Category: books (Page 15 of 23)

Memory Palace and other stories

September 22, 2013 / Nina

“At the moment we seem to be in a place with narrative fiction where there are people quite happy to write very straight-up nineteenth century realist stuff and people who want to play Derridean language games exploring textuality. I would like to say that there is a third interesting thing that fiction writers can do, which is to take on, in a speculative realist way, scientific ideas about the self and to engage with social complexity: how memory constitutes itself. So for all these reasons thinking about the self is important to me.”

(Hari Kunzru, in an interview with 3am Magazine)

We were at the V&A on Friday, attending the exhibition of graphic arts, installation and text entitled Memory Palace, based around the 10,000-word novella of the same name by Hari Kunzru. The exhibition is something of a new concept. Instead of working with a pre-existing text, the expo’s curators, Laurie Britton Newall and Ligaya Salazar, commissioned Kunzru to write an original work, knowing from the outset that it was to form the basis of a collaboration between one writer and 20 visual artists. (The curators explain more about this process in an essay here.)

I’ve been keen to catch up with Kunzru’s fiction for quite some time now. I’ve read his journalistic non-fiction with great pleasure, and his novels come highly recommended by critics I trust. Also, Kunzru has a refreshingly open and constructive attitude to science fiction, a fact readily apparent from this piece he wrote about Michael Moorcock for The Guardian in 2011. As explicitly full-on SF, his novella ‘Memory Palace’ seemed the ideal place to start and I was keen to visit the expo. I purchased the book more than a month ago in readiness, but due to an insanely expanding list of reading commitments I found the day of our trip to the V&A dawning with the novella still unread.

As it turned out, this was a good thing, because it meant I finished reading the text just shy of London Bridge, and stepped into the world of the exhibition just a short while later with Kunzru’s story still headily intact in my mind. In this state of full receptiveness, the exhibits seemed like a natural extension of what I’d just read, a logical enhancement of the experience. The quality of the graphic art was superlative. That the artists involved in the project were excited and inspired by Kunzru’s words – that they found them relevant and provoking and significant in their own lives – was movingly apparent in every piece on show. The work was also very beautiful. ‘Memory Palace’ shows us a radically unpleasant, dangerous and intensely possible-seeming vision of the future – yet, tellingly, the overall sensation evoked by this exhibit is one of warmth and great humanity.

This exhibition has clearly made a big impression on people. Looking at the online write-ups though, the thing that strikes me is how little direct commentary there has been on the full text of Kunzru’s story itself. There seems to be a tacit acceptance of the curators’ assertion that ‘print … is losing its dominance as a deliverer of the written word’, that Memory Palace the exhibition – ‘a physically immersive illustrated story that explores the idea of an exhibition as a walk-in book’ – is in its way the determining experience, more complex and more complete than ‘Memory Palace’ the story that inspired it.

Personally, I would have to disagree. I loved the exhibition – but I know that I will remember it chiefly as a very beautiful illustration of Kunzru’s text. Walking among the exhibits was inspiring and exciting – but as an intellectual and creative experience it could not compare even remotely with my private, concentrated reading of Kunzru’s story as we rushed towards an early draft of the London he seemed to be describing.

For me, words on a page are still the most immersive and interactive of all media. Best of all, you don’t need a machine or even a power source to get involved with them – they can be produced and explored and made to shimmer by anyone armed with a pencil and a scrap of paper. Print losing its dominance as a deliverer of the written word? I have yet to be convinced, I’m afraid.

‘Memory Palace’ is set in London 500 years in the future. An electromagnetic event of seismic proportions has destroyed our digital present, plunging the world into a new version of the Dark Ages. London is ruled by the ‘Thing’, a class of warriors convinced that mankind’s only salvation lies in a return to the Edenic state. Technology is outlawed. The act of remembering is banned. As a member of a secret organization of ‘memorialists’, the narrator of ‘Memory Palace’ sits in prison awaiting interrogation. He believes it all but inevitable that his time in prison will end with his execution.

The table, the bed, the rivets in the metal door – nothing about this cell is specific. None of it carries a trace. I could be anywhere, at any time in history; there have always been places like this. One thing I know: the blankness is not an accident. It is the meaning of my cell, the message my captors want to convey to me. (p25)

‘Memory Palace’, with its taut, intense interchanges between prisoner and captor, instantly evokes memories of allied texts – Winston Smith’s conversations with O’Brien in Orwell’s 1984, Montag’s journey from law-enforcer to law-breaker in Fahrenheit 451, Ivan’s story of The Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov – but in the power of its imagery, its elastically ironical, quicksand-silver use of language and the strength and originality of its London writing, this story gains through these resonances and is an essential and honourable addition to the core canon of science fictional dystopia. I tend to have a very physical reaction to writing I believe to be good, to be the real thing – and reading ‘Memory Palace’ made my heart rate increase, my breath quicken. To see a writer so perfectly achieve what he set out to do, to do it beautifully and with such conviction, is the greatest inspiration another writer could ask for.

I would wholeheartedly recommend anyone to buy the book and read this story. I would also encourage those who do read this story and like it to remember to include it on their SF awards nominations ballots for 2014. There are always a good few complaints during awards season about the poor quality of short fiction available for nomination. There are plenty of private moments when I find myself thinking people don’t complain enough – but as with all categories, the quality work is out there, you just have to look for it, sometimes outside of the more obvious venues. I’ve already highlighted stories by Sofia Samatar, Elizabeth Knox and M. John Harrison (if you haven’t bought and read ‘Cave & Julia’ already, then do so NOW) as shining examples of stories that deserve support and recognition. Kunzru’s ‘Memory Palace’ is another, the kind of story I envy for its grace, its articulacy, its passion, both for the subject in hand and for the words used to explore it. This is the kind of SF I want to be reading – and to be writing.

(A quick afterword on the physical book. If you can’t get to London to see the exhibition itself, don’t worry, because Memory Palace the book is a stunningly lovely and readily portable version of many of the things you would see at the V&A, the exhibition in your pocket, as it were. It contains high quality reproductions of many of the graphic works, together witb preliminary sketches for the installations. Most importantly it contains the full text of ‘Memory Palace’ – the one thing the exhibition could not practically contain, but that is the rationale and pivotal component of the entire enterprise.)

“On YA”

September 16, 2013 / Nina

I read a blog post by Adam Roberts over the weekend, in which he talked interestingly about the cultural significance of so-called Young Adult fiction and the challenge it presents to literary prizes like the Booker, which, as Adam would have it, ‘likes complex, challenging art’ but that which ‘never, ever rewards primitivist art.’

Adam wrote his post in response to an article on the OUP blog by a colleague of his at Royal Holloway, Robert Eaglestone, and a follow-up discussion on Twitter about the Booker shortlist. Eaglestone argues that said shortlist is diverse and innovative, Adam counters that in ignoring SF, crime, and YA, the Booker is deliberately avoiding engagement with three of the most culturally significant literary trends of the present time, thereby rendering itself irrelevant and parochial.

Familiar arguments then, and I’d say I’ve found myself on Adam’s side in those arguments far more frequently than not. I admire Adam’s literary criticism hugely – it combines erudition with a sharpness of wit that do not always make a natural pairing. His commentary on last year’s Booker was a tour de force and a joy to read. Why then, apart from the fact that I normally respect Adam so much as a critic, did I find myself becoming more and more uncomfortable with his post on YA? Why did I spend a significant amount of time over the weekend thinking about it, and coming finally to the decision that I had to reply?

Well, mostly because of this:

Imagine a music prize that has, through the 70s and 80s and up to the present, shortlisted only abstruse jazz, contemporary classical and Gentle-Giant-style prog rock concept albums. I love my prog rock, and partly I do so because it ticks all those aesthetic boxes I mention above—it is complex and challenging and intricate music. But I wouldn’t want to suggest that prog has had anything like the cultural impact or importance as pop, punk or rap. That would be silly. So how would you tell the judges picking those shortlists about the Ramones, the Pistols and the Clash? How would you persuade them that they’re missing out not just good music but actually the music that really matters?

