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On alien shores

August 13, 2018 /

From what I’ve read about her, Jane Rawson would seem to be one of those writers – like Aislinn Hunter, like Claudia Casper – who sometimes struggle to be heard amidst the tumult of overhyped debuts and routine praise for more established voices. Her novels are defiantly uncategorizable – her own debut was named Austrailia’s most underrated book – mixing and leapfrogging genres with scant regard for marketing categories. Well, the good news is that Picador have acquired UK rights to Rawson’s most recent book, the haunting and marvellous speculative novel From the Wreck, making her work available to a wider audience in 2019 and Clarke-eligible in 2020.

From the Wreck takes real historical events and bends them to its own ends in a manner I’ve not seen before, an imaginative leap that truly exemplifies the nature of radical speculation. On August 6th 1859, the steamship Admella (named for the ports she regularly sailed between, Adelaide, Melbourne and Launceston, Tasmania) was wrecked on Carpenter Rocks, South Australia. Although multiple efforts were made to reach the stranded survivors, foul weather made a rescue attempt impossible and of the 113 souls on board, only twenty-four ever made it back to shore. One of the survivors, cabin steward George Hills, was Rawson’s great-grandfather. The only woman survivor, Bridget Ledwith, disappeared from public view soon after the tragedy, making her identity a matter of mystery and speculation.

I was personally fascinated to discover that the Admella was built in 1857 by Lawrence Hills & Co, of Port Glasgow, on the Clyde. It is interesting to note that yet another Mr Hills – or more accurately Hill – has a part to play in this story: the painting Wreck of the Admella by Charles Hill hangs in the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.

What Rawson does with these established facts – with her own family history – is really quite extraordinary. George Hills returns home after the wreck. Traumatised by his experiences, he finds himself unable to forget the woman who he believes saved his life in the days spent clinging to the remains of the stricken vessel:

“She was a sea creature. He knew that. She had come into the boat from the ocean and she looked and smelled and felt all over like a human woman, but he was damned sure she was not.” 

So begins George’s obsessive search for Bridget Ledwith. Yet ‘Bridget’ may be closer to home than he realises. In the shapeshifting alien’s symbiotic relationship with George’s son Henry, other human-alien relationships come swiftly to mind – I was reminded especially of John Wyndham’s Chocky – and yet there is something tender and fragile and edgy that sets Rawson’s work apart:

“And not right then but soon after, when this ocean floor is settled, when all of the fat is gone and the bigger of the things with teeth dispersed, when we’ve remembered that yes it is possible to be even lonelier than you are when you are feeding on wet, rotten fat with the cousins of some crazy lantern-heads, then. When we remember that it is one thing to be in a world all ocean when that world is your own and quite another to be in a world all ocean when no one down there gives a holy damn about you and the only one who does on the whole bereft and stinking planet is some skinnylegged filthy-fingered swollen-hearted little upright on some dusty island up there where the sun is hot and the air is dry, well, then. That’s when we go. Then.”

The three key players in the drama – George, Henry, and the alien – are caught in a strange sort of love triangle that comes close to destroying them all, but the key to this novel is surely its ending, wise and beautiful and blessed because it is earned, arrived at through genuine struggle and personal cost. This is the opposite of the kind of artificially opposed positions we have seen in certain recent works of escapist SF, where real pain and danger are largely absent through being contained within a strictly codified set of markers, and resolution is swiftly arrived at because the conflict was only ever there in the first place to provide the satisfaction of a risk-free resolution. The relationships in From the Wreck are messy and ambiguous, holding the potential for real damage. Rawson’s ending is won through grief, through tragedy, through humility. and love that is as imperfect as it is genuine. From the Wreck provides perhaps the most positive view of humanity in relation to the alien I’ve read in a while, hinting at the innate ability of all parties to transcend boundaries, to learn, to find a safe common ground in spite of mutual ignorance and fear.

Other characters in the narrative are no less well drawn. The character of Bea in particular offers us a wonderful portrayal of a woman who simply will not fit the mould society has prepared for her. Her rebellion and personal victory are quiet yet determined, a refusal to be broken that does not exclude concern for others.

From the Wreck is informed by Rawson’s strong environmental concerns, her deeply sympathetic fascination with other life forms, and above all her sensitivity and skill as a writer, her fearlessness in seeking out new ways to tell stories and new stories to tell. From the Wreck is genuine ‘what if’ science fiction, exploring the possibility of first contact in a manner that does not give humans sole charge of the encounter. Rawson is fully aware that we are the strangers here, that the description of ‘alien’ is only ever a matter of perspective.

Into the Sharke tank

July 18, 2018 /

With just a few hours remaining before the winner of this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award is announced, here are my thoughts on the shortlist in a guest post I wrote for the Sharke blog at the ARU CSFF website. 

My initial reaction to this year’s Clarke Award shortlist was that it was one of the strongest in recent memory. After having read all six shortlisted titles that is an assertion I would stick by, even as my reasons for believing this have shifted, and my hunches as to the identity of the eventual winner have become much less certain.

