Chris’s new book Episodes is published today in hardback and ebook. The cover art is striking and extremely handsome.
It’s billed as a short story collection, but this book, it seems to me, is so much more than that. Carefully curated, it presents a valuable and fascinating overview of Chris’s work to date. Here you will find stories from the early part of his career, one of which, ‘The Invisible Men’, has only previously been available as part of the special reissue of Chris’s first collection, Real Time World. What shocks me most about this fifty-year-old story now is how prescient it feels.
Here you will find a novella, The Ament, which was first published in a somewhat obscure anthology in the 1980s and has not been seen since – until now. It’s a powerful piece of work, replete with Priestian themes (identity, reality, twins) and an absolute must-read for fans of The Glamour and The Prestige.
Chris often insists that he doesn’t write horror, yet in I, Haruspex, a novella from the turn of the millennium that has been equally difficult to access until today, you will discover one of the most unnerving works of gothic fiction you have ever read, all twisted up inside a bizarre and compelling story of time travel and WW2 espionage.
Palely Loitering and An Infinite Summer, both key works from the Priest canon and nominated for multiple awards, are hereby made available also for the first time in some years.
The table of contents speaks for itself. What makes Episodes even more special and so much more than just a collection is Chris’s own personal commentary, presented in the form of an introduction as well as individual forewords and afterwords to each of the texts. The story of the stories, in other words, and an important contribution to the overarching and constantly updating history of British science fiction.
This is a book to be savoured and treasured. More even than that, it is a book to challenge and inspire.
Heads of the Colored People, Naffissa Thompson-Spires (Chatto)
Heart Berries, Terese Marie Mailhot (Bloomsbury)
Lanny, Max Porter (Faber)
Lowborn, Kerry Hudson (Vintage)
Sweet Home, Wendy Erskine (Stinging Fly)
The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker (Hamish Hamilton)
The Vogue, Eoin McNamee (Faber)
This Brutal House, Niven Govinden (Dialogue)
The only one of the twelve I’ve read so far is Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall, which I think is brilliant. It is still a complete mystery to me (and, it would seem, to many others) why it didn’t make the Women’s Prize shortlist, and it is therefore all the more wonderful to find it showing up here.
Of the others, I own the David Keenan (Keenan’s debut, This Is Memorial Device, was a standout for me, and this new novel looks even more compelling) and the McNamee has been on my to-read list ever since I saw Anna Burns recommending it shortly after she won the Booker. Lanny, Lowborn, This Btutal House and Sweet Home are all similarly on my to-read list for 2019, and I am very curious about the Will Ashon.
I have found increasingly with the Gordon Burn Prize that the longlist tends to be made up of books that I have either read or earmarked for reading – this kind of radical collision between fiction and non-fiction, memoir and poetry is very much where my interests lie at the moment. The only book on this list that I have not come across at all so far is Terese Marie Mailhot’s memoir Heart Berries, which looks incredible and has a blurb from Kate Tempest – what more recommendation do I need?
The shortlist is announced on July 17th, which gives me seven weeks to read it. It’s going to be tight, but I’m going to try. I will also try to blog every book, followed by a round-up post including my own predictions and/or preferences for the shortlist. This will actually be the first time I’ve attempted to read an entire prize longlist, and I’m looking forward to the challenge. At this moment I have no preconceived ideas about what might get shortlisted and that is the best possible basis I can think of to go in on.
“A place on the longlist is recognition of work that stands out in the scale of its endeavour, often challenging readers’ expectations or pushing perceived boundaries of genre, sensibility or even the role of literature itself.”
I’ll be out and about next month, doing some bookshop and festival events for The Dollmaker here in Scotland and down in the West Country. In fact you could almost say I’ll be following in Andrew’s footsteps! If you’re in the area and would like to find out more about how the novel came to be written, together with themes of fairy tales, the dark fantastic and the importance of landscape in fiction, do come along. There will be readings and Q&As, and of course a chance to get your copy signed and personalised. Hope to see you on the road.