Which is all well and good – once again, I agree with Adam. The problem is that the analogy he is presenting seems utterly false, because the literary equivalents of The Ramones, The Sex Pistols and The Clash (and Kristin Hersh and Siouxie and Patti Smith) are not Suzanne Collins, J. K Rowling and Stephenie Meyer, as Adam would have them here, but Charles Bukowski, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Sarah Kane, Janice Galloway and (much though he pisses me off a lot of the time) Bret Easton Ellis. In terms of sophistication, formal achievement, and the way their product is received by its intended audience, Meyer et al are actually closer to the manufactured boy- and girl-bands that (like Meyer, Rowling and Collins) started coming to prominence in the nineties and noughties. Both are a cultural phenomenon, yes – but in terms of what one might call the Ongoing Literary Project (and the Booker Prize is expressly about the Ongoing Literary Project) their status is negligible. Complaining that Booker will never reward the ‘artistic primitivism’ of Breaking Dawn is like complaining that the jury will never award the prize to Fifty Shades of Grey.

There is another crucial point here that Adam never addresses. The punk and alternative bands of the 1970s (and continuing into the present day) were and are themselves made up of (necessarily slightly older) young adults, making music for themselves, for their peers, in the way that best expresses their view of the world and their fears for its future. Commercial YA fiction is (in the vast majority of cases) written by adults, for consumption by readers younger than they are, or to call it by its proper name, for the young adult market. Moreover, the market certainly and in many cases the books Adam names in his blog post are not progressive, as he suggests, but didactic. The Twilight series certainly is, and both his books and his many interviews make it impossible to forget that Philip Pullman was a teacher before he ever became a full time writer.

Mass market YA is not representative of some kind of social revolution, nor is it even properly zeitgeisty. Adam talks about the Harry Potter novels as ‘one of the great representations of school in Western culture,’ yet how many kids in Britain today could realistically compare their own schooldays with Harry’s time at Hogwarts, and I’m not just talking about the magic? Adam lauds the way sex is characterised in the Twilight books as ‘something simultaneously compelling and alarming, that draws you on and scares you away in equal measure’ – well, if that’s how you want to describe the bizarre and (to me) seriously dodgy amalgam of titillation and partisan prudery that is the strongest characteristic of these narratives, then OK. If you don’t, then you’ll be bound to admit that most of the most popular YA series are – like the manufactured pop that dates even as you download it – anodyne and half baked even in cultural terms, let alone in literary terms.

Let me make myself clear: it is not YA as such that I’m objecting to (much though I personally dislike the rather pointless label that has been slapped on it) but Adam’s (devil’s advocate? can he really be serious?) insistence on the lowest common denominator, on his confusion here of the popular with the excellent or culturally significant. There is absolutely nothing wrong with young adults reading, enjoying, discussing, role playing or writing fan fiction about Harry Potter or Twilight. There’s no doubt that the power of story that exists in these books is considerable, and marvellous, and that the authors can and should be congratulated and rewarded for helping to instil in younger people an enjoyment of reading and perhaps also of writing that will often continue into adulthood. There’s nothing inherently wrong with adults reading and enjoying this kind of popular YA either, so long as they acknowledge it for what it is, which is literary comfort food. But what Adam seems to be doing in his article is the equivalent of demanding that Star Trek novelisations should be placed on a level playing field, in literary prize terms, with seriously intended and formally accomplished works of speculative fiction such as those produced by M. John Harrison or Liz Jensen or Simon Ings or even Adam himself. Bollocks, is what I say to that. If we want YA to be taken seriously, shouldn’t we be pointing readers – and critics, and the judges of literary prizes – away from the sludge at the bottom of the literary barrel and towards those books and writers that genuinely do represent excellence, and cultural significance, and literary innovation in their writing for young adults? I’m sure that’s what Adam would do if he were arguing a similar case for SF, so why not here? Because (as with SF, as with crime) there are a wealth of books that fit into the young adult bracket that are also worth reading as literature. Natasha Carthew’s Winter Damage, Sally Gardner’s Maggot Moon, Helen Grant’s The Glass Demon and Rachel Hartman’s Serafina to name but four recent examples, the fiction of Melvyn Burgess and Frank Cottrell Boyce and Frances Hardinge and wonderful Margo Lanagan. As with science fiction itself, the list is extensive.

Nor is it correct to assume that YA will ‘never’ be rewarded or even acknowledged by the likes of the Booker. YA is already making its way on to the shortlists of the major ‘adult’ speculative fiction prizes – see Patrick Ness’s Monsters of Men in 2011, Rachel Hartman’s Serafina earlier this year. Jenni Fagan’s YA-friendly The Panopticon, also a finalist for this year’s Kitschies, has been widely praised in the literary mainstream and Fagan was herself named as one of 2013’s Granta Best of Young British Novelists. There was plenty of discussion, both before and after it won the Clarke Award in 2012, as to whether Jane Rogers’s The Testament of Jessie Lamb should be classified as YA – and yes, there it was on the Booker longlist. These books have been recognised by prize juries because they are good books – that is, demonstrating significant accomplishment in terms of style, use of language and literary form. Whether they are YA or not (or SF or not, or crime or not) is of secondary importance.

Adam complains that the Booker never rewards ‘primitive’ art. I’m not sure if he’s wanting to categorise the whole of SF as primitive art along with mass market YA – I know I wouldn’t (just read Light) – but the central question here is: do we want it to? What could possibly be gained by a panel of Booker Prize judges deciding to give the nod to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? This surely is not what the Booker – or the Clarke, come to that – is for. The way mass consumables work in the marketplace should never be confused with what literature does, which is to be sceptical, to question, to call to arms, to stretch the imagination and the intellect, to further the possibilities of what printed words on a piece of paper can accomplish. One could argue, perhaps rightly, that reaching a lot of people is in and of itself a significant literary achievement. But The Daily Mail reaches a lot of people and I don’t see Adam arguing that the Mail – that most perniciously conservative of daily rags – should be held up as an icon of the zeitgeist.

The task of literature – and that includes our YA literature – is not to reflect mass trends, but to buck them. The task of the Booker Prize, surely – and of the Clarke, and the Kitschies – is to recognise writers who are genuinely striving to do that.

Nina’s Crime Blog #3

September 10, 2013 / Nina

The Kills, by Richard House (2013)

We’re still only in September, and I have The Luminaries and The Goldfinch still to read, but I am going to be pretty gobsmacked if anything supersedes The Kills as my book of the year.

Book 1: Sutler

“Although no one has seen him they have managed to bump into him twice? That is quite a coincidence. Mr Parson, how is your knowledge of the American Civil War?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Do you read historical fiction? Have you heard of a sutler? It’s a military term.” Bastian’s face pinched with a teacher’s concentration. “A sutler is someone who follows the military, they sell provisions, clothes, uniforms, food…”

“I’m sorry?”

“Sutler. Sutler. S.U.T.L.E.R. It’s from the Dutch. It means someone who does the dirty work.” (pp171-2)

We follow a fugitive from the Iraqi desert to Grenoble, where he disappears again, perhaps forever. A huge amount of money has gone missing. A man calling himself Stephen Lawrence Sutler is the obvious suspect, but who is playing him, and to what purpose? A team of film makers who encounter Sutler in Turkey become entangled in his affairs with disastrous repercussions for them all.

Book 2: The Massive

Even now the work bothers him in ways he can’t describe. Too much junk, too much dust, broken concrete, stuffed shopping bags, too much crap to properly know what’s being hidden. These buildings, he shakes his head. They clear them out, knock them down, and then build these superhighways right through them. A superhighway crashing right through some mediaeval sunscorched slum. (p283)

In a direct prequel to the events of Book 1, we meet the men of Camp Liberty. Rem Gunnersen’s hand-picked team of security and ex-servicemen have been charged with disposing of the vast acreages of dangerous garbage that is the ultimate undisclosed product of the Iraq war. The money is good, and they’re removed from the more obvious perils of the combat zone, but as the men gradually discover more about the dangers of the work they are engaged in, and the identity of the person who put them in their situation, relations between them begin to unravel. Meanwhile, at home in the States, Cathy Gunnersen begins an investigation of her own.

