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Reading and writing

September 12, 2012 /

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is how the books I admire as a writer are not always the same books I want to read as a reader. The ideal – the point where the truly great books happen – is the nexus where these two vectors coincide.

I’m perplexed by this year’s Man Booker shortlist. Perplexed because although I successfully predicted four out of the six novels in contention (Mantel, Self, Moore, Thayil) the list still feels disappointing to me, insubstantial somehow. This isn’t just because I’m not a big fan of the two other titles on it (although I’m not – the inclusion of the paper-thin Levy is a total mystery to me, and although unfortunately I’ve not read the Eng the extracts I’ve sampled, both online and in bookshops, leave me with the impression that it is prone to purpleness, perhaps a bit saccharine) but because with the way the shortlist lines up it now feels as if there can be only one possible winner. It’s not even that I disapprove of that possible winner – he was my kind-of frontrunner from the start – but where’s the fun of the Booker without genuine debate?

I love Hilary Mantel – I think she’s one of the best writers working in this country at the moment and her novel Beyond Black is for me one of those ‘nexus books’, a novel that spurs me with envy as a writer and that engages me as a reader to the point of being seduced and ensnared from the very first paragraph. I haven’t yet read Bring up the Bodies, but I certainly will do, not just because I love Mantel but because I’ve been fascinated and horrified by the story of Anne Boleyn since I was about eight years old. The opening extract I read in The Guardian, with Thomas Cronwell flying his hawk, is a demonstration of everything high fantasy should aspire to, everything it could do and be if it tried harder and saw itself as literature, as writing, instead of just a churnforth of derivative stories. But in spite of knowing how much I’ll love Bring Up the Bodies, I can’t get excited by the thought of it winning the Booker. Mantel won in 2009 of course, with Wolf Hall. Bodies is a direct sequel to Hall. so as well as being the work of a writer who’s already won this prize, it’s work in the same mould. If BUtB were a completely different type of book from Wolf Hall, I’m sure I’d be cheering it on. As it is, in the context of the Booker, I just feel a bit lacklustre about it.

I’m delighted to see Alison Moore on the shortlist. The Lighthouse is a deftly worked, tightly wound little book of real merit and – again – genuine readability. Moore writes very well indeed, and the thing about her shortlisting that pleases me most is that it will bring her some deserved recognition and (I trust) be of assistance in moving her forward with her career. But The Lighthouse to win? For me, it’s too slight a book for that accolade. It seems to me that we should be demanding Booker winners with a thrust of greatness, a touch of madness, and a win for Moore would be like Anita Brookner’s win in 1984, when Hotel du Lac – how? how? – triumphed over J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun.

I think what I’m missing is precisely that – that thrust of reckless greatness, that edge of madness. Will Self’s Umbrella – the book I’m tipping as the eventual winner – does seem to have both. From the extracts I’ve read, I sense that Umbrella is a genuine attempt to write a novel that challenges and surprises and rewards attention, a novel that (and here’s the point) has stretched its author to the limits of his ability and then some. It’s an earned book, a book that aspires to say something about literature as well as just telling a story. Is this not what we want from our Booker winners? I know I do. As a writer I admire hugely what Self’s done in Umbrella. But as a reader, the thought of it exhausts me.  All that unrelenting ego, that insistent cleverness, for 400 pages. I just can’t – quite, yet – stomach the thought of it. I can’t help feeling that if I’m going to commit my reading time to a single book for an entire month there are so many other gaps in my reading – Gravity’s Rainbow, Infinite Jest, American Pastoral, Under the Volcano, Moby-Dick – that are in more urgent need of filling. When I read Adam Roberts’s review of Umbrella last month it made me shout with delight, so perfectly did it encapsulate the issues I have with a book like this. We know what Self’s doing, in other words, but do we care? I care, but not enough to leap upon Umbrella like unearthed treasure. If I can admire the ambition and worth of a book, but not feel desperate to read it, it’s only done half of its job. Which is sad. and this is something I feel bad about, because I want to love it.

Last week I read Nicola Barker’s 2004 novel Clear. Nicola Barker is special to me. She’s my almost exact contemporary, and whenever I think of her or consider her achievement I feel a deep-seated pang of guilt, that I somehow failed to get my shit together as early as she did, that I’ve spent the past decade of my life trying to catch up to where I should have been twenty years ago. Most of all though what I feel is pure admiration, thankfulness that such a writer as Barker exists, not just to inspire me as a writer but to create books that are such a blinding joy to read. I was reading Clear on our way to Brighton last Thursday, and Chris said I was making the whole railway carriage shake with my laughter. It’s true that almost every single page of the novel had its own laugh-out-loud funny moment. but Clear – like everything of Barker’s – isn’t ‘just’ funny. Where else but in Nicola Barker could you read an extended analysis of Kafka’s ‘The Hunger Artist’ and be having to stifle the giggles? Where else could London breathe and expand and erupt so magnificently filthily from its author’s devilish imagination without shedding its pristine glory? In Nicola Barker we have a writer who wears her (considerable) learning so lightly, with such impeccable judgement, that you can read any one of her books all the way through and simply enjoy it, revel in the linguistic dexterity and creative invention on every page without once feeling you’re been lectured at or talked down to or insisted upon. And yet Barker has more to say, more talent to demonstrate, than most of the ‘usual suspects’ put together. John Self, in his recent and very excellent review of Barker’s Booker-longlisted novel The Yips, said that ‘the central character is…. the finest character Martin Amis never created.’ Yes. And leading directly on from the same point, I was especially gratified to find John Self stating the following:

As in other Barker novels, The Yips is heavily populated with eccentrics and outsiders, the sort of people who struggle to fit into society – or into most fiction, for that matter. Fortunately, Barker handles them without going anywhere near the dreaded curse of whimsy. She does not look down on or mock her characters, and she takes the reader with her, sometimes literally.

