With just one day to go before the Gordon Burn Prize shortlist is announced, I have managed to read ten out of the twelve longlisted titles. Time constraints mean that I haven’t managed to blog about Will Ashon’s Chamber Music – a superb collection of essays, boldly conceived and powerfully executed – or Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall, which was one of my reading highlights from 2018. I also ran out of time to read Kerry Hudson’s Lowborn – a book I feel I am almost guaranteed to like and admire (contrary though this may seem, this is undoubtedly the reason it kept getting pushed to the back of my reading queue) – and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, the one book on the longlist whose presence there bemused me.
With these personal shortcomings very much in mind, my prediction for the shortlist is as follows:
The Vogue by Eoin McNamee
For the Good Times by David Keenan
Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss
Sweet Home by Wendy Erskine
Chamber Music by Will Ashon
This Brutal House by Niven Govinden
That being said, there’s an argument to be made for every single one of the titles I’ve read, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a very different shortlist emerging, with very different emphases.
I’m looking forward to finding out which books make it through. In the meantime, I’m also going to reveal my personal choice of winner, which would be Eoin McNamee’s The Vogue. The emotional power of that work, its inalienable sense of place, its stark poetry – even more than Ghost Wall and For the Good Times, my close runners-up, this is a novel that will remain with me for a long time to come.
When he looked at the ceiling of the shabby room, the damp patch over in the corner and the crack around the lighting surround, and the repeated crescent stains where somebody had bounced a dirty ball on the ceiling the fragility of it all was overwhelming and the beauty, too, because there was Marty’s sweatshirt lying in illuminated folds like a sleeve from one of those old paintings, and there were the towels, brilliant white on the floor: centuries of people had cleaned away the dirt from sheets and towels, pummeling at the stains and the grime, rinsing it all away, the water circling down the drain, and endless lines of washing, high in the sky, billowing in a hard wind. (‘Last Supper’)
A good short story should reveal a corner of a world. It should tell a story, of course, but of equal importance to me when I am reading is the sense of a hinterland, of the author introducing us to places and to people who form part of a complete vision, with their lives and the lives of others continuing – perhaps in unforeseen directions – long after the final page of this particular story has been read.
Wendy Erskine’s debut Sweet Home is a collection of small masterpieces. It is a book about Belfast but in contrast with David Keenan’s For the Good Times or Anna Burns’s Milkman it shows us the fallout from the Troubles in slipping glimpses – Kyle, who falls into a life of violence after suffering trauma at the hands of his father, or Olga, a lonely teacher whose married lover’s death in a punishment shooting has made her come to hate even the colour green.
Like Lisa Blower’s stories in It’s Gone Dark Over Bill’s Mother’s, which I read earlier this year, the stories in Sweet Home demonstrate an affinity for the form that makes them appear effortless, whilst at the same time employing ingenious twists and tricks of form and narrative that reveal an author who is not only fully conscious of the tradition she is working in but more than fully capable of ascending into its first rank of practitioners (Trevor, McGahern) – one of the stories from this collection, ‘Inakeen’, has already been shortlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Prize.
Yet Erskine brings also a contemporary urgency and better still an empathy to her narratives that is all her own. Like so much of the great Irish short fiction writing, these are stories of ordinary working class people caught in the grip of everyday crises – and one never escapes the sense that Erskine is documenting rather than inventing, This is how it is, she seems to say. Given a twist or turn of fate, this could be you or me, maybe already is. These are stories of a society driven to breaking point, not just by the violence of armed conflict but by the more insidious, ubiquitous violence of unchecked capitalism.
In their pathos and in their power, these are stories of now.
I particularly loved ’77 Pop Facts You Didn’t Know About Gil Courtney’ – a life-in-fragments of an Ian Curtis-like musician – because come on, you know I love stories that do stuff like this with form. But the jewel in the crown has to be the title story, ‘Sweet Home’ itself, which apart from containing a real heart-in-mouth moment of horror, is a composite portrait of grief that manages equally to encompass all strata of society. ‘Arab States: Mind and Narrative’ also deserves particular mention for its stark and empathetic portrayal of a road-never-taken, as does ‘Lady and Dog’ for its neat nod to Chekhov. (I have faith that Olga does not realise her final, desperate act of imagining, by the way – there’s no way Erskine would do that to us.)
