Over the past ten years, we have seen a seismic upsurge of interest and enthusiasm for what has come to be known as folk horror, a peculiarly British brand of weird fiction characterised by subtle intimations of the supernatural, an understated delivery and most crucially an interest in landscape and sense of place. The folk horror revival has produced some excellent work, texts that have already earned their place in the canon and will endure as classics. It has also produced its own share of duds, derivative works that rely too much on familiar tropes and showing little inclination to break new ground. All literary movements tend to run to a law of diminishing returns, and such disappointments are inevitable. Which makes it all the more marvellous when out of nowhere something brilliant arrives to surprise you.
Ben Tufnell’s novel The North Shore is that rare beast, a work of folk horror that holds its own with the classics whilst exhibiting genuine points of difference, a radical literary sensibility combined with an old-fashioned appetite for the strange that will, I am sure, see me returning to this novel repeatedly for new inspiration.
The unnamed narrator – we learn only their initials – grows up somewhere on the north Norfolk coast (I am guessing Salthouse, or Stiffkey), a landscape of treacherous marshland and sudden storms. Alone on the shore during one such storm, the narrator unwittingly becomes a part of something extraordinary, an event that will mark their life while never fully revealing the true extent of its mystery.
Ben Tufnell is a museum curator and writer on art, so while it is not entirely surprising to find him bringing aspects of art criticism into his narrative it is entirely to be welcomed. His writing on the transformative power of Dürer and Bosch came as a real joy for me, and the landscape writing – a vividly sensuous evocation of liminal spaces – is truly exceptional.
To mix folk horror with film criticism and botanical illustration – yes, please! The narrator’s own uncertainty over what they have experienced, the ways in which the potentially treacherous landscape reflects their personal isolation – this is a timeless book, one that will outlast any fashion and repay close attention. The author’s refusal to provide any easy conclusion or explanation enhances the whole.
This elegant, thought-filled book has been an unexpected delight during a difficult week and I am already looking forward to Ben Tufnell’s next novel.
They ran in a landscape where not a stick was alive, not a floating seed. The air was thick with dust or rain that glinted like cartoon radiation. There were forests of shattered leafless trees and wetlands denuded of vegetation, where the water was thick with plastic trash. In a few clips, a half-city stood on the horizon, a skyline of partial buildings that appeared to have been gnawed by fire. Some places had entirely lost the contours of our world… We understood: this was a future world in which the men had never disappeared. It was the hell to which we would have been condemned, the Earth they would have made.
Lines like these might make you think that what we are dealing with here is a classic alternate world dystopia in the feminist mode. You would be wrong. Sandra Newman’s The Men is a radical departure from tradition, a provocative critique of the feminist utopia and a challenge to easy thinking. If more science fiction were this original, our literary environment would immediately become more interesting, and more dynamic.
Jane Pearson is a damaged person. In her earlier life as a ballet prodigy she was groomed by the mentor she idolised to perpetrate abuse on teenage boys. Demonised by a public hungry for scandal, the life she eventually builds for herself is very different from the one she previously imagined. Married to Leo and mother to Ben, Jane’s inner restlessness is merely a precursor to the bewilderment and incomprehension that is about to destroy her world for a second time.
One evening in late August, at 7:14 precisely every human being with a Y chromosome disappears from the world. Aeroplanes, suddenly pilotless, drop from the sky; patients die on operating tables; factories grind to a halt. Women all over the world find themselves widowed, orphaned, homeless, freed, bereft. In the weeks and months that follow, a new world order begins to assert itself. A key player in the new politics is Evangelyne Moreau, a woman with a remarkable mind whose family were wiped out in an act of brutal police violence. Jane knows Evangelyne from college. The two almost became lovers, but Jane ultimately chose Leo. As the world shifts and changes about her, Jane journeys across the country in search of Evangelyne and the truth of what she felt those many years before.
Meanwhile, something else is happening, something disturbing. Videos are appearing online, a series of cryptic film clips entitled simply The Men. In them, armies of lost men march through a world that turns increasingly strange, increasingly depleted. And for many of the women watching, these are men they know. The Men quickly becomes an addiction, a form of mass hypnosis. But are the men real, or CGI fakes? What do the films mean and what do they point towards? For many women, the disappearance of the men is a chance at a new beginning. For others it ushers in a form of stasis, a reality that is ultimately as discomfiting as the world glimpsed in the violent film clips they are watching online.
For Evangelyne Moreau, The Men is more sinister still, a portent of her own destruction. Once again, she asks Jane to make a choice. But is this truly a choice that is Jane’s to make?
