Category: Uncategorized (Page 2 of 5)

I bang on about this every year I know but for me December really is the cruellest month. It’s not the cold so much as the dark, which is why I’m already feeling my spirits lift a little even in advance of hogmanay as we pass the winter solstice and there is the merest perceptible hint of lengthening evenings. Christmas this year felt different too – so much quieter and in keeping with the season somehow, a time of reflection and abatement rather than the month-long blaring insanity of conspicuous consumption. We were lucky of course, my mum and Chris and I, the three of us together for a lovely lunch and our usual post-pudding Scrabble tournament. I am so sorry if you didn’t get to see your relatives this Christmas.

I remember the final few days of 2019 as the days in which I read Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School. This is a novel whose clarity and strength of achievement felt to me at the time like a point of anchorage, a steel tent peg pinning down the tail-end of December, an intellectual full stop, bringing the reading business of the year to a satisfying close. It feels weirdly appropriate to be closing out 2020 with two short novels that are akin to The Topeka School in that they are the work of two post-post modernist writers roughly of the same generation as Lerner and similarly in the process of cementing and furthering their considerable gifts. Yet in their expression of liminal uncertainty, their ghostliness, their sense of hiatus these two books are the polar opposite of Lerner’s and perfect analogies for 2020, a year in which everyone waited, everything stopped.

All of which is my long-winded way of sneaking two extra books into my top ten reading highlights of 2020, David Keenan’s Xstabeth and Eimear McBride’s Strange Hotel, both strangely beguiling yet achingly sad, both novels of ineffable loss, both daringly innovative books from writers I admire tremendously and intend to keep keeping up with as new works appear. As for the rest, here they come, listed in the order in which I read them. I remember last year my top picks were chosen according to which books happened to have scored 10/10 on my own highly subjective and no doubt weighted book-score-ometer. This year I am varying the selection criteria slightly by going for the ten books that for whatever reason have stuck around to pester me. Many of these will have scored 10/10, though not all of them. Similarly not all the books I read in 2020 that did score top marks have made the final cut.