In Edinburgh I will be in conversation with Kirsty Logan, whose magical second novel The Gloaming has just been released in paperback. We’ll be discussing our approaches to writing, as well as the continuing role of fairytales in contemporary fiction and what makes these stories endure, even as they shift and change to fit the times. We’re lucky enough to be hosted by Golden Hare Books as part of their Feminist Books Fortnight.
Truro is the town Bramber Winters grew up in, where her love of dolls began. Come and join us at Waterstones for more discussion of The Dollmaker and its West Country roots.
The Dollmaker is published today. Of all my books to date, this has been the most hard fought, the longest in the making, the most intimate and personal. The novel’s principal characters, Andrew and Bramber, have been in my heart and in my mind for more than a decade. Finally, they are ready to tell their story. I hope all those readers who encounter them will love them as much as I do.
Thankfully, the process of bringing The Dollmaker to publication has not been anywhere near as stressful as writing it in the first place, and I want to thank the whole incredible team at riverrun for their support and enthusiasm in making the book a reality . As a physical object, it is a thing of real beauty., the artwork and book design perfectly in tune with the story itself. The vision and expertise involved in achieving that should not be understated. Andrew and Bramber could honestly not have been in safer hands.
I’d like to remind you that The Dollmaker is also available as an audiobook. Hearing my work come to life through the voices of others has always been a particular pleasure for me, the closest I have come to experiencing a book as a first-time reader might experience it. In this wonderful unabridged rendition by Luke Thomspon and Beth Eyre, it’s as if The Dollmaker truly takes on its own identity, apart from its author, a freedom every book needs and deserves. The extract below comes from the very start of the novel, which is coincidentally the passage I have chosen to present in my readings.
I will be taking part in author events to celebrate the launch of The Dollmaker through the month of May, both here in Scotland and in the West Country, where much of the book is set. Details to follow.
I’d already logged off by midnight last night, when the Women’s Prize longlist was announced, but I caught up with it first thing this morning with mixed reactions. I was actually very surprised to find that I’d succeeded in guessing four out of the sixteen titles – but the flavour of the longlist as a whole felt so different from my own wishlist that my overall feeling has been somewhat muted.
There are some books on the longlist that I did not get on with at all – My Sister, the Serial Killer, for example, failed for me entirely as a crime novel and felt gauche and deeply retrograde as a novel of relationships. ‘I could help Tade bleach his whites, if he would let me’ is the quote that best sums up the book’s many, many issues for me, and if I had to choose one word to describe it, it would be overhyped.
There are two books I don’t feel tempted to read because we seem to be drowning in Greek myths retellings at the moment – did the judges really have to pick The Silence of the Girls and Circe? This is just a personal bugbear and conversely I am always excited by novels that take mythology more as a starting point, resetting archetypical stories in a modern context – Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie is a prizewinning example, see also Laurence Norfolk’s masterpiece In the Shape of a Boar. Neither the Barker nor the Miller feels essential to me.
It is interesting to note that there is no dystopian fiction on this list – could this enthusiasm have run its course, at least for the moment? – and the most openly speculative novel in contention is not, as many seemed to predict, Daisy Johnson’s Everything Under but Melissa Broder’s The Pisces. I have enjoyed the vigorous debate sparked by this book, but haven’t read The Pisces yet and don’t feel in any particular hurry to do so.
This longlist does feel diverse and surprising and – its most laudable quality – it does include something for everyone. I would defy any reader not to find at least one book here that they can get wholeheartedly behind! Personally, I’m pleased and satisfied to see Milkman in contention. It could be argued that as the winner of last year’s Booker Prize, Milkman is not exactly crying out for extra publicity. However, it is an important, innovative and truly great novel – perhaps the only truly great novel on this list – and a Women’s Prize longlist that did not include it in its year of eligibility would be a nonsense. I’m delighted to see Ghost Wall, not only because it’s a superbly achieved book but also because it’s high time Sarah Moss received this kind of recognition – I hope she goes straight to the shortlist stage. I’m glad to see Sophie van Llewyn, too – her novel Bottled Goods was also longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and both the setting and the sensibility make it an instant ‘yes’ for me. Similarly, I was reading a review of Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive just a day or two ago and felt immediately that I wanted to read it, that this book’s autofictional approach would put it right up my street.