Book 3: The Kill

OK, there was the whole absurdity of it, obviously, it’s a crazy idea, but an appealing idea also, who doesn’t like the idea of two men, tourists, who kill, and take their instructions from a pulp novel. The very randomness of it. They come and go, and no one is ever caught – it’s morbidly satisfying, knowing you’ll never know. (p700)

Back in Book 1, a certain recent bestseller is passed around between various characters, a novel depicting a true crime investigation into a case whereby the author of a popular crime novel has disappeared in circumstances similar to those described in his own fiction. The novel is set in Naples, as is the fictional factual story that supposedly inspired it. It’s meant to be bad luck to say the title aloud. The person who originally owned the book in Book 1 has already disappeared.

Book 4: The Hit

“There was a murder.” The word was too ridiculous, spoken out in the sunlight, stupidly implausible. She can’t quite believe it, but doesn’t know what it would take to make such an event credible. Falling buildings, burning planes, deserts on fire, more plausible because of the scale. “They never found the victim.” (p891)

And in Book 4, the events of the novel that is Book 3 appear to be playing themselves out again, this time for real, in a different place and time and with a new cast of characters. Or is someone simply playing games with an urban myth? Some key characters from Book 1 reappear, still on the trail of Sutler, but there are now three Sutlers instead of just the one. We pick up their stories eagerly – but are we ever going to get the answers we’ve been looking for?

In her excellent recent review of Helene Wecker’s novel The Golem and the Jinni for Strange Horizons, Abigail Nussbaum makes reference to an article written for The Guardian by novelist Edward Docx in which he posits the over-familiar argument that novels employing genre materials will automatically prove inferior to the mainstream:

“It’s worth dealing with the difference again, since everyone seems to have forgotten it or become chary of the articulation. Mainly this: that even good genre (not Larsson or Brown) is by definition a constrained form of writing. There are conventions and these limit the material. That’s the way writing works and lots of people who don’t write novels don’t seem to get this: if you need a detective, if you need your hero to shoot the badass CIA chief, if you need faux-feminist shopping jokes, then great; but the correlative of these decisions is a curtailment in other areas. If you are following conventions, then a significant percentage of the thinking and imagining has been taken out of the exercise. Lots of decisions are already made.”

This argument is a nonsense based on a fallacy, namely the idea that a novel featuring an honest cop and a corrupt CIA chief, for example, must by its very nature find itself constrained within well-worn genre stereotypes, whereas a novel featuring a group of university students say, or TV execs wife-swapping in Hampstead, or a journalist facing dismissal because of phone hacking, will by its very nature offer a more rounded and psychologically realistic portrait of human interaction. It goes without saying that by-the-numbers fiction exists in all corners of the literary landscape – but to suggest that certain character or subject choices are intrinsically more prone to cliche or repetition or just plain bad writing has to be a false conceit. Either all writing exists on a level playing field – i.e, the success, failure, originality or otherwise of any given narrative is down to the skill and imagination of the writer, rather than the subject area in which he or she operates – or none of it does.

It would seem to me that the genre wars, as Nussbaum dubs them in her article, continue unchecked precisely because of a failure by both sides to acknowledge the simple and self evident fact that the use or non-use of speculative or thriller elements is in and of itself not a determining factor of literary quality.

It doesn’t help Docx’s cause that in spite what he says in the paragraph quoted above, much of his argument is based around the sub-standard output of hack writers such as Dan Brown, Stieg Larsson and Lee Child. (Child has to be one of the worst prose ‘stylists’ working today. I wish to God someone would call his bluff on that boast of his that he could write a creditable literary novel in three weeks – the results would make for grand entertainment indeed.) Docx is also seen to perform that neat trick so beloved of mainstream critics in hastily claiming those speculative or crime novels that disprove his argument (in this case Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment) for the literary mainstream. Thus critics like Docx bang on incessantly about the poor literary quality of works by Heinlein, Asimov, Campbell and Clarke, whilst insisting that Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, Ballard’s Crash, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Kuzuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go aren’t actually SF at all because they’re too well written. This kind of double standard is not just tiresome, it’s ridiculous.

I have a lot of sympathy with Docx’s frustration over the general crapness of much commercial fiction, but his lordly pronouncements on speculative fiction per se seem to be based far more around personal prejudice than on logic. Fyodor Dostoevsky proved again and again that a real writer can do anything he damn well likes with a basic thriller plot. Margaret Atwood, Patricia Highsmith, Joyce Carol Oates, Christopher Priest, Mike Harrison, Michael Swanwick and James Ellroy have all used genre materials to create literary masterpieces, and I could easily name dozens more who have done likewise. But for now I’m going to concentrate on naming Richard House.

Because House’s thriller-in-four-thrillers The Kills is a literary masterpiece. No amount of summarizing could adequately convey the power, complexity, literary elegance, and intellectual reach of this remarkable book. House has openly stated his admiration for Bolano’s great novel-in-five-novels, 2666 – a tough act to follow for anyone, but with The Kills, House has produced a work that is consummately worthy of its inspiration.

One of the things I dislike most about commercial thrillers is the way character motivation is so often twisted to fit the plot – characters do things not because they really would, but because the author needs them to. Nothing feels real, and because nothing feels real, nothing matters. The events that drive The Kills are strange, dark, frightening and mysterious – but not one thing that happens feels false, trite, predictable or unlikely. The plot – or should I say plots – seem to unfold with a flawless and inexorable logic from actions and decisions taken by characters who at every point in the story feel wholly three dimensional and real.

And this book is genuinely thrilling. As you might expect with a novel of this length (for those who don’t already know it’s 1,000 pages) its complexities take time to unfold and there is work to be done by the reader. You must come prepared to immerse yourself in this narrative, to devote yourself to it mentally for the time it takes you to read it. There will be moments of discomfiture – especially at the beginning – while you try to work out exactly where House is taking you, and for what purpose. But that is part of the joy of this book, and believe me when I tell you that every ounce of effort you put in will be repaid. There were moments in all four of the books when the hairs on the back of my neck literally stood on end as my eyes were opened to some new revelation or resonance, where I found myself racing through the pages, the pleasures of the prose now coming secondary to the simple and urgent need to know what was going to happen. This novel is long, but only exactly as long as it needs to be. I read a fascinating interview with Eleanor Catton at the weekend in which she compared long novels with DVD box sets in the way they offer the possibility of longer and more complex story arcs, of stories within stories and properly realised subplots. This is certainly true of The Kills. There are a lot of words here, but not one of them feels superfluous to requirements.

In matters of form, the book is a significant accomplishment. The four books are not so much linked together as enfolded in one another like origami. Resonances between them abound – not just going forward, but looking backward also. Even yesterday as I finished the book, I found myself cheering ‘oh YES!’ to a suddenly obvious parallel between Books 3 and 1 that I hadn’t noticed at all until that moment. There is a metafictional layering of narrative that – like the film of the book of the book in Books 1, 3 and 4 – results in what I can only describe as a millefeuille of storytelling, simultaneously singular and plural. In his review for The Telegraph, Jake Kerridge compares The Kills to ‘a dance that has been minutely choreographed’, a simile that feels particularly apt.

Kerridge’s favourite of the four Books would appear to be Book 2, The Massive, and if I were pushed to name my own favourite I think I might be inclined to agree with him. This damning indictment of Western actions in Iraq, the ignorance and greed that lay at the heart of the push towards so-called regime change and the thousand-and-one cock-ups in the wake of that, has the strength of purpose of the best kind of investigative journalism, with all the twists and turns (and horrific pay-offs) of a five-star political thriller. At the same time it is a deeply, deeply affecting literary novel about people. I’ll never forget Gunnersen’s men and I’ll never forget Cathy Gunnersen either. The Massive is less circuitous, less complex as narrative than the other three Books – its complexity lies in the way it interacts with the other novels – but this is perhaps where its strength resides. As a piece of political fiction it is a must-read. The Massive is an important book in its own right, by any standards.

