When earlier in the week I read Johanna Thomas-Corr’s excellent review in the Guardian of Maria Gainza’s new novel Portrait of an Unknown Lady, I was reminded that I never had caught up with Gainza’s first novel Optic Nerve, published in its original Spanish in 2014 and then latterly in an English translation by Thomas Bunstead in 2019. I remember reading reviews of it, noting it down in my ever-expanding ‘of interest’ file. I even remember, quite clearly, holding a copy of the book in my hand. I was in a big Waterstones somewhere – either Chris or I, I cannot recall now which of us it was, had been asked to come in and sign some books. I remember trying to decide between Optic Nerve and Laura Cuming’s elegantly articulated memoir On Chapel Sands, both books, coincidentally, with a central focus on art.
In the end I chose the Cuming, promising myself I would acquire the Gainza at a later date. But I never did. That morning, its details blurry, feels far away, on the other side of an unspeakable divide, with those books two of the sparsely connecting threads between then and now. Reading Thomas-Corr’s admiring retrospective words about Optic Nerve, I experienced a sudden and intense hunger for it, for that book precisely, no other would do. Not even wanting to wait the time it would take to arrive in physical form, I downloaded it in e-format and started to read it more or less immediately.
Novels by nearest and dearest aside, Maria Gainza’s Optic Nerve – or so it feels to me in this moment – is the most beautiful book I have ever read. ‘It was clear that Gainza, like British authors Rachel Cusk and Claire-Louise Bennett, was opening up new possibilities for the novel as a place of freedom,’ Thomas-Corr writes in her review, ‘where you could blend fiction, memoir, art history and anecdote. She immediately felt like a thrilling discovery.’ I agree with this totally. I agree also with her additional claim that Gainza’s fiction actually ‘has more in common with Roberto Bolaño’s, with its themes of art and infamy, craft and theft.’ There is, as Thomas-Corr maintains, a Bolano-esque depth of field to her ‘stories within stories, each with its own melancholy mood and unsolvable mystery.’
And there is something more, something still greater, a quality of emotional admission, of inclusivity and of risk-taking, of personal involvement – of vulnerability even – that reminds me of the stories and writing of Mariana Enriquez, a passion that dares to reveal, to expose the self in a way that others have not, and that includes myself.
I can say only that I am thinking on this, wondering and struggling with how to address it. I am getting to know the paintings Gainza writes about in Optic Nerve, studying them in detail, reliving the moments of their discovery through the filter of Gainza’s tapestried language, of a knowledge profoundly felt and acutely described.
I am saving Maria Gainza’s new book for the moment, as something to look forward to. To cherish and to rejoice in. We need voices like these, above all, voices that remind us of all that life and art can be and what it is for.
A book such as Julian’s was far more palatable. It always surprised him, how people lapped it up, extremity, how eager they were to consume what lay far outside the compass of their own experience, their relish for it if anything increased by the absence of the very thing, he, Louis, was abjured for removing – the screen of fiction. People believed that Julian didn’t need to make things up because the extremity of his experiences was such that it released him from that obligation.
Working on my current manuscript, I have been thinking a great deal about the weight we attach to ‘true’ narratives, and how objective truth might be said to differ from experiential truth.
If I say: ‘This happened to me’, is that enough to prove that it really did?
Since 2016, our experience of the world has become fragmentary and unstable, no longer measured in years, but in seasons, weeks and days. As a writer I feel I have become less capable and less desirous of constructing grand illusions. I have instead become obsessed with small details, with exploring the imaginative potential in day-by-day, sometimes minute-by-minute experience, with tracking the potential answers to the question: what really happened? My growing interest in true-crime narratives is both a response to and a driver of this. And precisely because much of the drama of such narratives lies in the mundane.
‘I don’t really believe in character,’ says Rachel Cusk in a recent podcast conversation with Sheila Heti, ‘I believe in moments of truth.’ In the second instalment of her Outline trilogy, Cusk demonstrates how the quotidian, when fully inhabited, can spiral outwards into a poetic hyperrealism, into the fire of language. How daily reality is never banal, but rather the greyish-brown outer crust of the entire luminosity of existence. The dinner party that forms the climax of the novel is, in its own subversive way, as revelatory and as disturbing as the family get-together that forms the subject of Thomas Vinterberg’s seminal 1998 movie Festen. Reading this book, in which ostensibly dull things happen in such a way as to make them seem life-defining, is to see reality, elusive as the leopard, changing its spots before our eyes.
Cusk’s writing truly is superlative. She has not only raised the bar for British literary fiction, she has opened up a new arena for the discussion and contemplation of what fiction is, and how it works.
*
Meanwhile and elsewhere, this marvellous essay by Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky articulates brilliantly the shock, terror and heartbreak of these anxious days.