I still find last year’s shortlist disappointing. In terms of the kinds of science fiction on offer it feels less diverse: dissimilar though the novels are in terms of subject matter and storyline, Occupy Me, After Atlas, A Closed and Common Orbit and Ninefox Gambit all occupy a similar territory, and one that is largely defined by its adherence to genre tropes and conventions. Although widely enjoyed and praised, the eventual winner The Underground Railroad still reads bland to me, both in terms of its literary styling and its use of science fiction. One year on, it seems clear that the most radical work on that list in terms of both literary ambition and engagement with the genre is Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station, although it could be argued that the form it takes – some will call it a fix-up, others will style it a story cycle – leaves it lacking the punch of a unitary novel.

The strength of this year’s shortlist lies in its showcasing of different approaches to science fiction, an aspect that only becomes clearer as you become better acquainted with the novels themselves. Whether intentionally or not, this year’s jury have managed to present a genuine snapshot of science fiction as it is being written and read in 2018, an achievement that would in itself be enough to merit applause. That the shortlist includes books of such quality as to make it difficult to call an obvious winner is the icing on the cake. As I write this in the run-up to the final announcement, I have absolutely no idea who is going to win.

The way it appears to me, the Clarke judges have presented us with six works that each occupy a distinct and readily identifiable category of science fiction, each of which is worthy of study and further analysis. Jennie Melamed’s Gather the Daughters represents a category that for want of a better title I will name the debut crossover. Recent years have shown a distinct upsurge in this category, which consists of novels published by mainstream imprints and aimed very much at a literary market, whose premise nonetheless makes use of solidly science fictional materials. These novels appear from nowhere and we often have no idea at the time of publication whether their (often young and hitherto unknown) authors will continue to interest themselves in speculative fiction as their careers progress. Recent examples in this category might also include Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles (2012), The Godless Boys by Naomi Wood (2011), The Dog Stars by Peter Heller (2012) and Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water (2014). Novels in the crossover debut category will often display a poetic literary sensibility and focus on character that makes them immediately accessible across genre divides, yet it could also be said that in terms of their use of science fiction they tend to be conservative, offering variations on a set of usually dystopian tropes that in science fictional terms at least have long ceased to be new. The most significant thing about this category is its popularity, among both readers and writers, and what such popularity tells us about how science fictional ideas are increasingly coming to be accepted as suitable subjects for mainstream literature.

While being a perfectly competent novel in many respects, Gather the Daughters did not win me over, mainly because – as outlined in my earlier review – I found the premise itself to be so unbelievable. I did enjoy Melamed’s character work, and I hope she chooses to dig deeper into speculative fiction in future novels. I am somewhat at a loss as to why the Clarke judges decided to shortlist this particular book however, and as a representative of the debut crossover category, I would have preferred to see Naomi Booth’s Sealed, a shorter but much more affecting essay in catastrophe, with a genuine sense of urgency as well as great sense of place.

C. Robert Cargill’s Sea of Rust could best be described as IMAX SF. Novels that fit this designation are those that can most easily trace their ancestry back to American ‘Golden Age’ traditions and that occupy most of the shelf space in the science fiction section of your local bookshop. Other Clarke Award winners and shortlistees that fall into this group are Greg Bear’s Hull Zero Three (2011), Alastair Reynolds’s Revelation Space (2001) Richard Morgan’s Black Man (2007) Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice (2013) and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time (2016). A propulsive, plot-heavy approach is usually central to these novels, which abide solidly by genre conventions and are happy within their confines. IMAX SF is unashamedly uninflected, not seeking to subvert genre conventions so much as joyfully endorse them. Language here is utilised as a tool for driving the story rather than an end in itself. These are the books that have done most – for good or for ill – to shape the landscape of popular media SF and be shaped by it in their turn.

As the largest sub-segment of science fiction, it is no surprise that IMAX SF shows the widest variation in quality, and I think it’s a shame that the Clarke jury selected Sea of Rust as their exemplar. As an adventure story pure and simple, it’s readable and entertaining, the kind of novel you might devour whole on a rainy Sunday afternoon before passing it on to your younger brother as an extra birthday present. As a serious contribution to the field, it has no significance whatsoever. Even from the first paragraphs I found I couldn’t help chuckling to myself over the implausibility of the point of view character, Brittle, as the narrative voice of an artificial intelligence. It’s so, so human – the human voice of a Hollywood screenwriter overdosing on exposition, to be precise. And as a citizen of the robot universe, just why would Brittle bother robo-splaining all this shit to me in any case? Come on, we can do better than this. If the jury wanted IMAX SF to be represented on the Clarke Award shortlist, why couldn’t they have gone for The Stars Are Legion, or Raven Stratagem, or New York 2130? Of all the novels on this year’s shortlist, Sea of Rust is the biggest mystery, and not in a good way. And to think the place could have gone to Gnomon instead…

Jaroslav Kalfar’s Spaceman of Bohemia falls into that slippery category that I am going to term ‘of speculative interest’. Novels in this category are often referred to in genre circles as ‘literary SF’, a term I have come to distrust and dislike as being too catch-all and therefore inaccurate. What they have in common is that they are targeted firmly at the literary readership, contain little or no mention of science fiction in their marketing, and generally make use of speculative materials in a symbolic capacity rather than being a more hands-on exploration of science fictional ideas. Recent examples might include Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things (2014), Richard Powers’s Generosity (2010), Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life (2013) and Jan Morris’s Hav (2006). Their writers usually originate from outside the science fiction conversation, but may – like Kazuo Ishiguro and David Mitchell – end up joining it as their knowledge of and interest in science fiction becomes more central to their work.