It’s no surprise that much of the commentary on The Kills has tended to focus on the form it takes. But I wouldn’t want to end this review without talking about the novel’s language, which to me feels sublimely fit for purpose and in many, many places simply sublime. There isn’t a single bad sentence in The Kills. The novel’s pared-down, factualizing and dispassionate style has a documentary quality, a purity and a deceptive simplicity that is beauty in its most refined state, a kind of literary invisibility that had me in envy of this author’s brilliance on every page. That House loves words, the English language and the act of trasmitting thought and emotion through the act of writing is everywhere, everywhere in this novel, and I would like to close with a passage that, for me, summarizes not only The Kills itself, but the state of being a writer:

And this was gone. The precise description of the decor along a mantelpiece, Krawiec’s mother’s house, the petiteness of it, sullen and ordinary, of Lvov at night, how capsule-like the city seemed, of the people seated facing the windows at the respite home in Lvov, the women on buses, the silent trains and trams. Everything lost: the airport and how coming into it pitched through a layer of fog – fog so you knew you were in the heart of Eastern Europe, right on the edge of another period entirely – how this worked as an image of what he would and would not find – coming through fog, OK, not great, but apt. The petrochemical works, the roadways, the fields and fields shaved of produce, and the intensity of it all, that one man could come from this flat monochrome to a city so bumpy and opposite and butcher two people. (p714 – and don’t be deceived by that line about Krawiec butchering two people – like everything in The Kills, it doesn’t turn out the way you think it will… )

I was hoping to have this piece written and posted before the announcement of the Booker Prize shortlist this morning, but events, as they say, intervened, and the list was actually revealed about an hour ago, while I was still buggering about trying to get this finished. I’m not going to comment on the Booker shortlist at the moment, except to say that I feel devastated for House that The Kills isn’t on it. This doesn’t entirely surprise me – I said in an email to a friend recently that I doubted the judges would have the courage to include it (because of its length, because it’s a crime novel, because, because because) – but it does seem to me to be a criminal oversight. The Kills is a major novel, a major thriller, a major contribution to literature. I would urge you to read it.

Nina’s Crime Blog #2

August 17, 2013 / Nina

Generation Loss, by Elizabeth Hand (2007)

(Those who read Crime Blog #1 will know I was intending Richard House’s The Kills to be my next excursion into the genre. I was just getting into it when we went to Spain – and anyone who’s seen the book in the flesh, so to speak, will understand why it wasn’t really practical to take it with me. So I took Generation Loss instead – much more acceptable in terms of the EasyJet baggage allowance. But fans of House fear not, The Kills will be featuring at this blog in due course.)

I’ve been a fan of Elizabeth Hand for quite some time now. I admire her writing greatly. I also sympathise with her preoccupations, which might loosely be described as the materials of obsession. Her characters are often loners, people who have become disaffected with society, who have fallen out with friends and lovers, who for one or other reason find themselves treading an unkempt path, often of their own making. Above all, Hand is interested in art and artists, but where some might portray art as a curative, for Hand’s protagonists it is more likely to be a purgative, an expression of the rage that is at least a part of their personal predicament.

One of the other things I love about Hand’s writing is her particular approach to the fantastic. Her touch here is always subtle – a leaching away of normality rather than a full-throated plunge into the surreal – and at least a measure of what we take as ‘unreal’ in her stories comes down to the skewed viewpoints and preternatural talents of her characters. Hand’s place in the canon of the fantastic is deservedly secure, and well recognised, which is why it came as something of a surprise to me that Generation Loss was being marketed as crime, pure and simple, with no fantastical element.

I was eager to find out what Hand might do with reality in the raw.

Generation Loss introduces us to Cassandra Neary, famous for fifteen minutes in her early twenties as a precociously gifted photographer whose images of the New York punk scene both shocked and enthralled a public hungry for sensation. Now in her forties, Cass is a burnt out case. Working as a bookstore clerk and still determinedly hooked on addictive substances, she has neither the wish nor the stamina to restart her career. When a former associate offers her the chance to interview Aphrodite Kamestos, a once iconic photographer who is now a bitter recluse living on a desolate island off the coast of Maine, Cass says no. What changes her mind is not the generous paycheque on offer, but the thought of meeting Kamestos, whose groundbreaking work was Cass’s own core inspiration. But there are secrets buried on Paswegas, and Cass’s intrusion into the lives of the islanders will have deadly consequences.

So far as the writing is concerned, all Hand’s trademarks are here in force. The New York scenes are beautifully handled, but it is in the passages about the landscape of Maine that Hand truly shines. The sense of place evoked in this novel is a considerable achievement. Fans of Stephen King will inevitably be reminded of the bleakly closeted island ambience of Dolores Claibourne and ‘The Reach’ and even Storm of the Century. But Hand adds an extra edge of lyricism, a keenly sympathetic insight into the lives of the islanders and their understandable resentment of those ‘from away’. The beauty and the bleakness of Paswegas are given equal weight, and the small but compelling cast of characters come vividly alive on every page. I’ve held a longstanding ambtion to visit Maine, and Generation Loss reinforced it, big style.

An island community is the perfect setting for a crime story. All those buried emnities, coupled with the fact that you already have all your suspects conveniently gathered together in one place, gives the crime writer a ready and fascinating alternative to the cliche of the country house, and it’s no surprise to see a writer of Hand’s calibre manipulating these very elements with panache and skill.

With so much about this novel to admire, I was all the more disappointed that the book as a whole did not work for me. From about the midway point it became uncomfortably clear that there were two stories in this novel, one subtle and resonant and deserving of closer scrutiny, the other cliched and unbelievable and demanding a Hollywood production company. I kept wishing it would bugger off and let me read more about Maine, and Cass, and photography. Unfortunately it monstered in and ate everything, leaving nothing in its wake but the sense that Generation Loss is yet another particularly tragic (because the writing is so effortlessly lovely) example of why thrillers are usually unsatisfactory as literature.

The true story of Generation Loss has nothing to do with Denny Ahearn. The true story of Generation Loss is the story of Cass and Aphrodite, Cass’s burnout, Aphrodite’s jealousy of her youth and talent, the conversation they should have had about that – and would have done, surely, had the ten-a-penny thriller plot not been allowed to become the driving force behind the action. Hand does her best to justify and give depth to what happens, but these efforts failed for me, because she had already killed off the most interesting character in the book, and because I never gave a damn about Denny, who is never a character so much as a necessary plot device:

Monstrous as he was, Denny was the real thing. So was his work. He really had built a bridge between the worlds, even if no one had ever truly seen it, besides the two of us. (p 317)

No he hadn’t – what Denny built was a freak room, the same as you see at the end of Silence of the Lambs and just about every serial killer thriller from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to The Shining Girls, the hidden chamber of memento mori that has become de rigeur in such dramas not through any real sense of story or narrative tension (these were killed off after about the twentieth time this tired old trope was employed) but because of the cod symbolism that passes for explanation of motive, and because those scenes, often played out in the half-dark, always look great on camera.

I finished Generation Loss deeply regretting the novel it should have been. That is, not a novel of generic crime fiction, but a novel about the corrosive nature of ambition and the damage it does to relationships, with other people and with the world. It’s unfair of me to twist someone else’s book to my own agenda, I know, especially as it’s precisely the very high quality of Hand’s writing that allows me to forget about the language and to focus instead on what I perceive as the novel’s problems.

But what I take away most of all from this book, apart from my continuing admiration for Hand’s talent and leading on directly from what I was saying in an earlier post about the inherent conservatism of the publishing world, is a feeling of concern. Concern about the commercial pressures brought to bear upon writers to produce stories that can be easily assimilated, stories, in other words, that we’ve all heard before.

Last night, Chris and I caught up with a movie we wanted to see but missed earlier in the year, Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond the Pines. The movie begins with Luke, a stunt motorcyclist (played by Ryan Gosling) who more or less accidentally discovers that he is a father. Wishing to play an active role in his baby son’s life, he throws over the itinerant carnival existence he has been leading and turns to bank robbery as a misguided way of making money to support his new family. We as audience know from the first that this is bound to end badly, and as we watch Luke speeding towards a police roadblock we believe we know everything there is to know about what comes next. We’ve seen so many other films like this, after all. Only as it turns out, we haven’t. The Place Beyond the Pines is as far from the by-the-numbers three-act Hollywood cop drama as it is possible to get. What we are offered instead is an original and arresting piece of work, beautifully scripted, powerfully acted and never afraid to be true to its own unique story. The plot, although it appears discursive, is actually masterfully structured – and solid gold proof that good stories are not rooted in formula, but in character, and landscape, and authentic mystery.