Although she has pulled away from the self-destructive behaviour patterns of her early twenties, Charlotte has not yet discovered her true direction in life. She is at that awkward stage: filling in time, working as a barista and waiting for something to happen. When a once-beloved childhood friend gets back in contact suddenly, Charlotte is cautious about renewing the relationship. Danielle was important to her – as close as a sister – but when she lost herself in heroin addiction, Charlotte felt forced to distance herself. When she meets up with Danielle for a drink, she begins to feel more hopeful. Her friend has finally kicked the heroin, and seems in a much better place generally. Could be things have changed for the better, after all.
But less than a week later, Danielle is found brutally murdered in a motel room. Charlotte is shattered. She cannot help asking herself if she might have triggered something – if Danielle’s murder might in some mysterious way be her fault. As the police investigation gets underway, Charlotte wonders who stood to profit by her friend’s death: her estranged mother, Sally, her pornographer boyfriend, Brandon, or someone else entirely, someone from the past Charlotte doesn’t even know about. Her friend’s death has raised demons – not least her own grief. And as with any mystery, there are some questions it might be better not to learn the answers to.
Melissa Ginsburg is a published poet, and her awareness and love of language is a defining feature of this, her first novel, an economical and neatly wrought piece of Texas noir from 2016. As fully befits more modern iterations of the genre, she has some fun reversing and reinventing classic noir conventions: men, for the most part, take secondary roles. Centre stage belongs to the women, and so do the drug and alcohol problems. There is a detective – the suitably rugged and likeable Ash – but he always seems to be one step behind the action, as Charlotte’s deeper, sometimes disturbingly intimate knowledge of the suspects in this case bring her closer both to the truth and to personal danger.
The action I would describe as intense rather than fast-paced, although there are moments of violence and genuine tension, and enough surprises to keep trad noir fans happy. The plot is well thought out, coming together in a way that is satisfying and without any of the eleventh-hour stupidity that so vexes me in generic crime fiction. I warmed to these characters, even when I found myself completely at odds with what they were doing – and that is entirely down to Ginsburg’s skill in characterisation, her obvious sympathy with the situations she is describing. Above all I would praise her sense of place. As in all the greatest noir, this is a novel of the city – of urban grime, debauched glamour and moral ambivalence, and if Sunset City belongs to anyone it is to Houston, Texas. Ginsburg finds poetry in the most mundane of subject matter, in small details and moments and sensory impressions lesser writers might skip over or simply not notice.
A short book, but an impressive one, and in spite of the horror at its heart, moving and humane.
I
feel I’ve been lucky with Hanya Yanagihara, in that I happen to have read her
in the right order. When I first started to hear about her debut novel The
People in the Trees, it was a book few people seemed to have come across, let
alone read. I went into it with no preconceptions – and came away mesmerised. I
would still count that novel – a hard-hitting, tightly-wrought, highly
individual and sometimes contentious piece of speculative eco-fiction – as a
steel-bright masterpiece, the kind of confident, original writing not often
encountered in a debut and that leaves you both eager and impatient to see
where the author will go next.
Where
Yanagihara went next, of course, was A Little Life, that steaming juggernaut of
a novel that for bizarre reasons of its own became that year’s literary
sensation and is still one of the most divisive books of the decade. I
rollocked through A Little Life; I found the story unputdownable, even though I
never entirely saw the point of it, how it made sense as a follow-up to The
People in the Trees. And I worried about Yanagihara as a writer. When a book is
that successful, it can have a detrimental effect on a career, bending it so
badly out of shape, leaving so little privacy or room for future experiment,
that it is sometimes impossible for the writer to fully recover.
There was a part of me that wondered if we would hear from her again, and so when I learned, sometime last year, that her third novel was imminent I felt both delighted – she was back after all! – and intrigued. What were we going to get this time, and how were the Fanyagiharas going to react to it? I knew going in that the book was speculative, which excited me; I knew also that To Paradise was bound to be one of the literary ‘big beasts’ of 2022, which excited me in spite of myself. As another 800-pager, would it be worth my reading time, and how could it possibly live up to the hype that was already erupting?
The
answer is yes, and yes. Just hours after finishing To Paradise, I find myself
in mourning for it, a book that gave me for the first time in a long time that
kind of reading experience one remembers from childhood: the sense of living
inside a world, of being on a journey with characters who will continue to
journey with you for the rest of your life. More than that, though, one could
argue that To Paradise is not so much book of the year as book of this year, that it belongs precisely and
inimitably to now, that it is an important piece of political fiction that will
remain as a guiding landmark in the literary landscape.
I
loved this book, which thrilled me and made me feel vindicated and left me
fearful for our future. It also helped me to understand where A Little Life
fits into the scheme of things, Yanagihara-wise, how her literary project
appears to be unfolding. In terms of her craft, where Yanagihara excels most is
in her storytelling, a fluidly compelling, deceptively easy style that keeps
her thousands of readers turning pages even when the narrative brings up
difficult subject matter and draws ambiguous conclusions. Such was the mass
appeal of A Little Life; To Paradise is equally readable but I would say
meatier and more challenging, even as it demonstrates how Yanagihara’s works are
not just great stories, they are about story.