Amis can be funny, yes, but he always tends to look down on his characters. More than that, he is snide. Barker is never snide. She writes her people into being with a deep empathy, with fellow feeling. She isn’t poking fun at the world she’s revealing, she’s inhabiting it. She understands the modern world and she understands people at an instinctive and personal level. Amis just… doesn’t. In contrast with many, I enjoyed Nicola Barker’s review of Amis’s latest, Lionel Asbo, because it was a piece of writing as well as a review, and it wasn’t afraid to go against the grain of prevailing opinion. (She likes it.) But oh is Nicola Barker ever the better writer. And I hope that, her admiration for Amis notwithstanding, she secretly knows it.

What all this means, I suppose, is that I’m mourning the absence of Nicola Barker from this year’s Booker shortlist. I’m still devastated that she didn’t win with Darkmans – in my opinion one of the first English masterpieces of the new century – in 2007. I felt certain that this had to be her year, and here she is denied yet again. This pains me. A Barker vs Self Booker – now that would have been something to get excited about.

Another ‘nexus’ book of 2012 for me has been Sam Thompson’s Communion Town. (You’ll find my review at Strange Horizons here.) While I was reading it I was excited and admiring in equal measure and I was always eager to get back to it – another crucial test for a ‘nexus’ book. More than that though and unlike so many the book has grown in my imagination since then. I now feel it’s an even better book than I thought it was in the first place, and feel almost personally aggrieved by the rather middling critical response it has received in the press and online. It has beauty and daring and knowingness and yes, that essential touch of the insane too, and I think it’s a book that will last. I can imagine reading Communion Town ten, twenty years from now and finding new pleasures in it. It should have been on the shortlist, dammit.

Before I forcibly curtail this oddly meandering rant, I do want to mention one book that bloody well should have been on the shortlist, only the judges saw fit to exclude it from the action entirely. That book is Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn and Child. I started reading it on Sunday evening and it is brilliant. If M. John Harrison were to write a crime novel, this would be it. The writing is – exquisite is the wrong word, it’s too muscular for that, too restrained, but still its beauty, its sheer writerly competence, makes me shiver with excitement. And the way the book’s been written – the experiment and lesson in form it provides – is, for any writer worth their salt, just thrilling. Thrilling is what I mean, too, for this is a(n albeit very special and unusual type of) thriller. You can read this book and simply love it, or love it simply, for the story on the page. It’s a gem of a novel, literary riches. Were the Booker judges all in comas? Was it not submitted? What the hell’s going on?

And the absence of Kelman and Warner? Don’t get me started…

Oh well. One thing I learned around the time of the Clarke Award is that this kind of thing always happens. I spent a fair amount of time earlier this year, looking up previous Clarke shortlists and (where available) the lists of submissions, and what I discovered was that there have been notable exclusions in every single year since the award has existed. Even in those years where the shortlist seemed strong, there were always better books that were inexplicably missed off.  And then every now and then you get a total cock up. Bound to happen. So it goes.

None of this is particularly surprising. I find it useful to remember when I’m ranting (or perhaps when I’ve finsihed) that the Booker judges (like the Clarke judges) are just six people, sat in a room. Compromises happen, trade-offs happen, shit goes down. An empirically ‘true’ shortlist cannot exist. Because it cannot exist, there are people who question the value of the Booker, of the Clarke, and of awards generally. I am not one of them. I love awards – not because I aspire to win them or because I set any exceptional value on the work of those who do, but because awards provide an arena for debate. I love to talk about books, I love to get angry about books, and something that gives me especial pleasure is to see other people getting passionate and just a little bit crazy about books also. The Booker provokes impassioned debate – every year it does it, regardless of whether people generally love the shortlist or think it’s a pile of pants.

And that always makes me very happy.

London rocks

September 2, 2012 /

Truly delighted to learn that London will be hosting the Worldcon in 2014. Is it stupidly early to be looking forward to this? We’ll be registering our membership shortly.

The novel has been consuming all of my energy this week. I’ve been writing 4,000 words each day on average as I work my way towards completion of the second draft. Second draft writes much quicker than first draft, that goes without saying, but even so it’s been a bit crazy. I’m almost there now. Hoping Chris will have something to read within the next week or so.

God, it’s a strange book. The feeling of it coming together at last is quite unsettling. I am knackered.