Like Gary Wolfe in his review for the Sharke roundtable, I would argue that Spaceman of Bohemia is a strongly written, compelling novel that makes use of genre materials more as a binding agent for its true narrative and to little effect. In Spaceman’s witty and ironical protagonist Jakub we encounter a point of view – the son of a State-sponsored torturer – that is rarely encountered in post-Soviet literature or indeed anywhere. The chief problem with this novel is that the realworld segments – Jakub’s memories of his childhood and his grandparents, the difficulty of growing up in a world where the systems that supported him are suddenly withdrawn – are so well rendered, so compelling that the science fictional elements – Jakub’s mission to the Chopra cloud and his relationship with the spider-like alien – feel thin by comparison. We believe totally in Jakub, in his obsessing over his broken relationship with his girlfriend Lenka, in the home he is forced to leave in the aftermath of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. We do not truly believe in or care about his space mission, and often find ourselves wondering if the book might have been better without it. I’m happy to see this novel on the Clarke Award shortlist because it reflects an open and flexible approach on the part of the jury, and of course because it is a good novel, but I don’t think it will win.

Omar El Akkad’s American War belongs to a category that is, if anything, even more slippery than ‘of speculative interest’ – indeed, some may claim it as an offshoot of that category and it’s so slippery I haven’t managed to come up with a name for it yet other than contemporary parable. American War is a novel that makes strong and overt use of speculative materials, yet is not truly interested in questions around the materials themselves. Other notable examples of science fiction as parable would include Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016), Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) and James Smythe’s The Testimony (2011), novels in which a science fictional element functions primarily as a gimmick to enable a particular premise. American War is more overtly science fictional than any of these, yet I found it disappointing for similar reasons. In his eagerness to showcase his thesis, El Akkad is overly wedded to his parable template, not fluid enough in his approach to genre to allow his characters proper freedom of movement within its confines. In some ways, American War reads more like an essay than a novel. Though well written, it lacks something in personality, and could date very quickly. As regards the Clarke Award, American War does provide plenty of material for discussion and I still think it’s a contender.

The category into which Anne Charnock’s Dreams Before the Start of Time most naturally fits is arguably the most interesting, being as it is the intellectual engine room of science fiction, the category in which new ideas and new approaches most frequently spark to life. I’m going to call it the New New Wave, in honour of the British tradition of science fiction not as a pulp commodity but as a literature of ideas, as pioneered by Mary Shelley and H. G. Wells. Recent and notable New New Wave novels would include Dave Hutchinson’s ‘Europe’ sequence (2015-2018), Adam Roberts’s The Thing Itself (2015), Tricia Sullivan’s Maul (2003), Matthew de Abaitua’s If Then (2015), Nicola Griffiths’s Ammonite (1993), Paul McAuley’s Fairyland (1995) and Christopher Priest’s The Adjacent (2013). I would stress that there is no requirement on New New Wave authors to be British, and one could point equally to Nick Wood’s Azanian Bridges (2016), Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2013), Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station (2016) Jennifer Marie Brissett’s Elysium (2014) or anything by Ted Chiang as valuable exemplars of this strand of SF. New New Wave books are characterised above all by their interrogative nature, their knowledge of the speculative genres and willingness to be engaged with them – in a word, they are inside jobs. Another adjective that might be applied is progressive, and many New New Wave writers adopt radical approaches in terms of form, language, subject matter, social and political commentary and sometimes all four. I have always been of the opinion that this is the kind of science fiction that the Clarke Award should be seeking out and promoting, and I was delighted to see Dreams Before the Start of Time turn up on the shortlist for this reason.

With her three fine novels to date, Anne Charnock has embedded herself firmly at the heart of the New New Wave tradition. Using clear, declarative language and a character-based approach, Charnock engages directly and with a palpable sense of curiosity with those ideas that form the building blocks of contemporary SF: human reproduction, gender and sexuality, artificial intelligence (anyone curious about how an AI might actually think and speak should give Sea of Rust a miss and skip straight to Charnock’s PKD-Award-shortlisted A Calculated Life), genetics, robotic technology and climate change. Her novels are understated but deeply felt, and she is not afraid to ask the reader to step into the shoes of her characters: if this happened, what would you do? Rather in the manner of James Bradley’s Clade, Dreams Before the Start of Time follows the stories of one family over a number of decades, unravelling the relationships that bind them even as it asks searching questions about the possible futures we might be facing. As a novel it is astute, sensitive and thought provoking and one senses that Charnock’s best work is still very much in the making.