*
There
are plenty of synopses of To Paradise available online, so I will refrain from rehashing
the plot here, except to say that the novel is divided into three ‘Books’, the
first set in 1893, the second in 1993, and the third Book, which occupies half
the novel’s page count, is a split narrative, alternating between the book’s
end-point in 2093 and decreasing intervals from fifty years before that. Much
has been made of Yanagihara’s use of names in To Paradise, with some readers
enjoying the repeated appearances of the same set of names throughout the three
parts of the book, with others finding the device confusing, pointless,
pretentious or all three.
Names
have always held immense significance for me in my own fiction, and as a writer
who has previously made use of devices not dissimilar to Yanagihara’s, I find
her latticework of repeating names affecting, powerful and structurally
significant, an anchoring weight that helps to give the sprawling, multiple
timelines shape and direction, and offers the reader a guiding light on their
way through the story.
As
a fuller and more detailed explanation of what Yanagihara is doing, I find a
musical analogy works best: think of To Paradise as a symphony, and the
repeating names and situations as musical subjects and leitmotifs, and her purpose
becomes instantly clear. The first movement, 1893, is an exercise in classic sonata
form, a propulsive allegro, strongly melodic and in a minor key. With its
clearly articulated conflicts, reversals and sense of jeopardy it appeals instantly
to our emotions. In this section we meet our three dominant melodic subjects, ‘David
Bingham’, ‘Charles Griffith’, and ‘Edward Bishop’, alongside their secondary
subjects and recurring leitmotifs, ‘Peter’, ‘Eden’, ‘Adams’, ‘Nathaniel’ and
others. We learn how David is an outsider, prone to mental illness and a sense
of alienation, how he is guided towards an anchoring stability in the form of
Charles, how his own passionate desires propel him towards uncertainty and possible
disaster in the form of Edward. As a background continuo we have a pandemic,
and the theme of the house, of Washington Square, an enveloping, grounding
presence that is also a cage.
The central movement’s twin elegies are stories of farewell, the first a ballet in which David vacillates between safe, rich Charles and his penniless but beautiful servant, the second is a lament, a letter written by the ghost of David’s troubled father. The extended final movement has alternating first and second subjects that gradually become interleaved in a mighty fugue. In this complex finale, we encounter leitmotifs familiar from the previous movements. As in a symphony, this accumulation of themes, our sense of recognition as we re-encounter them works to intensify our experience, reminding us of what has gone before and why it matters to us, which themes and persons are of greatest significance to the composer. The effect is magnificent, unified, cathartic.
Reading
To Paradise bears comparison with listening to Wagner, in that anything
approaching true understanding can only be encompassed by making the whole journey,
by seeing the thing through to its end, and that is part of its joy. Before
starting out, I had seen Book One described as Jamesian – its title, Washington
Square, is a pretty major clue – and so while I found Yanagihara’s storytelling
as addictive as ever, I could not avoid a feeling of disappointment either. Although
I could see where readers were coming from in their comparisons with Henry James
and Edith Wharton, the prose felt too smooth, too directed, too easily
consumable, more James-pastiche than true Master, too much like a fairy tale. As
with A Little Life, I was struggling to see the point. It is not until some
hundreds of pages later, and the feather-light recapitulation in Book Three,
that it becomes obvious that this atmosphere of fairy tale is no accident, that
this has been Yanagihara’s secret intention all along.
In
Yanagihara’s 2093, the US has become a kind of simulacrum of North Korea: while
elements of community, friendship, humanity and even pleasure remain, life as
we know it has become heavily circumscribed. The idea of individual choice has
become eroded, opportunities for self-expression are negligible to nil. In such
an atmosphere of oppression, the role of the Storytellers – in a world where
books are forbidden, those who used to be writers are allowed a limited outlet
through the oral tradition – becomes doubly important, the idea of story itself
as an agent for change takes on a new intensity,
That
some commentators have complained that the ‘letters’ within the text do not
read like real letters, that the repetition of names and situations is an
artificial construct seems like a red herring to me, an ignoring of the fact that
all novels and stories are constructs, and that the idea of literary verisimilitude
is a construct also. Yanagihara is not trying to write like Henry James – to write
like James is not simply a matter of aping a style, but of feeling the weight
of opinion and tacit knowledge and the relationship to history that comes with
having lived through James’s time. For us, now, ‘writing like James’ can never
be anything more than an act of ventriloquism. What Yanagihara does in Book One
is to tell a story; Yanagihara’s
Washington Square is not a serious attempt to replicate James’s approach, but a
nod towards a form. Wika’s letter in Book Two cannot exist, because Wika is
dead, but within the house of cards that all novels are, how can that matter?
As with the Storytellers in Washington Square Park in Book Three, we should not
expect ‘facts’ from Yanagihara, so much as emotional truth.
*
What
makes To Paradise important as political fiction is that in this time of huge
uncertainties, Yanagihara is brave enough and independent-minded enough to take
on massive questions without feeling the need to provide easy or comfortable
answers. Whether within the context of an oppressive class structure, the toxic
legacy of colonialism or the dangerous malleability of scientific fact, what
Yanagihara is most concerned with is our propensity to ignore an empirical
truth in favour of jumping on a community bandwagon, our preference for
judgement as opposed to analysis, our championing of a strident black-and-white
argument over the more muted shades of grey in which reality manifests.