Have been reading Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse. A dark, intense novel and I like it a lot. Above all it is beautifully made. There are odd little echoes of Suskind’s masterpiece Das Parfum, reminding me I really should read that again. A favourite of mine.

It’s great to read good work. I hope The Lighthouse makes the Booker shortlist – it deserves to.

For properly coherent and awake criticism of the full Booker longlist do please visit Adam Roberts. His wonderful posts have been keeping me entertained all week.

You Are Now Entering the Event Site: the teeming realms of M. John Harrison’s Empty Space

August 29, 2012 /

You can’t hope to control things. Learn to love the vertigo of experience instead.

(M. John Harrison What might it be like to live in Viriconium Fantastic Metropolis 2001)

 

M. John Harrison’s career to date has been an exercise in destruction – of the commonly accepted role of SF as an escapist literature, of the myth that SF cannot be ‘proper’ literature in any case, and of the comfortable assumptions and preconceptions of the genre’s core fan base about how SF should be and what it should set out to do.

When Harrison published the first of his trilogy of novels about the imaginary city of Viriconium, The Pastel City, in 1971, he was setting out to overturn what he saw as the ‘literalisation’ of the fantasy genre. Harrison’s Viriconium sequence highlighted the creative bankruptcy of commercial series fantasy by pointing up its over-reliance on overused tropes and hyper-detailed worldbuilding and then undermining it completely: In Viriconium, the third book in the Viriconium series, eventually relegates the eponymous city to the realm of the non-existent. Ironically, by metaphorically destroying his creation in such a way, Harrison returned to the fantasy genre much of the possibility it has always contained for magic, for metaphor, for poetry and for intellectual gamesmanship.

In 2002 with his Clarke Award-nominated novel Light, M. John Harrison played a similar opening gambit against the popular SF sub-genre of space opera, traditionally the literature of gung-ho space exploration, intergalactic conquest and super-technological advance. In his Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, Harrison has created a space opera that ridicules the notion of space opera, an anti-immersive fantasy, as he himself puts it, disguised as an immersive fantasy. The trilogy reaches its climax this July with the publication of the third book in the series, Empty Space,

In the first book, Light, Harrison introduces us to Michael Kearney, a theoretical physicist whose work will eventually lead to the invention of a version of faster-than-light space travel called the dynaflow, thus bringing about, by the twenty-third century, a vast space-diaspora of humankind. Kearney is also a serial killer who believes that he is being pursued by an existential monster called the Shrander. Alternating narrative strands involve us in the adventures of Seria Mau Genlicher, an ultra-rarefied breed of post-human space pilot known as a K-captain, and of Ed Chianese, a burned-out rocket jockey who still dreams of penetrating the ultimate no-go zone, the logic-defying and shape-shifting web of temporal effect and hyper-physics known as the Kefahuchi Tract.

In the 2007 follow-up to Light, the Clarke Award-winning Nova Swing, a section of the Kefahuchi Tract has fallen to earth in the far-distant extraterrestrial city of Saudade. The novel follows the attempts of Aschemann, a police detective, to investigate the activities of Vic Serotonin, an unpredictable loner who earns his living taking foolhardy ‘tourists’ into the Event Site, a career fraught with risks so perverse they cannot be predicted in advance.

In Empty Space, Aschemann’s one-time sidekick, known to us only as the Assistant, begins an investigation of her own, while Michael Kearney’s ex-wife Anna sets out on a quest to return an item of lost property to Kearney’s missing research partner Brian Tate. Ed Chianese returns, vastly changed, from his own suicide mission, while his old sparring partner Liv Hula is charged with the delivery of some highly dangerous cargo to regions unknown.

There’s plenty of what looks like space opera in the Empty Space books: there are exploding planets, after all, faster-than-light spaceships, genetic engineers, alien artefacts, obsessed and obsessive men of science. But this is Harrison we’re reading here, not Heinlein, and it’s crucial to realise that the action sequences and futuristic hardware are just the shadows thrown by the true narrative, a kind of armature of space opera on to which Harrison grafts the story he is actually intent on telling. The Kefahuchi Tract trilogy is principally the story of Anna and Michael Kearney, real-time human beings struggling to find some frame of reference within a world that is changing too fast to remain coherently explicable.

Far more than they will ever be space opera, the three Empty Space books form a three-part drama of adaptive alienation.

Harrison has often castigated readers as well as writers for wanting to ‘tame’ fantasy and science fiction by imposing upon it a system of the familiar. By demanding that it adhere to certain rules, such readers are restricting the imaginative possibilities of speculative fiction, clipping its wings, transforming a phoenix into something more closely resembling a battery chicken. By demanding that SF remain within the cordon of scientific veracity, the reader commits an act of imaginative vandalism. Harrison’s K-ships are constructed with words, not steel, not super-strength Perspex housings or semi-organic engine components; they were never meant to travel literally through space, but metaphorically, through the mind of the reader. From there, Harrison argues, they can go anywhere. In language that is a deft homage to the ghost of Raymond Chandler doffing his hat to T. S. Eliot, spliced together with the commentary from a twenty-second century video game and some of the more metaphysical lyrics of Nick Cave, Harrison renders the impossible possible, and not just possible but seemingly as the normal stuff of everyday life.