My final category is the modern classic. These are novels that stand a realistic chance of still being read generations from now, written from the heart of SF and yet not slaves to it, identifying a major trend or theme and exemplifying it with literary flair. A modern classic is not necessarily immediately identifiable. Some books – especially complex books – take time to be recognised and it may sometimes be years before we see them for the masterpieces they are. Modern classics associated with the Clarke – note that not all of them won it – would have to include China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000), Jeff Noon’s Vurt (1993), Michael Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (1993),Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army (2007), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Chip Delany’s Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1986), Geoff Ryman’s The Child Garden (1989), Ian MacDonald’s The Dervish House (2010), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1986), M. John Harrison’s Light (2002), and Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014). Perhaps the most interesting thing about this category is that a modern classic may originate from any of the other five categories.

Of all the novels on this year’s Clarke Award shortlist, Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne seems the most likely to earn its place as a modern classic. There is a beauty and simplicity in its manner of storytelling that makes it seem as if the book has always existed. That it will be read and enjoyed for many years to come is not in question. Undaunted by orthodoxies and unbothered by rules, VanderMeer’s approach to science fiction is as wayward as it is inventive, the mark of the true original. Yet VanderMeer is also telling us something important about our world, about the dangers and repercussions of human impact on the natural environment, about technology’s unpredictable impact on humans. As well as being superbly achieved and notable as literature, VanderMeer’s work is also important as science fiction. In its immediacy, its accessibility and its aesthetic beauty, Borne acts as a kind of summary statement of the author’s work to date and it is perhaps fitting that this is the novel that has finally won Jeff VanderMeer a place on the Clarke Award shortlist.

Better late than never, I say.

This is the first time for some years that I am not able to be present at the Clarke Award ceremony. I’ll be following the announcement online though, rest assured. I know which book I think should win, I know which book I want to win. I await the outcome of the judges’ deliberations with eagerness and great curiosity.

The Dollmaker – revealed!

June 19, 2018 /

As announced in The Bookseller today, I’m thrilled to finally reveal that my third novel, The Dollmaker, will be published by riverrun/Quercus in March of next year.

To say I’m delighted would be a massive understatement. My editor Jon Riley has been championing the book from the moment he read the manuscript, and the entire team at riverrun have been fantastically supportive right through the editorial process. I feel very lucky indeed to have landed among such enthusiastic and knowledgeable people. Their love for books has been evident in every meeting I’ve had with them. As I said in my statement for The Bookseller, I honestly cannot think of a better home for The Dollmaker than riverrun.

I’ll have more – much more – to tell you about the novel as we get closer to publication, but for the moment I just want to say that The Dollmaker is particularly close to my heart, perhaps because it’s been with me for such a long time. The dollmaker himself (well, one of them…) first appeared in my mind more than ten years ago, while I was still living and working in Exeter. I wrote an outline for what was always and immediately ‘his’ novel. Other things happened, other stories intervened – but I never forgot Andrew Garvie, and when I finally came back to work on the manuscript properly towards the end of 2016 I found his character and his story more compelling than ever. The Dollmaker has always been a book I needed to write, and here it is. I hope readers will fall for Andrew, just as I did.

Missing by Alison Moore

May 22, 2018 /

When, at the end of the story, the woman is on the verge of accepting that there will not be a relationship between them, when she is poised to leave the hospital room for the final time, abandoning the man to his coma, it is not at all clear whether she really will walk away or whether, pausing and looking back, she will give in and return. Jessie had put the question to the author, who might eventually reply and who would no doubt say that not knowing was the whole point… In each of the stories…there was a failure to connect, and the endings seemed to hang in the air; they were barely endings at all. 

I was skyping with a friend the other day and in the course of conversation we discovered we both happened to be reading the same book, Alison Moore’s newly released fourth novel, Missing. We agreed that Alison Moore was one of those authors whose books we acquire sight unseen the moment they come out. I devoured this latest in just two days. I could say that Missing is Moore’s best novel so far, but I am not entirely sure that would be accurate. One of the hallmarks of Moore’s writing is its consistency. Everything I have ever read by her is of a similarly high quality. I am convinced that Alison Moore is incapable of writing a bad sentence.

Missing tells the story of Jessie, a freelance translator in her late forties, living in the Scottish border town of Hawick. Her husband Will walked out on her some months ago and we don’t know why. Her cottage might be haunted, and there are ghosts from the past that keep rising up, ghosts that have largely defined the life Jessie is leading now.

To describe this novel as heartbreaking would seem to hint at drama, histrionics, yet much of the beauty and resilience of Moore’s novels lies in their avoidance of overt confrontation. Her characters’ worlds are focused inwards, their suffering, while not exactly secret, remains largely unspoken of, their tragedies translated into the thousand unceasing banalities of everyday life: a packet of frozen peas that will never now be retrieved from a neighbour’s freezer, a lost watch, an unmarked calendar. We cannot know the ending, and that, indeed, is the whole point.

There are books which, when you finish reading them, force you to stop everything for a moment to acknowledge their excellence, to mark a personal encounter with something special. Missing is one of those books, and it gives me great joy to say that it hit me hard. Alison Moore was famously shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2012 for her debut novel The Lighthouse. Missing deserves equal attention. More than that though, Moore deserves considerably more attention as a writer than she is currently getting.

Nice one!

May 2, 2018 /

The shortlist for the 2018 Arthur C. Clarke Award was announced by Tom Hunter at Sci-Fi London at midday today, and what an interesting and delightfully surprising shortlist it is!

