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Some books

March 17, 2024 /

When I reviewed Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things for Strange Horizons back in – my goodness – 2015, I described it as ‘unendurably slow’ and wrapped my arguments in a slew of niggles about ‘is this good SF??’ and suchlike, questions I seemed genuinely concerned with at the time but that now seem irrelevant. I think I knew even then that at least a portion of my apparent dislike of the book was rooted in the discomfort I felt while reading it. Not because of ‘bland characterisation’ or ‘wrongheadedness’ but because that novel really got to me. The unknowable alienness of the planet Oasis was something I experienced as a terrible homesickness, the sense that we were destroying our own world while fully aware of the fact that there was nothing better out there and no way back.

I find it mysterious and barely explicable and utterly right that The Book of Strange New Things, no matter its weight or size or unlikability, has survived every book cull we enacted in the years since, and there have been a few.

I think about Faber’s novel more or less every day now. Not just because of the subtext about his wife Eva, but because it seems clearer and clearer to me that the books that stay with you, that provide fuel for the onward journey, are so often those you have to fight to understand and come to terms with. The books that confound and confront you. The books that pick away at your insecurities and that feel most difficult.

Just about a month ago I finally bought and read Undying: A Love Story, the cycle of poems Faber published in 2016 about the death of his wife, the artist Eva Youren, from cancer.

I cannot now imagine a book coming closer to me than that one.

Other books I have been reading these past weeks include:

The Iceberg by Marion Coutts

Ti Amo by Hanne Orstavik

In Love by Amy Bloom

A Scattering and Anniversary by Christopher Reid

The other day on the train on my way back from Glasgow I found myself picking up Strange Loyalties, the third book in William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw trilogy. It seemed like something I wanted to read just then and I didn’t know until I began it that it too was about grief. Jack Laidlaw is seeking the truth about what happened to his brother Scott, who has been killed in a hit-and-run, because seeking the truth – what he does for work – is the only way Jack Laidlaw can deal with his grief. It is a wonderful novel – well wrought, honestly told, so keenly alive and for me at least perhaps the best of the three.

Somewhere around halfway through, I was knocked to the ground by the following passage, in which Jack speaks with the dying mother of one of his suspects:

She had a face like a handful of bones and those pilgrim eyes of the dying. Most of the essential luggage of her life had gone on ahead and here she was waiting at a wayside station among strangers who had other business. The living are all strangers to the dying. It’s just that they’re too polite to tell us so. They are kind to our crass familiarities that mistake them for someone else. They do not tell us that we are the bores who have crashed a party for one, seeking company for our own terrified loneliness we have suddenly recognised in their eyes. The dying arrive at true politeness. Even if they scream, they only scream in so far as it is necessary. For who else can establish the rules for what is theirs alone? They cannot be unkind to us, for they leave us alive when they are not. She was kind to me.

I am working. I am doing OK.

Just sayin’

August 10, 2023 /

When I reread Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home a month or so ago I found it astonishing to remember that the book was published in 2012, more than a decade old already and yet still, in my head at least, so enmeshed in and essential to our literary present.

The same could be said of Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation, published the same year and which I have finally, belatedly caught up with. I remember reading the press at the time, intrigued by the outrage the book seemed to be causing, though not enough to dive in immediately. I felt instinctively on the side of the writer, who seemed to have committed no other sin than have the temerity to say what she thought.

That writers say what they think seems to cause outrage rather too often, especially if the writer is a woman.

I feel amazed, disappointed, tired as I reread the reviews of Aftermath from the week of publication. Frances Stonor Saunders and Julie Burchill damning with faint praise, their responses inadvertently, embarrassingly sexist and profoundly un-literary. Burchill finds the final chapter of Aftermath ‘baffling’; Saunders thinks it ‘bizarre’ and feels it ‘should [have been] dumped altogether’. Most of the discussion seems to revolve not around Cusk’s astringent analysis, her mastery of language and form, but – as with Julie Myerson’s The Lost Child – whether or not she ‘should’ have written the book at all.

Aftermath is one of the most powerfully interrogative, furiously honest and boldly imaginative texts I have read. The final chapter is what makes the book a masterpiece. Always, but especially now, I feel grateful, inspired, humbled to have such talent to look up to, to show me what can, with sufficient courage, be achieved.

Faith in the Future

May 11, 2023 /

My new novel, Conquest, is published today.

