick you into thinking you know what’s coming. Gage Chandler is a true crime writer. His first book, The White Witch of Morro Bay, was an instant bestseller, and set him up for future successes. When his editor presents him with a new storyline and a novel approach to it, Chandler is initially sceptical – purchase an actual murder house? Go to live there? – but in the end he is unable to resist. He has personal links to the location, and location, above all, has always been intensely important to him. Also, there is a sense that this particular case has been brushed under the carpet.
The book we are reading, Chandler tells us early on, is the book he eventually came up with. It is not exactly the book he set out to write, not the book his regular fanbase might be expecting. Those who enjoy metafiction were always going to love this. Those who like straight thrillers, probably not so much. But what captivated me most about Devil House is the true subject of the book, that is, the problematical nature of true crime literature: why do we read it, should we be reading it and why do these questions matter? They are questions that have been on my mind for a while now, not least because I read and enjoy a lot of true crime literature.
The past eighteen months have taken this one stage further, though, because I have been working with a true crime narrative as part of my novel-in-progress.
It was Darnielle’s own obsession with true crime as a younger reader that kick-started Devil House – he has a lot to say about this here, and it’s a marvellous interview. I think it’s important to remember that true crime has changed and evolved a great deal since the days of the more blood-soaked, sensationalist and killer-obsessed narratives that tended to dominate the genre in the 70s and 80s when Darnielle was first consuming it. In the decades since, we have not only seen the pioneering work of writers such as Gordon Burn and David Peace, novels and creative non-fiction that takes on the subject of crime and particular criminals in a markedly different way, but more latterly the work of writers such as Sarah Weinman, Hallie Rubenhold, Nona Fernandez, Alice Bolin, Selva Almada, Rachel Monroe and Natasha Tretheway have made still further progress in revealing particular events and people more fully within the context of their social and political background.
None of which makes the stories they tell any less compelling. But they do ask us to consider why we are drawn to these narratives, a powerful and necessary question that deserves to be at the centre of any true crime story, no matter who is telling it.
Reading Devil House just as I am starting work on the second draft of what should hopefully be my next novel has been a fascinating, often startling and occasionally sobering experience as I stumble up against a deeply admired writer’s narrative responses to questions I have been asking myself. The story I happen to be working with is almost a century old; realistically speaking, anyone with a personal connection to the case must now be dead, a fact that does make some of these questions easier to deal with, though it does not make them irrelevant, especially as my treatment of the material is unorthodox. I do have other material on my hard drive, a project-in-embryo relating to a much more recent case. I am letting it lie for now, firstly because it’s still far from complete, secondly and more importantly because I don’t think it would be right to publish it yet.
The question of when it would be right is one I am still grappling with. Which is as it should be. All of this stuff comes up in Devil House, which is a huge part of why I love it.
I don’t have a particular plan for my reading in the year ahead. But I would like to steer towards books that feed, that seem to comment on, that feel in tune with my own evolving process and areas of interest. My new novel Conquest, which comes out in May, feels to me like the beginning of a new phase in my work, one I am excited about and challenged by. People have sometimes asked me if writing a book is something that gets easier with time, and there are ways in which it does, or at least it should do. You know you can go the distance, and you know you can always write more sentences about pretty much anything. But in the deeper sense, I would say no, it does not. With time comes the knowledge that writing good sentences is only the beginning. For writing to mean anything, it has to go further, into areas that might not feel comfortable, or easy. You have to make your writing count for something.
Which is terrifying, but entirely as it should be.
This is traditionally the time when I look back over my year’s reading and post a list of the books that most impressed me, resonated with me or stayed with me through the previous twelve months. I find myself resisting the traditional format this year, firstly because the number of books I read is somewhat lower than usual – this is mainly down to the fact that the first half of 2022 was dominated by our house move – and secondly because it has been such a weird year in general.
A lot of my headspace has been overtaken by the war in Ukraine, an outrage and a tragedy I cannot come to terms with and am still finding difficult to articulate. The eruption of this horrific, destructive and totally unnecessary war has made writing difficult at times – not the accustomed activity, but the moral sense. As with all the major events that have altered and shaken our world these past number of years, the effect for a writer, for anyone who makes or thinks or creates art, is to provoke the most searching questions about what kind of an artist you are, what kind of an artist you want to be, and the inevitable gap in between. This holds equally true for reading: which books are most urgent, most inspiring, most constructive? It goes without saying that the answers will be different for everyone, and for differing reasons.