From Herland to The Female Man, from Maul to The Power, feminist utopia has formed an important branch of science fiction, encompassing some of its boldest and most experimental ideas. The Men is an important and brilliant addition to the canon, not least in the way it interrogates what has gone before. The questions Newman poses are difficult to answer: would a world without men truly be more equal, more peaceful, more rational? How much, in the end, would we miss them? What is a man, even, and how much, if at all, does gender determine our identity? How far would we be prepared to sacrifice the safety of others in pursuit of our own desires?
The Men is that rare thing, a novel of ideas that pays equal attention to language, character and form. The eerie surrealism of the video sequences generates a sense of mystery and foreboding that is impossible to shake; like the women permanently hunched in front of their screens, we find it impossible to look away, even as the scenes turn darker and increasingly violent. The raw intelligence of this book, its brutal honesty makes The Men a bracing antidote to the more anodyne brand of supposedly political SF that in reality is little more than crowd-pleasing. Newman handles questions of politics, gender, race and philosophy with skill and compassion without succumbing to the platitudes of fashionable discourse or the temptation of providing comfortable answers.
And she can write. At a sentence level, Newman’s prose is fiery, passionate, poetical – in short, a joy. If science fiction’s core directive is to provoke, to interrogate established assumptions, most of all to re-imagine then it is writers like Newman that prove that science fiction as a mode of literature still has a future.
I have frequently been surprised, these past couple of weeks, by the way in which even seasoned literary commentators still slip into the habit of referring to Alan Garner as a children’s writer. I am sure I’ve said this somewhere before, but I continue to think of my first encounter with Garner’s work – The Owl Service, which I first read when I was around twelve – as among my most significant primary encounters with adult themes in literature. I found the book utterly compelling – but if you had asked me then what it was about I would have found it hard to answer. There was simply a feeling I had, a palpable sense of having touched something mysterious, timeless and possibly dangerous. I experienced the same feeling, albeit with a greater understanding of what was going on, both in me and in the book, when I belatedly caught up with Red Shift, some years ago.
As regards the Booker commentators, what on Earth is wrong with saying that Alan Garner is a writer who often centres young protagonists?
Which is exactly what he does in his 2021 novel, Treacle Walker, recently shortlisted for the Booker Prize, a fact that has made me feel more personally excited about the award than I have done since Anna Burns won it for Milkman back in 2018. The Booker has become generally much more innovative, inclusive and interesting in recent years, and I follow the annual discussion surrounding it with great enjoyment. Garner’s shortlisting though speaks to me personally. It counts, for me personally,. This is simply a feeling I have.
Treacle Walker tells the story of a boy, Joseph Coppock. Joe has recently been ill, and seems to spend a lot of time alone. Are his parents at work? Who looks after the house? We are never told. We live, for the duration of this short novel, entirely inside the world and mind of Joe as he encounters a mysterious rag-and-bone man, Treacle Walker, and falls into a daunting adventure that will alter his universe.
Treacle Walker speaks to Joe in riddles, an affectation he clearly finds simultaneously annoying and compelling. He is eager to learn the secrets the old man wants to impart to him, at the same time impatient, as any boy might be, to set his own stamp on the world, to interpret its signs and wonders in his own language. Most of the dialogue in Treacle Walker is conducted in the dialect of Garner’s native Cheshire, and one senses keenly Garner’s desire not to confuse or obfuscate but to set down, to save this unique language from annihilation in the twenty-first-century rush to refute the past. There is also a fierce feeling of privacy being accorded, the boy and the man who were always meant to come together sharing knowledge neither could fully fathom, until now.
It is notable that in the moments of highest tension and drama, the two cease with their mutual ragging and speak in terse, plain English. In these exchanges, it is almost as if the two are of a similar age and level of understanding.
As with all of Garner’s work, the action takes place against a vividly described, living landscape. One might almost say that Garner’s writing becomes the landscape, revealing it in all its aspects: peace, seclusion, discomfort, joy, alienation and terror:
But night was in the room, a sheet of darkness, flapping from wall to wall. It changed shape, swirling, flowing. It dropped to the ground and ruckled over the floor bricks; then up to the joints and beams of the ceiling; hung, fell, humped. It shrieked, reared against the chimney opening, but did not enter. It surged through the house by cracks and gaps in the timbers, out under the eaves. There was a whispering, silence, and on the floor the snow melted to tears.
This passage speaks to me particularly, both in its heady choice of words and in the symbols they carry. There have already been suggested many possible and plausible explanations of Treacle Walker’s meaning. For me, it is a book about the rising tide of chaos that accompanies change, the corresponding forces of growth and new imaginings that bring about progress. People have spoken of this novel as Garner’s last hurrah, a gathering together of his familiar themes, a farewell coda. It may be all of these things. Yet it is equally a work of bold experiment and dynamism, a book that makes use of ancient fable to speak to us in our own time with uncanny acuity.