This is an involving and finely wrought collection and one that absolutely honours the memory of Gordon Burn. I only hope that Wendy Erskine is at work on a novel because I can’t wait to read it.
How to end such a story, especially one that is this angry, like a big black fist? The voice is off-putting. All the important action happens offscreen; we don’t even see the shooting or the actual bodies or the video. Like that one guy in fiction workshop said, meta is so eighties. The mise en abyme is cool but overdone. This is a story of fragments, sketches. Dear author: thank you for sharing this, but we regret.
And what a brilliant story it is, this first, titular entry in the table of contents of this flawlessly executed, arresting debut collection. Of course, the very features listed by Thompson-Spires as flaws – her irony deliberately self-conscious – are its key attractions. That ‘Heads of the Colored People’ is a story of sketches, fragments leaves us as readers all the more intensely involved with it, reaching for truth even as we look away, sickened by the horror of truth’s implications.
Not all the stories in this collection are so deliberately oblique. Each and every one makes for compelling reading. My favourites are the linked stories – ‘Belles Lettres’, ‘The Body’s Defenses Against Itself’, the superb ‘Fatima, the Biloquist’. The brilliant little duology that is ‘This Todd’ and ‘A Conversation About Bread’. But then there’s the shocking needle-sharpness of ‘Suicide, Watch’ and ‘Wash Clean the Bones’ – I admire them all.
This is the kind of collection you might feel driven to read in a single sitting, just to see where it’s going, just to make sure that at least some of its characters emerge from their narratives unscathed. And to enjoy the writing, of course, the author’s seamlessly dexterous control of voice and form. Thompson-Spires has talked about her reasons for training her gaze on the American black middle classes in particular – because the issues they face are often hidden and not openly discussed – and this is a book that will make you question tired assumptions just as often as it makes you laugh.
I think it’s brilliant. I am so eager to see what Thomspon-Spires writes next, because the second book is, more even than the debut, the proof of an author’s intent and future direction.
I am not sure whether I personally would have considered Heads of the Colored People as a typical Gordon Burn Prize contender, if there is such a thing and maybe there isn’t and maybe that’s the point, but for me these stories have a smoothed perfection about them – an MFA quality – that removes them from the jagged edge of immediacy I have come to associate with the prize. Maybe I’m talking tosh and it wouldn’t be the first time. In either case, I hope Thompson-Spires garners many more award nominations, because the significance of her achievement is not in doubt.
This novel opens with one of its twelve principal characters walking over Hungerford Bridge on her way to the National Theatre, and in one of those weird moments of synchronicity that happen more often than cold logic would give life credit for, that is exactly what I found myself doing the day I finished reading Girl, Woman, Other. How could I not think of Amma as I reached the bridge’s mid-point, stopping, as I so often do when making that particular transition, to gaze out at the lights of London, to meditate on where the city is headed, where I see myself now in relation to it?
This is a great symphony of a novel, one in which a number of story threads and character arcs are gradually woven together – or unravelled, if you prefer to see it that way – in a dense and skilfully designed tapestry of narrative. No character is random, no incident irrelevant. And though many of the book’s central characters live in London and the novel has a great deal to say about that city in particular this is far from being exclusively a London novel.
Reading Girl, Woman, Other is an experience not unlike wandering through the departure lounge of an international airport: you watch individuals, couples, families, hear snatches of their conversations, pick up intimations of their worries and dreams, experience fleeting visions of a hundred lives. All are different, yet all are connected. All, for those moments in which you encounter them, seem somehow intimately and uncannily connected with your own.
The way the book is written, the form it takes – an unstoppable river of words alternately close-packed and free-wheeling, skittish – is for me at least its greatest joy. In its disregard for conventional arrangements of paragraphs and cut-and-dried syntax, the novel offers an irresistible invitation to dive right in: to be with its people, to question your own choices, motivations and assumptions, to recognise the role you play in shaping the lives of others and of our body politic. The use of different Englishes and registers of English forms an inalienable part of the work”s innate musicality.