The only one of the six I actively predicted might be on there is Omar El Akkad’s alternate-world civil war novel American War.  Though the novel didn’t entirely work for me personally, there’s never been any doubt in my mind that this is exactly the kind of book the Clarke should be noticing. Well crafted and passionately told, you could discuss American War all day and still not get to the end of it. I’m keen to see what other people think.

Gather the Daughters slipped under my radar rather, as it was published after the Sharke had run its course last year and perhaps because the central conceit – which reminds me a little of Naomi Wood’s The Godless Boys – seemed over-familiar. But a highly positive review from the brilliant Sarah Moss (others have compared it with Emma Cline’s The Girls, which is also a plus factor) leaves me insatiably curious about it and happy to see this somewhat under-exposed book brought to wider notice.

I’ve heard nothing but positive things about Jaroslav Kalfar’s Spaceman of Bohemia and it’s fantastic to see some Eastern European SF on the Clarke Award shortlist. I haven’t read Borne yet, but conversely that’s probably because I know in advance I’ll always find something to fascinate and inspire me in anything Jeff VanderMeer writes. C. Robert Cargill’s Sea of Rust would appear to be more towards the centre of SF than would normally attract me, but its premise sounds meaty and original and it’s an interesting addition to the shortlist.

Anne Charnock’s Dreams Before the Start of Time is without a doubt the book I am personally most thrilled to see on the shortlist. I’ve long been saying that Anne’s particular brand of science fiction – thoughtful and thought–provoking, human, strongly contemporary and beautifully crafted – is exactly the kind of writing we need to be seeing more of in British SF, and to have the jury pick out Dreams is something of a milestone. Congratulations, Anne!

The most surprising omission, for me, would have to be Nick Harkaway’s Gnomon, possibly the most ambitious science fiction novel of 2017 and it’s a shame that we won’t be seeing it discussed within the context of the Clarke. However, with this year’s submissions list containing so many high-quality novels, it’s inevitable that some would have to fall by the wayside. This is the best Clarke Award shortlist in years: diverse, engaging, surprising, packed with literary excellence. Most importantly of all, it showcases a wide variety of science fiction through differing interpretations of what SF is and what SF is capable of doing, providing a well focused snapshot of where science fiction was at in 2017.

Congratulations to all the shortlisted writers, and to this year’s jury for making such intelligent and unpredictable choices. At last – something for the Sharkes to well and truly get their teeth into!

Gotta read ’em all!

April 23, 2018 /

The shortlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction was announced this morning, and what a strong shortlist it is. I’ve already written about Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, which remains potent in the memory as much for what it does with form as for its urgent storyline. Elif Batuman’s The Idiot is the book I most want to read next. I adore Batuman’s essays, and her memoir about Russian literature, The Possessed, is a thing of rapturous beauty. Jessie Greengrass’s Sight is also high on my list, not least because of the contradictory reactions it’s been garnering. The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock and Sing, Unburied, Sing have been outliers for me up till now, but I’m planning to read both before the winner is announced, if I possibly can.

The novel I want to comment on today though is Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You: Or, Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife. If I read a more important book this year, I will be surprised. People have been describing this novel as a memoir of domestic abuse, which it is, but such a bald description fails to convey the majesty of all that is in it. If I were forced to use one word to describe When I Hit You it would be triumphant. It is a triumph not just in terms of victory of the spirit, but in terms of the writing art. The very act of writing – the act that most enrages the narrator’s solipsistic, jealous, controlling, abusive and above all selfish, selfish, selfish husband – is celebrated in these pages to the absolute utmost. Indeed, I cannot think of a better riposte, a sweeter revenge for the violence the narrator has suffered than this excoriating, empowering book about womanhood and violence, art, the practice of sanity, language and freedom of expression. I cannot think of a book that would be a more worthy winner of the Women’s Prize than this vital, supremely intelligent text, superbly realised. Angry but never embittered, this is a novel every woman – and for fuck’s sake, every man – needs to read as soon as they can.

The thing that strikes me – and pleases me – most forcefully about this year’s Women’s Prize shortlist is its seriousness. These are books that are not afraid to take the personal and make it political. These are books that are not afraid of going in hard on big questions. These are authors that are unapologetic about their love of language, their joy in experimentation, their determination to be heard, their willingness to be difficult. It will be very interesting to see if any of these turn up on the Booker longlist, announced in July. Congratulations to all the writers, and also to the judges on the boldness and brilliance of their choices, on showing us why and how the Women’s Prize continues to be so important.

You Were Never Really Here

March 21, 2018 /

I was in Glasgow yesterday evening for an event that ran as part of the Aye, Write! literary festival and featured an interview with crime writer Nick Triplow about his recent (and excellent) biography of fellow crime writer Ted Lewis, followed by a screening of Mike Hodges’s Get Carter, the film that brought Lewis’s most famous creation to a worldwide audience. I enjoyed the event tremendously, not least for this rare opportunity to see Carter on the big screen. Michael Caine will always be Michael Caine, for good or ill, but the film’s extraordinary sense of place, its grimy textures, its evocation of a certain time remain an extraordinary achievement. Get Carter captures the seventies in a way its creators would not – could not – have been aware of at the time, the surest test of a piece of art that actually appears ageless.