Jonathan Thornton’s insightful and generous review at Fantasy Hive offers an eloquent analysis of its structure and intentions, while Steve Andrews brings his particular knowledge and engagement to our ‘interview-review‘ at Outlaw Bookseller. As always, I hope that readers both familiar with my work and entirely new to it will enjoy discovering their own reactions and responses to a book that was a long time in the making and is to an extent a personal commentary upon the last few years.

Conquest is a novel about truth and post-truth, the familiar made strange, communal crisis and personal epiphany. But on the day that sees the book pass from my hands into the hands of readers, I would like to reflect upon the theme that perhaps most of all provided its guiding inspiration. In one section of the novel, my private investigator Robin remembers how at the age of twelve she fell ill with pneumonia and as a result was absent from school and from her normal life for more than six weeks. Feeling weakened from the disease and with no one to talk to, she listens to Radio 3 for hours on end. This is where, for the first time, she hears the Goldberg Variations, and falls in love with the music of J. S. Bach.

The same thing happened to me, more or less, and I count those six weeks spent listening to music as some of the most formative in my cultural life, a period in which I was able to experience works that might not otherwise have crossed my path until much later. Where I was able to think, in privacy and without interruption, about what music meant, not only in terms of my own emotional reaction to it but in the abstract.

Unlike Robin, this was not when I first heard the Goldberg Variations. I came to know Bach through others of his compositions: through listening endlessly to the violin concertos and playing the flute sonatas, through singing in the B minor mass, a valuable and joyous apprenticeship that meant when I finally did come to know the Goldbergs, in my middle twenties, it felt like coming home.  

One of the fringe benefits of my many years spent working in a music shop was the opportunity for listening. I was responsible for our whole stock of classical recordings, which meant I could buy in and test drive anything I wanted to. The effect was similar to being let loose in an enormous playground. One of the lessons I learned from all that listening was that recordings I initially considered my favourites could and often did cede their position to other performances, sometimes in the same day. That the point of studying different recordings is not simply to establish a hierarchy, fun though that can be, but to come to a deeper understanding of a piece of music through its various interpretations.

You would be surprised at the number of times you rub shoulders with Bach – through advertising, through film or game soundtracks, even through lift music – during the course of a single week. Without our consciously realising it, Bach reveals himself to us through an accumulation of encounters over many years, sure proof of his continuing ability to speak directly to millions of people across every conceivable divide of age or culture or background. Bach’s work deepens our relationship with the past, even as it informs our present. Through an intricate interweaving of sound and meaning that seems hardwired into all of us, Bach gives us faith in the future.

I have tried to convey something of Bach’s timeless and magical appeal in my writing of Conquest. I have not felt ready to write at length about music before now, precisely because the subject means so much to me, and also because it is difficult, for any writer, to add anything to what is already present in the music itself. In setting out to explore Robin’s world, and most especially Frank’s, I have found myself constantly in mental dialogue with those writers who have struggled with similar questions, and in so doing provided inspiration of their own. I hope I have added something to the conversation. I hope most of all that anyone reading Conquest who has for whatever reason persuaded themselves that Bach is not for them will throw aside their preconceptions and listen again.

2022: a year in review

December 28, 2022 /

This is traditionally the time when I look back over my year’s reading and post a list of the books that most impressed me, resonated with me or stayed with me through the previous twelve months. I find myself resisting the traditional format this year, firstly because the number of books I read is somewhat lower than usual – this is mainly down to the fact that the first half of 2022 was dominated by our house move – and secondly because it has been such a weird year in general.

A lot of my headspace has been overtaken by the war in Ukraine, an outrage and a tragedy I cannot come to terms with and am still finding difficult to articulate. The eruption of this horrific, destructive and totally unnecessary war has made writing difficult at times – not the accustomed activity, but the moral sense. As with all the major events that have altered and shaken our world these past number of years, the effect for a writer, for anyone who makes or thinks or creates art, is to provoke the most searching questions about what kind of an artist you are, what kind of an artist you want to be, and the inevitable gap in between. This holds equally true for reading: which books are most urgent, most inspiring, most constructive? It goes without saying that the answers will be different for everyone, and for differing reasons.

In terms of my own work, once the house move was out of the way, I quickly re-immersed myself in the writing of my next novel, a project I began in the summer of 2021 and that has proved the most challenging assignment I have set myself to date. I felt exactly the same after finishing Conquest – now frighteningly close to publication in May of next year – and so I count this sense of difficulty as a good thing, an indication that I am pushing my ideas and my capacity to express them as far as they will go.