1. The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel. This was my first 10/10 book of the year and it took its time coming. I loved Station Eleven but The Glass Hotel is even better in my opinion, confirming Mandel as a writer whose next work I would be eager to pick up without knowing anything about it in advance. Whenever I think of The Glass Hotel I think also of Mark Haddon’s The Porpoise, which had a similar effect on me in being the kind of well made, imaginatively vast, gorgeously surprising book that depends on nothing but its own vision, its own surety of purpose, its own beautifully deft exploration of its guiding principles. The Glass Hotel is set around the time of the 2008 financial crash, but it speaks profoundly to our own time. A novel to reread and to treasure.
2. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. I was thrilled to read this finally, a twentieth century classic that has been on my to-read list so long I was beginning to feel guilty every time I thought about it. As it turns out, Under the Volcano is everything everybody says it is: a masterpiece by any definition, The Waste Land in novel form. A cacophonous, parched, desolate, insane, stupendously beautiful, stiflingly oppressive work, a memoir of failure, tragedy and one moment of immortal triumph snatched from the wreckage. The experience of reading this book seemed interminable at the time and I never exactly looked forward to rejoining the consul but once back in his world the sheer power of Lowry’s language and vision proved irresistible. For all the copious amounts of alcohol consumed by almost everyone in it, Under the Volcano is no drunken outpouring; the form of the book is restrained and disciplined – weirdly, it kept reminding me of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, another modern classic I took a long time getting to but that changed my world. The literary allusions, the doublings, the assonances reveal in Lowry a knowledge and feeling for literature that echoes that of Nabokov. What. A. Book. It reaffirmed my faith and rekindled my resilience. If you need your appetite whetted further, do check out the Backlisted podcast discussion on Under the Volcano – it’s fantastic.
3. Minor Detail by Adania Shibli. I think this is the shortest book on this list but it is massive in scope. The uncanny clarity, the sense of dread and doubt that characterises Minor Detail make it unforgettable and in places actively frightening while you are reading it. The dual form it takes – the first half an historical crime narrative, chillingly rendered, the second part an autofictional investigation of that crime, fraught with nerves and doubt and the potential for harm – is itself the perfect metaphor for a land divided. Reading Minor Detail, one senses the author’s personal investment in a literary project that is more to her than just a project, it is a matter of justice. I felt privileged to read it and will be looking out Shibli’s previous work.
4. Nudibranch by Irenosen Okojie. This most recent collection of shorter fictions by Okojie has to be her most accomplished work yet. The power of the stories – who can forget ‘Grace Jones’, winner of this year’s Caine Prize for African Writing? – is more than equalled by the revelatory, revolutionary quality of the writing itself. Nudibranch was another book that felt tough to get to grips with on occasion but repaid every effort. It is a joyous thing, to see a writer so audacious, so in command of her powers. I am eager to see more attention being paid to black and minority-ethnic writers at the experimental end of fiction; happily Okojie is in their vanguard.
5. Katherine Carlyle by Rupert Thomson. I don’t just love this book, I am in love with it, all the more so because it burns slowly. I found the protagonist deeply irritating at first; gradually I became one with her. Was it Russia, was it Svalbard, was it the haunting, irresistible power of Thomson’s writing? The ending is so beautiful, so moving, so perfect. Thomson has to be one of the UK’s most criminally underappreciated writers. I will be reading Katherine Carlyle again and it might – just – be my favourite book of the eighty-eight I read this year.
6. The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell. Winner of the Clarke Award 2020 and bravo to the judges for coming to their senses and plucking this gorgeous rose from the thorns of that crazy shortlist. This novel is huge in both page-count and scope and some effort is required especially in the early stages to keep all the characters and their familial connections straight in your head. But keep the faith and you’ll find yourself beguiled and bewitched by a novel that is as intelligent as it is vast and that entirely lives up to its ambitions. One of my favourite aspects of The Old Drift is the extent to which it fulfils the radical potential naturally inherent in science fiction literature. More simply and less contentiously, The Old Drift is a great novel, one that deserves to stand the test of time. A modern masterpiece.
7. The Ministry of Truth by Dorian Lynskey. I will always associate this book with being on Jura, the birthplace of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the novel that is the subject of this creative, vibrant and keenly insightful piece of literary biography. It is lucky I read The Ministry of Truth on Kindle as any physical copy of the book would have ended up with asterisks and stars and underlinings on every page. Lynskey’s powers of analysis – the ways in which he is able to draw a seventy-year-old work into potent, sizzling dialogue with our own time – are as commendable as the clarity and inclusiveness of his writing. It might sound odd to say it, but for me at least The Ministry of Truth was a real page-turner, a book I devoured in just a couple of days before diving into a reread of its subject-matter. I am happy but not surprised to report that it, too, scored a resounding 10/10 on my dodgy book-ometer.
8. Born Yesterday: the news as a novel by Gordon Burn. Burn said in an interview that he hoped this novel would ‘bring back 2007’ to anyone reading it say twenty or thirty years in the future. Reading it in 2020 is a strikingly weird experience, not just because it does exactly that – I guarantee the events of that summer will feel instantly, eerily present to anyone who lived through them – but because of the way we have all ‘felt’ the news this year in a manner strikingly similar to that employed here, with a moment-by-moment immediacy that lends every individual, normally commonplace event the power of hyperreality . Born Yesterday is a powerful antidote to so much of the contemporary fiction we are told is ‘timely’ and ‘important’ but that is actually an empty construct, and I loved this book with my whole heart. Whenever I read Burn I find myself bitterly regretting his premature death, his keenly-felt absence from our literary lives. He challenges and inspires me like no other writer.
9. The First Stone by Helen Garner. Another of my literary idols. The First Stone landed Garner in a pile of controversy back when it was first published in 1995 but that just goes to show how necessary a work it was and remains. What a brave, remorselessly self-examining, curious, questing, prescient book this is (I am guessing Garner’s own description of the ‘intellectual openness’ of US academe is making her laugh out loud right now). Should the point need stressing (as depressingly it probably does) whether one agrees with the stance Garner takes at the beginning of The First Stone is immaterial; what matters is Garner’s desire to interrogate a question as objectively as possible, to examine evidence, her honesty in doing so, her refusal to be cowed or bullied, her constant openness to the possibility that she might be wrong. I listened to a podcast interview with Eimear McBride recently in which she stressed that the one duty of the writer is not to be simplistic. That, in essence, is the true subject of The First Stone and it is impossible for me to overstate how much I appreciate Garner’s project, her writing, the force of her literary personality as expressed through it.
10. The Inland Sea by Madeleine Watts. And talk of the devil, I came to Watts’s debut novel through an essay she published this year on the diaries of Helen Garner! (I love how these matters of interest so often join up.) The Inland Sea is a powerful, unusual and often discomfiting first novel that combines climate anxiety with memoir, a nation’s unsettled past history with the imminent near-future. The story of John Oxley and his search for Australia’s non-existent inland sea is compelling, dark and strange. The protagonist’s day-job as emergency services dispatcher offers a weird symmetry. Watts’s writing is sensitive and unsparing and her characters – Pat, Clemmie, Maeve and Lachlan – all spring vividly to life. As with all the best books, I was left feeling hungry for more and I cannot wait to find out where Watts goes next.

In spite of all obstacles and even because of them, 2020 has proved to be a fascinating, sustaining and fulfilling reading year for me, one in which the purpose and importance of reading has been stressed and re-stressed, the consolation, inspiration, energy and purpose that reading brings has been doubly precious. Next week and for my first blog post of the new year, I want to look forward into 2021 to some of the books I am particularly keen to be reading in the coming months. Until then, Happy New Year everyone – and take care out there.

I am intending to post again next week with a rundown of the books that have most captured my imagination in 2020, but before that I thought I would share some words on how this strangest, most disorientating of years has played out within the context of my life in writing.

Many more years will need to pass before we can begin to accurately assess the full impact of 2020 – personally, politically, socially, environmentally. Until we are able to gain some distance, what we have is a combination of memory-flashes, baseline anxiety and news-montage. Chris and I live on a Scottish island and this fact alone has helped us withstand much of the practical awfulness of living through a pandemic: low population density, low incidence of the virus in the community, ample and safe opportunities for spending time outside, generosity of spirit and considerate adherence to the official guidelines from all who live here. We have also felt the unexpected benefits of being used to relative isolation: yes, we were completely locked down on the island for four months (and look set to be again any day now), but being lucky enough to work from home we were able to find a new routine and a sense of purpose even in spite of the restrictions. Not being able to travel brought its own strange benefits. As the winter comes on, we speak reassuring words to each other about not going across to the mainland much at this time of year anyway – even under normal circumstances, the clash of weather and ferries can make the threat of being stranded something of a deterrent.