Could you call this film a crime drama? Yes, certainly. But more than that it is just a story about those people, full of surprises right up until the final frame, and so affecting and full of poetry that talking it over the following morning still brought tears to my eyes.

If stories like this prove anything, it’s that as writers we should have the courage to tell the stories we want to tell in the way we choose to tell them. Those are the kind of stories that catch fire.

The Race to NewCon

August 11, 2013 / Nina

A day or so before setting off for CelsiusCon I had a rather exciting phone call. The person on the line was Ian Whates, founder and director of NewCon Press. He was calling to say he’d just finished reading my novel The Race and wanted to discuss it with me. To cut a long story short, Ian loves the book, and we’ve now agreed a deal for NewCon to publish it. The novel will be released next summer, with an official launch at the Worldcon in London.

To say I’m over the moon about this is something of an understatement. This book has been a long time coming, it’s very close to my heart, and contains the best of my writing to date. It’s genuinely thrilling to know that people are finally going to get the chance to read it.

Equally thrilling is Ian’s enthusiasm for the book, his obvious commitment to publishing it with love and care. Ian has published stories of mine before, including my collection Microcosmos for NewCon Press’s Imaginings series, so he clearly knew something of what he would be getting when he opened the manuscript. But when we spoke on the phone, one of the first (and most pleasing) things Ian said to me was that even if he’d never read a word of my stuff before, reading The Race would have convinced him on the spot.

The world of publishing today is fraught with problems. Cutbacks in the support industries (publishers’ readers, sales reps, in-house copyediting) and a general unease and uncertainty around the changes wrought by the introduction of new media are certainly not helping, but the biggest hurdle faced by new novelists, it seems to me, is the general risk-averseness of the larger publishers. I sometimes get the feeling that commissioning editors for the big houses don’t really want to mess with novelty, they want more of the same thing they bought last week, only slightly different. A product they know already they can sell, in other words. And so bland orthodoxies are born.

I do have some sympathy with their predicament. Having worked at the selling end of the book industry for some years, I know something of the devilish difficulty that exists in persuading punters to take a chance on a new name, a new imprint, a new approach to writing. I’m certainly not one of those writers who insist that the ‘big boys’ are out to get them, to suppress new talent and innovation wherever they find it, because that’s clearly rubbish, a sentiment too often expressed by those who haven’t yet perfected their end of the deal – the damned book, in other words – sufficiently to have it seriously considered as a publishable prospect. But there is a certain nervousness abroad, particularly at the edge of genre, that can feel frustrating when you encounter it, a conservatism that’s just a little too… conservative.

That’s why having the support of a publisher like NewCon Press is such a valuable gift. Ian Whates knows the genre and he knows the business. I know he’ll do great things for The Race, and I sincerely hope The Race will do great things for him.

I’ve created a new page for The Race here at this site, where you can read a brief outline of the novel and a bit about how it came to be written. I’ll be adding more details – cover images, pre-ordering information etc – as they become available.

My criminal bloggage

July 30, 2013 / Nina

I don’t know the crime genre nearly well enough, and that has started to bug me. I’ve never read Henning Mankell, for example, or David Peace, Joseph Wambaugh or Kerstin Ekman, George Pelecanos or Karin Alvtegen. Crime fiction has presented us with some of literature’s most instantly compelling stories and many of its most enduring characters, but these are not the only reasons why I personally find it fascinating. What I love most about the idea of crime fiction is its forensic nature – the presentation and unravelling, in whatever form or style the writer chooses to present this, of a number of clues, or happenings, or incidents, and the way a story will arise almost inevitably out of this arrangement of disparate pieces. Every crime novel is, to a greater or lesser extent, an essay in the uncovering of something hidden, a key factor that has been deliberately concealed from the reader, often in plain sight, a mystery that the reader, for maximum enjoyment, feels compelled to solve.

I think it’s likely that a good part of the reason crime fiction is so popular lies precisely in this work of joint imagining, the way the writer invites the reader inside, to work with them, almost, in a work of joint creation.

I read all of Dorothy L. Sayers while I was at university, at least in part because of Harriet Vane’s Oxford connection. I continued to read a fair amount of crime fiction into my twenties, and there are a number of authors whose work I know pretty well. I devoured every book Ruth Rendell wrote as Barbara Vine (The Brimstone Wedding remains my favourite), and I read a lot of ‘core’ Rendells too, though I’ve always tended to prefer her non-Wexfords, wonderful books like Lake of Darkness, Going Wrong, A Judgement in Stone (turned into a marvellous movie by Claude Chabrol, La Ceremonie – go, go rent it now!) and my personal favourite The Bridesmaid (Chabrol made a movie of that, too – it’s pretty good, but not as good as the book) to the series novels. I read most of PD James (her standalone non-Dalgliesh book, Innocent Blood, was far and away my favourite) I developed an enduring obsession with the fiction of Patricia Highsmith. What I loved most about her work was the way you’d frequently get a crime novel without a murder in it, or else the murder plot would be subverted somehow, or take a completely unexpected turning. Her characters were nuanced, compelling and above all weird, and it is the effortless weirdness of her storytelling that continues to amaze me. Her ‘how to’ book on writing suspense fiction is a genuine treat.

I suppose that given the emotional ambiguity of a lot of my own fiction, it’s hardly surprising that the crime stories I tend to prefer are those that shirk the business of solving the mystery at their heart. Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel is a standout novel, a wonderful, joyously dark read that gives more with each subsequent reading at least partly because we never discover if Rachel ‘did it’ or not. The way du Maurier manages to get away with this inconclusive ending whilst at the same time making the novel a thrilling experience for the reader is a masterclass in genius-level storytelling.

More recently I’ve loved Roberto Bolano’s The Third Reich, in which Bolano subverts the generic crime novel beautifully by having the central action of the story – a character’s disappearance in mysterious circumstances – play itself out just beyond the main thrust of the narrative as it is presented to us, and also Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn & Child, firstly for its incredible London writing and secondly for its obstinate refusal to tell a traditional crime story at all. I was struck especially by something Ridgway said in an e-interview with John Self about the problem of the conclusive narrative:

I enjoy crime fiction a great deal. Or two thirds of it. By which I mean the first two thirds of each book. The last third of a crime book usually pisses me off. I love the exposition, getting everything set up and into position, and then the cranking out of the mechanics that are going to get the thing to dance. But in the last third it seems to always end up in a sort of badly choreographed dogfight and the pacing goes haywire and there’s so much chasing after loose ends that it ceases to have anything to do with our experienced world and becomes more a sort of fantasy of resolution, a kind of neurotic tidying of life’s mess, like sport.

These words sum up my own problem with the more conventional type of thriller pretty much exactly. (The same is true of way too many horror novels also – an amazing setup ruined by a downhill gallop towards a denouement that seems so stuffed full with cliches it’s enough to make you want to kill everyone involved in it.) Perhaps this is even why I seemed to fall out of love with the genre at some point. I feel now that I’ve been missing out, and that rejecting a genre because I don’t care for its bland centre ground would be the same as refusing to read science fiction because I no longer care for the work of Isaac Asimov. The trick – as with SF, as with horror – is to seek out the work at the edges, novels and writers whose concerns extend beyond the merely generic and into the personal exploration of defining obsessions.

I’ve read a fair amount of very good True Crime recently – Richard Lloyd Parry’s scintillating People Who Eat Darkness, Janet Malcolm’s excellent Iphigenia in Forest Hills, John Follain’s flawed but fascinating Death in Perugia, and Gordon Burn’s Capote-inspired Happy Like Murderers. (Burn is an achingly good writer, his premature death a genuine loss to literature.) Once again, what I’ve loved most about these books has been the construction of story through the examination of facts, the painstaking exhumation of salient details. I’ve seen more than one critic point to an obsession with detail as a defining characteristic of my own stories, so it seems likely that my excited response to this in the work of others is wholly to be expected.