Treacle Walker is tired, and Joe is ready and waiting to claim his future. As the two change places, or become one another, they mirror the unquiet yet seamless passing of one season to another.
They opens with what at first glance appears to be a gentle slice of English pastoral: a house in the country, a house that is described as ‘rather splendid’ and that from the roof enjoys ‘a full sight of the sea.’ The scene, with its seabirds and confluence of rivers and quiet conversation between friends, appears idyllic. And yet even here, in the first paragraph of this remarkable short novel, threats hover in the margins, not so much in the action as in the author’s choice of words:
A natural bird sanctuary, one was conscious of flight as part of the landscape.
What follows is a gradual winnowing away, a gleaning, as Dick puts it, of every freedom, of every unguarded action, a pushing back of life into its own dusty shadow. We find ourselves in a world in which artistic expression has been deemed unnecessary and dangerous for society. A growing band of human surveillance drones – the ‘they’ of the title – move through district after district, destroying artworks and burning books and banning music. Artists themselves are not harmed unless they physically resist or offer verbal objections, at which point reprisals are swift, brutal and unequivocal. Unless they appear at the beginning of a sentence, they are never capitalised. We have no idea if they are government-sanctioned, or self-appointed. Artists seek sanctuary in out-of-the-way places, rural enclaves and coastal settlements where the worst of the new laws have not yet come into effect.
We sense that it is only a matter of time before there is nowhere left to retreat to. As more and more places become unsafe, acts of defiance become smaller and more internalised. As time passes, it is not only creative work that is deemed inappropriate but more or less anything that speaks of individual, quiet enjoyment: living alone, walks in nature, the companionship of animals. Bands of ‘sightseers’ follow the gleaning parties, despoiling the landscape, holding rowdy gatherings and revelling in the bloodshed and censure meted out to dissidents. When they are not out on the streets looking for a bit of civil unrest, they are walled up inside their family homes, watching television.
I have seen some commentary on this book that suggests Dick’s vision of dystopia is simplistic and highly selective, that her characters are privileged and – ah yes, that weasel word again – elitist. I would argue that such protestations entirely misjudge the purpose and tone of They, which is a small masterpiece, the finest and most penetrative kind of allegorical SF. It is always tempting with literary dystopias, to demand that they be literal, to want to draw comparisons with one’s own time and place. There is no shortage of these in They, for which one could cite recent instances of drones spying on lone walkers in the Pennines, neighbours reporting on neighbours having a cup of tea with other neighbours, the equating of journalists with organised crime, the media trashing of impartial news broadcasting and the withdrawal of government support for English Literature as an academic discipline. The violent sanctioning of any form of personal expression in the name of spiritual appropriateness when it is in fact a blatant exercise in social control is happening to Afghan people and in particular Afghan women right now under the Taliban.
We will always find plenty of examples to choose from – that we cannot help doing so points to the fact that Dick’s novel is not out of date, as some have intimated, but timeless – but we should resist such simplistic reductionism. What we have in They is a powerful philosophical argument, a refutation of the will to power per se, an upholding of reason and personal liberty in the face of prejudice, of groupthink, of the unexamined urge to censure what is different. They stands also as a metaphor for itself: Dick, a queer writer who faced rejection and condescension as a daily reality, saw her work repeatedly belittled and sidelined, with They being described as ‘menopausal’ by a male reviewer in a national broadsheet.
And yet, its final words are hopeful; words of quiet yet determined resistance:
‘Hallo love’, I said, greeting another day.
It is important to point up Dick’s landscape writing as a salient feature of They. For Dick, noticing and valuing the natural world, as an essential source of spiritual renewal yes, but equally in and for itself, is not just prescient but an act of subversion, one that places They in its rightful place alongside other works of roughly contemporaneous and distinctly British science fiction such as Anna Kavan’s Ice, Christopher Priest’s A Dream of Wessex, Keith Roberts’s Pavane and Richard Cowper’s The Road to Corlay.
The story of how They was rescued from oblivion by a literary agent who happened to pick up a rare second hand copy in a Bath charity shop is beautifully told by Sam Knight in an article for The New Yorker, and elaborated upon by Dick’s champion Lucy Scholes in the Paris Review. The inspiration we can draw from Dick and from her writing – sparse, bold, direct, resolute and impassioned – is substantial, and I would recommend They to anyone who wants to learn more about how science fiction can still be ground-breaking and resonant without so much as a mention of new technology or alien planets.
We are lucky to have this book readily available to us again.