I loved what Akwaeke Emezi said in interview about inserting pages from their journal directly into the narrative of Freshwater: “There are a couple of things about writing it this way: first, the things that people think are fictionalised are not fictionalised. Second, I wanted to make clear it was autobiography, otherwise it would be considered to be very fantastical. I wanted readers to be sure that it was not magical realism or speculative fiction. It’s what has actually happened! I’m using fiction as a filter for it”. Yes, please! Diana Evans’s Ordinary People might almost be an alternative commentary on Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, its core quartet of characters moved twenty years into their futures and with a whole new set of problems. The plot summary makes it sound like yet another London mid-life-marriage-in-crisis novel, but the way it is written – free-flowing language, tumbling streams of cultural references, time shifts and jump cuts – makes it feel radical and new and very contemporary.
So that’s my kind-of preferred shortlist. I have absolutely no idea which book will go on to win. But that’s an exciting conundrum to have, and one that big prizes in literature should throw up more often.
This past week has been rather unusual. I’ve been on the road doing some advance publicity for The Dollmaker, talking to booksellers in London and across the West Country – where the novel is largely set – and having a delightful breakfast meeting with book bloggers and magazine editors at the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green. The strangeness of finding myself in the company of a whole bunch of people who had read the novel was a sensation outdone only by its pleasure. Andrew and Bramber have been a special part of my life for more than a decade. To realise that they have also become special to other people is the most valuable reward a writer could ask for. This is the end point of the process and one that only ever becomes more mysterious and surprising.
I have always loved travelling by train. One of the chief joys this week of what might otherwise have been a long and tiring series of journeys has been the opportunity to read three very different novels, one after another and with the effects lingering throughout this cut-off little section of time in the same way a particular weather or aroma might unexpectedly attach itself to a particular place. First came Peter Hoeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, a novel I was aware of and intrigued by on publication, yet somehow never got round to reading. I started it the week before last, when our island was still covered in snow, and completed it during the train ride from Glasgow to London that comprised the first leg of my journey.
The prevalence of frost, the steely Clyde, the progression through the still-snow-streaked hills of Cumbria brought me close to this novel in ways I could never have anticipated, and what I felt most of all through the first half of Smilla’s narrative in particular was an increased appreciation of the landscape in which I now live and work, a joy in what I have started to think of as the Northern aesthetic. And yet – and I still feel the pain of this – Smilla turned out to be very much a novel of two halves for me.
The novel’s Part One concerns the discovery of a body – the body of a young boy – and the increasing conviction on the part of the eponymous Miss Smilla that his death is no accident. It is set in Copenhagen, in winter, and I have rarely met with such an exquisite evocation of place, such a deep dive into the strange alchemy of idiosyncracies and generalities that make personal recollection so resonant and compelling. The attention to technical detail, both in matters of meteorology and what might be termed common bureaucracy – that kind of in-depth focus on what might wrongly be construed as irrelevances – made this extended section of writing a joy for me. I felt mesmerised by the beauty of it, by the author’s willingness to take that kind of poetic risk. This part of the novel is also characterised by an intricate social commentary examining the colonial relationship between Denmark and Greenland. The daughter of an Inuit mother and a mostly absent Danish father, Smilla feels irreconcilably caught between two cultures. The tension this induces informs the narrative in powerful and surprising ways.
The characterisation of Miss Smilla herself is a thing of wonder. Rarely have I felt so close to a character. Make of that what you will.