I booked for this event some weeks ago, and when I realised I would also be able to fit in the matinee showing of Lynne Ramsey’s new film, You Were Never Really Here, the trip suddenly became doubly worthwhile. You Were Never Really Here is based on a 2016 novella of the same name by Jonathan Ames, a text that turned out to be short enough for me to read in its entirety during my journey to Glasgow. I was thus able to experience the movie literally within an hour of reading its source text, something I don’t think I’ve ever done before and that made seeing the film almost like a weird kind of flashback. Whether this makes for a good way of looking at and thinking about adaptation I couldn’t say, but it is certainly a powerful and discomfiting one.

The Ames novella tells the story of an ex-Marine named Joe. Beaten and abused as a boy by his violent father, Joe’s trauma is broadened and deepened by his experiences in the military. He thinks constantly of suicide, and it is only his loyalty to his eighty-year-old mother, who was equally abused by Joe’s father, that keeps him going. Joe now works as a hired ‘fixer’ with a special ability in retrieving kidnap victims from their abductors. Violence is Joe’s tool, and he is an expert in its deployment. Returning to New York after a bad experience in Cincinnati, Joe is given a new job by his handler, McCleary: a senator’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Lisa, has been kidnapped. After six months of inconclusive police investigations, Senator Votto has received an anonymous text, informing him that Lisa has been put to work in a brothel frequented by rich businessmen and politicians. Joe is to recapture Lisa and return her to her father. There will be a rich reward. There are also risks, however. Votto’s father was known to be in deep with the Mafia, and there is reason to suspect that Votto may have come under pressure to conduct his political affairs in a similar fashion…

You Were Never Really Here was an almost perfect reading experience for me. Transgressive, sometimes horribly violent but often surprising in its twists and turns, fastidious and economical in its use of language, this is a novella that chews up the rulebook on show not tell (any kind of successful rule-breaking in fiction is a pump-the-air moment for me) and streams through the consciousness in a rush of blazing streetlamps and concussive hammer thwacks. Joe is a broken man, most would argue a bad man, yet as a protagonist he refuses to be categorised in such reductive terms. As a piece of writing You Were Never Really Here is a gem, as a work of noir fiction it should be famous. If you’re not keen on physical violence on the page, I’d advise caution, but otherwise I’d recommend it wholeheartedly.

I love Lynne Ramsey’s films, and her adaptation of Ames’s novella is a great piece of work that has already won prizes and should transport anyone who sees it. For me though, almost certainly because I came to the film feeling an unusually close kinship with the original text, it became a demonstration in how often film fails to reproduce the peculiar and unique intensity of a reading experience, the particular and perhaps irreplaceable intimacy of the printed page. Lynne Ramsey’s sense of place – her film-maker’s understanding of the urban landscape – is sensational, with a darkly alluring streetscene that reminded me somewhat of Steve McQueen’s 2011 film Shame.  I loved the film’s composed soundtrack and its use of incidental music. And yet in spite of some standout scenes – the death of the cop in Joe’s house (a certain eighties ballad will never be the same again), the ‘funeral’ at the lake – Joaquin Phoenix was never quite ‘my’ Joe. Perhaps he just talked too much. More importantly, I found myself mystified by some of Ramsey’s choices with regard to plot changes. In the novella, much of the horror lies in our discovery of Senator Votto’s obscene betrayal of his own daughter – which in its turn mirrors the way Joe was himself betrayed by his father’s abuse. By making Votto a victim, Ramsey has stripped the story of much of its urgency and narrative drive.

I sympathised with Ramsey’s ending – her desire to give Joe a second chance – and for this reason alone I would hesitate to say that we have lost something, exactly. It is more that we have been given something different, in its own way powerful but perhaps – perhaps – less memorable. Even the violence in Ramsey’s version, though we can see it right there on the screen in front of us, feels less impactful than what we are faced with on the page.

I am sure to watch this film again at some point, and when I do, freed from the immediate influence of the text, I will almost certainly admire it more. For the moment though I am still in the world of Ames’s novella, envious and rejoicing in the power of the writer to deliver something special that cannot be replicated.

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

March 12, 2018 /

I remember reading a slightly strange article a couple of years ago about how in times of crisis or political turmoil, the act of reading or writing fiction could begin to seem irrelevant, a sideshow. We should be reaching for deeper truths, more urgent subject matter. This argument would appear to be more persuasive now even than when the essay was written, and there is a part of me that identifies with the sentiment behind it. I examine my motives in writing fiction much more closely now than I did when I started out, interrogate myself constantly about what kind of fiction I want and need to be writing. I believe that these are healthy and valid questions for any writer. But think about it for more than five minutes and you’ll see that questioning the validity of fiction as a means of understanding the world is to ask the wrong question. The greatest fiction has always been more than an escape or a solace – see the hundreds of novelists incarcerated in gaols across the world as political prisoners who stand witness to that fact.  In Home Fire, by Kamila Shamsie, we see how powerful a tool the novel can still be in highlighting the most urgent political questions of our generation, how directly and how boldly fiction can speak. That Shamsie has chosen to use mythic archetypes in telling her story only adds to its strengths, showing how even such a seemingly abstruse concept as literary form can have a pivotal role to play in the construction of a political argument.