Book
Three of To Paradise contains some of the most pointedly urgent and questioning
analysis of our current reality that has so far appeared, a depiction of a
world teetering on the brink of multiple catastrophes, spurred on by ill luck,
bad judgement and conflicting interests. There are doubtless many more novels
still in progress that attempt to deal with the questions arising from the COVID-19
pandemic, to depict its corrosive material and intellectual effects on the
world we inhabit, but I am going to stick my neck out and say that To Paradise
will hold its ground, that it will come to be seen as an era-defining novel,
not because it is realistic in the way a nineteenth-century novel is deemed to
be realistic – it is not trying to be – but because of the risks it takes,
because the questions it dares to ask will still seem relevant.
As with all great novels, To Paradise is important because of the way in which it uses the particular to illuminate the universal, the times to reveal the timeless; in her endlessly circling reiterations, her multiplicity of time frames, Yanagihara shows how much of the terror and frustration of history is enshrined in the fact that it is all but impossible for one generation to learn from another, how in order to progress, each needs to experience for themselves how the world is, all too often with disastrous results. Seeing the timelines converge in Book Three, watching as the characters move from living a life we ourselves would recognise towards a darker state of being entirely, I felt an aching sadness, all of the time, and that feeling of living through a before-times, as we are ourselves.
‘If you did kill him,’ she said in a whisper, ‘and
if someone else found him that night – they might have been afraid to report
it. Don’t you think? Some people are like that. They’d rather walk away – or
push the body into a canal.’ Her brows trembled.
Everybody would rather walk away, Ray thought.
*
Trust me to begin this challenge with the last item on the list! This was actually a re-read, so I might feel tempted to double up on this category later in the year with something entirely new. But revisiting Highsmith is always a joy and always time well spent.
Patricia
Highsmith is routinely described as a crime writer, a label she herself found
irksome as she disliked being categorised – she thought of her books simply as
novels, and did not see the need or point of allocating them to a particular
genre. Given Highsmith’s genius for writing crime novels in which no crime
takes place, her ambivalence around the term is understandable.
There
are some very nasty murders in Highsmith; equally, there are books of hers in
which the shadow of murder hangs like the sword of Damocles over the entire
proceedings without ever falling. This seeming unwillingness to commit herself
wholeheartedly to the traditional form of the thriller, in which a crime is
committed, generating situational or moral chaos before eventually being
resolved, preferably with the villain getting their deserved comeuppance, did
not endear her to her American editors. In Europe, the interior, almost
philosophical nature of her novels has ensured for her work a popularity that
extends far beyond the Ripley novels and Strangers on a Train.
I
return to Highsmith’s books again and again because they offer a radically
different interpretation of what is meant by crime fiction. Her novels offer us
questions with no firm answers: if we can read crime novel knowing from the
outset that no crime takes place, what exactly is it that we are responding to?
And what are the particular properties that make crime fiction so compelling?
In
Those Who Walk Away, Rayburn Garrett is a young art dealer whose wife, Peggy,
has recently committed suicide. Ray is distraught at her death, and plagued by
an unfocused sense of guilt that he should have been able to foresee what was
coming, and did not. Peggy’s father Ed Coleman has no doubt that Ray is to
blame – he considers him feckless, charmless and insensitive, and the more he
dwells on his daughter’s death, the more his grief becomes tangled up with his
obsessive and irrational hatred for his indolent son-in-law.
After
making a half-hearted, one might almost say experimental attempt on Ray’s life
in Rome, Coleman heads for Venice with his current mistress Inez and an
entourage of hangers-on. Inez pleads with Ray that he should not try to see
Coleman, that he is not in a state of mind to listen to reason. Ray promises
her he will leave Venice without speaking to him, then does the exact opposite.
What plays out over the next fortnight or so is a kind of duel, a chase in slow
motion through the wintry streets of a city bedding down for the off-season. There
are acts of violence, but none of them prove fatal. There are acts of
deception, but in true Highsmithian fashion these are wilful and ultimately
pointless. The moments of highest tension are generated from brief sightings in
a busy street, inconclusive phone calls, the imagined repercussions of a
confrontation that never plays out.
Part
of the magic for me during this reread was being able to keep track of Ray and
Coleman via Google Streetview. When I first read Those Who Walk Away, which
must have been about twenty years ago, there was no such thing. Still, I
remember being entranced by Highsmith’s portrait of Venice, which is
unsentimental to the point of being mundane. Her writing reveals the city’s
split identity, its humdrum aspect, which might never become apparent to those
who come as tourists.
Highsmith
knew Venice well but had something of an on-off relationship with the place.
Her descriptions leave us in no doubt of the city’s beauty as it is perceived
by its millions of visitors, but they make us aware also of the ways in which
for those who live there, Venice is entirely ordinary. Highsmith’s Venice is a
city where working people go to and from their jobs, where small, backstreet
cafes have their regular morning clientele, where grievances are settled behind
closed doors and minor corruption flourishes. Bad weather settles in for days.