In the second half of the novel, Smilla smuggles herself on board a ship bound for Greenland and the eventual resolution of the mystery. There is absolutely no reason this section should not have been equally compelling – yet turning the page to begin this part of the narrative felt to me disconcertingly, almost shockingly akin to entering a completely different novel. The careful construction of a narrative edifice, the complexity, the minute observations, the fascinating web of relationships – whoosh, gone. Smilla barely seems to remember or think about her life and discoveries in the first section of the novel. What we have instead is a narrative that feels as if it is going through the motions: rather boring thriller elements, unnecessary killings, bare-bones characterisation, sketchy description that felt as if it had been bolted on at the last minute. I was literally open-mouthed with disappointment.
In the past two years or so I have become increasingly interested in new ways of writing crime fiction. What I rejoice in, more than anything, is the kind of novel that takes the detective story as its template and then makes something weighty and great from it, that nods to the tropes and enjoys them but that is driven to go that further mile in terms of literary invention: Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, Rupert Thomson’s Death of a Murderer, Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13, Katie Kitamura’s A Separation. While reading the first half of Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, I had the same feeling I had when I first read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, close on thirty years ago – that I was in the presence of a genuinely important work of European literature.
The second half blew that out of the water – almost literally. It felt desultory, by-the-numbers, filling in plot. Most of all, it felt to me as if Hoeg had refined Part One to a degree of perfection that pushed him to the boundary of his ability as a writer at that time, then for some unknown reason went on hiatus. Every writer knows what it’s like – leave a manuscript uncompleted for too long and something gets away from you. It is difficult, almost impossible, to re-enter the state that led to the creation of that particular narrative. Rather than trying to pick up where you left off, it is often better to start again from the beginning, to re-imagine the novel as the writer you have become in the time since you let it slide. Painful, but true.
I have absolutely no idea, of course, if anything of the sort happened. What I do know is that I just don’t get it. The novel’s resolution – the reason behind everything – I actually quite liked. It was sinister and frightening and unusual. But the hundred-and-fifty pages leading up to it were so much generic padding. The novel reads like a cut-and-shut. I’m still in mourning.
*
After that breathless roller-coaster ride of ecstasy and disappointment, it was actually quite weird to enter Looker, the debut novel from poet Laura Sims, a slim, present-tense, no-words-wasted novel of the perfectly-honed variety that is fashionable right now. The protagonist, a college lecturer, attempts to keep up an appearance of normality while her life collapses around her. As her personal crisis deepens, she becomes increasingly fixated on an actress who lives in the building across the street from her. The actress, it would appear, leads a charmed life. Our protagonist begins to collect pieces of it for herself – literally.
Hoeg’s aim – like Dostoevsky’s in Crime and Punishment, like Thomas Mann’s in The Magic Mountain – is to involve his reader, to draw them, through weight of words and argument, into the same philosophical and emotional labyrinth that enfolds their protagonist. In novels like Looker – think Sheila Heti, think Ottessa Moshfegh, think Gwendoline Riley – there is a distancing effect, achieved in part through the novel’s smoothly planed surfaces, in part through the author’s insistence on our stunned complicity. Like these novels’ protagonists, we do not act, we spy. We gaze, round-eyed, at the misfortune that inevitably unfolds. We are become, in fact, lookers.
I admired Sims’s novel for its perfectly modulated sentences, its mordant insights, its sharp analysis and demolition of traditional mystery tropes. It did suffer from being read straight after the Hoeg, though. You read Smilla and know in spite of everything that Hoeg was pushing himself to the limit. Looker feels studied and if not exactly arch then constructed by comparison. Too obviously aware of itself as good art. Katie Kitamura’s A Separation, though not dissimilar in some ways, takes more risks, reveals more personality, distills more real emotion and feels more mature generally. I liked Looker, but I didn’t love it.