In terms of my own work, once the house move was out of the way, I quickly re-immersed myself in the writing of my next novel, a project I began in the summer of 2021 and that has proved the most challenging assignment I have set myself to date. I felt exactly the same after finishing Conquest – now frighteningly close to publication in May of next year – and so I count this sense of difficulty as a good thing, an indication that I am pushing my ideas and my capacity to express them as far as they will go.
I am happy to report that I completed a first draft of that novel at the end of October. I am pleased with what has been accomplished, and looking forward to beginning work on the second draft in January. As with Conquest, the book I have in front of me is fascinatingly different from the book I set out to write. This tendency for works to evolve beyond their original remit has always been a part of my process, something I have come to accept as inevitable. In the case of these two most recent novels, the shift in identity has been even more radical. Once again, I think this is a good thing, a direct response to changing circumstance and the anxiety surrounding that.
What pleases me most about Conquest and its successor is how connected they feel. Not in terms of subject matter so much as intention. Conquest was decisively shaped by the lockdowns and by their impact on society; this new book is unquestionably a product of these past twelve months in particular.
Writing nurtures and protects and supports me. I struggle constantly with the need to be better, to be clearer about my direction and intent, to match the reach of my ambition with quality on the page. There is no contradiction in those two statements – indeed I believe and hope they are one and the same.
My book of the year is Red Comet, Heather Clark’s monumental and masterful biography of Sylvia Plath. I have read a lot on Plath – she is very important to me – but Red Comet is something else, something special, the biography Plath has always deserved. Finally we have a work that considers Plath on her own terms – as a poet first and foremost – and that while it never seeks to sideline the life, never underplays or undervalues the work, either. A superlative effort, a book for the ages.
Hot on its heels comes Hanya Yanagihara’s To Paradise, a novel that enthralled and excited me through every one of its 800 or so pages, delighted me with its structural complexity and satisfied me completely in terms of the ways in which it explored and articulated some of the more dangerous and destabilising elements of our current times. What I love and appreciate most in Yanaighara – aside from her marvellous storytelling ability – is her independent-mindedness, her disregard for fashionable rhetoric and her steely curiosity about the world and people as they actually present themselves. She is that rare thing, a novelist who is brave enough to experiment, and with each of her three books to date, she has set out to achieve something new. Where she’ll take us next, I have no idea.
One of my most gratifying reading experiences of 2022 has been my re-reading of JG Ballard’s first three novels, for an essay on Ballard’s approach to science fiction that is scheduled for publication as part of a new anthology in 2023. The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World formed my own first encounters with Ballard’s work, which is why I decided to concentrate my attention upon them in particular. In terms of both their language and their approach, their uniqueness and brilliance remains undimmed. Coming into contact with Ballard’s work always leaves me on a high, with the sense that no other writer is as inspirational or as provocative. Writing about him, thinking about him is both a challenge and a privilege, the only danger being that it’s difficult to move on again afterwards.
Other books that have proved important to me this year include Speak, Silence by Carole Angier, Souvenir by Michael Bracewell, The Paper Lantern by Will Burns, Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza, Stalking the Atomic City by Markiyan Kamysh, Red Pill by Hari Kunzru, The Instant by Amy Liptrot, Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel, The Men by Sandra Newman and Delphi by Clare Pollard.
I am still thinking about my reading aims, hopes and aspirations for 2023 – I’ll hopefully have a little more to say about them next week.
In the meantime, a huge thank you to everyone who stops by here, and wishing you happiness, peace and good fortune in the year to come.
Even the floors in the houses are ugly. Old boards were ripped out to be used as construction materials, and you have to try hard to find a place where you can jump into your sleeping bag, zip up, and zonk out. The locals burned all the villages next to the wire with the enthusiasm of the thugs from Toretsk who dragged fragments of the downed Malaysia Airlines Boeing to local scrapyards – like a carcass, a mammoth, prey, whatever.
In 1972, a novel was published that is arguably one of the most influential science fiction stories of all time. Roadside Picnic, by the Russian writer-brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, tells of a world forever altered by a chance visitation. As readers, we never get to see the aliens – if there were any aliens – but we are offered glimpses of the things they leave behind. Objects saturated in mystery whose purpose is unknown, whose effects can be lethal, whose wider influence on Earth’s history and culture is incalculable and lasting. The contaminated zones are forbidden territory, fenced and guarded; for the stalkers who risk their lives and their sanity to penetrate these zones, they are something in the nature of an addiction.