Unwary Americans shiver in unheated lodgings. Life goes on.
As
Coleman and Ray pursue each other through the less frequented backstreets, I
found myself checking their locations online, compelled to glimpse something of
what they might have seen, not just the thronged and glittering quaysides of
Zattere and Schiavoni but also the plainer, less frequented back lots and
alleyways of Chioggia and Giudecca, where Ray and Coleman alternately take
refuge in the homes of ordinary Venetians.
And
of course I fell more in love with the myth of Venice than ever, of course I’m
all the more determined to finally visit, once travel becomes less insane. I
shall go in the off season, when it’s chilly and when, or so I understand,
there are marginally fewer people. I want to sit in a cafe and read, in an
unknown little square somewhere. I want to reread Invisible Cities, and think
about Ray spinning falsehoods to Elisabetta and finding he cannot bear to leave
the city until he has settled the business of Coleman once and for all…
Early
on in the narrative, Ray buys a silk scarf he happens to notice in a shop
window because it seems so exactly like the kind of scarf his wife Peggy might
have owned and treasured. A chapter or two later, Coleman notices the scarf,
which Ray has pulled out of his pocket by accident, and demands Ray hand it
over. He immediately assumes that it is Peggy’s, and that as such he has a
right to it. Ray feels aggrieved and affronted whilst at the same time
nurturing a feeling of vindicated spite: the scarf isn’t Peggy’s, so more fool
Coleman. This scarf becomes a symbolic stand-in for the acts of duplicity, of
mistaken-ness, for the unprovable lies that criss-cross the narrative. It might
also be taken as a cipher for the novel’s most notable absence, that is, Peggy
herself.
I
don’t just mean that Peggy is dead before the novel opens – we never actually
get to meet her as a living person. What comes across still more strongly is
the fact that neither of these men who are purportedly fighting over her –
locking horns like stags, the old king and the venal upstart – would seem to
have the slightest clue about who she really was or what she was like.
Both
Coleman and Ray go along with and contribute to the received opinion about
Peggy, that she was ‘unworldly’, idealistic, more child than woman, that she
was somehow ‘disappointed’ by the reality of life and so decided to end it. Her presence flickers at the corner of our
consciousness, barely seen, ghostly, not just because she is dead but because no
one seemed to pay her sufficient attention when she was alive.
We
know that like her father she was a talented artist – but neither Ray nor
Coleman seems much interested in why she more or less gave up painting in the
months before her death. Coleman’s grief comes across mostly as the
inarticulate, violent rage of a man rudely divested of a valuable possession.
As for Ray, he seems mostly to have forgotten Peggy, to have reduced her to an
idea, a pretty silk scarf. The conflict he engineers with Coleman is far more
interesting to him, far more vital.
As
with every duel ever fought, this was never about the woman. It’s a
dick-measuring contest. I would love to know if Highsmith herself saw it that
way, though I suspect not. Men like Coleman and Ray fascinated her in and of
themselves for the curious nullity, the restless dissatisfaction at the heart
of their obsessions.
As
a writer, I feel there is so much I can learn from Highsmith. Again and again
she delivers books in which craft and art are in symbiosis, perfectly weighted
and working as one. Her writing is never showy – there is a pared-back,
less-is-more quality to it that nonetheless has an element of refinement and
literary knowingness that is woefully absent from much of today’s ultra-slick
thriller writing.
The
landscape of her books – street scene, social milieu and most of all the
atmosphere of certain bars, restaurants, hotels, resorts and apartment
buildings – is memorably evocative. Rather than relying on hectic and unconvincing
circumstantial twists, the drama of her peculiar plots is rendered more or less
entirely through the medium of character.
There
is no trickery, no formal fireworks. The stories Highsmith tells appear to be
simple, even uneventful. Yet there is something, a perplexing oddity, a fierce
beauty that makes them both readable and memorable. You may not always get a
murder but Highsmith has a way of highlighting the strangeness at the heart of
normality that might make you imagine a murder where none has taken place.
That’s how it is at the end of Those Who Walk Away. We don’t really have a clue
what Coleman and Garrett are going to do next, whether they’ll never see each
other again, as each insists, or whether their bizarre duel is going to
continue until one of them dies.
2021 is a difficult year to describe. 2020 felt fraught, urgent, dangerous and tense. 2021 has felt more nebulous, more fractured, characterised by uncertainty and an increasing sense of restlessness. In terms of personal achievement, I delivered a new manuscript, a book that for me feels very much like the product of 2020, seamed and studded with all the furious contradictions that year brought but referenced obliquely rather than colliding with them head-on. It’s a novel I’m hugely proud of, and one I look forward to sharing with you in 2023.