*
Passing from Looker to Eugene McCabe’s Death and Nightingales provided another jolt, this time in the opposite direction. Set in County Fermanagh in the first half of the nineteenth century. the novel tells a story of nascent sectarian violence, family secrets, betrayal and murderous revenge. It is a crime novel only in the loosest sense: by the time the action is over, a crime has been committed. Of the three novels I read this week, McCabe’s is the most traditional in form – the most staunchly realist. It is also the only one of the three you could point to and call flawless, or Dostoevskian, or both. In terms of page length it is as economical as Looker, yet in terms of the richness and passion of its language, its taut dissection of national schisms, the many unforgettable scenes at its heart it would seem to contain three times as much. One feels enriched and invigorated from reading it, certain in some sense that this is how great writing should taste and feel and be, equally certain that one can never and will never attain such mastery.
It’s strange, though, isn’t it? While I was looking up information on Eugene McCabe, I came across his appallingly unprofessional and, frankly, childish ad hominem attack on the critic Eileen Battersby in the Irish Times back in 2011. A salutary reminder that even the greatest writers are capable, on occasion, of being absolute dicks.
Christmas is a weird time of year – something to do with the discomfiting proximity of too many memories – and I always feel freer and more energised once it is over and the new year begun.
For me, one of the most keenly anticipated of January pleasures lies in contemplating the reading year ahead. I suppose it would be remiss of me not to mention that my own new novel The Dollmaker made the Guardian’s 2019 in Books line-up for April, which was a wonderful surprise. The list also includes several books I am already looking forward to. There are new story collections from Samanta Schweblin and Irenosen Okojie, new novels from Siri Hustvedt, Kevin Barry and Deborah Levy, new essay collections from Rachel Cusk and Helen Macdonald, and of course I Am Sovereign, a new novella-length work from Nicola Barker, which will go straight to the top of the reading pile when it comes out in July. Not mentioned in the Guardian’s round-up but just as eagerly awaited by me are Helen Oyeyemi’s new novel Gingerbread, due in March (and wouldn’t it be lovely to see Oyeyemi finally getting some of the award attention she so obviously deserves?) and Plume, from Will Wiles, due in May. I have adored Will’s previous two novels to date and if anything, Plume sounds even better – bigger, weirder, more ambitious. I seriously cannot wait.
Talking of prizes, I have decided that my key focus this year will be on the Gordon Burn Prize. For the past couple of years, I couldn’t help noticing that by the time the Gordon Burn longlist was announced in May I’d already read at least three of the titles on there and sometimes more. Clearly the universe is trying to tell me something and I am already excited at the thought of reading and hopefully reviewing all of this year’s contenders.
Award shenanigans aside, one of the downsides of focusing one’s reading around literary prizes is the emphasis this necessarily places on new books. New books are shiny and tempting and addictive but for the writer especially the constant indulgence of these magpie habits can be dangerous. Dangerous because they encourage us to neglect older texts – texts we somehow never got around to reading when they were new, texts that have lingered in our imagination and might better serve it, texts that have been tried and tested in the maelstrom of time and survived to tell their tale.
It is for this reason that my other reading project this year will focus upon books published before 2019. It seemed to make sense to choose nineteen of them – enough titles to have a genuine influence on my reading year but without becoming onerous or restrictive. I have tried to be instinctive rather than scientific in making this list, choosing books that seem relevant to me as a writer right now and that I genuinely want to read. In keeping with the instinctive tag, I present the books to you here in the order they occurred to me, some dropping and swapping and general fannying about notwithstanding:
Middle C by William Gass. Gass has been on my reading list for a decade, so it’s time I got started. I have chosen Middle C rather than The Tunnel because of the musical thread that runs though it, which feels resonant for me now more even than usual.
The Notebook by Agota Kristof. A book I have been meaning to read ever since CB Editions reissued it in 2014 . Here is a wonderful piece about it by Slavoj Zizek.
Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard, Another step on my journey with a writer who becomes increasingly important in my imagination, year on year.
Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy. I had not heard of Jaeggy until I stumbled across her last year in the form of this fine essay in the New Yorker by Sheila Heti, whose first novel How Should a Person Be I had recently read. It turns out that Jaeggy was a close friend of Ingeborg Bachmann, which seems like the ideal excuse to add a bonus book to this list, Bachmann’s experimental novel Malina, which is being reissued by Penguin in May.
Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk. Tokarczuk won the 2018 Man Booker International for her novel Flights. I’d read this interview with her shortly before that and was instantly smitten. I’m drawn instinctively to Drive Your Plough because of its mystery element.
Cast In Doubt by Lynne Tillman. Tony White’s list of Top Ten Experimental Thrillers went live at the back end of 2017, believe it or not, to roughly coincide with the publication of his own superb experimental thriller The Fountain in the Forest in January of last year. It’s a list I keep coming back to and I wanted to pick at least one book from it for this one. I chose the Tillman because I’d never come across the author before and because it sounds fantastic – something to keep me going while I wait for the release of the next book in White’s existential detective trilogy…
Mao II by Don DeLillo. Reading Falling Man last year reminded me I really do need to read more DeLillo.
Martin John by Anakana Schofield. I became interested in this book when it was shortlisted for the Goldsmith’s Prize in 2016 and it’s stayed on my to-read list ever since.
Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg. Another novel I’ve consistently failed to read for more than a decade. I had it on my list for the Bute Noir crime reading challenge last year and never quite got to it, a fact that seems ludicrous, given my interest in off-piste crime fiction.
My Sister My Love by Joyce Carol Oates. See above. Plus I like to read at least one Oates a year if I can.
Zone by Mathias Enard. Another title from indispensable indie press Fitzcarraldo. A recent podcast interview reminded me I never caught up with this novel and that I really should.
Seventeen by Hideo Yokoyama. An off-beat crime novel from a writer who is a bestseller in his native Japan. I’ve been curious about this book since it came out.
The Longshot by Katie Kitamura. Kitamura’s A Separation remains one of my favourite novels of the past few years, one I think about often and will definitely read again. While I’m waiting for her next book, I thought I’d catch up with her first, which received excellent reviews at the time and sounds tough and compelling.
Every Day is for the Thief by Teju Cole. A novel that’s been on my to-read list for quite a while. I’m also hoping to include Cole’s book of essays, Known and Strange Things, which sounds fantastic.
The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud. This novel is written from the point of view of the brother of the Arab man murdered by Meursault in Albert Camus’s classic text L’Etranger and was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt in 2015, I’m intending to reread L’Etranger (for the first time in at least twenty years) immediately beforehand so I can properly appreciate the relationship between the two novels.
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine by Iris Murdoch. 2019 marks the centenary of Murdoch’s birth, which seems the perfect excuse to make the acquaintance of one of the three or four Murdoch novels I have yet to read. For the past several decades it’s been fashionable to sneer at Murdoch, so it’s nice to see her enjoying a tentative renaissance. I’ve been reading her since the age of sixteen and few novelists have afforded me such constant and consistent enjoyment and wonder and inspiration. It was Iris Murdoch, more than anyone, who first revealed to me the novel’s imaginative possibilities in their full madness and glory. I have read most of her novels several times and it is almost impossible for me to pick a favourite.
The Plains by Gerald Murnane. One way and another, I read a lot about Murnane last year without actually reading him. Time to put that right.
Beloved by Toni Morrison. Somehow I’ve never read this. See above.
The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner. I’ve not read Kushner either and this shortlistee from last year’s Booker is a novel I’m interested in not least because it seemed to divide opinion more than any of the others except the marvellous Milkman…
So there they are, my nineteen for nineteen. I don’t have any reading order in mind, just the broad intention to have read them all by the end of the year. I’m sure there will be books on this list that affect my reading and writing in unexpected ways, and I can’t wait to get stuck in.