In 1979 came Stalker, the film adaptation of Roadside Picnic, scripted by the Strugatsky brothers and directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. In the years since, the Zone has continued and deepened its hold over the imaginations of games developers, film makers, musicians, artists and writers. Especially writers. M.John Harrison’s 2007 novel Nova Swing, the second book of the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy and winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, is an open letter to Roadside Picnic; Jeff VanderMeer’s bestselling Southern Reach trilogy equally so. There is something in the premise that seems uniquely magnetic and eerily mystifying, a postmodern spin on the trope of the ‘lost domain’ as first made explicit by the French writer Alain-Fournier in his 1913 classic Le Grand Meaulnes. Roadside Picnic offers a vision that is both beautiful and cruel, prosaic in its essence – some aliens do a pit stop, dump some trash – and yet shimmering with a sense of wonder that can never be extinguished or fully explained.
I first read Roadside Picnic in the early eighties and it has remained a touchstone text for me ever since, one of those few works of science fiction that I read – eagerly and indiscriminately – as a young person that has followed me into my life as an adult writer. I have read it half a dozen times and love it almost beyond reason. I need only to open its covers to fall immediately back under its spell. For me, it is the way in which the prosaic is enmeshed with the seemingly miraculous – with the vexed and corrosive nature of those miracles – that makes the novel so special for me. Add to that the unconventional manner of its storytelling, its moral ambivalence, the fact that it is a classic of Russian literature.
I also love Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which I approach as an entirely separate work, an adaptation of the Strugatskys’ novel in the true sense of the word, that is, a wholly new artistic endeavour inspired by an original. Tarkovsky does not really do characterisation – the people in Stalker are archetypes, a point underlined by the fact that the cast list does not give them names but designates them simply as ‘writer’, ‘professor’, and of course ‘Stalker’. It is the atmosphere of the film that compels, the mingled sense of beauty and threat, captivity and unbounded freedom that offers a hyper-real visual translation of what the Strugatsky brothers convey through the written word.
Anyone who comes into contact with Roadside Picnic seems to grasp instinctively that the book is important, that it offers a commentary on human existence, on the danger and pain and wonder of being alive. What then can I say about Stalking the Atomic City, a book that is as much a naked homage to Roadside Picnic as Stalker or Nova Swing but that has the distinction of being a work of non-fiction?
The book’s author, Markiyan Kamysh, is a Ukrainian writer. His father was a nuclear physicist and one of the ‘liquidators’ who risked their lives in order to clear up and lock down the exclusion zone surrounding the Chornobyl nuclear reactor following the catastrophic explosion and meltdown in 1986. Kamysh’s father died in 2003. Kamysh describes himself as ‘a writer who represents the Chornobyl underground in literature’. He might equally be called a stalker, one of the many dozens of adventurers, thrill-seekers, scrap metal looters, tour guides and misfits who since the turn of the century have been venturing into the exclusion zone, hiking and mapping, photographing and itemising its vast and hazardous spaces, often at risk of ruining their health, both physical and mental.
Most of them, perhaps predictably, are men; there is an element of stalking that seems to be little more than a dangerous and elaborate form of cock-measuring contest. There is more to it than that, though. There is poetry and there is horror. There is a vitality, a rawness, a sense of contact with an utterly new and uncharted space, a enclave of strangeness that might as well be an alien planet. There is, above all, the freedom that comes with casting off the directives of a world too heavily circumscribed by outside command.
Reading Kamysh’s book – part ballad, part Bildungsroman, part psychogeographical investigation – has offered me my most uncanny reading experience of the year, because it appears to reflect a version of reality first described in a novel of the imagination written fifty years ago, first lived by a film director who died from the cancer caused by the toxins that pollute the site of his most famous movie. The layers of literature contained within it – for Stalking the Atomic City is both a wholly new homage to Roadside Picnic and a demolition of it – now find themselves cloaked in a new, still more terrible reality as the zone itself has become part of a new battleground, a frontline in the war launched by Putin’s forces against the people of Ukraine.
