I’m very happy today. I’ve finished the book, and Chris has read it.
Author: Nina (Page 56 of 64)
Something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is how the books I admire as a writer are not always the same books I want to read as a reader. The ideal – the point where the truly great books happen – is the nexus where these two vectors coincide.
I’m perplexed by this year’s Man Booker shortlist. Perplexed because although I successfully predicted four out of the six novels in contention (Mantel, Self, Moore, Thayil) the list still feels disappointing to me, insubstantial somehow. This isn’t just because I’m not a big fan of the two other titles on it (although I’m not – the inclusion of the paper-thin Levy is a total mystery to me, and although unfortunately I’ve not read the Eng the extracts I’ve sampled, both online and in bookshops, leave me with the impression that it is prone to purpleness, perhaps a bit saccharine) but because with the way the shortlist lines up it now feels as if there can be only one possible winner. It’s not even that I disapprove of that possible winner – he was my kind-of frontrunner from the start – but where’s the fun of the Booker without genuine debate?
I love Hilary Mantel – I think she’s one of the best writers working in this country at the moment and her novel Beyond Black is for me one of those ‘nexus books’, a novel that spurs me with envy as a writer and that engages me as a reader to the point of being seduced and ensnared from the very first paragraph. I haven’t yet read Bring up the Bodies, but I certainly will do, not just because I love Mantel but because I’ve been fascinated and horrified by the story of Anne Boleyn since I was about eight years old. The opening extract I read in The Guardian, with Thomas Cronwell flying his hawk, is a demonstration of everything high fantasy should aspire to, everything it could do and be if it tried harder and saw itself as literature, as writing, instead of just a churnforth of derivative stories. But in spite of knowing how much I’ll love Bring Up the Bodies, I can’t get excited by the thought of it winning the Booker. Mantel won in 2009 of course, with Wolf Hall. Bodies is a direct sequel to Hall. so as well as being the work of a writer who’s already won this prize, it’s work in the same mould. If BUtB were a completely different type of book from Wolf Hall, I’m sure I’d be cheering it on. As it is, in the context of the Booker, I just feel a bit lacklustre about it.
I’m delighted to see Alison Moore on the shortlist. The Lighthouse is a deftly worked, tightly wound little book of real merit and – again – genuine readability. Moore writes very well indeed, and the thing about her shortlisting that pleases me most is that it will bring her some deserved recognition and (I trust) be of assistance in moving her forward with her career. But The Lighthouse to win? For me, it’s too slight a book for that accolade. It seems to me that we should be demanding Booker winners with a thrust of greatness, a touch of madness, and a win for Moore would be like Anita Brookner’s win in 1984, when Hotel du Lac – how? how? – triumphed over J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun.
I think what I’m missing is precisely that – that thrust of reckless greatness, that edge of madness. Will Self’s Umbrella – the book I’m tipping as the eventual winner – does seem to have both. From the extracts I’ve read, I sense that Umbrella is a genuine attempt to write a novel that challenges and surprises and rewards attention, a novel that (and here’s the point) has stretched its author to the limits of his ability and then some. It’s an earned book, a book that aspires to say something about literature as well as just telling a story. Is this not what we want from our Booker winners? I know I do. As a writer I admire hugely what Self’s done in Umbrella. But as a reader, the thought of it exhausts me. All that unrelenting ego, that insistent cleverness, for 400 pages. I just can’t – quite, yet – stomach the thought of it. I can’t help feeling that if I’m going to commit my reading time to a single book for an entire month there are so many other gaps in my reading – Gravity’s Rainbow, Infinite Jest, American Pastoral, Under the Volcano, Moby-Dick – that are in more urgent need of filling. When I read Adam Roberts’s review of Umbrella last month it made me shout with delight, so perfectly did it encapsulate the issues I have with a book like this. We know what Self’s doing, in other words, but do we care? I care, but not enough to leap upon Umbrella like unearthed treasure. If I can admire the ambition and worth of a book, but not feel desperate to read it, it’s only done half of its job. Which is sad. and this is something I feel bad about, because I want to love it.