I haven’t written much crime fiction myself, mainly because I’m terrified of cocking it up, but I have written some. My linked pieces ‘Wilkolak’ (first published in Crimewave #11 and reprinted in Maxim Jakobowski’s Mammoth Book of Best British Crime #10) and ‘The Tiger’ (published earlier this summer in Paul Finch’s anthology for Gray Friar, Terror Tales of London) are both psychological crime stories with a slight supernatural element. More recently, my novella Vivian Guppy and the Brighton Belle, my contribution to Eibonvale Press’s railway anthology Rustblind and Silverbright, makes a feature of precisely the investigative, forensic style of writing I’ve been talking about here. It’s not a crime story so much as a mystery – a ‘where is it’ rather than a ‘whodunit’. The story’s protagonist, Marian, could definitely be described as a detective – though it’s not criminals she’s trying to unearth but model trains. When I delivered this story I said to David Rix of Eibonvale that what defined Vivian Guppy for me most of all was what tremendous fun it was to write (and believe me when I say that this is not always a given), and I was recently surprised and very delighted to see Des Lewis describe the story in his real-time review of Rustblind as ‘a veritable page-turner’.

I’ve always felt immensely attracted though somewhat daunted by the prospect of trying to write a crime novel, but something Joel Lane said to me recently, that crime fiction ‘is just a matter of finding a crime or a criminal to write about’, clarified matters for me enormously. In placing the emphasis firmly on description, on the forensic examination of a given situation, rather than on the mechanical kind of plotting that led me to shy away from crime fiction in the first place, he gave me a means to analyse what matters to me most in this kind of writing, and the sense that I might even be able to produce some.

In the meantime though, I’ve decided it’s high time I got to know the genre a little better. To this end I’m going to try and prioritize crime fiction in my reading over the coming months, and blog about each novel I read, sharing my thoughts and findings and my conclusions at this blog. Hopefully I’ll start to build my own personal canon of crime writing as we go. So, with no further ado…

Nina’s Crime Blog #1: The False Inspector Dew, by Peter Lovesey (1972)

This might seem an odd place for me to start. Peter Lovesey writes crime fiction in the ‘golden age’ tradition: intricately worked mysteries with surprising plot twists and often within an historical setting. Classic detective fiction has few equals for sheer readability when it is done well, but the emphasis lies first and foremost with the building of a firm overall structure in which every happening is created expressly to move the plot forward. There is little room for digression in this type of story, and the characters tend to adhere fairly rigidly to their role as plot dictates it, rather than wandering off all over the place or messing things up with their complex psychologies. The False Inspector Dew is no exception to this. But what lifts it above the average and makes it a delight is Lovesey’s clear love for and knowledge of his chosen strand of detective fiction, a love that articulates itself in the blissful and knowing ironies that make The False Inspector Dew so funny as well as so clever.

It’s 1921 and Walter Baranov has a problem. He’s a dentist, and he likes being a dentist – but his wife Lydia, a failing actress, has other plans for him. She wants them to sail for America in the hope of making it big in motion pictures. Walter sees only disaster ahead – but unfortunately for him it’s Lydia who has control of the purse strings, and she’s threatening to sell his dental practice to finance their voyage. Help arrives in the form of Alma, a patient of Walter’s whose passion for him is such that she’s prepared for them to try anything – even murder – to be rid of Lydia and free to pursue a life together. Things seem to go well for them at first – but an unforseen calamity soon reverses the tide of their fortunes, and Walter finds himself in the unenviable position of acting as detective to solve the crime he himself would seem to have committed…

The plot is beautifully worked – Ruth Rendell herself defied anyone to predict the outcome and I duly found myself outwitted at each new turn. But it’s Lovesey’s prose that makes all this happen in such fine style. His writing is of the kind that is so fit for purpose it is invisible – elegant, correct, unadorned, created solely for the pleasure of telling its story in the deftest manner possible, this is what I’d call Just Good English, and it would be well if more of Lovesey’s would-be imitators were to take a lesson from him in how to write as well as what kind of stories to tell. Each character is drawn with economy and great clarity. The humour is wonderful – the kind of sardonic wit that is either part of a writer’s God-given armoury or it is not.

I chose The False Inspector Dew to kick off my crime blog mainly because this novel has always been a favourite of Chris’s and I was curious to see how I liked it. What strikes me most about it is that it’s a whodunit in the proper old-school sense of the word. The crimes against good plotting in contemporary TV cop dramas are legion and tiresome. We recently caught up with ITV’s Broadchurch, for example, and although we enjoyed ourselves watching it, and were able to work out who the killer was through a process of elimination, we felt cheated in that there was nothing in the script to prefigure motive, nothing whatsoever. For a screenwriter to rely on a shock revelation – ‘ooh, X is a secret paedophile!’ – that occurs less than twenty minutes from the end of an eight-hour drama is lazy writing, simple as that, and to be deplored, especially when you have great actors like Olivia Colman and David Tennant working for you, who deserve better.

Lovesey takes no such shortcuts. Everything is there on the page, right from the beginning. The reader can either choose to try and solve the mystery independently as s/he goes, or simply sit back and enjoy the feeling of being confounded.

What all this adds up to is traditional detective fiction of the highest order. I probably wouldn’t choose to read this particular stripe of crime fiction terribly often, if only because it is so far from my own style and species of ability that it leaves me little room to be directly inspired. But do I admire it? Yes I do. And did I enjoy it? Yes I did – and plenty.

Next up: The Kills, by Richard House (I may be some time… )

Booker longlist announced

July 23, 2013 / Nina

Well, that was interesting. Of the thirteen guesses I made, only one of them, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, turned out to be correct, and perhaps the best thing that can be said about this year’s Booker longlist is that it will have similarly confounded a lot of people’s expectations. A majority of the books here are by established writers – but not by writers whose names you’ll necessarily hear every day. This means that those who feel like making an educated guess about the shortlist and final result will all have something new to discover. Which can only be a good thing.

If there’s one huge area of disappointment it’s that there are no works of speculative fiction on this list. If you’re into statistics at all, you’ll see that actually makes it less progressive than last year’s list, which featured Sam Thompson’s amazing Communion Town and Ned Beauman’s The Teleportation Accident, both of which made fascinating and varied use of speculative ideas. If you felt like stretching the point you might also include Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse in that tally, as it has a distinctly slipstream vibe.

There’s nothing like that this year. I suppose you could include Jim Crace’s Harvest, sort of – the fact that I’ve never found myself particularly excited by Crace’s brand of fabulation is most likely my fault and not his.

I’m flabbergasted not to see Nick Royle’s First Novel make an appearance. All in all, I feel curiously deflated by this list, which feels more conservative to me in terms of subject and form than it might seem at first sight.

The novel I’m far and away most excited about here is Richard House’s The Kills. I’d heard of this vaguely prior to seeing it longlisted, but didn’t know much about it. On reading the synopsis – it’s a novel in four novels, a crime story within a crime story within a crime story – my first thought was ‘wow, it sounds as if Richard House has read Roberto Bolano!’ I was delighted, on reading an interview with House, to discover that this is indeed the case and that The Kills was inspired, among many other things, by House’s reading of 2666. I ordered the book straight away and can’t wait to read it.

I’ll also be looking forward to Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries. Catton’s first novel, The Rehearsal, did amazing things with what on the face of it sounded like a conventional idea based around a high school teacher-pupil affair scandal, Reading it was a genuine surprise, one of those fabulous moments in a reading life where you find your own expectations subverted utterly, and all you can do is bounce around in your seat thinking ‘bravo!’ The Luminaries looks like being similarly ambitious, and I feel certain that I’ll love it, just from the incisive and ironical self awareness of Catton’s writing.

Is the rest of it all a bit trad Booker though or is that just that my own particular literary interests don’t jibe with the judges’?

Perhaps I’ll change my mind in the coming days.

Get to know the Booker longlist here.

And do read this excellent interview with Richard House here.