A tad late for Hallowe’en, but if you’re looking for a new ghost story to read I can thoroughly recommend Alison Moore’s new novel The Retreat. Moore is an extraordinarily good writer. Each of her five novels to date has been in its own way perfect: not a dud sentence in sight and with the slowly brewing tension deliberately understated. Moore sees no need for shocks or histrionics or forced affect in her work – her deft, spare handling of language, her facility for creating weird situations, above all her intense yet utterly realistic evocation of character are more than sufficient for creating a unique body of work for which ‘unhallowed’ might turn out to be the defining adjective.
Her latest concerns an artists’ retreat, a rather uncomfortable house on a somewhat inaccessible island. Once you’re there it’s difficult to leave without making a scene, without deliberately setting yourself in opposition to your fellows, which is the last thing you want to be seen doing when you’re supposed to be forging a mutually supportive atmosphere of communal creativity. Sandra, a rather disappointed painter, finds her experience of the island falling far short of her expectations. Carol, a novelist in search of sanctuary, finds the ghosts becoming actively beneficial to her work in progress. Who gets out alive? Moore will keep you guessing until the very last page. I loved this book, which is effective and disturbing to a far more potent degree than any number of more deliberate or dramatic haunted house stories. The only problem with being a Moore fan is that the moment you’ve finished reading one of her novels you’re already looking forward to the next – and Moore, to her credit, is a writer who is prepared to give her books all the time they need to come into being.
Another November miracle comes in the form of Sarah Hall’s new novel Burntcoat. Like The Retreat, Burntcoat is sparse, economical and intense, carrying more emotional weight and resonance than you might expect to find in novels twice its length. Here we follow Edith, a sculptor who has found fame but at an immense cost, whose narrative is conducted during what we understand to be the final weeks of her foreshortened life. Edith’s background is traumatic – her mother Naomi, a writer, experiences a dramatic personality change following a brain haemorrhage when Edith is young. Yet still she drags herself back to life, relearning not only her passion to make art, but also her ability to adequately love and care for her daughter. It is Edith’s relationship with Naomi, as much as her all-consuming love affair with a refugee chef named Halit, which forms the armature of this novel, which in essence is a book about how love transforms us, and what real love means.
Burntcoat takes place against the background of a pandemic. The world is swept by a disease still more deadly than COVID, and with still more destructive implications both for individuals and for society. This is a harrowing firestorm of a book, and as a commentary on what we are currently experiencing, what it costs us to live through such a crisis, I cannot imagine many better ones coming along. As someone who has read most everything Hall has written, I would count Burntcoat as her crowning achievement to date.
Again, I can scarcely wait to see what she has planned for us next. Reading writers this good is always something of a game-changer, an electrical shock to the head, a reminder that the work of art is always worth the effort.
A couple of weeks ago I had the great pleasure of talking with writer and folklore enthusiast Mark Norman, the creator and host of the very excellent Folklore Podcast. We had a wonderful conversation about The Good Neighbours, diving deep into the original inspiration behind the novel and the long tradition of fairy folklore within literature. The opportunity to talk about this aspect of the book with someone so deeply attuned to it was especially welcome, and if you’d like to find out more you can listen to the episode here. While you’re at it, you might also want to check out the wealth of resources available at The Folklore Network, including all previous episodes of the podcast. It’s an inspiration.
Talking of which, now seems like an excellent time to give a shout-out to Mark’s latest book, Dark Folklore. Written together with folklore historian and playwright Tracey Norman, this book is an exploration of the more sinister side of folklore and looks like an absolute must for anyone interested in folk horror, either from a reader’s or writer’s perspective. You can buy the book here.
The first known appearance of the joker-vagrant Till Eulenspiegel in German literature comes with the publication of an anonymous chapbook in 1510, though his origins in folklore and oral storytelling most likely date back still further. Since then, his incarnations have been multitudinous and varied, including operas, comics, novels and films. To get some idea of the importance of Till Eulenspiegel to German culture, a British audience might find it useful to think of the centrality of Robin Hood to our own myth-making and storytelling, most especially in the protean, elusive nature of such a character, neither wholly hero nor villain, always on the move, forever reinventing himself as befits the time and place.
Daniel Kehlmann’s most recent novel Tyll, translated from the German by Ross Benjamin and shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, sets the action at the time of the Thirty Years’ War. Tyll Ulenspiegel is born the son of a miller, Claus, who finds himself a miller more by disagreeable luck than critical judgement. Claus Ulenspiegel’s true passion is for ideas – ideas that, with witchfinders roaming the land and a religious war on the horizon, turn out to be dangerous not only for him but for the entire village. Tyll, who from a young age shows a perspicacity and insularity that sets him apart from other children, is quickly forced to rely on his own resources. Brute twists and turns of fate, combined with Tyll’s mercurial and essentially unknowable nature, make for a picaresque narrative of unexpected happenings and unusual daring.