We have friends down south who have contracted the virus but thank God none of them have suffered severe complications. The person closest to me who has been most impacted this year has been my mother. She has had her elective surgery cancelled twice, and with the current uncertainties around January lockdown – how severe will it be, how long will it last? – it is more or less impossible to estimate or discover when her operation might be rescheduled. My mother is an incredibly resilient person and has been remarkably upbeat through most of this year, but to see her in pain, her mobility increasingly affected is both worrying and upsetting. We understand there are many, many others in a similar position or worse, and here again we have much to be grateful for: my mum lives on the island, we have formed a social bubble/extended household and so I can spend time with her whenever I want to. Had she still been living in Cornwall, we would not have seen each other all year and as someone who suffers from anxiety she would have felt increasingly isolated.

Of course there are thousands of families, separated at this moment, who are not nearly so fortunate.

Though we have all of us come through this year together, seen and felt and cataloged its proliferating anomalies in a kind of Greek chorus of accelerating strangeness, each and every one of us will have experienced 2020 differently. Much of my own anxiety has been abstract, political, ambient: I am now middle aged, finally fully engaged in the work I love and cherish and was born to do and possessed of the kind of temperament – driven, obsessive – to be able to keep doing it even in spite of the mounting uncertainties. We are in a co-dependent relationship, my work and I, so it is lucky that we strengthen and encourage each other rather than engaging in mutually assured destruction. In terms of my own mental health and personal anxiety, certain years of my twenties, thirties and forties have been far harder to bear than this one. Had the events of this year taken place a decade ago, my situation – emotional, practical, financial – would have been very different.

This is something I remember and think about all the time, as I think about and internally rail against the myriad ways in which the government response to the epidemic – incomplete, uncoordinated, politically compromised as it is – has worsened the crisis, deepened social divisions and created an environment in which so many individuals and communities will find it even harder to recover.

If I were to try and articulate the feelings that have predominated and continue to define this year for me I would speak of existential nostalgia (in the Tarkovskian sense) for certainties that never existed, a constantly thrumming anger at the way political expediency has been granted ascendancy over societal need, a heightened, calamitous awareness of the entropic instability of the universe at large.

There is no doubt these fears and concerns have affected my writing, not in the matter of my ability to write but in my uncertainty over what might be relevant and what might be enough. At the beginning of 2020 I was well into the first draft of a new novel. I remember being fairly happy with the way it was developing, although that seems like a long time ago now, an isolated period now marooned on the further side of an insurmountable time-barrier. As the first period of lockdown came into being, I had just begun to write a portion of the narrative that was linked to yet discrete from the main body, an embedded text of the kind I love to create and that in this case immediately became suffused with all the anger and fear and disorientation of those first unbelieving weeks of the pandemic.

I redrafted this section recently and found memories of that time flooding back in a disturbing way. I am glad to report that this story has survived through to the current version of the novel in all its furious weirdness. The rest of that first draft was not so lucky. As I finished writing the embedded text and emerged again into the main stream of the narrative, everything about it felt wrong, insufficient, out of sync with my current thinking. It did not help matters that I suddenly became obsessed with pandemic literature – not zeitgeisty zombie apocalypses but older texts, writing that had arisen from the anxieties and social concerns of the time of writing: Camus’s The Plague, Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider. I now have a file of notes on all these and more, which I am sure is going to come in useful for some future project and that I fully intend to return to but caused me nothing but trouble earlier this year as I tried to knit some of these strands into a narrative already burdened with too many conflicting areas of interest.

I ended up dumping the lot, all 60,000 words of it. Discarding words is an inconvenience I have grudgingly learned to accept as a part of my process. I felt much better for having made this decision but starting completely from scratch brought its own problems and the novel had to undergo another heavy-duty realignment before assuming the form it now has, a form that finally bears some resemblance to what I have in mind. The draft currently stands at 68,000 words. I have another 20,000 words or so to write (some already drafted, the rest new material) at which point I will have what will amount to a complete working draft. This will then need to be redrafted as a continuum, the part of the process I find most rewarding (not to mention something of a relief) and that transforms the pile of dog-eared pages into a book.

This has seemed an incredibly trying, vertigo-inducing process at times. It has also been exciting, rewarding, thrilling, testing my abilities, stretching my ambitions and posing difficult yet energising questions about the kind of book I want to write, the direction I need to take, the type of writer I am endeavouring to become. It is both discomfiting and uniquely satisfying, to know that as a writer the answers to such questions are already within you. That as the writer of this particular book, you are the only one who can solve its problems.

I am hoping to have those problems solved, to the best of my ability, sometime during the first quarter of next year.

I am also happy to report that while all this was going on I also managed to complete two pieces of short fiction and draft most of a third story, to be delivered in March.

I feel incredibly lucky to do what I do, to love what I do, to be fit and well enough to do it to the best of my ability. If anything, the challenges and sobering insights of 2020 have redoubled my commitment to my work, re-ignited my passion and gratitude for the talent of others, reaffirmed my conviction that art absolutely matters. I hope that everyone reading this is able to find some joy, comradeship and peace this festive season, as well as the hope of better days to come. Stay safe, everyone. And see you back here next week for my best of the year.

Alan Rossi’s debut novel takes place in the days following a tragic road accident. Nicholas and April are travelling home following a party on campus. In a moment of inattention, their car skids off the road and flips over. April is killed instantly. Nicholas dies later in hospital. As readers, as spectators, we know this from the outset. In one sense, the central drama of the novel takes place before the novel begins. In another, quite different sense, that drama is just beginning.