This philosophy drove them, in the late decades of the 21st Century, to launch themselves blind into dynaflow space, with no idea how to navigate it, in craft made of curiously unsophisticated materials. They had no idea where the first jump would take them. By the second jump, they had no idea where they started from. By the third they had no idea what “where” meant.

It was a hard problem, but not insoluble. Within a decade or two they had used the Tet-Kearno equations to derive an eleven-dimensional algorithm from the hunting behaviour of the shark. The Galaxy was theirs. Everywhere they went they found archeological traces of the people who had solved the problem before them – AIs, lobster gods, lizard men from deep time. They learned new science on a steep, fulfilling curve. Everything was waiting to be handled, smelled, eaten. You threw the rind over your shoulder. The eerie beauty of it was that you could be on to the next thing before the previous thing had lost its shine. (Empty Space p230)

There is an imagic clarity to Harrison’s SF that moves far beyond scientific logic, a voice that tells us that if we are able to imagine a thing it has in a sense already happened. We read and – like the gene-spliced, heavily tailored fighters of Preter Coeur – we simply become. The art of the Empty Space trilogy as a whole lies not in predicting futures so much as in practically defining the art of the imaginatively possible.

But what of Empty Space the novel? If the main play of Light had to do with discovering the links between the novel’s seemingly disparate characters and the worlds they inhabit, and the theme of Nova Swing is how those characters might escape the magnetic pull of the life they previously imagined for themselves, the recurring motif in Empty Space is the failure to connect. Aschemann’s unnamed Assistant is unable to ascertain not only the true nature of a possible homicide but the extent to which she still remains a human being. Liv Hula struggles to come to terms with the fact that the part of her life that defined her is most likely over. Most of all, Anna Waterman is unable to connect the life she has created for herself in the wake of Michael Kearney’s death – a new husband, a daughter, a lifestyle that, in the asset-stripped economy of the twenty-thirties, borders on the affluent – with the disturbing emotions and unanswered questions that are a recurring hangover from her life before. It is no surprise to discover that it is not the far future strands of the narrative that drive this novel, but Anna’s struggle to square what she knows with what she feels – both about herself and about the world that insists on constantly reinventing itself around her.

In the end, if you have a certain sort of mind, you can’t even separate the mundane from the bizarre. That’s why you find yourself face down in the bathroom at eighteen years old, studying the reflection of your own pores in the shiny black floor tiles. And if afterwards you choose a dysfunctional person to be your rescuer, how is that your fault ? Who could know? More importantly, the past can’t be mended – only left behind. People, the dead included, always demand too much. She was sick of being on someone else’s errand. “I did my best,” she thought, “and now I can’t be bothered any more.” (p258)

Harrison subtitled his novel A Haunting, and in truth Empty Space concerns itself with many hauntings, most of all with how the future is haunted by the past.  What if the marvels and wonders inside the Kefahuchi Tract turn out mostly to be the contents of Anna Kearney’s summerhouse, the discarded detritus of a past that she can never quite bring herself to throw away? When expanded to fill the world, these shards of forgotten reality become secrets and marvels. Memory, as much as matter, can never be destroyed, it simply reasserts itself in an alternative form. In the final third of the book the tone darkens as the personal wars being waged in the minds of the novel’s characters threaten to spill out and engulf the universe. In his baroque descriptions of impossible intergalactic atrocities, what Harrison brings to mind most of all is the state of suspicion, hostility and constant war-readiness that is the everyday reality of our own twenty-first-century political culture, and most of all our own dangerous inured indifference towards it.

Then war was everywhere and it was your war, to be accessed however it fitted best into your busy schedule. Seven second segments to three minute documentaries. Focussed debate, embedded media. 24-hour live mano a mano between mixed assets in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, or a catch-up of the entire campaign – including interactive mapping of EMC’s feint towards Beta Carinae – from day one. In-depth views included: How They Took the Pulsed-Gamma War to Cassiotone 9; The Ever-Present Threat of Gravity Wave Lasing; and We Ask You How You Would Have Done It Differently! People loved it. The simulacrum of war forced them fully into the present, where they could hone their life anxieties and interpret them as excitement. Meanwhile, under cover of the coverage, the real war crept across the Halo until it threatened Panamax IV. (p237)

Readers of trad SF coming to the third book in the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy hoping for a sense of closure might find themselves disappointed, but such a reaction would be both limited and limiting, and I would argue that M. John Harrison wrote Empty Space as a proof against the whole idea of closure. These are books that can be read in any order, singularly or together; no matter how you choose to enjoy them, their mystery will remain insoluble. This is not to say that there are no linear narratives at work here, because there are, and they are entrancing and mysterious and compulsively readable. But they are still not the main point of Harrison’s story. The point, as Ballard might have said, is not outer space but inner space, not the feats of ordinary heroes, but the paradoxes, treacheries and wonders of extraordinary humanity, what goes on in our own heads when confronted with the existential horror and glory of being alive.