In Sophocles’s Antigone, the titular character petitions King Creon of Thebes for permission to bring home the body of her disgraced brother Polyneices for a proper burial. King Creon refuses, and when Antigone carries out funeral rites for Polyneices in direct contravention of his orders, he demands that she be captured and executed. Antigone’s sister Ismene tries to remonstrate with the king, offering to die in her place. Antigone’s fiance Haemon – Creon’s son – though initially shocked by his beloved’s transgression, attempts to placate his father, begging him to spare Antigone and allow her to return home. Creon wavers, eventually acquiescing to his wife’s entreaties, that mercy be shown towards the young people as the gods would wish. In the manner of classical tragedy, his decision comes too late: Antigone has hanged herself, Haemon likewise commits suicide when confronted with her loss. Creon has saved his throne, but lost everything that mattered most to him in the process.

Home Fire begins with a sleight of hand, a deft and understated precis of what is to follow. Isma is at the airport. The eldest of three siblings, she has spent the past six years caring for twins Aneeka and Parvais, following the deaths of their grandmother and mother in quick succession. The twins are now nineteen, on the brink of going their own way in the world. Isma can return to the life she was expecting to live, fulfilling her cherished ambition to take up a research scholarship in the US. Though her paperwork is in order, Isma is detained at passport control, interrogated at such length about her purpose of travel that she misses her flight. On arrival in Boston, she tries to put the incident behind her, but the forces of politics and circumstance are already moving against her. The siblings’ father was a known jihadi who died while being transported to Guantanamo Bay. Their father was never around much – the twins have no real memories of him – but still, his outlaw status has been enough to keep the family on MI5’s radar. More devastatingly still, Aneeka’s twin brother Parvais has fallen under the influence of ISIS supporters and been persuaded that his place is in Raqqa, fighting the fight in honour of the hero father he never knew. Isma is furious – she blames Parvais for putting the whole family’s security at risk through his selfishness. Meanwhile Aneeka, desperate to be reunited with her brother, begins a relationship with Eamonn Lone, the son of ‘Lone Wolf’ Tory Home Secretary Karamat Lone, the one man who has it within his power to grant permission for Parvais to return home.

The airport detainment scenes aside, the opening chapters of Home Fire are deceptively bland. We see a young woman embarking on the next stage of her life, making new friendships, falling in love. It is only gradually, as parallel plot lines draw inexorably together, that the narrative begins to take on the characteristics of Greek tragedy.  Shamsie’s novel makes for an extraordinary reading experience, both at the level of story and in terms of its formal execution. Home Fire‘s relationship with its legendary precursor is subtle, striking, brilliantly clever, the extent of the narrative’s involvement with its source material only becoming fully apparent as the novel nears its conclusion. It could be argued that Shamsie’s characterisation is a little flat, that the characters’ identification with mythic archetypes renders them prisoners of the plot – but this also works in the novel’s favour, strengthening the bond with Antigone and revealing how myths are made. Personally, I found the characters managing to break free of their preordained roles just sufficiently to make them compelling in their own right, Aneeka and Parvais particularly, with Shamsie’s use of language – never less than excellent in terms of its craft – attaining a special resonance and beauty throughout those passages.

For me, this was a heart-pounding, heart-breaking narrative of great power and importance, the kind of novel you want to press into people’s hands. Ideally, Home Fire would be read by everyone in Britain, right now. That’s how relevant it felt to me as fiction.

After finishing Home Fire, I remembered an article Shamsie wrote for the Guardian in 2014, detailing her own experience of applying for British citizenship, Ideally, everyone should read this too, and ask themselves what it means for Britain when even an artist who continues to make an incalculable contribution to the cultural life of both her countries can be made to feel despair and panic in the face of this bureaucracy, a political culture that directly opposes every ideal it is said to espouse. As a writer, Shamsie was deemed ineligible to apply for leave to remain, because that category of application was abolished – writers, artists and composers are no longer of material value to British society, it seems. If she’d been trying to apply now, she would have found the goalposts moved again – she would been deemed ineligible on grounds of not having a big enough bank balance.

Britain is a poor sort of place right now, frankly. Home Fire shows us some of the ways we are being made poorer.

Women’s Prize for Fiction

March 8, 2018 /

International Women’s Day, and the announcement of the longlist for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. I’ve been looking forward to this, and I wasn’t disappointed. One of the things I like about longlists is that the perspective they offer on a literary moment is deeper and wider than any six-book shortlist can hope to be. Here we have sixteen books. Those who enjoy such exercises can get stuck into what those books are saying about women writing now, and the societies they find themselves writing in. Aside from that, this is a fascinating selection of novels to read and enjoy,