In its interest in the absolute now as the uppermost layer of the peculiar arrangement of time we know as history, Girl, Woman, Other is absolutely a Gordon Burn book. As an intense and vivid evocation of the lives of black British women, how they have always been here and have always mattered, this work is essential. I don’t mind admitting that I fell in love with it, and more than a little.
Behind me, mirrored, the head of the snake, puffs, opens its black hood, my brain is going to fucking, spunk, bears fangs in its opened mouth, hoods its tongue, is spit on a mirror, and mirrored is miracle: because I know now why there are no snakes in Ireland. I know now. Saint Patrick told them to beat it because snakes move through time differently from us. Their tails are in the past but their heads are in the future. That’s why Saint Patrick told them to beat it. He had to get rid of them. Because if you can read the future then the game is up. And where would Ireland be without the game?
In Anna Burns’s Milkman, a young woman takes refuge in literature as a way of escaping the random brutality of life in the dystopia that is Belfast during the Troubles. In For the Good Times, we are on the other side of the fence, with the milkman who wasn’t really a milkman or at least others like him, pissing about and getting pissed and doing revenge jobs for the Ra while we’re about it.
This is a world where the laughter is loud and the singing is wild and the blood flows painfully and often. This is not a comfortable place to be. This discomfiting impasse, this rupture between a world in which life is lived and comic books are enjoyed and smart clothes admired and the hell in which lives are taken tit for tat and artists burn alive behind barricaded doors is conveyed to us through the words of Sammy, a provo in his youth, now in prison. Sammy is visited by visions – of his beloved best friend Tommy and the horrors they committed together, of the snake that stands for treachery and every single mistake made by every man, ever.
This extraordinary division in register, shifting the novel back and forth between Sammy’s hard-nosed, almost flippant account of irreconcilable social division and its violent consequences, and the hallucinogenic, occult imaginings of a pawn in the game who intuits realities and poetries beyond, realities that are almost more terrifying and more brutal than the blood and grime that is become his daily grind.
For the Good Times reaches beyond social realism into visionary experimentalism to offer us a novel that is in full control of its combustible material, deploying it in a manner that must rank as one of the harshest critiques of paramilitary violence you will ever read, at the same time utilizing it brilliantly as just that: material for the construction of a complex and subversive, bravura work of art.
As an unflinching portrait of these ‘good times’ this book is painful, hard-hitting, difficult to deal with. As the work of a writer who surely counts as one of the most exciting and complete artists at work in Britain today, For the Good Times is a must-read. To add that Keenan’s writing channels the spirit of Gordon Burn to an uncanny degree would seem superfluous to requirements.
“I wanted to make the point in a way that the modernist tradition in Ireland really stems from the Irish vernacular, the love of telling jokes, and the idea that storytelling is performative, and that there are different ways in which to perform a story. I wanted some passages to have the cadences of songs, I wanted to have stories told like interviews back and forth, and some that were pure fantasy like comic strips—this all comes from the Irish folk tradition, but also from the Irish street tradition, which I think definitely informs Irish modernism: that tremendous faith in the power of language.”
(From a fabulous interview with David Keenan at The London Magazine here.)
Literally minutes after finishing reading This Brutal House and while in the process of checking a reference I discovered Ryan Murphy’s HBO series Pose (currently available on BBC iPlayer and amazingly good). In the space of a week I have gone from knowing nothing about the background to Govinden’s novel to knowing at least something about it. I kind of wish I’d discovered Pose before reading This Brutal House but at the same time I’m glad I didn’t, firstly because I can now enter the world of the book again retrospectively and with added sumptuous visuals, and secondly because reading the book ‘blind’ delivers the kind of literary electric shock that reminds us of why we are readers and (especially) why we are writers.
I found this book difficult (a compliment), not in its subject matter so much as the way in which its content is delivered. I’m not a fan of the omniscient voice narrator – I tend to slide away from fabulism – and so I found the use of the first person plural for the Mothers’ narrative somewhat distancing even as it is perfectly appropriate for its context. The narrative is largely expository, the text so dense in places it feels as if you’re having to fight your way inside it. I found it most effective to read this novel in hour-long chunks, so as to immerse myself fully and not to lose the thread.