But the other side of the fence things only deteriorated. Seaward in the fog, you could feel distance growing in everything. From Lizard Sex to The Metropole, the shutters were up all along the strip. The old fashioned signs banged in the wind; rust ran down from blisters in the paintwork. Outside the joint they called 90-Proof & Boys, the air tasted of salt. Ivy Mike’s lay silent and unoccupied. The circus wasn’t in town, and it was coming on to rain. (p192)

This is Harrison’s description of the sunset strip at New Venusport, but it might equally well be Blackpool in the off season, and it is Harrison’s ability to invest our accustomed reality with the nacreous, rarefied light of the future fantastic that is one of his greatest gifts to us as a novelist. In the end, no matter how far we dream of travelling, we are stuck with what we’ve got. What Harrison seems to be telling us is that what we’ve got is quite enough to be going along with.

(This review was first published in Starburst #379/iPad edition July 2012)

So where am I now?

August 13, 2012 /

Chris delivered The Adjacent to Simon Spanton of Gollancz at the end of last week and I’m really missing it! For the past two years I’ve had the privilege of living with this novel, unfolding in the background of everything I do. When you’re close to someone and you love their work, you can’t help but take that work into yourself, acclimatise yourself to it so that it comes to feel like a natural part of your working environment. Now it feels like a favourite music I’ve had playing on repeat has been switched off.

But the book is magnificent. Last week was my first opportunity to read it from beginning to end, chronologically and in order. It’s an extraordinary work, perhaps Chris’s most wide ranging and powerful to date. And as Blackadder might have said, that’s up against some pretty stiff competition. The cumulative impact of the text as it reveals itself is immense. This book will, I feel, surprise and astound anyone who comes into contact with it.

So last week was a pretty big deal.

Hopefully this one will be also as work on my own novel continues and intensifies. I’m now, let’s see, almost 46,000 words into the second draft, well into Part Two and feeling good about it. Writing this book has been rather like trying to get comfortable in bed – not easy when your mind is in constant overdrive and the slightest sound can wake you but when you finally manage it you know it feels right. I now feel I know this book. Even if never entirely in control, I feel comfortable with what I’m doing. Perhaps this is why, after almost a year working on it, the book finally has a title.

The novel is called What Happened to Maree.

I read Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home and felt disappointed. The premise appealed to me so much, but in the event what I found was a slight book, rather akin – in effect if not in subject matter – to last year’s Booker winner, Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. At a sentence level, Swimming Home was finely worked and well above average. But in spite of everything Tom McCarthy says in his intro I found both the subject matter and its treatment bafflingly conventional, and the sketchy characterisation uncomfortably incapable of supporting the weight of significance placed upon it. Which was all a bit of a shame. The last chapter was the best.

I am now reading Roberto Bolano’s The Third Reich, and loving every word of it. That man is my idol. I so need to watch and learn….

Booker Longlist 2012

July 25, 2012 /

Oooh exciting!

At first glance, this looks to be one of the most inspiring Booker longlists in quite some time and so much better than last year’s. I applaud the comment from Peter Stothard, editor of the TLS and this year’s chair of judges, stating that the main criterion for selection was that ‘a text has to reveal more, the more you read it.’

“If it’s disappointing that novels by famous writers aren’t there, then so be it. That’s the difference between Man Booker judges and buyers at Waterstones. We’re not looking for books that you can pick up in a shop and say ‘I must have that’. We’re looking for books that are good value for money, that you don’t leave on a beach, that you read again and again. I love the idea of people taking the longlist to read on the beach, but these are books I want people to bring back.”

As someone who believes that the best test of any great novel is the desire to reread it, nothing could please me more in this context than this kind of attitude. And I have to say I love the look of this longlist. It feels adventurous and ambitious. There’s style as well as story. There’s even some speculative fiction on there, by God! These are books you actually want to read and talk about.

I’m especially thrilled to see Sam Thompson’s debut Communion Town making a showing. I was lucky enough to have access to an ARC of this, and I thought it was wonderful. Its inclusion was a real surprise (whether it’s actually a novel is a debatable point) but a delightful one. My review of Communion Town will be up at Strange Horizons on Friday.

It’s also good to see Ned Beauman on there. I thought the first half of his debut Boxer, Beetle was excellent – sardonic, imaginative and just a little bit whacko – and although the book lost its way for me in the end (premise to die for, wasted on an inconsequential caper novel) I still think Beauman is a writer with amazing promise.

I’m a huge fan of both Nicola Barker and Hilary Mantel, so that’s two more ticks. Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse has already been recommended to me by Nick Royle, and I can’t wait to read it. I like the sound of Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home so much I’ll be ordering it as soon as I’ve finished writing this post. I’ve also just been listening to Jeet Thayill read from and talk about his novel Narcopolis. The prose is gorgeous – resolutely poetic and yet uncluttered – and the idea of this book excites me greatly.

Even the Will Self sounds interesting! My only regret is that I won’t have time to read the whole list before September, because ideally I’d love to blog each book and be a proper armchair judge this year. Hopefully I’ll be able to get part of the way there, though, and I know there’ll be plenty of informed opinion and debate cropping up online for me to enjoy as I go along.