For the past five years now I’ve been keeping a formal tally of the books I’ve read throughout the preceding twelve months, allocating each of them a mark out of ten and a paragraph or so of notes and observations. These scorecards act as informal aides memoires and are strictly for my eyes only, though taken as a whole and year on year, they provide a fascinating insight into the onward progress of my own reading. Failed projects, wilted enthusiasms, sudden insane passions, they are all charted here in these sequential Word documents. The very randomness of these reading journeys has served to frustrate and annoy me in previous years, leaving me with the sense that I could have done better, that I should have been more organised, that I didn’t stretch myself enough. I have resolved to do better in future, but in spite of all best intentions have rarely done so.
This year’s reading tally marks itself out as different in two distinct ways. Firstly, I have somehow managed to read getting on for twice as many books as what has come to be the norm for me. This might be partly on account of a lower average page count per book – I don’t know, I haven’t counted – but it is also the result of my having set aside more time specifically for reading. So whilst I am still well behind on what I would ideally have achieved, some progress has been made.
The other way in which my 2018 reading year feels different is that – and perhaps this is also a by-product of having read more books – I feel invigorated by the lack of a core focus rather than disappointed by it. I feel I have learned stuff this year, as much as anything by reconnecting with those aspects of literature that resonate most with me. I feel that I have been changed by my reading just as my reading has changed.
Something happened to me roughly halfway through the year, and that something was Eley Williams’s collection Attrib. It is difficult to articulate how hugely excited I was by these stories, which – rather like Camilla Grudova’s The Doll Alphabet last year – seemed to smash so many assumptions about what makes a ‘good short story’. Williams’s stories fall a long way from the Raymond Carver ‘slice of life’ archetype that has become the template for so many first collections and big competition winners. Rather, whilst never eschewing emotion – many of the stories in Attrib made me gasp aloud with their poignancy – they are mainly about language, about the many uses to which language might be put. They are about formal inventiveness, and they are never afraid to wear their intellect on their sleeve.
Reading these stories set a fire in me to up my game. More, to keep seeking out work that would challenge and inspire me in similar measure. Thus began a period where I read in quick succession a series of works that have marked this year for me in indelible ways: Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, which I can honestly say is one of the most perfect novels I’ve ever read, First Love by Gwendoline Riley, Universal Harvester by John Darnielle, The Cemetery in Barnes by Gabriel Josipovici, Munich Airport by Greg Baxter, Missing by Alison Moore, Caroline’s Bikini by Kirsty Gunn, Milkman by Anna Burns and Berg by Ann Quin, the pearl of them all, which has attained a kind of ideal status in my mind as the point where the hallucinatory power of language and the nervous drive of story become perfectly fused.
These works, and what I feel to be my collaboration with their authors in reading them, continue to resonate, working a profound change of mood and heightening of ambition within me and in my writing. In recent weeks I have also begun working my way through the T. S. Eliot Prize longlist, an experience that is proving similarly energising and instructive. In the raw power of words – the sounds they make – as well as the formal inventiveness on the page that sometimes only poetry can provide, I am stunned by the richness and erudition and energy of these collections, which have reconnected me instantly with the excitement and writing-hunger that overwhelmed me when first I read Eliot, Plath, Lowell, Szirtes, Fainlight. What I felt most on reading these new collections, some of them by new poets, was I’ve been away too long.
The vast part of my energy this year has been spent in constructing my next novel, The Good Neighbours. This is a book I first began to write about four years ago, when we were living in Devon. It has been through monumental changes since then, but the important work of the last six months has been sped on its way – goaded forward – by the driving inspiration provided by the works I’ve mentioned above, by the changes and development in my own writing practice that have occurred through this reading year. I finished a complete third draft of The Good Neighbours just a couple of days ago. I’m thrilled to have the book mostly done by the close of the year. What thrills me most is that it is my most personal and – to me – most risk-taking book yet. What I can say for certain is that it represents, exactly, where I am as a writer right now, a piece of ground I want to build on. In this at least, the book is a success. Whether it is a success in more outward-facing, worldly ways will be for others to decide.