Last week I read Nicola Barker’s 2004 novel Clear. Nicola Barker is special to me. She’s my almost exact contemporary, and whenever I think of her or consider her achievement I feel a deep-seated pang of guilt, that I somehow failed to get my shit together as early as she did, that I’ve spent the past decade of my life trying to catch up to where I should have been twenty years ago. Most of all though what I feel is pure admiration, thankfulness that such a writer as Barker exists, not just to inspire me as a writer but to create books that are such a blinding joy to read. I was reading Clear on our way to Brighton last Thursday, and Chris said I was making the whole railway carriage shake with my laughter. It’s true that almost every single page of the novel had its own laugh-out-loud funny moment. but Clear – like everything of Barker’s – isn’t ‘just’ funny. Where else but in Nicola Barker could you read an extended analysis of Kafka’s ‘The Hunger Artist’ and be having to stifle the giggles? Where else could London breathe and expand and erupt so magnificently filthily from its author’s devilish imagination without shedding its pristine glory? In Nicola Barker we have a writer who wears her (considerable) learning so lightly, with such impeccable judgement, that you can read any one of her books all the way through and simply enjoy it, revel in the linguistic dexterity and creative invention on every page without once feeling you’re been lectured at or talked down to or insisted upon. And yet Barker has more to say, more talent to demonstrate, than most of the ‘usual suspects’ put together. John Self, in his recent and very excellent review of Barker’s Booker-longlisted novel The Yips, said that ‘the central character is…. the finest character Martin Amis never created.’ Yes. And leading directly on from the same point, I was especially gratified to find John Self stating the following:
As in other Barker novels, The Yips is heavily populated with eccentrics and outsiders, the sort of people who struggle to fit into society – or into most fiction, for that matter. Fortunately, Barker handles them without going anywhere near the dreaded curse of whimsy. She does not look down on or mock her characters, and she takes the reader with her, sometimes literally.
Amis can be funny, yes, but he always tends to look down on his characters. More than that, he is snide. Barker is never snide. She writes her people into being with a deep empathy, with fellow feeling. She isn’t poking fun at the world she’s revealing, she’s inhabiting it. She understands the modern world and she understands people at an instinctive and personal level. Amis just… doesn’t. In contrast with many, I enjoyed Nicola Barker’s review of Amis’s latest, Lionel Asbo, because it was a piece of writing as well as a review, and it wasn’t afraid to go against the grain of prevailing opinion. (She likes it.) But oh is Nicola Barker ever the better writer. And I hope that, her admiration for Amis notwithstanding, she secretly knows it.
What all this means, I suppose, is that I’m mourning the absence of Nicola Barker from this year’s Booker shortlist. I’m still devastated that she didn’t win with Darkmans – in my opinion one of the first English masterpieces of the new century – in 2007. I felt certain that this had to be her year, and here she is denied yet again. This pains me. A Barker vs Self Booker – now that would have been something to get excited about.
Another ‘nexus’ book of 2012 for me has been Sam Thompson’s Communion Town. (You’ll find my review at Strange Horizons here.) While I was reading it I was excited and admiring in equal measure and I was always eager to get back to it – another crucial test for a ‘nexus’ book. More than that though and unlike so many the book has grown in my imagination since then. I now feel it’s an even better book than I thought it was in the first place, and feel almost personally aggrieved by the rather middling critical response it has received in the press and online. It has beauty and daring and knowingness and yes, that essential touch of the insane too, and I think it’s a book that will last. I can imagine reading Communion Town ten, twenty years from now and finding new pleasures in it. It should have been on the shortlist, dammit.
Before I forcibly curtail this oddly meandering rant, I do want to mention one book that bloody well should have been on the shortlist, only the judges saw fit to exclude it from the action entirely. That book is Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn and Child. I started reading it on Sunday evening and it is brilliant. If M. John Harrison were to write a crime novel, this would be it. The writing is – exquisite is the wrong word, it’s too muscular for that, too restrained, but still its beauty, its sheer writerly competence, makes me shiver with excitement. And the way the book’s been written – the experiment and lesson in form it provides – is, for any writer worth their salt, just thrilling. Thrilling is what I mean, too, for this is a(n albeit very special and unusual type of) thriller. You can read this book and simply love it, or love it simply, for the story on the page. It’s a gem of a novel, literary riches. Were the Booker judges all in comas? Was it not submitted? What the hell’s going on?
And the absence of Kelman and Warner? Don’t get me started…
Oh well. One thing I learned around the time of the Clarke Award is that this kind of thing always happens. I spent a fair amount of time earlier this year, looking up previous Clarke shortlists and (where available) the lists of submissions, and what I discovered was that there have been notable exclusions in every single year since the award has existed. Even in those years where the shortlist seemed strong, there were always better books that were inexplicably missed off. And then every now and then you get a total cock up. Bound to happen. So it goes.