Stalking the Atomic City reads as a dirty love poem to Roadside Picnic, just as Roadside Picnic reads as a shuddering premonition of Atomic City. Each seems to contain the other – not just in the likeness of the experiences they describe but in the beauty and intelligence of their language, their radical vision, the correlation of the word ‘stalker’ with the word ‘writer’.
The war in Ukraine is grounds both for anger and for deep grief. In its own impassioned, mysterious way, Stalking the Atomic City is an expression of that anger and that grief, as well as an undaunted assertion of Ukrainian identity. This book thrilled me and chilled my blood, even as I fell helplessly in love with it. I hope Markiyan Kamysh is doing OK, and that he is writing.
When the news broke earlier this year that Maureen Kincaid Speller was seriously ill, like all of her friends and colleagues I felt deeply upset. Maureen had seemed still in the very prime of life; she still had so much to offer to the world and to her community; there were so many books and ideas and questions she had still to write about. The thought that she might be leaving us was not one I was ready to dwell on, and still find it hard to come to terms with.
Once the initial shock had subsided I began to think about conversations I’d had with Maureen about assembling a collection of her criticism, a selection of work that best expressed her passion for books and for thinking about books, as well as shining a spotlight upon the particular authors and subject areas she felt most drawn to write about. I knew this was a project close to her heart, one she was eager to see fulfilled so that she could move on to the next phase of her work, uncovering new insights and drawing upon fresh enthusiasms.
When I tentatively suggested to Maureen’s husband, Paul Kincaid, that I would like to help Maureen put together such a collection he was immensely supportive. When I contacted Francesca Barbini at Luna Press and asked her if she might be in a position to provide a home for Maureen’s work, she came on board immediately. And so A Traveller in Time was born. I cannot adequately express my gratitude to Francesca and to Paul for their enthusiasm, for their instant understanding that this needed to happen.
Of course, the original and cherished intention was for Maureen herself to be a part of this process. Time, and Maureen’s illness, were sadly against us in this. But I am happy and glad to know that Maureen knew about the project, that even until a couple of weeks before she died we were planning to meet in person and discuss it. Since Maureen’s death in September, the project has seemed if anything more urgent, more necessary. I am delighted to tell you that I have now completed the bulk of the editorial work, and Luna have scheduled A Traveller in Time for release in September 2023, exactly a year after Maureen died, and in time for launch at next year’s FantasyCon.
We are lucky enough to have secured cover art from the award-winning Iain Clark, who designed the wonderful poster and artwork to launch the bid for the 2024 Glasgow Worldcon. I look forward to sharing that cover in due course – it is truly beautiful.
I am delighted, gratified and very proud that this project is on its way to becoming a physical reality. Maureen was special. The work she did was uniquely her own. In reading her words, we remember her. I hope and trust that we of the science fiction community will be doing exactly that for many years to come.
The winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2022 is Deep Wheel Orcadia, by Harry Josephine Giles.
This book was first on my radar some months before its publication and I ordered my copy from our local bookshop as soon as it came out. A science fiction novel. By an acclaimed Scottish poet. In Orcadian Scots with parallel English text.
This couldn’t have been more up my street if it tried. I was delighted, and amazed, when it turned up on the Clarke Award shortlist, not least because the shortlist as a whole is one of the boldest and most exciting – for me, at any rate – in some years.
I was lucky enough to receive an advance copy of Aliya Whiteley’s Skyward Inn and found it as original and thought-provoking as everything I’ve read from Whiteley, who, I firmly believe, is one of the most important writers working in British science fiction today. With this, her second appearance on the Clarke shortlist, I thought 2022 might be her year. That pleasure still awaits us, but her repeat shortlisting in and of itself is a welcome recognition of her considerable talent.
I wasn’t the hugest fan of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun – I found it bland and sketchily imagined, too reminiscent of the children’s fable it was originally intended to be. But I like Ishiguro. I admire his willingness to experiment with ideas, to keep moving forward. Each new book from him feels meant, as if he’s still considering its challenges even as it’s published. That quality of nervousness means I’m always eager to read his next work, as I will be again. I am glad the Clarke jury picked him out once more for further discussion.
I have not quite finished reading Courttia Newland’s A River Called Time yet – the reason this post is so delayed – but I love the writing, very much, and I was gratified to see the jury make yet another bold choice.