Guessing the Booker longlist

July 18, 2013 / Nina

I saw an amazing photo online yesterday. Posted by the Man Booker Prize at their Facebook page, it’s an image of all this year’s Booker subs, stacked deliberately in such a way that we can’t see what they are. I suppose it might theoretically be possible to work it out from what is visible, but I wouldn’t fancy trying. It did occur to me though that, surprising though it may seem, I’ve never tried to call the Booker longlist before, and so I thought it might be fun to try that instead.

When last year’s longlist was first announced I thought it was great. Looking back on it now it just seems weird. Some odd inclusions, and the usual kind of disparate air to the whole thing that makes you feel faintly deflated. More interesting than 2011’s, sure, but still not totally amazing, and when the eventual shortlist was published what I mostly felt was disappointment and a kind of rage that Nicola Barker wasn’t on it. Oh well. All this is pretty much par for the course with the Booker, and as with all literary prizes, the point, so far as I’m concerned at least, lies not in who wins or even what gets shortlisted, but in the discussion about books the prize provokes: the passion, the evangelism, and most of all the disagreements. That the Man Booker Prize gives readers one possible starting point for looking at the year in books – that’s enough to justify its existence in itself.

And so we come to 2013. One notable fact about this year’s eligibles is that many of the usual suspects aren’t among them. There’s no new Amis this year, no McEwan, Swift, Boyd, Smith (Zadie or Ali), Enright or Mantel. There’s Coetzee, and he’s a writer I love, but I’m just not fancying The Childhood of Jesus for the line-up. There’s Atwood, but her new book is the third in a series, and unless it turns out to be totally amazing – which we won’t know for another month as it’s not out until August – I can’t see Maddaddam making the cut either. This temporary shortage of ‘big beasts’ can only be a good thing, so far as I can see, because it opens things up a bit, and the presence – or lack of presence – of starry names on the longlist won’t immediately dominate the discussion around it.

So – who will get longlisted? Your guess is as good as mine, and I hope we will see some more guesses going up in the five days that remain before the Booker judges make their announcement at midday on Tuesday July 23rd. But here we go with my own attempt at predicting it. In alphabetical order then:

Americanah – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. This still forms part of the TBR pile on my bedside table (along with Lanark and Traveller of the Century) but from what I’ve sampled of it so far this is an amazing book, far reaching and provocative and, like everything Adichie has produced, just superbly written. I think it’s a cert for the longlist – and deservedly so.

Life After Life – Kate Atkinson. I love Atkinson’s writing. She’s sensitive and perceptive and obviously cares a great deal about the craft. There’s been a lot of discussion about how well the speculative elements of this novel succeed – some have enjoyed the subtlety of it, others have felt the book doesn’t go far enough in tackling its central idea – but I think it’s great to see Atkinson trying a new direction and perhaps the good press she’s received for Life After Life will encourage her to be bolder next time around. In any case, she’s a thoughtful and committed writer who should be on this list.

Idiopathy – Sam Byers. I read the extended extract from this when it was published in Granta and was hugely impressed by it. Amazing writing, and the tone of the thing – darkly ironic, with a kind of surly rage bubbling away underneath – really got to me. The word on the street says that the novel as a whole more than lives up to that Granta extract, so on it goes. I’m going to have a sneaky extra punt here and say that Care of Wooden Floors by Will Wiles is most likely running neck and neck with Idiopathy for this year’s bravura debut spot, and that either or indeed both of them might make it through.

The Luminaries – Eleanor Catton. Still not out yet, so I haven’t read it, but I loved, loved, loved Catton’s first novel The Rehearsal – boldly original and one of the most brilliantly written debuts I’ve read in ages. I can’t see The Luminaries being anything less than equally fascinating, and the advance press has been very positive. Catton is surely a contender.

Meeting the English – Kate Clanchy. I love her short stories – quietly considered and perfectly crafted, they make every word count. A first novel from a mature writer is always an interesting prospect and I feel certain that Clanchy can more than hold her own here. I think we’re going to see her on the list.

The Hired Man – Aminatta Forna. Again, I love her short stories. She’s a wonderful writer, sensitive and wide ranging and able to pack a lot of emotional punch into a very few lines. I love the premise of The Hired Man and I want to read it soon. I have the distinct feeling that the judges will have been impressed by what Forna has produced here.

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia – Mohsin Hamid. I’ve not read The Reluctant Fundamentalist yet, but I started reading Hamid’s new one the other day and was completely and utterly hooked in less than a paragraph. This book feels so powerfully essential I can’t see it being overlooked. I absolutely love and envy this kind of writing – both informal and impassioned, yet still poetic and so masterfully put together, it conveys its anger through a searing brand of humour that this writer is making his own. I wish I could write like this but I know I can’t and never could. Go for it, Mohsin.

Perfect – Rachel Joyce. Joyce’s debut made the Booker longlist last year and attracted a lot of positive attention, but I must admit I’m liking the premise of her follow-up a whole lot more. I love the idea of basing the central conceit of a book around the two seconds that were added to time in 1972 – that’s pure slipstream. This novel has a good feeling about it, and from what people are saying it’s a neat step forward in terms of technical achievement from Harold Fry.

Questions of Travel – Michelle de Kretser. I loved The Lost Dog, and the opening of de Kretser’s new novel is just beautiful. De Kretser is so accomplished as a writer it’s scary. The book’s receiving some wonderful press and I’m sure it’ll longlist.

The Adjacent – Christopher Priest. Yup, I am so biased. But there have been calls for some years now to see a genuine contender step forward from SF to turn the Booker on its head, and following the abject failure of last year’s judges to list M. John Harrison’s Empty Space, surely The Adjacent has to be it. It’s a book packed with ideas, surprise, wonderful mysteries and allusive writing. It’s unlike anythng else that has been published this year and plays games with form few writers dare even to attempt. It’s arguably Priest’s most ambitious book to date and most importantly you don’t need to have read a single word of science fiction to be able to understand, love and appreciate it. I’m hoping that the judges will have rightfully been enthralled.

The Professor of Truth – James Robertson. I love Robertson – I think he’s a wonderful writer, sincere and boundlessly imaginative and just what we need. The Testament of Gideon Mack was one of my favourites of the year it came out, and the premise of The Professor of Truth grabs me very hard indeed. More people need to discover Robertson and I hope that this year they will.

First Novel – Nicholas Royle. I love this book. It was one of the first things I read this year, and I’m having a really hard job finding any new novels that match it in terms of excellence. If it doesn’t get longlisted, the judges are mad. Simple as that.

All the Birds, Singing – Evie Wyld. Wyld’s first novel made a considerable splash and it’s not hard to see why. Like de Kretser, she writes amazing sentences. Also like de Kretser, she has a way of packing emotion into those sentences that is hard to emulate. Her accomplishment in considerable. I think this book, like the Adichie, is a cert.

So there’s my Booker dozen. Before I leave you to go and get on with making your own predictions, I’d like to add two footnotes:

Five books I would love to see on the longlist but think won’t quite make the cut

(OK, so these are just five extra punts, basically)

The Secret Knowledge – Andrew Crumey
The Falling Sky – Pippa Goldschmidt
The Machine – James Smythe
Strange Bodies – Marcel Theroux
Secrecy – Rupert Thomson

Five books that should be on there but won’t be because they’re by yanks

(The Americans have their own prizes, sure. That’s the official argument for not letting them in on the Booker – but are we just afraid to let them in, because we secretly think they’ll kick our arses?)

The Round House – Louise Erdrich
The Woman Upstairs – Claire Messud
The Accursed – Joyce Carol Oates
Big Brother – Lionel Shriver
Sisterland – Curtis Sittenfeld

So – there we go. Roll on July 23rd, and let the games commence!

Fantastic Journeys

June 29, 2013 / Nina

Rustblind and Silverbright is here! Every good book deserves a proper send-off, and I’m delighted to announce that Rustblind will be launched upon the world with all due ceremony – not to mention generous amounts of alcohol – at 7pm this coming Thursday, July 4th, from the excellent Review bookshop at 131 Bellenden Road SE15. That’s just 5 minutes’ walk from Peckham Rye station – head down Bellenden Road to the junction with Choumert Road. The bookshop is opposite The Victoria pub – you can’t miss it. Review is a wonderful independent and independently-minded bookshop, situated in a beautiful, tree-lined South London street (and any of you North Londoners out there about to protest that there is no such thing, just come along and see for yourselves!) with a designated events space and a selection of great cafes and pubs in the immediate vicinity. In short, it’s the perfect venue and we’re delighted that Review is hosting us.