None of this is particularly surprising. I find it useful to remember when I’m ranting (or perhaps when I’ve finsihed) that the Booker judges (like the Clarke judges) are just six people, sat in a room. Compromises happen, trade-offs happen, shit goes down. An empirically ‘true’ shortlist cannot exist. Because it cannot exist, there are people who question the value of the Booker, of the Clarke, and of awards generally. I am not one of them. I love awards – not because I aspire to win them or because I set any exceptional value on the work of those who do, but because awards provide an arena for debate. I love to talk about books, I love to get angry about books, and something that gives me especial pleasure is to see other people getting passionate and just a little bit crazy about books also. The Booker provokes impassioned debate – every year it does it, regardless of whether people generally love the shortlist or think it’s a pile of pants.
And that always makes me very happy.
We spent a magical day in Brighton on Thursday, attending the Improving Reality conference, an event organised by the amazing Honor Harger of Brighton’s digital culture agency Lighthouse, with the purpose of exploring the responses of contemporary artists, thinkers, architects and writers to speculative concepts.
We weren’t entirely sure what to expect, which was great, actually, because it meant we went in there with our minds completely open to anything we might see or hear. What we were given, over the course of the conference’s two two-hour sessions, was a serving of contemporary and futuristic culture so enthusiastically radical, so naturally explorative and unaffectedly boundary-breaking, that we were talking about it for hours afterwards. The characteristic that seemed to unite those on stage was exactly that quality of uncompromising zeal you’d hope to find in any artist wholeheartedly consumed by the passion for making new work of any kind.
When people who don’t think they like SF start talking about why they think they don’t like SF, you find that what they’re often put off by is an idea of futurism as a kind of ‘woo’ domain of super-science and dehumanizing technology, surrounded by a sea of jargon and computer code – stuff they either can’t understand easily or don’t relate to, in other words. But what struck me most about the artists of Improving Reality was their generosity of spirit, their inclusiveness, the way they were actively reaching out to lay people and inviting them to contribute – to projects, to thought processes, to discussion. The totally wonderful Leila Johnston (contributor to Wired, managing editor of The Literary Platform), when asked about the essence of the speculative, answered unhesitatingly. ‘It’s the human story.’ she said. ‘The trouble with SF is that people think it’s all tech-y, that it’s all about computers taking over. To be relevant to people, the future has to encompass the personal.’
This idea was also a strong theme in Warren Ellis’s ‘seance for the future‘, in which he encouraged individuals to get excited about the future by properly embracing the present. ‘If the future is dead,’ he said, ‘then today we must summon it and learn how to see it properly.’ Other highlights were Joanne McNeil’s story about what happened when she went in search of the Sanzhi ‘UFO houses’ in Taipei (a personal odyssey far too involving and peculiar to be summed up with the words ‘they’d been demolished’) and Luke Jerram’s slideshow of his Glass Microbiology project, in which he commissioned contemporary glassmakers to reproduce the molecular structure of viruses using blown glass. I was particularly affected by Regine Debatty‘s presentation of Milica Tomic’s ‘Container’ project, which centred around the artist’s response to a little known atrocity of the Afghan war.
Rounding off the conference we had Rebekka Kill, with her musical presentation Facebook is like Disco, Twitter is like Punk, a delightfully new way not just of talking about social media, of analysing what it does, but of explaining it to those who feel threatened by it. I loved every moment.
An important thing to note: five of Improving Reality’s eight keynote speakers were women. This wasn’t a deliberate parity policy on behalf of the organisers – these were simply the speakers they wanted to invite, who they felt best expressed the mindset of the event as a whole. Organisers of future SF conventions, take note – the women you’re looking for are out there, ready to speak. All you need to do is ask. There are no excuses.
And while we’re on the subject of awesome women, the Brighton SF panel that followed the conference gave everyone in attendance the opportunity to get a sneak peek inside Lauren Beukes’s upcoming novel The Shining Girls. from whose pages Lauren was generous enough to give us two readings.
If SF has shown us one thing over the years, it’s how difficult it is to predict the future, but in the case of The Shining Girls I’m going to stick my neck out: it’s going to be good.
Truly delighted to learn that London will be hosting the Worldcon in 2014. Is it stupidly early to be looking forward to this? We’ll be registering our membership shortly.
The novel has been consuming all of my energy this week. I’ve been writing 4,000 words each day on average as I work my way towards completion of the second draft. Second draft writes much quicker than first draft, that goes without saying, but even so it’s been a bit crazy. I’m almost there now. Hoping Chris will have something to read within the next week or so.