As is usual and ever-delightful with Daniel Kehlmann, the story does not proceed in a straightforward fashion. Instead, we are offered a series of discrete snapshots, shuffled like a deck of cards, dropping us in and out of Tyll’s life and times at irregular, non-linear intervals, so that even as we reach the end there are still gaps that can only be filled by our own imagination. As in a painting by Bruegel, certain figures dart forward to capture our attention, before sloping off into the background, making space for someone else. And the story is as much about the troubled social and political landscape in which it takes place as its eponymous hero. The Thirty Years’ War left many thousands dead, and was responsible for the deaths of millions more through the poverty, displacement, disease and starvation that it inflicted. One of the most powerful effects of the COVID pandemic, for me, has been the way in which it has revealed our residual closeness to events that previously seemed quite distant. Hilary Mantel has been brilliant at evoking the strong political parallels between our own time and the time of the Tudors. In Kehlmann’s hands, history is similarly pliable, similarly present.
Most of all, it is Kehlmann’s deft and original approach to the fantastic that illuminates this novel, that lends it the timeless allure and magical slipperiness of its jester protagonist. The land our little troupe travel through is alive with spirits and goblins, witches and will o’ the wisps, with hunches and premonitions, with gods and monsters that are as much the creatures of a nation’s troubled psyche as of her boundless forests, things only half-seen that still cannot be unseen because we know they are there. Kehlmann’s evocation of a magical landscape is nothing more and nothing less than the conjuring of a time in which magic and religion, alchemy and science mixed freely among the crowds, sowing their own brands of dissent and chaos, of healing and treachery among the people of a world – as continues to be proven – not so very different from our own.
In his refusal to provide answers or pass judgments, Kehlmann proves himself as tricksy and light-fingered as his shadowy hero. Tyll is a distillation of wonderland, a casket of ambiguous treasures. Beware his Midas touch – it may leave you with asses’ ears.
“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.” (Matthew 10: 29.)
As we patiently wait for this year’s Clarke season to get underway (we have been reliably informed this will happen soon) I have been travelling back in time to revisit some older works of science fiction, some of them past winners of the Clarke, some of them now ascended to the status of classics. I like to do this periodically because I enjoy it, because I have never failed to find it instructive and fascinating. The field of science fiction is now so big and so diverse it would be impossible to encompass all of it in a single lifetime; nonetheless, there are certain works that keep cropping up, works you hear about so often there is often the sensation of having absorbed them by osmosis. Which cannot compare with having actually read them, a fact illuminated for me this week as I finally caught up with Mary Doria Russell’s landmark novel of first contact, The Sparrow.
The Sparrow won the Clarke Award in 1998, the same year Mary Doria Russell was awarded the Astounding Award for Best New Writer and the BSFA Award for Best Novel. She had already won the Tiptree Award in 1996, The Sparrow’s year of (US) publication. A big winner then, a big hitter. Looking at the 1998 Clarke Award shortlist now and in the light of having just read The Sparrow, Russell’s win seems obvious, a no-brainer. Reviews at the time universally praised the novel for its humanity, its depth of vision, its refusal to provide the reader with easy answers. I would describe The Sparrow as absolutely classic second-wave, social SF, as close to the Le Guinian ideal as you could get without actually being Le Guin. Reading it was enough to make me fall hopelessly back in love with this kind of close focus, unironic, problem-based science fiction, to remind me not just of the point of it but the sense of urgency it can carry, especially in our current times.
The Sparrow is a deep, dense, difficult novel that stands equally as a classic of political fiction, philosophical fiction or social commentary. Yet the question that nagged at me most persistently during my reading was as to whether The Sparrow would get published today, in its current form, by a science fiction imprint?
The Sparrow is the story of Emilio Sandoz, a young Jesuit priest from a poor background in Puerto Rico who has experienced trouble and violence throughout his childhood. His talent for languages has taken him into many other disadvantaged communities all over the world, and when the SETI program at Arecibo begins to pick up verifiably alien radio communications, Emilio is stricken with the passionate desire to travel to their source, to meet the aliens for himself and come to a greater understanding of God’s purpose.
The mission to Rakhat, organised under the aegis of the Jesuit Society, seems at first to be astoundingly successful: Emilio and his comrades make a safe planetfall, soon coming into contact with peaceable rural hunter-gatherers called the Runa. Through a series of increasingly complex interactions and misfortunes , the travellers become aware that they have barely scratched the surface of the planet’s culture and reality. When Emilio eventually returns to Earth, he is not at all the same man who left. The novel offers a tense and thrilling chronology of what really happened; it equally examines the question of whether Emilio will ever be able to come to terms with that.