A good year. And what I notice now, as I look down the list of previous winners, is how excellent those winners have been, these past few years. Deep Wheel Orcadia is no exception, and this excites me. When a book like this appears, it throws positive energy back into science fiction, illuminating its possibilities, inspiring fresh approaches. i love it when that happens. Congratulations, Josie Giles, and to the Clarke Award jury, for rewarding a work that so powerfully showcases the radical ambition that will always characterise the best SF.
They ran in a landscape where not a stick was alive, not a floating seed. The air was thick with dust or rain that glinted like cartoon radiation. There were forests of shattered leafless trees and wetlands denuded of vegetation, where the water was thick with plastic trash. In a few clips, a half-city stood on the horizon, a skyline of partial buildings that appeared to have been gnawed by fire. Some places had entirely lost the contours of our world… We understood: this was a future world in which the men had never disappeared. It was the hell to which we would have been condemned, the Earth they would have made.
Lines like these might make you think that what we are dealing with here is a classic alternate world dystopia in the feminist mode. You would be wrong. Sandra Newman’s The Men is a radical departure from tradition, a provocative critique of the feminist utopia and a challenge to easy thinking. If more science fiction were this original, our literary environment would immediately become more interesting, and more dynamic.
Jane Pearson is a damaged person. In her earlier life as a ballet prodigy she was groomed by the mentor she idolised to perpetrate abuse on teenage boys. Demonised by a public hungry for scandal, the life she eventually builds for herself is very different from the one she previously imagined. Married to Leo and mother to Ben, Jane’s inner restlessness is merely a precursor to the bewilderment and incomprehension that is about to destroy her world for a second time.
One evening in late August, at 7:14 precisely every human being with a Y chromosome disappears from the world. Aeroplanes, suddenly pilotless, drop from the sky; patients die on operating tables; factories grind to a halt. Women all over the world find themselves widowed, orphaned, homeless, freed, bereft. In the weeks and months that follow, a new world order begins to assert itself. A key player in the new politics is Evangelyne Moreau, a woman with a remarkable mind whose family were wiped out in an act of brutal police violence. Jane knows Evangelyne from college. The two almost became lovers, but Jane ultimately chose Leo. As the world shifts and changes about her, Jane journeys across the country in search of Evangelyne and the truth of what she felt those many years before.
Meanwhile, something else is happening, something disturbing. Videos are appearing online, a series of cryptic film clips entitled simply The Men. In them, armies of lost men march through a world that turns increasingly strange, increasingly depleted. And for many of the women watching, these are men they know. The Men quickly becomes an addiction, a form of mass hypnosis. But are the men real, or CGI fakes? What do the films mean and what do they point towards? For many women, the disappearance of the men is a chance at a new beginning. For others it ushers in a form of stasis, a reality that is ultimately as discomfiting as the world glimpsed in the violent film clips they are watching online.
For Evangelyne Moreau, The Men is more sinister still, a portent of her own destruction. Once again, she asks Jane to make a choice. But is this truly a choice that is Jane’s to make?
From Herland to The Female Man, from Maul to The Power, feminist utopia has formed an important branch of science fiction, encompassing some of its boldest and most experimental ideas. The Men is an important and brilliant addition to the canon, not least in the way it interrogates what has gone before. The questions Newman poses are difficult to answer: would a world without men truly be more equal, more peaceful, more rational? How much, in the end, would we miss them? What is a man, even, and how much, if at all, does gender determine our identity? How far would we be prepared to sacrifice the safety of others in pursuit of our own desires?
The Men is that rare thing, a novel of ideas that pays equal attention to language, character and form. The eerie surrealism of the video sequences generates a sense of mystery and foreboding that is impossible to shake; like the women permanently hunched in front of their screens, we find it impossible to look away, even as the scenes turn darker and increasingly violent. The raw intelligence of this book, its brutal honesty makes The Men a bracing antidote to the more anodyne brand of supposedly political SF that in reality is little more than crowd-pleasing. Newman handles questions of politics, gender, race and philosophy with skill and compassion without succumbing to the platitudes of fashionable discourse or the temptation of providing comfortable answers.
And she can write. At a sentence level, Newman’s prose is fiery, passionate, poetical – in short, a joy. If science fiction’s core directive is to provoke, to interrogate established assumptions, most of all to re-imagine then it is writers like Newman that prove that science fiction as a mode of literature still has a future.