Next year, my third novel The Dollmaker will finally be released into the world. What makes me most excited about this is that I am happy with the book, which sounds a simple and obvious thing to say but it really isn’t. The Dollmaker took a long time to come together but it came right in the end. The book being published in April is the truest and best version of itself that I could possibly make it, which is all any writer can aim for, really. I hope that those of you who choose to read it will love it as much as I do. I’ll announce details of events and interviews about The Dollmaker as they become available.
I am also thrilled to announce that in September Titan will be publishing a new and definitive edition of The Silver Wind. Titan have presented me with a wonderful opportunity not only to edit and revise the existing text, but to add new material. The new edition will include two previously uncollected Silver Wind stories as well as a brand new novella, which I always intended to be part of the original book but that never worked entirely to my satisfaction. I spent part of this summer redrafting that novella, and then re-editing the entire text as a continuum. I’m very happy with the results and hugely excited about having The Silver Wind out in the world in a form that feels complete and true to my intentions. I’ll be posting cover art here as soon as it’s ready, as well as a fuller description of the book itself.
2018 saw me publish criticism for the first time in The Quietus, a matter of particular satisfaction to me as I love that magazine. Its left-field and idiosyncratic approach to the arts feels particularly important in a world of increasing blandishment and I was especially pleased to make my debut there with an essay on the literature of 9/11 that necessitated a considerable amount of research and hard graft generally. Writing this essay, as well as another long one I wrote for Strange Horizons on the new TV adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock was an enriching experience that made me reassess my approach to criticism – not only the subjects I want to write about but the way I want to write about them. I would like to make my criticism more personal, for one, more contiguous with my fiction writing. I would also like it to be more focused on subjects that actively interest me, as opposed to fighting battles that cannot be won and that are in any case false conflicts. My first revelation along these lines came last year, when I resolved never again to use the falsely opposing terms genre SF and literary SF. This year it was the appalling standard of some of the debate around Anna Burns’s Milkman, of which a particularly offensive and need I add ignorant piece in the Times marked the nadir.
The fact is – and this should be obvious – that there is no conflict between books that focus on immersive narrative (‘a jolly good story’) and those that focus upon the ways and means by which such stories are created. One does not negate the other, any more than a reader who prefers one approach to putting words on a page should count themselves superior to those who prefer another. And yet I continue to see entire segments of the online debate around books polarising itself around precisely these non-existent issues. It’s tiresome and I’ve had enough of it. I won’t promise not to read any more of these articles (for the flesh is weak) but I am going to make a particular effort not to write any. I would like to focus instead on criticism that actively engages with work I identify with as a writer and consider to be important. The kind of critical writing we find at sites such as Splice and This Space are beacons in this regard, as are the informed and in-depth discussions on offer at the Backlisted and Republic of Consciousness Prize podcasts.
The ugliness and chaos of our current politics only serve to emphasize the necessity of writing and reading as far outside the box as we can bear to push ourselves. Writing is first and foremost the transmission of ideas and we should not doubt its importance. The work that readers and writers do together has always and will continue to form the building blocks of practical and philosophical change.
I have a new story out in the November issue of Clarkesworld magazine. You can read it here.
‘The Gift of Angels: an introduction’ was drafted in Paris last year, during my residency at Les Recollets. I finished the draft just three days prior to my departure – you could say the novelette takes place in real time. My return to Scotland was also an immediate return to work on the final draft of The Dollmaker and the then-current draft of the novel I am working on now, and so it was not until the end of this summer that I was able to complete the story and submit it.
Some readers might notice that ‘The Gift of Angels’ is a sequel, of sorts, to my 2016 story ‘The Art of Space Travel’, though the two works function entirely independently of one another. ‘Gift’ brings together elements of memoir, criticism and complete fiction in a way I had not quite dared to attempt before but that is coming increasingly to preoccupy me. I wouldn’t normally say this, but I love this story. I hope readers will enjoy discovering it.
My huge thanks to Neil Clarke at Clarkesworld for being open to the story’s possibilities, and to my French publishers and the wonderful people at La Maison de la Poesie and Les Recollets, to whom ‘The Gift of Angels’ is dedicated.