In the months since completing that book, I have begun inching my way towards the next work, a transition that has felt more complex and troublesome even than usual. The times we are living through throw up searching questions; as a writer, it does not seem altogether surprising if those questions end up being framed around the process of writing, not just the how but the what and the why. There is never any doubt in my mind that writing – art – has value, that whatever trauma is being addressed, the practice of reflection and analysis, of creative re-imagining inherent to all art is intrinsic to the experience of being human.
Such knowledge should not prevent us from being robust in our seeking out of our own best practice. I count myself fortunate in that this period of not-knowing – familiar in its outline, yet different in its particular details every time – has always felt energising to me. I never quite know how I will come out of it, or what will result. If I can feel certain of anything, through this time as all times, it is the joy I find in the power and the talent of other writers. Discovering new works, new directions, new attitudes, visions and modes of expression – the excitement and the gratitude never lessens.
By this same time last year, the document on my hard drive entitled ‘Books 2021’ was already filling up with upcoming works of fiction and non-fiction I was eager to read. Many of them were books whose publication dates had been postponed, pushed over from 2020 into 2021 in the hope that by the time they were released, in-person events and book festivals would be happening again. This turned out not to be the case, and on the far side of 2021, I cannot help noticing that the number of books on my ‘Books 2022’ list is considerably smaller. There is a sense of uncertainty affecting all of us: what shall we be reading, what shall we be writing? There is an eerie sort of silence.
Here also, there is opportunity. Not knowing – feeling less sure of what I’m going to be reading leaves more space for new discoveries. It also leaves space for me to go back and read more of the books I did not manage to get to in 2021. A year of regrouping, maybe. A year of finding out what is important.
I enjoy reading challenges because they give my reading a focus. This can be especially valuable if the challenge is related in some way to a problem or question that has a bearing on my work in progress. I also enjoy reading challenges because they provide me with a framework for talking to readers. With all of this in mind, I have created my own crime reading challenge for 2022. As regular readers of this blog will know by now, I am always on the lookout for original, challenging and imaginative approaches to genre archetypes, with the mystery archetype foremost among them. For pure reading pleasure, there’s nothing to beat a mystery. There is also no stronger template for withstanding the often punitive process of literary experiment.
I have created thirty prompts, some of them leaning heavily towards my particular interests, others designed to take me into less familiar territory. Thirty seems like a good number – big enough to make the challenge interesting, not so huge that it becomes burdensome, squeezing out all other reading. The individual challenges can be completed in any order, and can be based around any aspect of crime writing: fiction, true crime, journalism, history or memoir can be considered and included for any of the prompts. I am hoping to have completed and blogged all thirty by the end of the year. Here are the prompts. Let’s see how we get on:
Published in 2022
By a debut author
Translated from the French
Translated from the German
Translated from the Italian
Translated from the Spanish
Translated from the Japanese
Set in South America
Nordic
Set in Australia
By an author based on the African continent
By an African-American author
Historical mystery
Experimental published since 2000
Experimental published before 1980
Published by an independent press
Classic noir
Neo noir
Golden Age
Nineteenth Century
Published before World War 2
By a Scottish author
Legal thriller
Financial or military
With a speculative element
Award-winning
Has been adapted for the screen
Woman detective
Based on real events
Any crime but murder
I have some ideas already for how I might fill some of the categories, books I have been wanting to read for a while and now have the perfect incentive to tackle. Others I have not yet started to think about. Mainly I am hoping to be surprised. Surprised and inspired. Here’s hoping we can all find something of the same in 2022.
Another strange year leading to another winter solstice, a moment of hiatus in which I unerringly find it helpful and cheering and fascinating to look back upon the books I have read in the past twelve months. I didn’t have a particular reading project or structure in mind through most of 2021, which is probably why I feel driven to set myself a new challenge for 2022, but more on that in the next post. That being said, the books I have felt most drawn to this year do seem to have grouped themselves into two distinct categories: true crime and crime-ish fiction, and a broad swathe of novels that might loosely be defined as autofiction and autofiction-inflected. The reasons for this, I suspect, have to do with my current work in progress and my evolving interests as a writer.
But first, the outliers. The best two novels of speculative fiction I read in 2021 were firstly The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, a huge, brave, questing book that gathers you into its mystery and won’t let go. This is philosophical science fiction at its most committed and complex, a book that stretches the possibilities of the form and reminds us of what science fiction is actually capable of. It’s so beautifully written, a landmark novel that should be talked about more than it is. Second comes Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, which I was thrilled to see take the Women’s Prize for Fiction earlier this year. It is the timelessness of Piranesi that most impresses, the sense that this novel has existed for a long time and will continue to endure. It is written with a pure mastery of form and content that comes only with time and experience, with long hours of sitting with an idea, patiently exploring its corridors, finding out its secret chambers, honing the language of its expression to a lustrous shine. Thank you, Susanna Clarke, for this beautiful gift, and for adding to the pantheon of fantasy literature such a peerless pearl.