I am happy to report that I completed a first draft of that novel at the end of October. I am pleased with what has been accomplished, and looking forward to beginning work on the second draft in January. As with Conquest, the book I have in front of me is fascinatingly different from the book I set out to write. This tendency for works to evolve beyond their original remit has always been a part of my process, something I have come to accept as inevitable. In the case of these two most recent novels, the shift in identity has been even more radical. Once again, I think this is a good thing, a direct response to changing circumstance and the anxiety surrounding that.

What pleases me most about Conquest and its successor is how connected they feel. Not in terms of subject matter so much as intention. Conquest was decisively shaped by the lockdowns and by their impact on society; this new book is unquestionably a product of these past twelve months in particular.

Writing nurtures and protects and supports me. I struggle constantly with the need to be better, to be clearer about my direction and intent, to match the reach of my ambition with quality on the page. There is no contradiction in those two statements – indeed I believe and hope they are one and the same.

My book of the year is Red Comet, Heather Clark’s monumental and masterful biography of Sylvia Plath. I have read a lot on Plath – she is very important to me – but Red Comet is something else, something special, the biography Plath has always deserved. Finally we have a work that considers Plath on her own terms – as a poet first and foremost – and that while it never seeks to sideline the life, never underplays or undervalues the work, either. A superlative effort, a book for the ages.

Hot on its heels comes Hanya Yanagihara’s To Paradise, a novel that enthralled and excited me through every one of its 800 or so pages, delighted me with its structural complexity and satisfied me completely in terms of the ways in which it explored and articulated some of the more dangerous and destabilising elements of our current times. What I love and appreciate most in Yanaighara – aside from her marvellous storytelling ability – is her independent-mindedness, her disregard for fashionable rhetoric and her steely curiosity about the world and people as they actually present themselves. She is that rare thing, a novelist who is brave enough to experiment, and with each of her three books to date, she has set out to achieve something new. Where she’ll take us next, I have no idea.

One of my most gratifying reading experiences of 2022 has been my re-reading of JG Ballard’s first three novels, for an essay on Ballard’s approach to science fiction that is scheduled for publication as part of a new anthology in 2023. The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World formed my own first encounters with Ballard’s work, which is why I decided to concentrate my attention upon them in particular. In terms of both their language and their approach, their uniqueness and brilliance remains undimmed. Coming into contact with Ballard’s work always leaves me on a high, with the sense that no other writer is as inspirational or as provocative. Writing about him, thinking about him is both a challenge and a privilege, the only danger being that it’s difficult to move on again afterwards.

Other books that have proved important to me this year include Speak, Silence by Carole Angier, Souvenir by Michael Bracewell, The Paper Lantern by Will Burns, Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza, Stalking the Atomic City by Markiyan Kamysh, Red Pill by Hari Kunzru, The Instant by Amy Liptrot, Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel, The Men by Sandra Newman and Delphi by Clare Pollard.

I am still thinking about my reading aims, hopes and aspirations for 2023 – I’ll hopefully have a little more to say about them next week.

In the meantime, a huge thank you to everyone who stops by here, and wishing you happiness, peace and good fortune in the year to come.

Stalking the Atomic City

December 13, 2022 /

Even the floors in the houses are ugly. Old boards were ripped out to be used as construction materials, and you have to try hard to find a place where you can jump into your sleeping bag, zip up, and zonk out. The locals burned all the villages next to the wire with the enthusiasm of the thugs from Toretsk who dragged fragments of the downed Malaysia Airlines Boeing to local scrapyards – like a carcass, a mammoth, prey, whatever.

In 1972, a novel was published that is arguably one of the most influential science fiction stories of all time. Roadside Picnic, by the Russian writer-brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, tells of a world forever altered by a chance visitation. As readers, we never get to see the aliens – if there were any aliens – but we are offered glimpses of the things they leave behind. Objects saturated in mystery whose purpose is unknown, whose effects can be lethal, whose wider influence on Earth’s history and culture is incalculable and lasting. The contaminated zones are forbidden territory, fenced and guarded; for the stalkers who risk their lives and their sanity to penetrate these zones, they are something in the nature of an addiction.