God, it’s a strange book. The feeling of it coming together at last is quite unsettling. I am knackered.
Have been reading Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse. A dark, intense novel and I like it a lot. Above all it is beautifully made. There are odd little echoes of Suskind’s masterpiece Das Parfum, reminding me I really should read that again. A favourite of mine.
It’s great to read good work. I hope The Lighthouse makes the Booker shortlist – it deserves to.
For properly coherent and awake criticism of the full Booker longlist do please visit Adam Roberts. His wonderful posts have been keeping me entertained all week.
You can’t hope to control things. Learn to love the vertigo of experience instead.
(M. John Harrison What might it be like to live in Viriconium Fantastic Metropolis 2001)
M. John Harrison’s career to date has been an exercise in destruction – of the commonly accepted role of SF as an escapist literature, of the myth that SF cannot be ‘proper’ literature in any case, and of the comfortable assumptions and preconceptions of the genre’s core fan base about how SF should be and what it should set out to do.
When Harrison published the first of his trilogy of novels about the imaginary city of Viriconium, The Pastel City, in 1971, he was setting out to overturn what he saw as the ‘literalisation’ of the fantasy genre. Harrison’s Viriconium sequence highlighted the creative bankruptcy of commercial series fantasy by pointing up its over-reliance on overused tropes and hyper-detailed worldbuilding and then undermining it completely: In Viriconium, the third book in the Viriconium series, eventually relegates the eponymous city to the realm of the non-existent. Ironically, by metaphorically destroying his creation in such a way, Harrison returned to the fantasy genre much of the possibility it has always contained for magic, for metaphor, for poetry and for intellectual gamesmanship.
In 2002 with his Clarke Award-nominated novel Light, M. John Harrison played a similar opening gambit against the popular SF sub-genre of space opera, traditionally the literature of gung-ho space exploration, intergalactic conquest and super-technological advance. In his Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, Harrison has created a space opera that ridicules the notion of space opera, an anti-immersive fantasy, as he himself puts it, disguised as an immersive fantasy. The trilogy reaches its climax this July with the publication of the third book in the series, Empty Space,
In the first book, Light, Harrison introduces us to Michael Kearney, a theoretical physicist whose work will eventually lead to the invention of a version of faster-than-light space travel called the dynaflow, thus bringing about, by the twenty-third century, a vast space-diaspora of humankind. Kearney is also a serial killer who believes that he is being pursued by an existential monster called the Shrander. Alternating narrative strands involve us in the adventures of Seria Mau Genlicher, an ultra-rarefied breed of post-human space pilot known as a K-captain, and of Ed Chianese, a burned-out rocket jockey who still dreams of penetrating the ultimate no-go zone, the logic-defying and shape-shifting web of temporal effect and hyper-physics known as the Kefahuchi Tract.
In the 2007 follow-up to Light, the Clarke Award-winning Nova Swing, a section of the Kefahuchi Tract has fallen to earth in the far-distant extraterrestrial city of Saudade. The novel follows the attempts of Aschemann, a police detective, to investigate the activities of Vic Serotonin, an unpredictable loner who earns his living taking foolhardy ‘tourists’ into the Event Site, a career fraught with risks so perverse they cannot be predicted in advance.
In Empty Space, Aschemann’s one-time sidekick, known to us only as the Assistant, begins an investigation of her own, while Michael Kearney’s ex-wife Anna sets out on a quest to return an item of lost property to Kearney’s missing research partner Brian Tate. Ed Chianese returns, vastly changed, from his own suicide mission, while his old sparring partner Liv Hula is charged with the delivery of some highly dangerous cargo to regions unknown.
There’s plenty of what looks like space opera in the Empty Space books: there are exploding planets, after all, faster-than-light spaceships, genetic engineers, alien artefacts, obsessed and obsessive men of science. But this is Harrison we’re reading here, not Heinlein, and it’s crucial to realise that the action sequences and futuristic hardware are just the shadows thrown by the true narrative, a kind of armature of space opera on to which Harrison grafts the story he is actually intent on telling. The Kefahuchi Tract trilogy is principally the story of Anna and Michael Kearney, real-time human beings struggling to find some frame of reference within a world that is changing too fast to remain coherently explicable.
Far more than they will ever be space opera, the three Empty Space books form a three-part drama of adaptive alienation.