Nicholas and April leave behind a four-year-old son, Jack. In the hours and days following the accident, members of their family attempt to come to a decision over who of them is best placed to care for him in his life without his parents. Nicholas’s brother Nathaniel and his wife Stefanie are convinced that not only are they best suited to be parents, they are also Jack’s rightful guardians as appointed by Nicholas and April. Nicholas and Nathaniel’s father David has other ideas – with their busy working lives, can Nathaniel and Stefanie really offer Jack the stability he needs? April’s mother Tammy, partially estranged from the family, feels she is being pushed out. She believes she shares an instinctive bond with Jack, the kind of bond that no amount of money or possessions can come close to replacing.

As the six people in this drama draw closer geographically, so the cracks and contradictions in their intertwined relationships begin to appear. In the end it is left to Nicholas – trapped and dying in the wreckage of his car – to imagine into being a future he himself will not live to see.

This novel is a difficult read in all the right senses: emotionally devastating, morally ambiguous, with questions left unanswered and no ideal solutions on offer. Nicholas’s section in particular is devastating, and given the psychological pressures of our current circumstances I would advise sensitive readers to approach with care. But I would, unequivocally, advise them to approach, for Mountain Road, Late at Night is an extraordinary achievement, and whilst it is a difficult book to come to terms with it is absolutely not a difficult book to read. Rossi’s narrative burns off the page – I kept thinking of it as a stream of lights, of cat’s eyes, illuminating each new stretch of the road it travels, offering partial but transformative glimpses of what is to come.

There are times you read a book and think: this writer loves and reveres the written word. This was one of those times for me. The imagery, the thought process, the densely articulated emotion, the lack of sentimentality, the heartfelt compassion and depth of empathy – these are the effects and attributes of Rossi’s writing and you will find this novel, slim though it is, circumscribed though it is in terms of its canvas and cast of characters, impossible to forget.

If you liked John Wells’s movie August: Osage County (brilliantly adapted for the screen from his own stage play by Tracy Letts) then you will love Mountain Road, Late at Night.

There is something curiously timely about this book. Watching its action unfold is somewhat akin to watching April and Nicholas’s accident unfold in slow motion: everything is happening now, and everything that happens in the days afterwards is also happening even as the car begins its fatal slide across the mountain highway. We cannot alter what is happening, but we can live in these moments, we can feel close to the protagonists – all of them, equally (though I loved Tammy best!) – and we can examine our thoughts, our feelings, our actions as if we, too, were a part of this drama.

We are a part of this drama. What we do matters. What we say matters. How we feel matters.

The current situation is of an extreme magnitude. The word everyone keeps using is unprecedented, a word too often put in play maybe, only in this case it’s true. At least for us, at least for now. I normally love this time of year – with the evenings getting longer and the light increasing, it is my favourite time of year, more beloved even than summer, because all the flowers are opening and summer is still to come. Seeing our little town so closed and so quiet at a time when it would normally be opening itself to the increasing sunshine and a growing number of visitors is heartbreaking. I worry especially for all the small traders and hospitality businesses and freelance individuals who depend on these visitors, as our town depends on them, on being visible, on being beloved. Yet at the same time there is a sense of relief, that this shutdown happened before the season got underway, increasing the risk to the town and to resident islanders.

It will take everyone a long time – years maybe – to process and recover from what has happened, what is still happening. We do not properly have the language to process it, not yet – hence the over-reliance on preconceived images of dystopia, which are inadequate and more especially mostly inaccurate. We must and will in time develop that language, and in constructing a narrative I hope also that we will think differently about what can be achieved – what we can achieve – if the political will is there. We have seen measures enacted over the past weeks and days that we would never have imagined possible. What if the same measure of political will were brought to bear in combating climate change? In helping marginalised communities? In protecting threatened environments and ecosystems?

There is a measure of disjuncture, in the present time, in reading books that were written and conceived before the present time. I am sure everyone reading this will have found themselves reading a novel or watching a TV drama and thinking: ‘ooh look, people in a pub!’ or something of that kind. People in a pub – like an image from deep time. A disjunctive and somehow shocking experience.

We might find it useful and even helpful to fully inhabit those moments of inner drama, to try and understand them, to discover what they mean for our ability to imagine.

Knowing that we will – on an individual as well as a societal level – be changed by this is frightening, estranging, humbling and utterly new.

Read what feels right for you. In a move that might seem counterintuitive, I found myself reaching for Countdown City, the second novel in Ben H. Winters’s Last Policeman series. Reading about a murder investigation taking place against the background of an impending asteroid strike might not seem like the happiest of impulses right now, yet the protagonist’s calm, compassionate, organised and professional attitude to coping with disaster has a curiously calming effect. I loved the obsessive attention to detail in the first volume – I love this kind of forensic writing – and it has been hugely enjoyable and energising to encounter it again.

Work is good, being in touch with friends is good. As through those dark and uncertain months that are the Scottish winter, running early in the morning is good. When I’m running, everything feels normal. When I’m reading, everything feels new.

I’d like to particularly thank all those writing and creating content – getting new stuff to read and watch and think about is even more important now than it is usually. A particular shout-out to Influx Press, who are planning to take some of their author events online as the lockdown continues, and to booktubers and podcasters Caroline, Eric, Simon, Mercedes, Jen, Sophie, Lauren, April, Rachel and Claire among many others – your passion for what you read and your resilience in continuing to make videos to keep us all going through this current crisis is a priceless gift.