In 1979 came Stalker, the film adaptation of Roadside Picnic, scripted by the Strugatsky brothers and directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. In the years since, the Zone has continued and deepened its hold over the imaginations of games developers, film makers, musicians, artists and writers. Especially writers. M.John Harrison’s 2007 novel Nova Swing, the second book of the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy and winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, is an open letter to Roadside Picnic; Jeff VanderMeer’s bestselling Southern Reach trilogy equally so. There is something in the premise that seems uniquely magnetic and eerily mystifying, a postmodern spin on the trope of the ‘lost domain’ as first made explicit by the French writer Alain-Fournier in his 1913 classic Le Grand Meaulnes. Roadside Picnic offers a vision that is both beautiful and cruel, prosaic in its essence – some aliens do a pit stop, dump some trash – and yet shimmering with a sense of wonder that can never be extinguished or fully explained.

I first read Roadside Picnic in the early eighties and it has remained a touchstone text for me ever since, one of those few works of science fiction that I read – eagerly and indiscriminately – as a young person that has followed me into my life as an adult writer. I have read it half a dozen times and love it almost beyond reason. I need only to open its covers to fall immediately back under its spell. For me, it is the way in which the prosaic is enmeshed with the seemingly miraculous – with the vexed and corrosive nature of those miracles – that makes the novel so special for me. Add to that the unconventional manner of its storytelling, its moral ambivalence, the fact that it is a classic of Russian literature.

I also love Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which I approach as an entirely separate work, an adaptation of the Strugatskys’ novel in the true sense of the word, that is, a wholly new artistic endeavour inspired by an original. Tarkovsky does not really do characterisation – the people in Stalker are archetypes, a point underlined by the fact that the cast list does not give them names but designates them simply as ‘writer’, ‘professor’, and of course ‘Stalker’. It is the atmosphere of the film that compels, the mingled sense of beauty and threat, captivity and unbounded freedom that offers a hyper-real visual translation of what the Strugatsky brothers convey through the written word.

Anyone who comes into contact with Roadside Picnic seems to grasp instinctively that the book is important, that it offers a commentary on human existence, on the danger and pain and wonder of being alive. What then can I say about Stalking the Atomic City, a book that is as much a naked homage to Roadside Picnic as Stalker or Nova Swing but that has the distinction of being a work of non-fiction?

The book’s author, Markiyan Kamysh, is a Ukrainian writer. His father was a nuclear physicist and one of the ‘liquidators’ who risked their lives in order to clear up and lock down the exclusion zone surrounding the Chornobyl nuclear reactor following the catastrophic explosion and meltdown in 1986. Kamysh’s father died in 2003. Kamysh describes himself as ‘a writer who represents the Chornobyl underground in literature’. He might equally be called a stalker, one of the many dozens of adventurers, thrill-seekers, scrap metal looters, tour guides and misfits who since the turn of the century have been venturing into the exclusion zone, hiking and mapping, photographing and itemising its vast and hazardous spaces, often at risk of ruining their health, both physical and mental.

Most of them, perhaps predictably, are men; there is an element of stalking that seems to be little more than a dangerous and elaborate form of cock-measuring contest. There is more to it than that, though. There is poetry and there is horror. There is a vitality, a rawness, a sense of contact with an utterly new and uncharted space, a enclave of strangeness that might as well be an alien planet. There is, above all, the freedom that comes with casting off the directives of a world too heavily circumscribed by outside command.

Reading Kamysh’s book – part ballad, part Bildungsroman, part psychogeographical investigation – has offered me my most uncanny reading experience of the year, because it appears to reflect a version of reality first described in a novel of the imagination written fifty years ago, first lived by a film director who died from the cancer caused by the toxins that pollute the site of his most famous movie. The layers of literature contained within it – for Stalking the Atomic City is both a wholly new homage to Roadside Picnic and a demolition of it – now find themselves cloaked in a new, still more terrible reality as the zone itself has become part of a new battleground, a frontline in the war launched by Putin’s forces against the people of Ukraine.

Stalking the Atomic City reads as a dirty love poem to Roadside Picnic, just as Roadside Picnic reads as a shuddering premonition of Atomic City. Each seems to contain the other – not just in the likeness of the experiences they describe but in the beauty and intelligence of their language, their radical vision, the correlation of the word ‘stalker’ with the word ‘writer’.