Harrison has often castigated readers as well as writers for wanting to ‘tame’ fantasy and science fiction by imposing upon it a system of the familiar. By demanding that it adhere to certain rules, such readers are restricting the imaginative possibilities of speculative fiction, clipping its wings, transforming a phoenix into something more closely resembling a battery chicken. By demanding that SF remain within the cordon of scientific veracity, the reader commits an act of imaginative vandalism. Harrison’s K-ships are constructed with words, not steel, not super-strength Perspex housings or semi-organic engine components; they were never meant to travel literally through space, but metaphorically, through the mind of the reader. From there, Harrison argues, they can go anywhere. In language that is a deft homage to the ghost of Raymond Chandler doffing his hat to T. S. Eliot, spliced together with the commentary from a twenty-second century video game and some of the more metaphysical lyrics of Nick Cave, Harrison renders the impossible possible, and not just possible but seemingly as the normal stuff of everyday life.
This philosophy drove them, in the late decades of the 21st Century, to launch themselves blind into dynaflow space, with no idea how to navigate it, in craft made of curiously unsophisticated materials. They had no idea where the first jump would take them. By the second jump, they had no idea where they started from. By the third they had no idea what “where” meant.
It was a hard problem, but not insoluble. Within a decade or two they had used the Tet-Kearno equations to derive an eleven-dimensional algorithm from the hunting behaviour of the shark. The Galaxy was theirs. Everywhere they went they found archeological traces of the people who had solved the problem before them – AIs, lobster gods, lizard men from deep time. They learned new science on a steep, fulfilling curve. Everything was waiting to be handled, smelled, eaten. You threw the rind over your shoulder. The eerie beauty of it was that you could be on to the next thing before the previous thing had lost its shine. (Empty Space p230)
There is an imagic clarity to Harrison’s SF that moves far beyond scientific logic, a voice that tells us that if we are able to imagine a thing it has in a sense already happened. We read and – like the gene-spliced, heavily tailored fighters of Preter Coeur – we simply become. The art of the Empty Space trilogy as a whole lies not in predicting futures so much as in practically defining the art of the imaginatively possible.
But what of Empty Space the novel? If the main play of Light had to do with discovering the links between the novel’s seemingly disparate characters and the worlds they inhabit, and the theme of Nova Swing is how those characters might escape the magnetic pull of the life they previously imagined for themselves, the recurring motif in Empty Space is the failure to connect. Aschemann’s unnamed Assistant is unable to ascertain not only the true nature of a possible homicide but the extent to which she still remains a human being. Liv Hula struggles to come to terms with the fact that the part of her life that defined her is most likely over. Most of all, Anna Waterman is unable to connect the life she has created for herself in the wake of Michael Kearney’s death – a new husband, a daughter, a lifestyle that, in the asset-stripped economy of the twenty-thirties, borders on the affluent – with the disturbing emotions and unanswered questions that are a recurring hangover from her life before. It is no surprise to discover that it is not the far future strands of the narrative that drive this novel, but Anna’s struggle to square what she knows with what she feels – both about herself and about the world that insists on constantly reinventing itself around her.
In the end, if you have a certain sort of mind, you can’t even separate the mundane from the bizarre. That’s why you find yourself face down in the bathroom at eighteen years old, studying the reflection of your own pores in the shiny black floor tiles. And if afterwards you choose a dysfunctional person to be your rescuer, how is that your fault ? Who could know? More importantly, the past can’t be mended – only left behind. People, the dead included, always demand too much. She was sick of being on someone else’s errand. “I did my best,” she thought, “and now I can’t be bothered any more.” (p258)
Harrison subtitled his novel A Haunting, and in truth Empty Space concerns itself with many hauntings, most of all with how the future is haunted by the past. What if the marvels and wonders inside the Kefahuchi Tract turn out mostly to be the contents of Anna Kearney’s summerhouse, the discarded detritus of a past that she can never quite bring herself to throw away? When expanded to fill the world, these shards of forgotten reality become secrets and marvels. Memory, as much as matter, can never be destroyed, it simply reasserts itself in an alternative form. In the final third of the book the tone darkens as the personal wars being waged in the minds of the novel’s characters threaten to spill out and engulf the universe. In his baroque descriptions of impossible intergalactic atrocities, what Harrison brings to mind most of all is the state of suspicion, hostility and constant war-readiness that is the everyday reality of our own twenty-first-century political culture, and most of all our own dangerous inured indifference towards it.