Commentary on The Sparrow tends to focus on the question of faith: what is it, and can it be maintained in the face of one’s own error, wrongdoing or personal suffering? Mary Doria Russell was brought up a Catholic, though she later declared herself an agnostic before converting to Judaism. Matters of faith and the nature of the religious experience have preoccupied her throughout her writing life and the delicate, empathetic, wholly non-judgmental way these issues are handled in The Sparrow makes for a profound and thought-provoking reading experience. The novel is equally a powerful meditation on the erroneous and damaging assumptions of ‘enlightened’ colonialism, the harm that can be done to others simply through ignorance; the humans contaminate the ecology of Rakhat simply by being there, and their uninvited presence in the lives of the Runa community has ramifications they cannot even guess at. That Russell introduces these questions without seeking to apportion blame makes The Sparrow doubly powerful and three times as interesting.
For The Sparrow is, above all, a novel of character. The first third of the novel is spent exploring the lives and complex histories of the principal characters, their relationship to one another and how they came to be involved in one another’s fates. There is an intricacy here, a willingness to sit down with people and learn about them, that is absolutely central to the success and impact of the novel as a whole. If I were to draw a comparison, it would be with the densely layered character work undertaken by Emily St John Mandel in Station Eleven: without the complexity and detail of the sections set before the Georgia flu pandemic, Station Eleven would be just one more post-apocalyptic ‘band of brothers’ novel. It is Mandel’s centring of character, of individual psychology that lifts it above and beyond, that makes the book extraordinary. So it is with The Sparrow, and I can only hope that if a new writer were to produce a comparable work today, they would meet with the kind of editor prepared to fight for the book on its own terms, rather than conceding to a commercial pressure that certainly exists, to ratchet up the tension, to keep the action moving, to get to the point.
In the very best fiction, the journey very often is the point, what it reveals about a set of characters in a particular environment. You could argue that science fiction especially is precisely about that. The Sparrow is a magnificent achievement. Russell’s novel is now a quarter of a century old, yet feels timeless in its storytelling. It absolutely did make me fall back in love with this idea of science fiction, and I would like us to see more of it.
Reading these two story collections back-to-back presented an eerily similar aesthetic experience to my encounter with Geen and Ferrante last week, only in reverse. Both collections deal with social change, buried secrets and personal crisis. Both employ elements of the fantastic to secure their effects. Yet the manner of approach, the mode of attack could not be more different, with the internal temperature of these stories, above all, providing a fascinating contrast.
Enriquez’s stories (translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell) take place against the shifting, unstable backdrop of dictatorships past. In ‘The Intoxicated Years’ we follow a group of teenagers as they confront issues of identity, addiction and sexuality in the years following the fall of the Peron regime. The political repercussions and personal reckonings that preoccupy their parents are to their children a matter of intense dullness, of ‘yeah, whatevs’; set against the agonies of teenage angst, the adult world even in its moment of greatest precariousness feels tedious, played out, irrelevant. Only as they grow older do they begin to understand how no one can live surrounded by such a society and emerge unscathed.
Other stories come populated more literally with ghosts from the past and monsters of the present, and Enriquez’s manner of merging the bitterest social commentary with elements of horror – see ‘Under the Black Water’ for a Lovecraft-tinged death cult (this story carries strongly resounding echoes of Clive Barker’s ‘The Forbidden’ aka Candyman) and ‘The Neighbour’s Courtyard for a hideously unsettling variation on the zombie story – is brilliantly handled. The stories’ boldness in confronting issues of violence against women is, for me, the strongest, most vital aspect of this collection. Women here struggle not only against weak, bullying husbands and cowardly fathers, they have the whole machinery of systemic machismo to deal with as well:
How many times had a cop like this one denied to her face and against all evidence that he had murdered a poor teenager? Because that was what cops did in the southern slums, much more than protect people: they killed teenagers, sometimes out of cruelty, other times because the kids refused to ‘work’ for them – to steal for them or sell the drugs the police seized. Or for betraying them. The reasons for killing poor kids were many and despicable.