Clearly the stink that was kicked up over last year’s Booker has had some effect. Let’s just hope we’ll be able to say the same about next year’s Clarke…..

Empty Space

July 19, 2012 /

M. John Harrison’s novel Empty Space, the final instalment in the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, is published today.

The first thing I ever read by MJH was his story ‘The Ice Monkey’. I came upon the story completely by chance, in a second hand copy of an anthology called New Terrors 2. It was just a scrappy little Pan paperback, but I bought it the moment I saw it, firstly because it was edited by Ramsey Campbell and secondly because it contained a story by Christopher Priest (‘The Miraculous Cairn’) that I hadn’t read yet.

It’s interesting to look back at older anthologies (New Terrors 2 was first published in 1980) because they present a fascinating portrait of who has survived. NT2 contains stories by US horror stalwarts Robert Bloch and Charles L. Grant, both sadly no longer with us, both now members of horror’s hall of fame. There are a number of other stories by writers who were clearly promising at the time but who have since, for whatever reason, stopped publishing.

But of course it’s Priest and Harrison that stand out most strongly from this table of contents. Both young, both British, in 1980 both just getting into their stride, quite obviously these were the two to watch.I wonder what stories the anthologies of today will tell us in thirty years’ time?

‘The Ice Monkey’ bothered me. It bothered me because I’d never read anything like it before and I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to make of it. Here it was in a horror anthology, but although I found it acutely disturbing there was no way it could be placed in the same bracket as, say, the Charles L. Grant. Was it SF? Again, I wasn’t sure. It kind of reminded me of Ballard’s The Drought, another masterpiece I’d recently discovered, but it didn’t have anything so overtly SFnal as a world apocalypse going on in it.

I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it compelled and drew me and nagged at me. I knew I loved the writing, the imagery, that godawful abandoned house in the middle of an industrial wasteland. I knew that this, whatever the hell genre it was supposed to be, was the kind of story I wanted to be reading and learning about and I couldn’t keep away from it. I must have read that story three or four times right through before I could leave it alone. Subsequent to that I was thrilled to discover Signs of Life and, a little later, The Course of the Heart. I acquired MJH’s new collection Travel Arrangements as soon as it came out. I was sold.

When Light, the first book in what has come to be known as the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, was first published in 2002 I bought it eagerly but found myself a little bemused. The Brian Kearney strand – prizewinning physicist becomes serial killer in order to fend off existential monster – was precisely the kind of stuff I’d come to expect from MJH, home turf, if you like. But the interwoven stories of Ed Chianese and Seria Mau Genlicher? What was I, so at home in the disintegrating worlds of Choe Ashton and Isobel Avens, to make of these far future montages, which seemed to me inextricably enmeshed in quantum ironies, so multilayered I could scarcely untangle them. They were also such…… fun. Fun makes me nervous. What was I supposed to do with it?

I wasn’t sure, so I kind of left my thoughts about the book in limbo. Nova Swing, when it appeared in 2006, I found easier to penetrate. It seemed to be a loving and awesomely creative riff on Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic, a touchstone book for me since forever, and this presented me with a ‘way of reading’ the Light books that began to give me a clearer insight into what MJH was doing – with SF, with the trilogy, with his writing. On completing Nova Swing I read Light again and this time I got it immediately.  I laughed, I cried (this is literally true) and it was a revelation. When I recently reread Light for a third time, as a preparation and a lead-in to reading the final act of the trilogy in Empty Space, I found it so good it was frightening, the kind of book that, as a writer, makes you sit down and bury your head in your arms and keep saying ‘shit.’

It’s hard to talk about Empty Space without referring back to the other two books, because of course you’ll find characters reappearing, story threads unravelling or, occasionally, tying themselves up, moods and places and events recurring in droves. But you’ll also find that Empty Space is a rather different kind of book from either of its two predecessors, which are both in turn rather different from one another. If Light was the definitive grand opera of space opera, the exact point where SF stops being SF and becomes proper metaphysics, and Nova Swing was an intrepidly successful experiment in time travel, both backwards and forwards,  then Empty Space is a meditation, both a resolution and deconstruction of its own (totally awesome) internal narrative. If Light segued effortlessly into metaphysics, then Empty Space segues effortlessly into poetry. MJH has repeatedly cited T. S. Eliot as an early influence, and if Nova Swing takes you deeper into the Zone, Empty Space revisits ‘The Waste Land’, only not then, and more so.

You can read Empty Space – or either of the other two – perfectly well on its own. Its internal logic and poetry makes it complete and completely satisfying unto itself. But read one, and trust me you will demand to read the others!

In his recent interview with Simon Ings at ARCfinity, MJH talks about there being ‘no contradiction’ in his mind between the Light books ‘giving good value’ as space opera whilst at the same time making the whole concept of space opera rock in its foundations. To say that all three books – both singly and together – succeed, absolutely, on both levels is kind of a cataclysmic understatement. I loved the story of Empty Space, as story I was barely able to put it down. But Empty Space is so much more than just story. At a sentence level, as writing, Empty Space is like an infinite jewel casket. As a novel, it makes you pull up short and reappraise everything you’ve ever read or tried to write. As a statement on where we are now, where we are headed and what the fuck we think we’re going to be doing when we get there, Empty Space is a nostalgic reverie, a philosophical treatise, a thrown gauntlet.