Then war was everywhere and it was your war, to be accessed however it fitted best into your busy schedule. Seven second segments to three minute documentaries. Focussed debate, embedded media. 24-hour live mano a mano between mixed assets in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, or a catch-up of the entire campaign – including interactive mapping of EMC’s feint towards Beta Carinae – from day one. In-depth views included: How They Took the Pulsed-Gamma War to Cassiotone 9; The Ever-Present Threat of Gravity Wave Lasing; and We Ask You How You Would Have Done It Differently! People loved it. The simulacrum of war forced them fully into the present, where they could hone their life anxieties and interpret them as excitement. Meanwhile, under cover of the coverage, the real war crept across the Halo until it threatened Panamax IV. (p237)
Readers of trad SF coming to the third book in the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy hoping for a sense of closure might find themselves disappointed, but such a reaction would be both limited and limiting, and I would argue that M. John Harrison wrote Empty Space as a proof against the whole idea of closure. These are books that can be read in any order, singularly or together; no matter how you choose to enjoy them, their mystery will remain insoluble. This is not to say that there are no linear narratives at work here, because there are, and they are entrancing and mysterious and compulsively readable. But they are still not the main point of Harrison’s story. The point, as Ballard might have said, is not outer space but inner space, not the feats of ordinary heroes, but the paradoxes, treacheries and wonders of extraordinary humanity, what goes on in our own heads when confronted with the existential horror and glory of being alive.
But the other side of the fence things only deteriorated. Seaward in the fog, you could feel distance growing in everything. From Lizard Sex to The Metropole, the shutters were up all along the strip. The old fashioned signs banged in the wind; rust ran down from blisters in the paintwork. Outside the joint they called 90-Proof & Boys, the air tasted of salt. Ivy Mike’s lay silent and unoccupied. The circus wasn’t in town, and it was coming on to rain. (p192)
This is Harrison’s description of the sunset strip at New Venusport, but it might equally well be Blackpool in the off season, and it is Harrison’s ability to invest our accustomed reality with the nacreous, rarefied light of the future fantastic that is one of his greatest gifts to us as a novelist. In the end, no matter how far we dream of travelling, we are stuck with what we’ve got. What Harrison seems to be telling us is that what we’ve got is quite enough to be going along with.
(This review was first published in Starburst #379/iPad edition July 2012)
“Later, after closing the curtains, I turn the lights back on and study one by one the various elements of my situation. I’m losing the war. I’ve almost certainly lost my job. Every day that goes by distances me a little further from an improbable reconciliation with Ingeborg. As he lies dying, Frau Else’s husband amuses himself by hating me, assaulting me with all the subtlety of the terminally ill. Conrad has sent me only a little money. The article that I originally planned to write at the Del Mar is set aside and forgotten….. Not an encouraging panorama.”
(Roberto Bolano The Third Reich p236 trans. Natasha Wimmer)
I love Roberto Bolano. Since first discovering him a couple of years ago I’ve come to love him more and more. He sits up there alongside Vladimir Nabokov in my personal pantheon of genius, and with one crucial difference: Nabokov’s work is a distant summit of perfection that can be worshipped and admired but never approached, whereas with Bolano you can kind of imagine – almost – how his effortlessly beautiful novels came to be made.
No one seems to know quite what to make of The Third Reich. Published posthumously only last year, it was actually completed in the late eighties, and was one of Bolano’s first attempts at writing a novel. For Adam Mars Jones in The Guardian, this seems to have been the signal to fixate on what he perceives as the book’s imperfections – being written without a foreknowledge of 9/11, for example, or its quaintly old school gamers with their boards and dice. I was baffled by Mars Jones’s review, which seemed determined to relegate The Third Reich to the category of literary prentice pieces, interesting failures. He tends towards the belief that it is only Bolano’s untimely death that grants the work its scant validity. I would argue the opposite, that it is Bolano’s tragically early departure from the literary scene that has given critics such as Mars Jones a false perspective. Suddenly there are all these ‘new’ Bolano works flooding the market – they can’t all be good, surely? This early stuff – interesting for the scholar perhaps, but not for the general reader. Stick to The Savage Detectives or By Night in Chile…..
I think that if The Third Reich were to appear in print tomorrow, by a new young writer (Bolano was just thirty-five when he wrote this, remember) it would be hailed as extraordinary, whether it had mobile phones in it or not.
It’s an odd, odd story. Udo Berger, a young German and champion gamer, is on holiday with his girlfriend Ingeborg on the Spanish coast. The hotel they’re staying at is the same hotel Udo used to come to as a teenager with his family a decade before. It hasn’t changed much – and neither has his adolescent crush on the hotel’s owner-manager, Frau Else. Udo is planning to use his time away to complete an article he’s supposed to be writing for one of the gaming magazines. Instead he finds himself getting sidetracked by the tempestuous to-ings and fro-ings of another young German couple, Charly and Hanna, diverted by the weird indolence of the resort itself and increasingly obsessed by his relationship with El Quemado, a disfigured beach hermit who turns out to be his gaming nemesis.