My personal favourites among these stories are those in which the horror is less overt, where the line between the uncanny and the everyday is most cunningly hidden. ‘An Invocation of the Big-Eared Runt’ follows a tour guide as he entertains tourists with tales of the city’s most notorious murderers and serial killers, among whom the eponymous big-eared runt is most notorious of all, most especially because of the studied delight he seemed to take in the crimes he committed. As Pablo becomes ever more obsessed with the runt, the more the strain of his home life seems to tell on him. The story’s final lines are chilling, all the more so because they are inconclusive. The collection’s tour-de-force is ‘Spiderweb’, in which a young woman tied to a peevish and controlling husband goes on a day trip with him and her extravagantly charismatic and forthright cousin Natalia. Juan-Martin’s nagging and complaining is a constant irritation, and when their car breaks down on the return journey a reckoning seems at hand.
The landscape, atmosphere and tension of ‘Spiderweb’ are reminiscent of stories by Roberto Bolano in which the threat of violence, ever-present, hovers just out of sight. As soldiers of the regime torment a waitress at the neighbouring dining table, Juan-Martin’s unwavering sanctimoniousness threatens to push the threat over the edge towards calamity. Natalia though has her own ideas on how to deal with Martin. Once again, this story is all the more effective through leaving the reader to draw their own conclusion.
After the heat, dust and sweltering tension of Enriquez, I found the atmosphere of Mary South’s stories chilly at first; studied, beautifully turned and just a little too careful. I have seen other critics reference the SF TV series Black Mirror in their assessment of this debut collection, but the more I read of You Will Never Be Forgotten, the more this description seemed too pat, too obvious, and not wholly accurate. It is only really the first story, ‘Keith Prime’, that recalls Black Mirror, not to mention Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, and in spite of being (as are all the stories) beautifully written, it is the one I find least interesting, precisely because its minimalist, soft-sci-fi tropes have been rehearsed before. South makes overt use of science fiction again in ‘To Save the Universe, We Must Also Save Ourselves’, in which the messy real-life dramas of actor Faith Massey are set against the unswerving heroism of her screen incarnation, Dinara Gorun, captain of the spacecraft Audacity.
Fans of the movie Galaxy Quest will find themselves chuckling happily along, and the story leaves no doubt it is doing its own thing by placing Faith’s battle with entrenched sexism – the most indestructible monster she has faced both onscreen and off – front and centre. Far stronger though are those stories in which South turns away from convention and pushes hardest against the boundary between the disdainfully ironic and the overtly uncomfortable. ‘Frequently Asked Questions About Your Craniotomy’ starts out reading like a conventional ‘list’ story but gradually strays into territory that is both horrific and heart-shattering. ‘Architecture for Monsters’ follows a journalist-fan of the groundbreaking architect Helen Dannenforth as she works to uncover the inconvenient truths at the heart of a genius’s life and art. ‘The Promised Hostel’ is, in common parlance, something of a mind-fuck, also a great story, while the title piece ‘You Will Never Be Forgotten’, in which a content moderator at ‘the world’s most popular search engine’ seeks to confront her rapist, is equally bold and ambiguous.
If South’s collection seems to lack the visceral, palpable urgency of Enriquez’s, this could well be down to the fact that I read the two books so close together. The elegance of South’s writing, the smooth turns from the domestic-banal to the queasily unnerving, her unswerving examination of aspects of the way we all live now makes You Will Never Be Forgotten well worth seeking out, and leaves the reader in eager anticipation of what South will write next. As for Mariana Enriquez, I understand her next novel is shortly to appear in English translation and I cannot wait. In the meantime, I would urge you to take an hour’s break to watch this conversation between Enriquez and M. John Harrison at this year’s (unavoidably Zoom-based) Buenos Aires Literary Festival. The insights into their writing lives, literary process and aesthetic outlook are many, varied and scintillating. Well worth your time.
Hort is described in many ways by these voices, but I can always tell that they are talking about him. Him to me, she or it or they to others, and sometimes there are long pauses as the limitations of language are reached. Hort has been a lover, a murderer, an adventurer, a cataclysm, a God. But to him we have all been the trusty companion.
It wasn’t until I was almost three-quarters of the way through Aliya Whiteley’s new novel Greensmith (published by Unsung Stories on October 12th) that I realised I was reading an extended critique of Doctor Who. Not the show itself – no debating Classic versus New, no wrangling over who is or was the best Doctor here – so much as its moral universe. The lonely alien in the blue box, the scintillating, hyperactive superbeing whose sole mission, or so it seems in the stories, is to keep us – us personally – safe from harm. It is a seductive vision. The number of Who episodes that feature a lonely, chosen child, waiting by their bedroom window staring up at the stars, awaiting the return of the hero only they know exists – we have all been that child at some point, if only at five o’clock on a Saturday evening (apologies to younger viewers but that is still Doctor Who time for me).
What we learn through our time with the show is that all these hopeful children, sooner or later, will be discarded. The moment of parting is always searingly painful – watch any of those episodes again now and inevitably I’ll find myself in tears – and yet we conspire to forget. To believe that next time, for the next companion – for us – the outcome will be different, that we will be the One.