The war in Ukraine is grounds both for anger and for deep grief. In its own impassioned, mysterious way, Stalking the Atomic City is an expression of that anger and that grief, as well as an undaunted assertion of Ukrainian identity. This book thrilled me and chilled my blood, even as I fell helplessly in love with it. I hope Markiyan Kamysh is doing OK, and that he is writing.

Announcing A Traveller in Time

December 1, 2022 /

When the news broke earlier this year that Maureen Kincaid Speller was seriously ill, like all of her friends and colleagues I felt deeply upset. Maureen had seemed still in the very prime of life; she still had so much to offer to the world and to her community; there were so many books and ideas and questions she had still to write about. The thought that she might be leaving us was not one I was ready to dwell on, and still find it hard to come to terms with.

Once the initial shock had subsided I began to think about conversations I’d had with Maureen about assembling a collection of her criticism, a selection of work that best expressed her passion for books and for thinking about books, as well as shining a spotlight upon the particular authors and subject areas she felt most drawn to write about. I knew this was a project close to her heart, one she was eager to see fulfilled so that she could move on to the next phase of her work, uncovering new insights and drawing upon fresh enthusiasms.

When I tentatively suggested to Maureen’s husband, Paul Kincaid, that I would like to help Maureen put together such a collection he was immensely supportive. When I contacted Francesca Barbini at Luna Press and asked her if she might be in a position to provide a home for Maureen’s work, she came on board immediately. And so A Traveller in Time was born. I cannot adequately express my gratitude to Francesca and to Paul for their enthusiasm, for their instant understanding that this needed to happen.

Of course, the original and cherished intention was for Maureen herself to be a part of this process. Time, and Maureen’s illness, were sadly against us in this. But I am happy and glad to know that Maureen knew about the project, that even until a couple of weeks before she died we were planning to meet in person and discuss it. Since Maureen’s death in September, the project has seemed if anything more urgent, more necessary. I am delighted to tell you that I have now completed the bulk of the editorial work, and Luna have scheduled A Traveller in Time for release in September 2023, exactly a year after Maureen died, and in time for launch at next year’s FantasyCon.

We are lucky enough to have secured cover art from the award-winning Iain Clark, who designed the wonderful poster and artwork to launch the bid for the 2024 Glasgow Worldcon. I look forward to sharing that cover in due course – it is truly beautiful.

I am delighted, gratified and very proud that this project is on its way to becoming a physical reality. Maureen was special. The work she did was uniquely her own. In reading her words, we remember her. I hope and trust that we of the science fiction community will be doing exactly that for many years to come.

Weird Wednesdays #19: Treacle Walker by Alan Garner

September 14, 2022 /

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.

Mid-Year Book Freakout tag

June 19, 2022 /

As I have mentioned here before, one of my biggest downtime pleasures is watching Booktube videos. Sharing in the expression of love and knowledgeable enthusiasm for books is a joy in itself, and I have particularly come to enjoy the way the cyclical recurrence of certain tags and list videos have come to take the form of a literary calendar, mapping out the bookish year with reactions to book prize longlists, anticipated releases and what progress – if any – has been made in the meeting of reading goals.

Let me say from the outset that my own reading goals have been shot to shit. There is a genuine reason for this – the house move – but I still feel disappointed that my Cloak and Dagger reading challenge, so carefully curated, is now so far off schedule that there is little hope of my catching up, especially as I have taken on a couple of extra non-fiction side-projects in the meantime.

Rather than despair over this – because come on – and because I like the challenge so much I have decided to defer it to 2023, when I will begin the whole thing again from scratch. So far as this year is concerned, I intend to read whatever the hell takes my fancy. Given that I have so much research reading to do on top of my other commitments, I know I will have to keep my expectations in check. But it does lift my heart to think that we are only halfway through the year, and that there are more books yet to be read that I don’t yet know about.

In anticipation of that, I thought I would post my own responses to the mid-year book freakout tag, because I have been freaking out, just a bit, and because it’s an interesting way of taking the literary temperature of my year to date.