All these criticisms, in the end, act as plus points: This Brutal House is the kind of novel that stays with you forever, that, once having read it, you can pick up whenever you want and recapture its sense of itself in just a few splendid paragraphs.
I would have liked the book to deliver more of the atmosphere of the vogue balls themselves, the artistry, the coding, the furious competition. Unsurprisingly I enjoyed the formal invention of the vogue caller chapters and could have done with more of them. Stand-out sequences for me were Teddy’s experience in the Chanel store (everything about that chapter is genius) and his later dialogue with the refuse collectors.
At the heart of the book lies Teddy’s story with Sherry and the fleeting glimpses we are offered throughout the course of the novel prove effective as a uniting thread. To ask for more of Sherry and Teddy would seem too greedy.
I know already that This Brutal House will not be my favourite book from the Gordon Burn longlist – in a sense, it is not a novel that was written ‘for’ me and that is well and good – but I know also that it must be one of the contenders most worthy of winning. In entering new territory, both in terms of form and subject matter, in its willingness to take risks, in its superb level of literary achievement, in its opening of the reader’s eyes to social division and hidden oppression, in its reflection on a historical moment This Brutal House loudly embodies the spirit of the Gordon Burn Prize and I will long treasure what it has brought to me, not just as a reader but as a writer too.
It’s interesting how greatly our reaction to books is defined not always by the book as it stands, but by the book we are looking to find.
Of all the novels on this year’s Gordon Burn longlist, Lanny is probably the most beloved by readers and I can see why. Max Porter has a poet’s ear for language. In spite of the bleakness of certain sections, the book as a whole is big-hearted and ultimately positive in its outlook. The action takes place within an enclosed rural community we feel we come to know – as readers, we are drawn into this community, we feel ourselves become a part of it, for better or worse.
All of the above could equally be said of another novel, Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13. Perhaps because of the similarity of their conceit, I found myself constantly comparing the two and for me at least, Lanny loses out – definitively – at every juncture.
The wonder of Reservoir 13 lies in the depth it accrues – the multi-layered, undramatic reconstruction of lived reality, the genuine ambiguousness of many of the characters – characters we come to know only gradually, characters who might easily be us. Lanny is too brief an exercise – too studied – for its ecosystem to properly evolve. Even as the language of their thoughts is beautifully evoked, its characters shade towards stereotype. I hate to say it, but Lanny the golden child feels as if he belongs in another novel – Harry Potter, for example. The book might have worked better – and again, this probably says more about me as a writer than it does about the novel – if Lanny had been some more typical little toerag, ruining his neighbours’ vegetable patches playing Bravo Two Zero or spraying obscene graffiti on the village hall.
As it was, I didn’t believe in him. God preserve me from whimsy.
Part 3 of the novel, that too-tidy resolution, feels altogether too swiftly arrived at, and entirely unearned. Part 2 was much more satisfying. If anything, the novel needed to be longer. It needed to dig in more. It needed to have the courage of its original convictions. Max Porter has spoken eloquently of how Lanny began life as a long poem and I think the bones of that original conception – more abstract, more lyrical (and yes, the Lanny of the poem – when it’s just him and Pete – is entirely conceivable as a character and as a poetic being) – show through too starkly, without ever showing through enough to deliver the rigour this project demanded.
Has ambition, lacks depth, too woolly. It’s not him, it’s me.
When I graduate from the partial hospitalization program, I’ll receive a medallion. The people in group will adorn me with compliments and kind wishes. Then I will get on a plane and perform the persona of a successful author—a feature, interviews, a book tour. The medallion will be inside of my jacket pocket, between my fingertips. My hands will smell like a coin, and my nervous laughter will be amplified by a microphone, and women will line up to adorn me with kind wishes, and they’ll tell me they’ve been hurt too, and I’m scared I’ll reach out to hold them and the coin will fall out of my pocket like the secrets I don’t tell. The coin will fall out and I’ll have to admit that I’m a dumb Indian—and maybe that’s what they need to hear. You can’t obscure the truth with the mundane. You can’t illustrate pain for tourists.