The story is told as a series of diary entries, and it’s this discursive, naturalistic style – so typical of Bolano in general as well as the diary format in particular – that is part of what makes this novel so compelling. The story emerges for us as it emerges for Udo – inextricably interwoven with the greater and lesser minutiae of each passing day. There is no sense that this novel is plot-driven – but as Udo himself is a driven character, we are driven, as we follow his thoughts, to share his obsessions.
Bolano was a poet long before he was a novelist – indeed, he always viewed his career as a prose writer as a necessary second best – and this is evident in everything he writes. There is an unhesitating appreciation of the weight of words, their relative values, their positioning within a sentence. He will write of love and philosophy with as much commitment as he will write of a walk to the chip shop – and vice versa – but in Bolano’s hands it is hard to notice where the merely descriptive begins and the reflective leaves off.
With Bolano, it is all about voice. His is the voice of art, with just enough of artifice to hold it in place. The Third Reich should become a bible for any writer.
Last week sometime I overheard M. John Harrison talking online about the difference between what he calls ‘desk fiction’ and ‘notebook fiction.’ ‘Desk fiction,’ he says, ‘is more plotted and manufactured. Found material is used but doesn’t directly generate the story.’ He cites his 2002 novel Light as his best ‘desk job.’
As his best notebook job he cites Climbers, and in his blog he describes the process of writing notebook fiction thus:
I made rules which enabled me to play a game about generating the story from the found material, rather than using the material as dressing for an already-made-up story. The idea is that your armature for any given story is its emotional and/or “philosophical” theme, & that theme is expressed initially as an arrangement of the found material. After a lot more operations, the found material ends up as a thematically driven narrative.
I got that idea from the early cinema documentarists, who never used a script but shot millions of feet of footage around their subject then spent two years editing the story into view. They would allow the observed material to tell them what it wanted to say. Flaherty used the image of an Inuit carver, whose greatest effort goes into seeing the subject already implied by the shape of the piece of bone he is going to carve.
I found all this both remarkably inspiring and a penetratingly useful way of thinking about fiction – both what it’s like when you read it and what kind of fiction you want to be writing. Reading this entry by MJH and thinking about it over the past few days it seems to me that the category of ‘desk fiction’ or ‘notebook fiction’ could be gainfully applied to most any novel, whether it was actually created from found material or not, that it’s a matter of feel, as well as method.
I don’t know how The Third Reich was written, but it has the feel of the ultimate notebook novel scratched into every page.
I don’t know how Nabokov’s Ada was written either (on index cards though, probably) but it has the feel of the most glorious desk job. Ever.
If I’m applying this to myself at all, I reckon I’ve been pretty much a full-time desk writer up until now. I aspire to notebook fiction though, I ache for it. And Roberto Bolano’s going to teach me how to write it…..
“So the call to arms is a twofold one: firstly, let’s have a look around, it’s a big world, and if bits of it move you, don’t be afraid to write about it. Second, be bold, and proud of who are and where you come from. Express your culture, your concerns and those of your community and the voices within it, however movable a feast that is. Because if you don’t, the chances are that it might not be around in the future. So do what Trocchi and MacDiarmid would do: don’t get obsessed with histories and legacies or markets and ‘rules’, just hit those keys and see what happens.”
(Irvine Welsh, speaking on literature and national identity at the Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference.)
Chris delivered The Adjacent to Simon Spanton of Gollancz at the end of last week and I’m really missing it! For the past two years I’ve had the privilege of living with this novel, unfolding in the background of everything I do. When you’re close to someone and you love their work, you can’t help but take that work into yourself, acclimatise yourself to it so that it comes to feel like a natural part of your working environment. Now it feels like a favourite music I’ve had playing on repeat has been switched off.
But the book is magnificent. Last week was my first opportunity to read it from beginning to end, chronologically and in order. It’s an extraordinary work, perhaps Chris’s most wide ranging and powerful to date. And as Blackadder might have said, that’s up against some pretty stiff competition. The cumulative impact of the text as it reveals itself is immense. This book will, I feel, surprise and astound anyone who comes into contact with it.
So last week was a pretty big deal.