For everyone reading this blog, please keep safe and well.

You can find a short and beautifully illustrated essay by Alan Rossi about the inspiration he finds in the Blue Ridge Mountains here.

At the time of writing (Saturday morning) I am halfway through reading Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School, and if I finish it, as I hope to, by the time of posting then I will have read eighty-five books this year. Not a colossal number by some marathon readers’ standards (you know who you are!) but good enough. Enough to be left with the sense that the year has provided something in the way of progress and of discovery. Enough to feel that I am about to enter 2020 knowing more about myself as a writer than I did twelve months ago. Reading, for me, has always been about that: the sense of community and communality with other writers, the being reminded of what we’re doing and why we do it. Now, perhaps more than at any other time in my life, I look upon writing as a vocation, and not just writing but everything that goes with it: thinking, reflecting, engaging with ideas and above all reading. It’s a serious business, a business of personal dedication, a truth that resists defamation as it resists erosion. It is this I hold to as we enter the next decade, with all its challenges.  

One thing I have decided not to do this year is to set myself any specific reading goals for the year to come. Chief among bookish pleasures through the month of December are the various end-of-year reading lists, videos and podcasts put out by reviewers, readers and critics, wrapping up old reading projects and detailing their upcoming reading plans. As many of these same readers discover, even the best laid of bookish plans are apt to fall by the wayside when confronted by time. Nor is this a simple matter of being seduced by newer, potentially more exciting titles. For me at least it has more to do with the fact that my reading evolves: each book I read has a knock-on effect on the next, has a direct bearing upon subsequent reading choices, and so I might often find – I do often find – that the reasons for setting a particular reading goal as much as the goal itself no longer feel relevant. This can feel frustrating but it is exciting too – that sense of discovery again, the feeling that you are being remade as a reader even as you read.

I know I am bound to be sucked into some prize-reading projects at some point – I am particularly looking forward to the release of the Republic of Consciousness Prize longlist in January (an energising and inspiring way to begin any year), the Gordon Burn Prize longlist in May and the Goldsmith’s Prize list beyond that. I enjoy book prizes not through any misplaced excitement at guessing the winner – the very notion of ‘winning’ in literature is a ridiculous one, and potentially harmful – but because of the discussion they generate, and because the particular focus of certain awards is interesting to me. They help my reading, in other words, even if only to push it in the opposite direction, they inspire debate. But I’m not going to be rigid about it: if I find myself losing interest in an awards shortlist, or if I don’t have the time, or if something more relevant presents itself, then that’s fine. There is always more to read.  

If I had to sum up my 2019 as a reading year, I’d describe it as oddly circular. You remember the hideous sequence in The Blair Witch Project where the three doomed students spend an entire day walking in a complete circle? My reading year has been something like that but (I hasten to add) in a good way. I find certain ideas coalescing, certain ambitions becoming cemented, certain interests being validated and reaffirmed. I’m working on three separate writing projects at the moment, a novel and two distinct pieces of creative non-fiction, each of which alternately feeds into and stimulates the other, the entire process stoked and bolstered by reading, and reading is rocket fuel. These three projects are my most personal to date, and the most challenging, which is why I am excited by them. There is a fear factor, but fear, at least when it comes to writing, is another brand of rocket fuel.

Since 2012, I’ve been in the habit of listing and making brief notes on all the books I read in the given year, as well as allocating to each a mark out of ten. These scores are arbitrary and personal, as likely to be affected by what was going on in my life or most especially in my writing when I read a book as by how far a particular title turned out to accord with my bookish needs or prejudices at the time. The lists are interesting to look back on though, especially over time as patterns emerge and themes repeat. For my best books of 2019, I’ve decided to reveal the nine titles I gave a 10/10. I had no plans to do this at the start of the year, so there has been no pre-calculation involved, and I have resisted the temptation to up the scores of certain titles just to include them here, strong though that temptation has turned out to be. (There are ten 9s on my list, any of which might have been a 10 on a different day.)

Here, in the order in which I read them, are my 9 10s of 19:

Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz. Reading Harwicz is like mainlining pure language. Her use of metaphor, her creative juxtaposition of particular images and ideas brings her prose so close to poetry it makes no difference. Her sheer outspokenness as a writer, her definitive abandonment of traditional narrative form, her willingness to break all kinds of taboos makes this novel seem almost illicit, a secret code for writers and for women writers especially. Harwicz’s follow-up, Feebleminded, which was published in English translation this May, is even more insane and just as brilliant (I gave it a 9, if you’re wondering, knocking off a point mainly, I think, because it gave me the literary equivalent of room-spin when I first started reading it. I subsequently discovered that the best, perhaps the only way of reading Harwicz is to down the whole book in a single sitting. This kind of full immersion not only allows the story to free itself from the mass of words, it also – frightening though this may sound – makes the mindsets of the protagonists seem logical and normal!)

As If by Blake Morrison. This is Morrison’s account and personal reflections on his time spent as one of the journalists commissioned to cover the trial of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, the ten-year-old murderers of toddler James Bulger in 1993. I read this book primarily for research but as a work of true crime, as a personal enquiry into the nature of violence and the nature of the British media I cannot recommend Morrison’s work enough. Incredible writing, important insights. A very tough reading experience but absolutely necessary. I shall be reading this again.  

Black Car Burning by Helen Mort. I wrote about this novel earlier in the year and love it unequivocally.