Maybe I’ll wear the coin like a talisman, or be in the hospital again.
One writer’s journey, and so much more. It would be interesting to place this book in dialogue with Janet Frame’s An Angel at My Table, Anna Kavan’s Asylum Dance, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. I find myself remembering especially Meena Kandasamy’s When You Hit Me, which similarly makes the quality of its own sentences the theme of the work as well as the means through which that theme is explored, the proof of its own pudding.
In white culture, forgiveness is synonymous with letting go. In my culture, I believe we carry pain until we can reconcile with it through ceremony. Pain is not framed like a problem with a solution. I don’t even know that white people see transcendence the way we do. I’m not sure their dichotomies apply to me.
Of central importance also is Mailhot’s identity as a Native woman. The passages examining the difficulties she experienced as an MFA student – the internal opposition she felt to particular assumptions and demands – are marvellous and striking. The book’s genesis – as a series of individual essays – does not in the least affect its overall cohesion and resonance. A short work, but so resolute, with a quality of expression that frequently approaches poetry.
As if its words were hewn from rock. Heart Berries is the kind of book that makes you want to write, immediately, to capture moments and memories and arguments as they thrash and burn.
“Airbases in Co Down have always fascinated me… During the war, pilots had been billeted in the house where I was brought up in in Kilkeel. Pilots had written their names on the rafters upstairs and there was a yellowed pin-up of Betty Grable on the attic door. The ghosts of airmen have always been with me.” (Eoin McNamee on The Vogue)
Anyone wishing to know more about the plot of Eoin McNamee’s The Vogue, and its connections to the Greencastle air base in County Down should read the interview in the Irish Times linked above, which offers excellent and valuable insights into McNamee’s writing life and process. I was particularly interested to discover that he does not think of The Vogue at all as a crime novel. I get his reasoning – The Vogue’s emphasis is not on crimes committed so much as the years and layers of history that conspire to obfuscate them, the collective acts of remembering that will eventually bring them to the surface – but thinking about the novel in terms of its relationship to crime fiction does reveal other aspects, most notably the form the novel takes, its complex web of clues, its fractured skeleton.
The Vogue is a brilliant crime novel. It is a brilliant, achingly evocative piece of writing full stop. While reading it I felt rage and tension and sorrow and above all endless admiration for the writer. To experience The Vogue is to experience giddy exhilaration at the risks taken, the tightrope-walk balance McNamee demonstrates in knowing when to keep us guessing, when to show his working, when to reveal the maggots at the heart of the apple.
Oh, the joy of reading a novel that doesn’t give much of a toss about ‘accessibility’. For the first fifty pages I wasn’t ever entirely sure of what was going on and I loved it. Thank f**k for publishers and editors who are still prepared to run with that, to not harp on about reader expectations, to understand that what they have is a fantastic novel, a marvellous writer, to put their money where their mouths are. I was talking to someone the other day about how important music has always been to me, how my love for music has from a young age influenced the way I read, the way I look for meaning in texts – first find the rhythm, the tone, the way the language resonates, through a novel’s structure come to understand its melody – and the first thing any reader should notice about The Vogue is its music, which had me catching my breath with excitement – excitement that writers are doing this – on every page:
Upritchard dreamed of the girl in the pit. His surroundings mocked him. The posters in dirty frames, men and women frozen in mid-season gaiety. He lagged pipes with old jumpers and pushed teatowels into the gaps between frame and window. Rime frosted the inside of the single windowpanes, starred and crystalline and aglitter when he turned his torch on them so that they seemed their own nebulae, something cold and far away. He sat alone by a paraffin stove in the kitchen. There was a leather suitcase on the table in front of him, the lid covered in yellowed travel labels for Skegness and Brighton, the sea on shingle beaches, lights strung out along Victorian esplanades, pierside amusements. Long-gone summers.
The Vogue seems to me a quintessentially Gordon Burn-type book, the kind of novel the Gordon Burn Prize was set up to champion and celebrate. This has been my first encounter with Eoin McNamee’s writing, an experience that has ensured I will be working my way through his backlist as a matter of priority.