I encountered two similarly enthralling pieces of historical writing in 2021; both happen to be by German authors. First comes Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann (English translation by Ross Benjamin), an audacious picaresque set during the Thirty Years’ War and loosely following the career of Till Eulenspiegel, the legendary jester and chaos-bringer who may or may not have existed as a real person. Each of Kehlmann’s books is a law unto itself, yet remains indisputably, indivisibly his. You never know from one novel to the next what you’re going to get from him – only that it will be brilliant, and memorable, and inspired. Tyll is a masterclass in revealing how the mundane world can be rendered fantastic, how starkly the present can be illuminated by the past. Goodness knows how, but this book about a brutal conflict that proved disastrous for the whole of Europe also manages to be funny.
Horst Krüger’s searing Bildungsroman The Broken House was originally published in Germany in 1966 and now appears for the first time in English translation (by Shaun Whiteside). The Broken House is a work of creative nonfiction that deals with the author’s experience growing up in Nazi Germany, and the impact of such a childhood on the rest of his life. This is a brilliant book, a masterpiece of economy, precision and passion, of the deployment of language in the structure of resistance. The unflinching clarity of Krüger’s vision, his hunger for truth and above all for the truth of art offer reflection and a warning for our own troubled times.
Of the crime books I read, those that made the deepest impression were firstly The Treatment by Michael Nath, a fictional reimagining of the circumstances and personalities involved in the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry and its seismic aftermath. The scope of this book is huge; the language, which gives knowing and erudite nods to the revenge tragedies of Marlowe and Webster, is scintillating and a thing of wonder. I continue to feel a genuine bewilderment, that a novel of this calibre should escape award notice. I would also need to mention Beyond Belief by Emlyn Williams, an imaginative chronicle of the Moors Murders that is as tensely compelling as it is devastating, a direct precursor of the documentary crime writing of Gordon Burn and David Peace. Beyond Belief was a best-seller when it was first published in 1967, yet it is rarely spoken of now, a bemusing oversight that needs to be remedied.
In 2021 I found myself both delighted and inspired by autofiction. Along with everyone else I read and enjoyed Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler, No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood and Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett. I also fell in love with two older works of autofiction, The Lover by Marguerite Duras and Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux. Of particular note for me, however, were two works that see their authors go a step further in what they choose to do with their material, setting their own experiences in direct counterpoint with the language or literature of another. My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jen Shapland is a both a personal and biographical exploration of a classic writer by her literary descendant. I fell for this book, and for Carson and Mary’s story, hook, line and sinker. Shapland has written something important, not only about McCullers, but also about women writers and queer writers and the ways in which they have so often been denied or erased. I am doubly interested by her project because of what it says and proves about the ways of writing (auto)biography, the freeing of a subject through allowing her the space to step forward and reveal her own truths. I loved this book and I actually think that for this one time only Rachel Cooke, a reviewer and critic I admire tremendously, missed the point.
I also loved Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton, a work of memoir exploring the author’s spiritual love affair with Japan, her real-life affair with a Japanese man, and her experience of learning to be a translator of the Japanese language. As someone who has felt a similar sense of personal identification with both the German and Russian language and people, I found this book resonant, moving, revealing and exquisitely felt. Barton’s examination of language as a transformative experience, almost as a physical substance, is so personal and so brilliant. I’d read this book again in a heartbeat and will be seeking out Barton’s translations as a matter of priority.
I found much delight in a tranche of novels that begin with the feel of lived experience but swerve off into the wilder and more elusive terrain of fiction. Early in the year I experienced the weird synchronicity of reading Olivia Sudjic’s Asylum Road and Jakuta Alikavazovich’s Night As it Falls (translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman) back to back. Both novels feature protagonists dealing with the fallout from the war in the former Yugoslavia; both examine themes of alienation, family, the failure of intimacy and the trauma of war on future generations. For novels that could be twin sisters in terms of their subject matter, they are each strikingly, almost unnervingly different in terms of how they express themselves, the emotional restraint and tightly honed language of the Sudjic sitting in stark contrast with the fraught, hallucinatory vision of the Alikavazovich. Both are equally superb. I also loved LOTE by Shola von Rheinhold, an experimental novel of huge power, originality and humour that calls into question the elision of black artists and writers from the history of modernism. Whilst it would not be altogether inaccurate to describe LOTE as a black Secret History, this novel truly is unlike anything I’ve read before and I can’t wait to see what von Rheinhold comes up with next.
Top billing in the not-autofiction category though goes jointly to My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley and Intimacies by Katie Kitamura. I cannot praise highly enough Riley’s precision and observational skill, her merciless portrayal of what it is like to be a writer who comes from a non-literary background, the eternally sparring forces of guilt and entrapment. The sequence when the father takes his daughters to a Chekhov play is magisterial, and resonated so starkly I had to laugh out loud. Riley is rapidly becoming a favourite author for me, one whose work offers a piercingly accurate portrait of a Britain I feel I’ve inhabited all my life, one whose novels will be read and analysed for many decades to come. Meanwhile, Kitamura’s Intimacies is a profound and searching novel about truth and lies, confrontation and evasion, freedom and commitment. The different forms of intimacy – some distasteful and corrosive, others life-sustaining – are explored amidst a web of changing perspectives and realities that shades towards the hyper-real. The tiny elements of detective fiction put me joyfully in mind of Kitamura’s previous novel A Separation, and play right into my particular area of interest. A beautiful piece of work, which I loved exactly as much as I hoped I would.