  1. BEST BOOK YOU’VE READ SO FAR IN 2022 would have to be Optic Nerve, by Maria Gainza. This book was exactly what I needed to read at the particular moment I read it, and I will be following Gainza’s literary journey from here on in.
  2. BEST SEQUEL YOU’VE READ SO FAR IN 2022. I’ll have to cheat a little with this one, as I don’t think the author would necessarily want to see this book described as a sequel, but if we can include in that category books with characters we first met in an earlier novel then it’s definitely Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel. Those who read and adored The Glass Hotel, as I did, will enjoy hunting down those Easter eggs. But there’s no need for you to have read Mandel’s previous novel to enjoy this one, which is searching, original, moving and gorgeously achieved. I loved it from the first page.
  3. NEW RELEASE YOU HAVEN’T READ YET, BUT WANT TO. Oh my goodness, there are so many – some languishing here on my desk. For the sake of keeping this short, I shall confine myself to two. John Darnielle’s Devil House is a must for me, firstly because I have loved his previous two books and secondly because I am excited to see what he’s done with a fake-true-crime narrative. And then I have been hearing very good things about Hernan Diaz’s Trust. I have read the preview and found it irresistible, and the metafictional ‘found document’ format is very much my bag.
  4. MOST ANTICIPATED RELEASE FOR THE SECOND HALF OF THE YEAR. Once again, I shall confine myself to two. The first is Babysitter, by Joyce Carol Oates. I’m a huge Oates fan in any case, and here she is with an imaginative retelling of a true crime story. Cannot miss it. And secondly there’s The Furrows, from Namwali Serpell. Her Clarke-winning debut The Old Drift is a book I still think about a lot, both for its astounding writing and its treatment of time. The Furrows sounds every bit as intriguing.
  5. BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT. I have been lucky this year in that the books I have actively sought out have been sustaining and each in their own way worthwhile. My experience with review assignments has been more mixed. Shall I just say that I think I am burned out on what I shall loosely term the ‘soft dystopia’? It is fascinating, how many books in this genre are debuts. There are conclusions to be drawn there, no doubt.
  6. BIGGEST SURPRISE. The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie. I very much enjoyed Sarah Phelps’s BBC adaptation and what with Laura Thompson’s lovely biography Agatha Christie: An English Mystery acting as my sanity blanket through the book-packing process, I thought I would try out the novel, a late work by Christie and one I had never even heard of before seeing the TV series. I was surprised and delighted by how solidly crafted it is, how modern it feels. In terms of her sentence-level achievement, Christie often gets a bad press, one I found myself feeling – as I have on previous occasions – is undeserved.
  7. FAVOURITE NEW AUTHOR – DEBUT OR NEW TO YOU. Once again, that would have to be Maria Gainza.
  8. BOOK THAT MADE YOU CRY. To Paradise, by Hanya Yanagihara. Given the discomfiting and unstable nature of the year to date, it already seems like ages since I read this, but I thought it was magnificent – a powerful and fearless examination of the problems we face as a society and as individuals, written by an author one-hundred percent in control of her material. I would definitely read it again. Ysnagihara has quickly become the kind of author that makes you insatiably curious about where she will go next.
  9. THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BOOK YOU’VE BOUGHT SO FAR THIS YEAR would also count as the most expensive! I am not going to name it, because it is the key primary source text for my novel-in-progress, but I will say that it dates from the 1950s, and is signed and dated by the author. Its beauty is tied up in its provenance, and the way it brings the events it described so vividly to life.
  10. WHAT BOOKS DO YOU NEED TO READ BY THE END OF THE YEAR? Many, many books. For reasons similar to those that prompted my Golding binge last year, I will be re-immersing myself in J.G. Ballard’s three key disaster novels. Off at only a slight tangent, I am lucky enough to have in my possession an ARC of Martin MacInnes’s new novel In Ascension, which I absolutely intend to get to before the year is out. One of my most anticipated reads of last year was Speak, Silence, Carole Angier’s investigative biography of W. G. Sebald. I actually began reading this the week before we moved out of our previous house and was instantly smitten. I had the book with me all the time we were in temporary accommodation, but was too tired and preoccupied to give it the full attention it so obviously deserves. I expect to be back in Sebald’s world before the end of summer.

Eyes Wide Open: Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza

March 5, 2022 /

When earlier in the week I read Johanna Thomas-Corr’s excellent review in the Guardian of Maria Gainza’s new novel Portrait of an Unknown Lady, I was reminded that I never had caught up with Gainza’s first novel Optic Nerve, published in its original Spanish in 2014 and then latterly in an English translation by Thomas Bunstead in 2019. I remember reading reviews of it, noting it down in my ever-expanding ‘of interest’ file. I even remember, quite clearly, holding a copy of the book in my hand. I was in a big Waterstones somewhere – either Chris or I, I cannot recall now which of us it was, had been asked to come in and sign some books. I remember trying to decide between Optic Nerve and Laura Cuming’s elegantly articulated memoir On Chapel Sands, both books, coincidentally, with a central focus on art.