The thing that stands out about this list for me personally is that it includes a satisfying number of titles I am genuinely excited about! Regular readers of this blog will know I’ve already read and adored Nicola Barker’s H(A)PPY. In her first reaction to the longlist, writer Naomi Frisby, who has shadowed the Women’s Prize five years running, notes that this is Barker’s first ever shortlisting, which seems preposterous when you think about it, but makes Barker’s inclusion here particularly welcome and timely. I am also especially eager to read Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You, Jessie Greengrass’s Sight, Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, Sarah Schmidt’s See What I Have Done and Kit de Waal’s The Trick to Time.  I’ll plan to read as many of these longlisted titles as I can before the shortlist is announced on April 23rd, and with any luck I’ll be blogging about some of them here as I go along.  Here’s the full line-up:

H(A)PPY – Nicola Barker (Heinemann)

The Idiot – Elif Batuman (Cape)

Three Things About Elsie – Joanna Cannon (Borough)

Miss Burma – Charmaine Craig (Grove)

Manhattan Beach – Jennifer Egan (Corsair)

The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock – Imogen Hermes Gower (Harvill Secker)

Sight – Jessie Greengrass (John Murray)

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine – Gail Honeyman (Harper Collins)

When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife – Meena Kandasamy (Atlantic)

Elmet – Fiona Mozley (John Murray)

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness – Arundhati Roy (Hamish Hamilton)

See What I Have Done – Sarah Schmidt (Tinder)

A Boy in Winter – Rachel Seiffert (Virago)

Home Fire – Kamila Shamsie (Bloomsbury)

The Trick to Time – Kit de Waal (Viking)

Sing, Unburied, Sing – Jesmyn Ward (Bloonsbury)

On a not entirely unrelated note, Anne Charnock and I made the front page of our local paper The Buteman this week, with a story about us both being shortlisted for the BSFA Awards. Great photo by Chris, and especially great to see it making the news on International Women’s Day!

Portrait of the Artist: Self & I by Matthew De Abaitua

February 23, 2018 /

“My mouth is full of blood but I’m not even angry. This is my true rite of passage: punched in the face I remain eminently reasonable. That is what marks me out as ready for the middle class: that I can defer gratification, stifle fury, for some putative future gain. I may be six foot two, fourteen stone of muscle and one stone of fat, but I will never be good at fighting because I will always have to calculate whether to hit back or not. Because there is no aspect of my life that a brawl improves, no problem that can be solved with violence. And yet, as a young man, you give up that aspect of your persona reluctantly, want to hint that you can put yourself about. Eddie could dish it out. In the riot at Cantril Farm, he fought hand-to-hand against the rioters for hours.”

For Will Self, it was a strange interlude. For Matthew De Abaitua, it was the beginning of everything.

“In the Nineties, everywhere – from a system of sea caves to a transit van looping around the M25, from a ruined abbey on the Yorkshire Moors to a loading bay in Shoreditch – was a great place to have a party. And our social relations were conducted as if we were at a long party, always intoxicated, with nothing taken too seriously, and all unpleasantness put off until tomorrow. 

Andy had stumbled on the vital truth about the Nineties: it may have been a soft-headed, heaving mass of meretricious triangulation but it was also a great place to have a party.”

In 1994 and fresh from a year on Malcolm Bradbury’s famous creative writing program at the University of East Anglia, Matthew De Abaitua is offered the apprenticeship of his dreams: a six-month stint as amanuensis to Will Self, living and working beside his employer in a rented cottage in rural Suffolk. Self is on the Granta List, the newly anointed enfant terrible of English letters. Bogged down in the quagmire of publicity and celebrity journalism’s New Glib, he is anxious to get started on a new fiction project. De Abaitua has not published anything yet. He knows only that he passionately – desperately – wants to be a writer. He hopes the next six months will change his life.

Self & I is a little classic. A unique insight into the mindset and working methods of one of the key writers to have emerged from the post-Thatcher years, it is also a manifesto, in a sense, for beginning writers, a wrestling over some of the questions of what it means to be a writer in today’s Britain. De Abaitua provides stunning chapters on his brief stint as a security guard in Liverpool’s docklands, his complex relationship with his working class background and the inevitable, inexorable decay of adolescent allegiances. Above all, his search for a subject – the ever-present conflict, in young writers, between talent and inexperience – is related in pitiless detail. Will Self emerges from the narrative as a curiously lonely, driven individual, relentlessly in pursuit of his goals and harried by his personal demons – a typical writer, in other words. De Abaitua struggles with doubt, finally coming out on top but bruised from the tussle. For this writer at least there is no such thing as a redemption arc. The war is ongoing.

For anyone who experienced the Nineties in Britain first hand, there will be plenty of laugh-out-loud moments here. De Abaitua captures the ridiculous self-entitlement of the time, the blindness-to-impending disaster, with wit and accuracy. There is also much to interest the science fiction reader. One of De Abaitua’s tasks as Self’s amanuensis was to transcribe hours of taped interviews between Self and J. G. Ballard. Ballard’s pinpoint analysis of the intellectual decline of science fiction through the eighties – and De Abaitua’s ruminations upon it – provide some of the standout moments of the book for me, and anyone interested in current science fiction criticism should read this account.

Self & I is a candid and revealing portrait of a particular artist at a particular time. It is De Abaitua’s book far more than Self’s, and coming from a writer who has already provided us with some of the most original and brilliantly executed science fiction of the past decade, it should be counted as a significant achievement. We await his next project eagerly, and with anticipation.

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