Hopefully this one will be also as work on my own novel continues and intensifies. I’m now, let’s see, almost 46,000 words into the second draft, well into Part Two and feeling good about it. Writing this book has been rather like trying to get comfortable in bed – not easy when your mind is in constant overdrive and the slightest sound can wake you but when you finally manage it you know it feels right. I now feel I know this book. Even if never entirely in control, I feel comfortable with what I’m doing. Perhaps this is why, after almost a year working on it, the book finally has a title.
The novel is called What Happened to Maree.
I read Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home and felt disappointed. The premise appealed to me so much, but in the event what I found was a slight book, rather akin – in effect if not in subject matter – to last year’s Booker winner, Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. At a sentence level, Swimming Home was finely worked and well above average. But in spite of everything Tom McCarthy says in his intro I found both the subject matter and its treatment bafflingly conventional, and the sketchy characterisation uncomfortably incapable of supporting the weight of significance placed upon it. Which was all a bit of a shame. The last chapter was the best.
I am now reading Roberto Bolano’s The Third Reich, and loving every word of it. That man is my idol. I so need to watch and learn….
I’ve just been watching Mo Farah’s beautiful, beautiful win in the Olympic men’s 10,000 metres. What a race. I could hardly bear to watch those two final laps. I didn’t see how he could possibly hang on to it. Totally awesome.
And in spite of all Olypmic distractions (of which there have been many) I have been working well on the book this week. I’m almost at the end of the second draft of Part One. Things feel like they’re sliding into place – finally, suddenly – and I begin to catch glimpses of what I’ve been struggling to catch hold of this whole past year.
Listening to: Gillian Welch (again).
Currently reading: Doris Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor. What an unnervingly strange book that is. I haven’t read Lessing for some years, but it’s hugely instructive to be doing so at the moment. I like the way her thought processes seem to formulate themselves even as she writes. I admire her total disregard for the conventions surrounding how a good novel should behave and be constructed. Lessing’s work seems almost to construct itself as it goes along. It becomes what it needs to be. I would aspire to such courage. Also, it’s fascinating to note how central SF and SFnal ideas have been to Lessing’s career. She’s not afraid to own this, either.
I like.
Oooh exciting!
At first glance, this looks to be one of the most inspiring Booker longlists in quite some time and so much better than last year’s. I applaud the comment from Peter Stothard, editor of the TLS and this year’s chair of judges, stating that the main criterion for selection was that ‘a text has to reveal more, the more you read it.’
“If it’s disappointing that novels by famous writers aren’t there, then so be it. That’s the difference between Man Booker judges and buyers at Waterstones. We’re not looking for books that you can pick up in a shop and say ‘I must have that’. We’re looking for books that are good value for money, that you don’t leave on a beach, that you read again and again. I love the idea of people taking the longlist to read on the beach, but these are books I want people to bring back.”
As someone who believes that the best test of any great novel is the desire to reread it, nothing could please me more in this context than this kind of attitude. And I have to say I love the look of this longlist. It feels adventurous and ambitious. There’s style as well as story. There’s even some speculative fiction on there, by God! These are books you actually want to read and talk about.
I’m especially thrilled to see Sam Thompson’s debut Communion Town making a showing. I was lucky enough to have access to an ARC of this, and I thought it was wonderful. Its inclusion was a real surprise (whether it’s actually a novel is a debatable point) but a delightful one. My review of Communion Town will be up at Strange Horizons on Friday.
It’s also good to see Ned Beauman on there. I thought the first half of his debut Boxer, Beetle was excellent – sardonic, imaginative and just a little bit whacko – and although the book lost its way for me in the end (premise to die for, wasted on an inconsequential caper novel) I still think Beauman is a writer with amazing promise.
I’m a huge fan of both Nicola Barker and Hilary Mantel, so that’s two more ticks. Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse has already been recommended to me by Nick Royle, and I can’t wait to read it. I like the sound of Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home so much I’ll be ordering it as soon as I’ve finished writing this post. I’ve also just been listening to Jeet Thayill read from and talk about his novel Narcopolis. The prose is gorgeous – resolutely poetic and yet uncluttered – and the idea of this book excites me greatly.
Even the Will Self sounds interesting! My only regret is that I won’t have time to read the whole list before September, because ideally I’d love to blog each book and be a proper armchair judge this year. Hopefully I’ll be able to get part of the way there, though, and I know there’ll be plenty of informed opinion and debate cropping up online for me to enjoy as I go along.
Clearly the stink that was kicked up over last year’s Booker has had some effect. Let’s just hope we’ll be able to say the same about next year’s Clarke…..