In the end I chose the Cuming, promising myself I would acquire the Gainza at a later date. But I never did. That morning, its details blurry, feels far away, on the other side of an unspeakable divide, with those books two of the sparsely connecting threads between then and now. Reading Thomas-Corr’s admiring retrospective words about Optic Nerve, I experienced a sudden and intense hunger for it, for that book precisely, no other would do. Not even wanting to wait the time it would take to arrive in physical form, I downloaded it in e-format and started to read it more or less immediately.

Novels by nearest and dearest aside, Maria Gainza’s Optic Nerve – or so it feels to me in this moment – is the most beautiful book I have ever read. ‘It was clear that Gainza, like British authors Rachel Cusk and Claire-Louise Bennett, was opening up new possibilities for the novel as a place of freedom,’ Thomas-Corr writes in her review, ‘where you could blend fiction, memoir, art history and anecdote. She immediately felt like a thrilling discovery.’ I agree with this totally. I agree also with her additional claim that Gainza’s fiction actually ‘has more in common with Roberto Bolaño’s, with its themes of art and infamy, craft and theft.’ There is, as Thomas-Corr maintains, a Bolano-esque depth of field to her ‘stories within stories, each with its own melancholy mood and unsolvable mystery.’

And there is something more, something still greater, a quality of emotional admission, of inclusivity and of risk-taking, of personal involvement – of vulnerability even – that reminds me of the stories and writing of Mariana Enriquez, a passion that dares to reveal, to expose the self in a way that others have not, and that includes myself.

I can say only that I am thinking on this, wondering and struggling with how to address it. I am getting to know the paintings Gainza writes about in Optic Nerve, studying them in detail, reliving the moments of their discovery through the filter of Gainza’s tapestried language, of a knowledge profoundly felt and acutely described.

I am saving Maria Gainza’s new book for the moment, as something to look forward to. To cherish and to rejoice in. We need voices like these, above all, voices that remind us of all that life and art can be and what it is for.

A Season in Null-Space: Transit by Rachel Cusk

February 28, 2022 /

A book such as Julian’s was far more palatable. It always surprised him, how people lapped it up, extremity, how eager they were to consume what lay far outside the compass of their own experience, their relish for it if anything increased by the absence of the very thing, he, Louis, was abjured for removing – the screen of fiction. People believed that Julian didn’t need to make things up because the extremity of his experiences was such that it released him from that obligation.

Working on my current manuscript, I have been thinking a great deal about the weight we attach to ‘true’ narratives, and how objective truth might be said to differ from experiential truth.

If I say: ‘This happened to me’, is that enough to prove that it really did?

Since 2016, our experience of the world has become fragmentary and unstable, no longer measured in years, but in seasons, weeks and days. As a writer I feel I have become less capable and less desirous of constructing grand illusions. I have instead become obsessed with small details, with exploring the imaginative potential in day-by-day, sometimes minute-by-minute experience, with tracking the potential answers to the question: what really happened? My growing interest in true-crime narratives is both a response to and a driver of this. And precisely because much of the drama of such narratives lies in the mundane.

‘I don’t really believe in character,’ says Rachel Cusk in a recent podcast conversation with Sheila Heti, ‘I believe in moments of truth.’ In the second instalment of her Outline trilogy, Cusk demonstrates how the quotidian, when fully inhabited, can spiral outwards into a poetic hyperrealism, into the fire of language. How daily reality is never banal, but rather the greyish-brown outer crust of the entire luminosity of existence. The dinner party that forms the climax of the novel is, in its own subversive way, as revelatory and as disturbing as the family get-together that forms the subject of Thomas Vinterberg’s seminal 1998 movie Festen. Reading this book, in which ostensibly dull things happen in such a way as to make them seem life-defining, is to see reality, elusive as the leopard, changing its spots before our eyes.

Cusk’s writing truly is superlative. She has not only raised the bar for British literary fiction, she has opened up a new arena for the discussion and contemplation of what fiction is, and how it works.

*

Meanwhile and elsewhere, this marvellous essay by Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky articulates brilliantly the shock, terror and heartbreak of these anxious days.

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