The Sing of the Shore by Lucy Wood. I admired Lucy Wood’s debut collection Diving Belles, but for me this 2018 eollection is even stronger. We’re back in Cornwall, but the elements of myth and magic Wood incorporated so seamlessly into Diving Belles have been stripped away, leaving a tougher, harsher-seeming landscape that nonetheless seems to shimmer with aspects of the uncanny. Such a strong book, a natural (southern) counterpoint to the Mort. I’m hoping we’ll hear news of Wood’s next project soon because I’m eager for more of her sensitive, penetrative, unsentimental landscape writing.  

I Am Sovereign by Nicola Barker. Pure, unadulterated, mischievous, brilliant, intelligent, tender, human, literary delight.

Slip of a Fish by Amy Arnold. Thinking about this novel now I can’t help seeing how closely, in its way, it compares with the Harwicz. The approach is different – more vulnerable and less combative – but the unsettling subject matter, the unnerving ambiguity and pain of the relationships described, makes this feel almost like a sister narrative. Slip of a Fish is a profoundly impressive debut and I hope we see more from Arnold soon.  

The Porpoise by Mark Haddon. I named this book as my ‘Tiny Tim’ in my Christmas Carol book tag, the novel that I feel is deserving of more attention than it has so far received, and I will continue to repeat my puzzlement at why it has commanded so much less than its fair share of debate and discourse in 2019. The Porpoise is a masterclass in the use of myth and fairy tale in postmodern fiction. More than that, it is a heart-pounding story, immersive and interrogative at the same time (a hard trick to pull off). This novel is full of colour and magic, clever twists of both the narrative and literary variety. It also includes what might be the sole legitimate (and literal!) use of a deus ex machina in contemporary fiction. Glorious book. Read it.   

Dark Lies the Island by Kevin Barry. I was all set to give this collection a 9 but the final story, set in Berlin, raised the threshold because I found it so moving and resonant. Every story is a gem, though, and Barry looks set to be the kind of writer who will just get better and better. I’ve been saving his Booker-longlisted Night Boat to Tangier to read in early 2020 and I can’t wait.

Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner. Reading this was like seeing my own thought processes laid bare. Not the substance of the thoughts, or not always – Lerner’s ‘Adam’ is still in his twenties, and a guy – but the way thoughts cross and diverge, coalesce into images, become ideas. The way he writes about becoming acquainted with a second language, the way meaning accrues gradually to words, and sets of words – the way meaning becomes defined, rather in the manner of the initially blurred outlines of a Polaroid photograph – resonated with me particularly as I’ve never come across such an accurate rendition of my own experience. Art, poetry, history, impostor syndrome, the writer’s evolving objective awareness of what will be their material – Leaving The Atocha Station sits beside certain texts I read in 2018 (Greg Baxter’s Munich Airport, Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, Eley Williams’s Attrib, Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation) that have been helping to build my courage, confidence and ambition as a writer. I gave Lerner’s follow-up 10:04 a 9, simply in response to the fact that of the two, Leaving the Atocha Station is marginally my favourite. At the time of writing I cannot imagine giving The Topeka School anything less than a 10 [edit 31/12 – yup, it’s a 10]. It’s the kind of novel that defines a career. I’m still struggling to articulate what it is about Lerner’s writing that has affected me so much, so I’ll stop trying for the moment and encourage you to go and listen to Lerner himself in this excellent podcast interview. His ideas about what constitutes autofiction are expressed with clarity and deep practical insight and I loved every minute of what he has to say.

Regular readers of this blog will know I struggle with Christmas, a festival that has become unsure of its identity, hollowed out through commercialism, unrealistic expectations and personal stress, and with December in general, with the light decreasing and the encroachment of, well, Christmas. I’m thinking that next year I might organise a special meal and evening of ghost stories for the solstice as a strategic counterattack – December 21^st is like a breath of light and sanity for me, always has been – but in the meantime, this winter has been made easier by my morning runs. Leaving the house each morning at around 7:30, I have seen the light leach back into the sky, the sun rise in a wash of red and blazing orange above the firth. The physical contact with the outside air, the sense of the world as planet has been a matter of spiritual sustenance and renewal. The days have seemed longer, more resilient, and Christmas day itself was made special by taking part in the morning swim at Scalpsie bay. The weather was… cold but incredible, as was the experience as a whole, in fact. I’ve never done a winter swim before and as a first this was unforgettable. Two books also have helped to anchor me through the disappointments and uncertainties of this past month: Under the Rock, by Ben Myers and Ghostland, by Edward Parnell. Both these works evoke and examine ideas about landscape, belonging, grief, creativity, resistance and inclusive heritage that feel powerful and relevant to me and I thank them for being there.

Huge thanks to everyone who has supported me this year, who has read this blog or read The Dollmaker or found interest or joy in any of the books or films I have ranted or raved about. A happy new year to you all, and here’s to new adventures and new directions in the months to come.      

It’s been a tough couple of weeks for everyone, and as Christmas is traditionally a time for fun and games, I thought it would be good to play one. There’s a tag going around on Booktube at the moment based around Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and in between rushing to finish some review commissions before the end of the year I’ve greatly enjoyed watching readers’ videos detailing their choices. The tag was invented by Booktube regular Lauren Wade – you can see her original video here – and my own choices are below:

1: The Ghost of Christmas Past – A book that was a childhood favourite

There are so many I could choose, of course, but I’m going to plump for Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer. This is a time-slip story that in its melancholy and in its slight edge of danger has the feel of a ghost story, which makes it particularly appropriate for the season. As with so many favourite works from childhood, I never actually owned this book – I had to keep going back to the library whenever I wanted to read it again, which was often. I think I might treat myself to my own copy – finally – in the new year.