Buy it and read it and start discussing it asap.

The witching hour

July 12, 2012 /

After loving Mr Fox (and previous to that The Icarus Girl) I’ve been using my reading time this week to catch up with Helen Oyeyemi’s third novel, White is for Witching. I remember the reviews at the time being mixed, which is most likely why it’s taken me so long to get round to reading it.

Turns out I was a total idiot. Taking too much notice of reviews like this, a distinctly sour-faced write-up which seems to ignore the point of the book so entirely as to make it meaningless, always carries with it the risk that you’ll end up missing out on something truly worthwhile, the kind of book that divides the critics, because it’s unclassifiable, because it’s elusive, because it’s difficult.

Trust the writer, not the reviewer, I say.

And White is for Witching is not difficult, for God’s sake. It’s complicated, yes – and deeply complex. It jumps back and forth in time and between narrators. Its language alternates between a lively and illustrative contemporary vernacular and the high poetry of witchcraft, densely allusive. Its stories are nested one within the other, back touching stomach, spooned together as its two principal characters, Miranda and Ore, lie spooned together, their knees hooked at dangerous right angles, like the legs of spiders. Times, cultures, terrors, manias, all intertwined like lovers, like interlocking pieces of some beautifully constructed and arcane jigsaw puzzle.

But all this does is to make the book sublime, not difficult, and certainly not ‘difficult’ or, even worse, ‘confused.’

Helen Oyeyemi is so for real. She’s a writer bursting with natural talent – her prose has that instinctive assurance, that quality of wildfire, that is a sure sign that she was born to do this – yet she is also a writer acutely aware of what she is doing. Her literary sensibility, her understanding of the texts that inspired her (Dracula, Uncle Silas, The Fall of the House of Usher) makes White is for Witching possibly the most elegant and knowing homage to the high Gothic that I have ever read, whilst at the same time extending the reach of this novel far beyond that, to encompass contemporary concerns in a direct and bold and strikingly original way.

White is for Witching is also bloody terrifying. In stark contrast with The Guardian‘s reviewer, I found the sense of mounting claustrophobia in the novel, especially in the scenes near the end where Ore is trying to make her escape from the house, to be as unsettling and actively upsetting as anything in Dracula and more so. This is now, after all, this is here. There’s an acute sense of realism in White is for Witching, of believability, that still has me absolutely spellbound.

This book is brilliant, in every sense. Read it. And do listen to Helen Oyeyemi talking about White is for Witching here.

After finishing the first draft of the novel last week I am now leaving it to simmer while I catch up on a couple of other smaller but not unimportant bits and pieces. I’ve been finishing my author profile for PS, to accompany the release of Stardust, and now I’m completely absorbed in writing the piece that will complete my collection for NewCon, to be published in 2013 as part of the Imaginings series of short story collections. The story is called ‘Higher Up’ and I’m within touching distance of finishing a first draft. It’s rather different from the story I thought it was going to be but – well, I’m kind of liking that.

Winchelsea

June 27, 2012 /

So she parked on a street adjacent to The Lookout (by the Old Strand Gate) where there was a famously stunning view over the marshes below (the Royal Military Canal, the long road into Rye, the remains of Camber Castle, Winchelsea Beach, Dungeness – the power station and the lighthouse, both twinkling vaguely in the Channel – even France, on a good day), and led him by the hand (although he insisted on leaving the boy behind – ‘as a precaution’) to take in the vista.

The wind was biting and it was threatening to rain again. Dory gazed down, in silence, for several minutes, yet no matter how hard he tried (and he was trying – the powerful wave of his reason crashing, indomitably, against the sheer cliff of his instinct), he seemed incapable of feeling any kind of rapport with the landscape.

‘But where’s the great forest, Elen?’ he finally murmured.

(Nicola Barker, Darkmans p439)

The extraordinary thing is that when I first read Nicola Barker’s magisterial novel Darkmans in 2007 I had not yet encountered this landscape, nor seen any of the places named in the paragraphs above. Now that I am getting to know them, to assimilate them as imagery as well as fact, I find that Barker’s novel – which I loved and admired from the first – resonates with me all the more deeply.

Darkmans is a piece of work. In an interview she gave around the time of its publication, Nicola Barker talked about how she went into a kind of suspended animation during the final months of writing it, cutting off the internet, wearing ear muffs to block out all exterior noise. I found myself understanding and applauding. Real writing takes everything, precludes all other mental activity, all outside stimuli.

It means forfeiting the quotidian world – at least for a while.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Darkmans today, about how much I admire it – those unruly, renegade sentences, that don’t-give-a-stuff disregard for competent orderliness (and ordinariness) that conceals such stern craftsmanship, most of all that vertiginous, daredevil way of commandeering the fantastic – and how much it still continues to inspire me.

The scope of its ambition – and it’s an ambition realised – is enough to prevent any writer from sleeping at night.

It’s one of those books I like to keep close by, like a lucky charm.