Rustblind and Silverbright is David Rix of Eibonvale’s first solo editing project, and if this auspicious start is the way he means to go on, then the world of horror and slipstream is in for some fine treats in future, that’s for sure. I’ve had a sneak preview via the proof pdf, and I can tell you that the selection of stories on offer is really rather special. Clearly David is not the only one who keeps the subject of trains close to his heart, because the contributors to this railway-themed anthology flaunt their affection, fascination and obsession with the railways in every word they write. There have been railway anthologies before of course, but I seriously believe there’s never been anything quite like this one. Rix’s attention to detail in the original cover art, formatting and interior layout is the icing on the cake.

And that’s not all! This ‘evening of the uncanny’ will also see the official London launch of Quentin Crisp’s Defeated Dogs (Eibonvale Press), P. F Jeffery’s Jane (Chomu Press) together with two new titles from PS Publishing, Rosanne Rabinowitz‘s captivating Machen-themed novella Helen’s Story, and my own story cycle Stardust. In celebration of the launch, PS are currently offering a special deal on joint purchases of Helen’s Story and Stardust, so those who aren’t able to get to the event won’t miss out.

The evening will feature a series of readings by authors, who will be happy to answer your questions and of course sign your books! Please do come along and say hello, have a glass of wine with us and get involved in all things uncanny. We’ll look forward to seeing you on the night.

You can read more about the event at the Review’s events diary here.

Nod

June 25, 2013 / Nina

“How did you know it was coming?”

That stumped me. Had I seen Nod coming? It was true that part of me had always remained outside the old world – a ghost with folded arms. I think I always suspected that some sort of fraud was being perpetuated as I watched ‘normal’ play out. Maybe I just expected more of life than it was ever realistically going to be able to deliver – maybe I was a romantic.

Real romantics are never the ones with the easy, winning ways about them; the real romantics are always the guarded ones, the paranoid and the worried, the ones with furrowed brows and coffee jitters. After all, anyone looking with open eyes at the world we’d made would have to have been very, very worried. (Nod, pp155-56)

Apocalypse seems to be in fashion at the moment. The end of the world is so much in vogue that writers and film directors are falling over themselves to come up with new and exciting ways to doom the planet. The end result is that we’ve been faced with some pretty silly scenarios recently, most of them zombie-related, many of them not worth our time. When I first read the synopsis of Adrian Barnes’s debut novel Nod – in which civilization is brought to a juddering halt when the global population becomes fatally psychotic through lack of sleep – I mentally rolled my eyes and breathed a silent ‘oh no.’ I couldn’t imagine how such a bizarre idea could be made to work, much less contribute anything substantial to the literature of universal destruction. I might not have read it at all, had it not been for the violently differing responses it began to elicit. Critics I admire and trust quickly aligned themselves more or less fifty-fifty either side of the love-it/hate-it axis. I became curious in the extreme, especially when the book scored valuable kudos for its publisher, Hebden Bridge-based indie Bluemoose Books, by graduating to the Clarke Award shortlist. How could I not want to read a novel that seemed to inspire devotion and dislike in equal measure?

I was eager to find out what I thought.

Let me announce my own allegiance straight away: I loved it. I was sold almost from the first page, because Nod turned out to be different in every respect from what I imagined it would be, and when it comes to new novels at least there’s nothing I enjoy more than being proved wrong.

One of the things the ‘hate-it’ critics seemed to dislike most about the novel was the voice of its narrator, Paul. While his wife Tanya works the corporate hamster wheel to bring in the money, Paul sits at home obsessing over obscure texts on etymology, writing books that he is finding increasingly difficult to get published. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are readers who have judged Paul to be a heartless bastard: disaffected, cynical, grudging and selfishly malcontent. But I’m bound to admit that I found Paul’s excoriating brand of honesty brave and refreshing. He cuts to the chase, that’s all – and doesn’t give much of a damn what anyone around him has to say about that. What some have seen as Paul’s smug isolationism I read as barely contained fury at what he perceives as his own failures, his objectifying of Tanya as the desperate, staring-eyed consternation of a man who knows beyond all doubt that the person he loves is going to die, and there isn’t a single damned thing he can do to save her. Paul’s social commentary – devastating and ruthless though it is – is braver and more accurately aimed than most of anything you’ll find in the more poetically moderated mainstream. And cynical be damned. To my mind at least, Paul – see the quote above – is actually one of the romantics.

More often than not, I found myself being won over to Paul’s side. But the most surprising discovery I made about Nod was that it’s not really a future catastrophe novel at all – it’s a book about now.

Yes, there’s a story – quite a powerful one, actually – about the world ending. In the tradition of many great end-of-the-world narratives, a big thing begins with a small thing that rapidly snowballs. People can’t sleep, and without sleep people die, ergo the world is heading for total meltdown in just thirty days. There’s no known cause for this curious pandemic, no hope of finding a cure either, because only a tiny minority seem to be exempt from the condition and everyone else is spiralling downhill at the same ultra-rapid rate. In a remarkably short space of time, what passes for normality becomes a nonsense and finally a charnel house. A freaked-out navy man nukes Seattle. The lunatics have taken over the asylum, and the asylum is the world. But it seems clear from early on in the book that Barnes is not writing a zombie apocalypse at all, but an indictment of our soiled and congested present:

The television’s caffeinated universe kept unfolding. The flesh-draped skulls of the anchormen and women yammered, and their joke shop teeth chattered. And their eyes! You’d have to handle those twitching eyes carefully if you ever found them in the palms of your hot little hands; you’d have to fight the urge to squeeze their jelly till it squished between your fingers. The men and women on TV were brazen heads. Of Irish derivation, a brazen head was omniscient and told those who consulted it whatever they needed to know, past, present or future: ‘let there be a brazen head set in the middle of things… out of which cast flames of fire.’ Isn’t that television, exactly? In the middle of things, burning away? (Nod, pp13-14)

What Nod portrays, more than the hypothetical bizarre, is the everyday commonplace: the compulsive pursuit of needless information, the desperate rush to acquire superfluous things, the violent cycle of exploitation that is end-of-the-road capitalism. The novel’s narrative is a thread to hang this on, a deliberate hyperbole, an ironical rant. What Barnes seems to be saying, put most simply, is: ‘wake up!’ The best science fiction of Nod lies not in its depiction of an implausible catastrophe, but in its usage of the story tropes of apocalypse as metaphorical construct. Indeed, I found the best way of reading and understanding Nod was to see the entire narrative as one extended metaphor, one of Paul’s ‘lost’ words, or a new word even, struggling for expression.

The novel’s final paragraph acts as a rewind to now. More than showing us what has happened or warning us of what might happen in the future, it’s reminding us of all the things – through greed, through waste, through iniquity, through political ignorance, through sheer habitual passivity – we stand to lose in a present that is already unravelling.

And of course for Paul, for Barnes, for all of us what remains in the end are our stories, our ways of telling our lives that in their variousness maintain our integrity in the face of impossible opposition. If words cannot in the end save us from what must come, they can at least insist that we were here:

In these final hours, I meditate on the passing of Nod and – of course – on words. There’s more power in words than people think. How does the Bible begin? ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ Nod was the miracle of the undergraduate poet, the sensitive young person who discovers that he or she can combine adjectives and nouns higgledy piggledy and come up with all sorts of fantastic monsters: cowering towers, fierce slumber, panicky taxis, shy murderers, and the like. (Nod, p198)

The rashness, the impetuosity, the unevenness, the anger of Nod is what made this novel, for me at least, unexpectedly moving. Nod reads like a book that had to be written. To my mind, there are few better recommendations for reading anything.

Category: books (Page 15 of 23)

Memory Palace and other stories

“On YA”

Nina’s Crime Blog #3

Nina’s Crime Blog #2

The Race to NewCon

My criminal bloggage

Booker longlist announced

Guessing the Booker longlist

Fantastic Journeys

Nod

Categories

Archives

Blogroll

Search

Meta