2: The Ghost of Christmas Present – A recent book that you think will become one of your all time favourites

I’m planning to write a best-of-year post around this time next week, so more recent favourites to follow, but for the purposes of this tag I’m going to pick Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner. This was published in 2011, so an open question as to whether it actually counts as recent or not, but as I read it for the first time this year I think it qualifies. I cannot imagine ever falling out of love with this book, or with Lerner as a writer. The way he talks about art, poetry, the art of translation, the interaction of past and present, duplicity, uncertainty – this is a portrait of the artist as a young man that will stand the test of time for sure.

3: The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come – A book coming out next year that you’re most excited about

The list of books I want to read next year is already well into double figures (David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue, Evie Wyld’s The Bass Rock, Emily St John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel, Ottessa Moshfegh’s Death in Her Hands…) but if I had to pick one to top that list it would have to be The Liar’s Dictionary, by Eley Williams. Her debut collection Attrib. made such an impression on me I think it’s fair to say it changed my writing life. The synopsis for this new book sounds so far up my street it’s practically living in my attic. I can’t wait to see what Williams has come up with.

4: Bah, Humbug! – A book that everyone else loves that you just can’t stand

This isn’t going to be a popular opinion (and I guess that’s the point), but I’m going to have to pick Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments. I love Atwood’s work, I love everything Atwood stands for. But come on, this novel is weak and massively overhyped. I’m just going to come out and say it: The Testaments should never have been written, much less won the Booker (Lucy was robbed).

5: Bob Cratchit – An old dependable that you always recommend

I’m sure the list of books I habitually recommend is overlong and predictable, so I’ll pick one of the weirder ones from it and go for Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn & Child. I am obsessed with this book, by what Ridgway does with the crime genre. In fact, I think I’m due a reread…

6: Tiny Tim – An underhyped book that you think deserves more love

Zero hesitation here in pushing Mark Haddon’s The Porpoise. This book made me cry just because it’s so excellently written. The treatment of myth, the mixing and merging of genres, the sheer joy of this thing. And what a wonderful ending. I adored it literally from the first page. I cannot understand why this book isn’t making more waves.

7: Today? Why it’s Christmas Day! – What’s a book that always gets you in the mood for Christmas (apart from A Christmas Carol)?

Well, that’s going to have to be Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. For Christmas read Christie-mas. Job done.

8: The Muppet Christmas Carol – Your favourite film adaptation of a book

This is really difficult. I’m torn between the obvious Christmassy ones – Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express (see above), Sidney Lanfield’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, Jack Clayton’s The Innocents – and adaptations I love that have no Christmas connection – Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, John Schlesinger’s Far From the Madding Crowd, David Lean’s A Passage to India – so I think I’m going to opt for Joseph Losey’s The Go-Between, which although it is set at the height of summer I’m convinced I saw for the first time at Christmas. This film had a profound effect on me and I love it still.

Wishing all readers of this blog a peaceful and magical festive season, stuffed with good books, good food and great ghost stories. See you back here soon for my end of the year book roundup and plans for 2020.

Looking at the average rating for John Darnielle’s second novel Universal Harvester yesterday on Goodreads, I felt kind of heartbroken. But then reader reviews are unpredictable – that’s what’s so fascinating about them – and a solid percentage of how they pan out can be put down to clumsy marketing, Trying to cash in on the thriller market is not usually a good idea if the book you are trying to sell is not a thriller. You piss off the thriller fans, and risk not reaching the novel’s natural audience in the process. More marketing departments should realise this, and come up with more imaginative approaches.

By coincidence, the shortlists for this year’s Shirley Jackson Awards were also published yesterday, and looking through the Best Novel category I felt heartbroken all over again. The Shirley Jackson shortlists are always strong, and this year’s are absolutely no exception. But there was no place for Universal Harvester and as it’s one of the finest pieces of weird fiction I’ve read in recent years, I’m finding it difficult to understand why. I can see that there are logical arguments for excluding it – no supernatural element, no ‘real’ horror, no easily definable weirdness – but then isn’t that the essence of weirdness, that it can’t be easily defined?

Universal Harvester is weird. And it’s fantastic. Reading a novel this well executed always makes my heart clench. If you’re interested in weird Weird fiction, you should seek it out.

*

When he imagined himself all grown up, he saw himself in Nevada, maybe owning a store, or managing a business in Des Moines. If he thought of the future at all, it looked like the present. and so the young, bored Jeremy of the Nothing Happened variation rings false, and I put more stock in the one I see this afternoon, standing behind the counter eating a sandwich, reading through the classified ads in the Des Moines Register, the Jeremy who’s there when Sarah Jane gets back from Collins, throwing herself wildly through the door of Video Hut as though seeking shelter, her eyes wide, her face darting deerlike first to the right, now to the left, the story she brings so fresh with the terror of its insult that she takes over an hour to tell it, like a person who’s saying things out loud to make sure she won’t forget them.