The wonder of myths is in their longevity, their ability to transcend time and place, to become as personal as they are universal. That mythologies can also be harmful – mendacious – is a truth we do not care to examine as deeply as we ought.
Of course, Greensmith is so much more than an extended essay on one particularly popular British TV show, though the plot synopsis does a pretty good impression of a Moffat story from Mat-Smith-era Who. Penelope Greensmith is fifty-three years old. She is a botanist and librarian. More importantly she is the keeper of the Collection, a ‘bank’ of every plant species on Earth, assembled by Penelope’s father with the help of a mysterious invention called the Vice.
When a deadly virus begins decimating all plant life on Earth, Penelope is taken under the wing of a being who calls himself the Horticulturalist, and who claims that together they can discover a way to fight the virus and save the planet. Reduced to a two-dimensional slip of information, Penelope is whirled away into time and space, embarking on a series of ever more fantastical adventures. The further she journeys, the more she begins to suspect that Hort is hiding the essential truth about his identity and his mission.
More so than with any other form of literature, science fiction tends to encourage discussion of what it does and what it is for. Fans talk enthusiastically of newness, of SF’s potential for the exploration of complex ideas, All too often, such potential is disregarded in favour of familiarity. Through the media of games, TV shows and movies as well as books, science fiction is more popular now than it has ever been. We are undoubtedly living through a new golden age of science fiction, with the uncertainty of the present moment providing a mirror to the multitude of fictional universes there are to choose from. Popularity always has a down-side, however, and the demands of an increasing fanbase have in many cases stymied the genre’s progress as a literary form. Readers say they want bold ideas, yet in reality what they prefer are ideas that are brightly coloured and easily digestible.
When science fiction is truly bold, truly ground-breaking, its very boldness can make it puzzling and harder to parse. Ideas that are truly complex take longer to absorb. I would argue that anyone who reads Greensmith and doesn’t find themselves wondering on at least one occasion what the hell they are reading, isn’t reading hard enough.
Greensmith is a backwards hero’s journey that questions the very concept of the hero. It is a novel with a middle-aged woman as its protagonist that actually talks about middle age, about the menopause, about the difficulty of forming relationships when one is fiercely attached to one’s independence. Greensmith is about family ties, loyalty that transcends logic, the love of one’s planet. Most of all it is a book about plants: plants glorious and multitudinous and various, plants that stir the imagination and stimulate the senses, plants that are beings sharing our world as opposed to material to be used by humans as food and shelter.
Greensmith is a novel that is not afraid to talk, at length, about complex ideas. The adventure portion of the novel – the first half – is in a sense simply the set-up for a philosophical argument about existence, eternity and the inherent moral danger in assuming one’s own interpretation of history to be superior to another. It is a novel that refuses to give us the happy ending we humanly yearn for – yet it does deliver another concept of rightness, one it takes time to come to terms with but that is ultimately more satisfying and more durable.
I have heard Greensmith described as a comedy. This judgement may say more about my seemingly irrepressible tendency to cry at Doctor Who than it does about the novel, but I found it to be one of the most poignant, elegiac and spiritual works of science fiction I have read all year.
Aliya Whiteley is a writer of rare originality and inventiveness. Her instinct for new ways of looking at things, her seemingly inexhaustible capacity for intelligent observation, her passion for asking questions and for ideas make her one of the most important writers of speculative fiction working today. That her books are quiet and often uncategorisable, that they require sitting with and thinking about, that they deny easy solutions and trite explanation – these qualities are what make them true to the spirit of science fiction, that will ensure their longevity. What Greensmith means to me will be different from what it means to you – and therein lies its glory.
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With ten episodes of Corona Crime Spree and sixteen Weird Wednesdays, this post marks exactly six months of weekly blogging – half a year’s worth of essays. It also happens to mark the week in which I completed a working draft of my novel-in-progress. The final chapter was written on the Isle of Mull, where an earlier version of the text was originally set. This gave me the weird sensation of inhabiting a ghost-version of the novel, almost as if the space I was occupying belonged to other characters.
Dervaig, Isle of Mull, September 2020
Completing a version of the book as it now is came as something of a relief, though I won’t really know what I’ve ended up with until I begin work on the second draft, in a few weeks’ time.
At the beginning of lockdown, it seemed important and helpful to post what became in effect weekly dispatches from my desk, charting the progress of my reading and thinking through this strangest of years. It still does feel important and helpful, and although I have decided to be more flexible with my schedule – this will be the last Weird Wednesday in this particular sequence – I intend to keep posting regularly through the autumn and winter.