Whatever else it has been, in terms of its reading material 2021 has proved fascinating, challenging and varied. I feel I’ve learned a lot, that I might even be making progress. I want to take the opportunity to wish all of you who read this blog a wonderful Christmas, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing. Be safe, be well, and be of good heart.
A tad late for Hallowe’en, but if you’re looking for a new ghost story to read I can thoroughly recommend Alison Moore’s new novel The Retreat. Moore is an extraordinarily good writer. Each of her five novels to date has been in its own way perfect: not a dud sentence in sight and with the slowly brewing tension deliberately understated. Moore sees no need for shocks or histrionics or forced affect in her work – her deft, spare handling of language, her facility for creating weird situations, above all her intense yet utterly realistic evocation of character are more than sufficient for creating a unique body of work for which ‘unhallowed’ might turn out to be the defining adjective.
Her latest concerns an artists’ retreat, a rather uncomfortable house on a somewhat inaccessible island. Once you’re there it’s difficult to leave without making a scene, without deliberately setting yourself in opposition to your fellows, which is the last thing you want to be seen doing when you’re supposed to be forging a mutually supportive atmosphere of communal creativity. Sandra, a rather disappointed painter, finds her experience of the island falling far short of her expectations. Carol, a novelist in search of sanctuary, finds the ghosts becoming actively beneficial to her work in progress. Who gets out alive? Moore will keep you guessing until the very last page. I loved this book, which is effective and disturbing to a far more potent degree than any number of more deliberate or dramatic haunted house stories. The only problem with being a Moore fan is that the moment you’ve finished reading one of her novels you’re already looking forward to the next – and Moore, to her credit, is a writer who is prepared to give her books all the time they need to come into being.
Another November miracle comes in the form of Sarah Hall’s new novel Burntcoat. Like The Retreat, Burntcoat is sparse, economical and intense, carrying more emotional weight and resonance than you might expect to find in novels twice its length. Here we follow Edith, a sculptor who has found fame but at an immense cost, whose narrative is conducted during what we understand to be the final weeks of her foreshortened life. Edith’s background is traumatic – her mother Naomi, a writer, experiences a dramatic personality change following a brain haemorrhage when Edith is young. Yet still she drags herself back to life, relearning not only her passion to make art, but also her ability to adequately love and care for her daughter. It is Edith’s relationship with Naomi, as much as her all-consuming love affair with a refugee chef named Halit, which forms the armature of this novel, which in essence is a book about how love transforms us, and what real love means.
Burntcoat takes place against the background of a pandemic. The world is swept by a disease still more deadly than COVID, and with still more destructive implications both for individuals and for society. This is a harrowing firestorm of a book, and as a commentary on what we are currently experiencing, what it costs us to live through such a crisis, I cannot imagine many better ones coming along. As someone who has read most everything Hall has written, I would count Burntcoat as her crowning achievement to date.
Again, I can scarcely wait to see what she has planned for us next. Reading writers this good is always something of a game-changer, an electrical shock to the head, a reminder that the work of art is always worth the effort.
Earlier this summer I had the great joy and privilege of creating a piece of work based around an interview with the disaster risk engineer Josh Macabuag. The resulting story, ‘Forces and Loads’, is now live as part of the Inventive podcast initiative from the University of Salford, which places writers together in creative collaboration with workers in STEM.
I found Joshua’s interview and the insights it gave me into his work to be instantly inspiring, and I hope I have conveyed some sense of the power of his story through my own interpretation of it. ‘Forces and Loads’ runs in Episode 2 of the second series of Inventive, and you can listen to that episode here.
I am hugely grateful to Anna Scott-Brown and Adam Fowler of Overtone Productions for their help and expertise in making the experience so enjoyable and of course to Josh himself for allowing me an insight into his world. As I say in my own portion of the interview, I found enough material here for an entire novel and ‘Forces and Loads’ is a story I might well find myself revisiting in the future.
A couple of weeks ago I had the great pleasure of talking with writer and folklore enthusiast Mark Norman, the creator and host of the very excellent Folklore Podcast. We had a wonderful conversation about The Good Neighbours, diving deep into the original inspiration behind the novel and the long tradition of fairy folklore within literature. The opportunity to talk about this aspect of the book with someone so deeply attuned to it was especially welcome, and if you’d like to find out more you can listen to the episode here. While you’re at it, you might also want to check out the wealth of resources available at The Folklore Network, including all previous episodes of the podcast. It’s an inspiration.
Talking of which, now seems like an excellent time to give a shout-out to Mark’s latest book, Dark Folklore. Written together with folklore historian and playwright Tracey Norman, this book is an exploration of the more sinister side of folklore and looks like an absolute must for anyone interested in folk horror, either from a reader’s or writer’s perspective. You can buy the book here.