This road sign, whose history I haven’t investigated yet, can be seen just before the turnoff path to Winchelsea station.

I can’t help but feel there has to be a story here somewhere.

Climbing towards Winchelsea Beacon.

Tram Road, Rye Harbour.

Rustblind and Silverbright

June 12, 2012 /

David Rix of Eibonvale Press has just announced a call for submissions for a new anthology. The theme is trains and railways. The wonderful title is drawn from a story by Wolfgang Borchert.

I will always have a soft spot for Borchert. His stories ‘Das Brot’ and ‘Nachts Schlafen die Ratten Doch’ were the first pieces of German fiction I read in their original language – like Kafka, and like Chekhov in Russian, Borchert’s talent for expressing complex truths in a deceptively simple way makes him an ideal starting point for anyone trying to learn his language. I was moved by these stories, but it wasn’t until I tried translating his rather longer story ‘Billbrook’ that I began to fully understand the power of his writing and the extremity of his wartime experience.

Anyone coming to ‘Billbrook’ unannounced, as it were, might be forgiven for taking it to be a science fiction story set in the days following a nuclear holocaust. In fact it’s about the blanket bombing, in WW2, of Borchert’s home city, Hamburg.

Borchert loved his city, and he is brilliant at portraying the multitudinous multiplicity of the urban environment. He loved the magic and the mystery of the city as organism, and his grief at the utterly needless and wanton destruction of his home-place – its literal reduction to rubble – might be said to be at least as much the cause of his appallingly early death (aged 26) as the complications from hepatitis that are usually cited. Borchert, like so many Germans, was a victim of both the Nazis (he was arrested more than once by the Gestapo for his anti-Nazi views, imprisoned and then sent to the Eastern Front as punishment) and the Allies.

Borchert also loved railways. We know that from the way they shimmer and creak and thunder into his stories. When he likened the human soul to the railway track – ‘rusty, stained, silver, shiny, beautiful and uncertain’ – he was recognising the possibilities for change, for beauty and above all for exploration that railways provide in both the physical and spiritual realm, the way trains – somehow much more than cars and at least equally with space rockets – excite and stimulate and prompt the creative imagination.

I don’t think it’s too presumptious to argue that Borchert would have loved the idea of an anthology of SF railway stories. He might even have written one for Rustblind himself. Let us hope he would at least approve the use of his words in the choice of title.

I know that this project is very close indeed to David’s heart and has been long in the planning. He first mentioned it to me more than a year ago – while we were watching a ‘cab ride’ DVD shot from a train running the Tren a las Nubes line across Argentina. His train addiction is one I share. Indeed a love of trains is common to many writers, who value the opportunities they provide for the most productive kind of solitude, for the observation of people and places, for meditation and reflection, for extended reading time. Not to mention being a mobile workspace.

It’s going to be thrilling to see what stories people come up with.

You can – and please do – read the full submission guidelines for Rustblind and Silverbright right here.

End-of-the-week thoughts

May 27, 2012 /

Weird. I see from these entries that it’s just about six weeks since I began work on what I thought would be the second draft of my novel. It feels much longer ago, probably because the book I’m writing now is completely different.

I did precisely one week’s work on that second draft before I realised that something was wrong. What was wrong was the entire first section of the book. I spent a day or so going ‘oh fuck’ (it was 35,000 words we were talking about, after all) before deciding to junk it.

It seemed the only thing to do. I didn’t think that what I’d written was bad, just that it did not fit. It was swinging the novel into a cul de sac. I still felt happy with the middle sections of the book, but I wanted to rewrite the beginning and I knew that if I did that it would mean rewriting the most of the final section also. In effect I would have lost three months’ work, possibly more.

‘Comfort’ may not be the right word, but what made me certain I was doing the right thing was knowing it was not the first time something like this had happened to me and far from it. I begin with characters and situations, never plots. The only way I can find out what one of my stories is about is by writing it, and sometimes – very nearly always – the story I begin with is not the story I eventually arrive at. A lot of words get discarded. It took me three false starts – about 8,000 unused words – before I got a proper handle on ‘The Muse of Copenhagen’, for instance. For a while it began to feel like one of M. R James’s infamous ‘stories I have tried to write’ and it’s absolutely true to say that it was only my attachment to the protagonist and his situation (oh, and my promise to Jon Oliver and his House of Fear) that kept me going with it.

Similarly with the novel. I had this core section – about 25,000 words – that seemed to me to be the essence of the novel, the book as I’d always imagined it, a narrator with a story to tell. I could not let her down.

I fixed my mind on that character, and started again at Page 1.

Now, six weeks on, I have a whole new Part One, and this week I made a good start on rewriting Part Four. The book’s SFnal quotient is significantly stronger and more defined, something that delights me immeasurably. Those who know me best know that I get terribly nervous and vague when talking about work in progress, but I think it’s OK to say I’m quietly excited.

The thing still doesn’t have a title, but I’m trusting that will reveal itself eventually.

Just finished rereading: M. John Harrison’s (dauntingly magnificent) Light and Nova Swing, in preparation for the third book in this trilogy, the forthcoming Empty Space. Next up: China Mieville’s Railsea.

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