When we first start reading Universal Harvester, we think we can guess what kind of story we are letting ourselves in for. Jeremy Heldt lives with his father Steve in Nevada (with a long first ‘a’), Iowa. He’s twenty-two years old, still clerking at the video rental store where he’s been working since he left school at eighteen. His dad is worried about him, but he’s not the kind of man to interfere, especially when he knows that both of them are still grieving the loss of Jeremy’s mother Linda in a car accident some years before. Jeremy’s OK with his job. He knows he’ll have to move on sometime, only not quite yet. Then a regular customer – all the Video Hut’s clientele are regular customers – brings back a video saying there’s something wrong with it, that someone has recorded something over part of the movie. Not enough to spoil the picture – it’s just five minutes or so – but enough to make her think she should inform the management.

Jeremy takes the video home and watches it through. Strange scenes are revealed. The interior of an old outbuilding, a woman running along the road at night, a bound figure seated in a chair with a pillowcase tied over their head. Jeremy is disturbed, and captivated. The driveway, the outbuilding, look familiar. Could these scenes have been shot locally? He tells his employer, Sarah Jane, about the video, only by then a second customer has reported similar problems. Sarah Jane thinks they should investigate further. Jeremy is inclined towards the belief that it’s best left alone…

The haunted video subgenre has become a staple of horror fiction and film, and its popularity shows no signs of diminishing. The whole ‘Ring’ franchise is based around it. Books like Marisha Pessl’s Night Film and Joel Lane’s The Witnesses are Gone are honourable examples of it. Universal Harvester even namechecks The Blair Witch Project in acknowledgement of it. I am particularly fond of ‘lost film’ stories, and it was definitely this part of the premise that drew me towards Universal Harvester in the first place.

What I found when I read the book was something quite different. The first half of Darnielle’s novel – Jeremy’s day-to-day life in Nevada, the video store, the discovery of the film clips, Sarah Jane going AWOL – really is only the beginning, the receiving end of the mystery, rather than the mystery itself. We then jump-cut to another family, the Samples, living a similar life to the Heldts only forty years earlier. Peter Sample and his five-year-old daughter Lisa live through a similarly devastating loss to that experienced by Steve and Jeremy, when Peter’s wife Irene walks out of her home one day, never to return. The way her absence impacts the lives of her husband and daughter is the real subject of Universal Harvester. The way in which Lisa’s story connects with Jeremy’s will only be understood as the novel reaches its close.

*

Sarah Jane jutted her neck forward a little and narrowed her eyes, trying to get better focus without having to draw nearer; she noticed a few small yellow bodies lazily drifting in and out of the hole. It made the gourd feel heavier in her sight than it had when she’d been imagining robins or nuthatches. Birds nest lightly. She thought about so many wasps crowded into one place, a great throng displacing some small family of two or three birds. She saw the muddy netting of the nest half-blocking the hole, dusty runover from all the activity inside. And she noted, finally, a wet spot at the bottom, a darkening patch almost as big as her hand. Honey? There is no wasp honey. But the gourd had been put there for birds. 

Darnielle’s writing is laconic, languorous, his (eventual) plot distinctive and highly personal. Yet the subjects he deals with are universal and vast as the Iowa skyline. The way in which he breaks the fourth wall – an unidentified first person voice interrupting the steady flow of third person narrative – is mysterious and perplexing, leaving us with the feeling of being watched. In many horror stories, this unknown intruder would turn out to be the serial killer, salaciously plotting his next move, salivating over past atrocities, and it is assumed knowledge of this kind that makes these incursions seem sinister when we first start to notice them. The truth, again, turns out to be different and much more interesting. Darnielle’s formal experimentation is of the most skilful kind: subtle and ingenious, deepening the mystery before finally clarifying it, never tipping over into wilful obscurity.

*

If you learn to look hard enough, you can find stories in seemingly impenetrable tableaux. Street scenes. Parking lots. People waiting for a bus.

In its treatment of time and memory, Universal Harvester shares some interesting connectivity with Jon McGregor’s magnificent Reservoir 13. The story is revealed in sideways glances, brief asides. Both these novels – my favourites of the year so far – are concerned at their heart with the dignity, pathos and transcendence of ordinary lives; better, that there is no such thing as ordinary, that in the intricacy of their particular passage through the world, all lives are unique. In its examination of the inherent strangeness of lived experience, the hazy gap at the heart of things where even final revelations do not reveal everything, Universal Harvester is weird to the core. I cannot recommend this beautiful novel highly enough.

The Isle of Bute doesn’t get much snow usually. This morning it is settled too deep to put the rubbish out. The front steps form a series of steeply undulating curves. The wooded slope to the rear of our house, an enchanted forest.

I last encountered snow like this ten years ago, when I was living in London. Children sledding in Manor Park, the ducks, confined to one small area of an otherwise frozen pond. I remember leaving work early, anxious to reach home before the railway network shut down completely. Pulling out of Shadwell on the DLR, snow gusting against the windows, the stations closing one by one as the train passed through.

I remember when I was small: collecting icicles, storing them in the ice box, they were so huge, so beautiful. I didn’t want them to die. Completing the ‘barefoot challenge’ in a race with my brother: three times around the house, no socks, no shoes.

A fortnight ago, and a drive through the Trossachs: Callander, Loch Katrine, the Duke’s Pass, sere and glorious, a landscape from an epic quest. Snow still lying at the roadside from the last snowfall. A ‘road closed’ sign, which we hesitated over and then ignored, seeing cars running safely through from the opposite side.

The Duke’s Pass this morning would be impassable.

This morning I went barefoot to put the rubbish out, not wanting to drag snow inside the house, or soak my clothes.