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2018 Reading Roundup Part 2 – and onward to 2019

December 27, 2018 /

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.

2018 Reading Roundup: Part 1

December 10, 2018 /

In the first of two end-of-year posts I want to talk about my reading of crime fiction in 2018. Some of you may remember the Bute Noir crime reading challenge first thrown down by the organisers of Bute Noir way back in January. I thought this might be a useful and interesting framework for considering crime fiction and so it proved to be. While in one sense I failed the challenge – I did not manage to read a book in all thirty categories – I consider it a success in that it encouraged me to take in a broader spectrum of crime books than I might otherwise have encountered, all whilst reading a grand total of twenty-four titles overall.

BOOK WITH A ONE-WORD TITLE:

Sirens by Joseph Knox

BOOK PUBLISHED IN 2018

The Fountain in the Forest by Tony White (January 2018)

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara

BOOK WRITTEN BEFORE 1950

Double Indemnity by James M. Cain

BOOK BY A SCOTTISH AUTHOR

The Blackhouse by Peter May

BOOK SET IN SCOTLAND

Bloody January by Alan Parks

BOOK SET IN THE FUTURE

The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters

BOOK WITH REAL-LIFE CRIMES

This House of Grief by Helen Garner

Joe Cinque’s Consolation by Helen Garner

Death of a Murderer by Rupert Thomson

BOOK IN TRANSLATION

The Pledge by Friedrich Dürrenmatt

BOOK SET IN AMERICA

So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman

You Were Never Really Here by Jonathan Ames

BOOK SET IN NEITHER THE UK NOR THE US

The Shape of the Ruins by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

BOOK BY AN AUTHOR YOU HAVE NEVER READ BEFORE

Red Riding 1974 by David Peace

The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy

BOOK ADAPTED FOR THE SCREEN

On Beulah Height by Reginald Hill (ITV June 1999)

AUDIO BOOK

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey (read by Paul Young)

BOOK RECOMMENDED BY A FRIEND

Jawbone Lake by Ray Robinson

BOOK WITH A TITLE OF MORE THAN SIX WORDS

I Hear the Sirens in the Street by Adrian McKinty

BOOK THAT YOU HAVE STARTED BEFORE AND NEVER FINISHED

Laidlaw by William McIlvaney

BOOK BY AN AUTHOR OF COLOUR

Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke

BOOK BY A BUTE NOIR 2018 AUTHOR

The Cry by Helen Fitzgerald

So what did I discover? The short answer to that would be plenty, and that the loose and baggy genre of crime fiction is as riven with pleasures and problems as the loose and baggy genre of science fiction. Commercially I  suspect they have a lot in common, these two estranged cousins: both are dominated, on the online airwaves, by an inner circle who go to all the conventions, who tend to ignore the work of so-called interlopers (to shun it if said interlopers get too mouthy) and who believe in their hearts and minds that it is they who are the guardians of the ‘real’ stuff, that they alone understand their chosen genre and know how to write it. This line of reasoning can get rather dull. In the world of the reader, who in most instances knows little of the internecine squabbling that so frequently dominates so-called genre spaces, the reality is much broader and much more open to enquiry. On hearing of my interest in writing crime fiction, a wonderful friend of mine once said to me: it’s really very simple – all you need is a crime or a criminal to write about. His words have stuck with me, not least because they might apply equally to science fiction – just find something weird and interesting and possibly to do with an imagined future you want to write about– and because they demonstrate above all the permeability of genre, the tenuousness of its existence. What we’re saying when we talk about ‘the genre’is simply that we like certain kinds of stories, stories that tend towards uncovering and solving a mystery, stories that tend towards looking at the world in a way that would seem to expand the nature of what we call reality. Sometimes they do both. What is certain is that there are no rules as to who is allowed to tell these stories, and that those hierarchies that exist within so-called ‘genre circles’ are seldom if ever a reliable yardstick for finding their most challenging and memorable examples.

Far and away the best ‘troubled cop’ story I’ve read in along time and this year certainly was William McIlvaney’s magisterial Laidlaw. I am far from the first to express similar sentiments, and very late in discovering McIlvaney’s genius for myself, but what is it about his approach to the simple police procedural that raises it so high? There’s the writing, for a start. McIlvaney writes Glasgow –its speech and its rhythms – in an unadorned, unselfconscious manner that is a constant delight and matter for admiration. But he’s never afraid to express abstract ideas or to reach for the language that best expresses them. This kind of confidence to mix philosophy with street talk is rarely encountered and even more rarely successfully executed. In McIlvaney it comes across as easy assurance but what it is, of course, is the considered hard graft of the committed artist. Then there’s the story. No ludicrous plot twists or high octane car chases for our Willie and what a blessed, blessed relief that turns out to be. In Laidlaw we get a murder that like the vast majority of real murders is senseless, squalid, awful,should never have happened and that ripples out into the community with knock-on effects that are devastating, sad and unexpected. The whole ensemble resists sensation, and sensationalism. People travel around by bus. The understatement of the ending is possibly the most truthful and affecting I’ve ever read in a crime novel. The social attitudes are showing their age a little now but no matter, the underlying fabric and pure intent of this novel is so solid, so skilfully worked it will never age.

Of course a writer as skilful and groundbreaking as McIlvaney will have his imitators – who wouldn’t want to be that brilliant? But for every book as remarkable as Denise Mina’s The Long Drop there are a dozen instantly forgettable generic procedurals that serve only to reinforce the uniqueness of their inspiration, Alan Parks’s Bloody January being an interesting case in point. Allan Massie’s typically insightful review in The Scotsman lays out the case beautifully, and while it is clear from the overall soundness of the structure and attention to place that Parks cares very much about what he is doing, you can’t get away from the fact the results are merely adequate rather than special. Parks’s anti-hero McCoy is just your standard troubled cop, the Dunlops are cardboard villains and the victims are simply placeholders. The ambiguities and complexities that are the lifeblood of Laidlaw are all but absent.

Swapping Glasgow for Manchester, Joseph Knox’s debut Sirens suffers from similar problems. This debut novel arrived garlanded with praise and I was expecting something special, yet it disappointed me in similar ways to Stav Sherez’s The Intrusions from 2017. Both have wanker protagonists and not in a good way (are we meant to feel sympathy for poor, beleaguered, addicted, semi-disgraced Aidan Watts? Short answer, I didn’t), both are novels awash with predictably sexist attitudes hidden beneath the guise of ‘look at me, I’m exposing sexism’, both attempt to cover middling to poor character work with convoluted and ultimately tedious plots. In both cases, the writing is fine – always serviceable, occasionally even interesting, but any effort here is ultimately futile because the overall concept is just so tired.  

Across the water in Northern Ireland, Adrian McKinty’s I Hear the Sirens in the Street could have been just as uninspiring but somehow it saved itself. In so many ways it’s a bad book – unconvincing third-act denouement, bolt-on musical references (some of which are anachronisms – see the reference to an Arvo Pärt record in 1984, also the idea that someone might not have heard of Blondie by the same year) and above all appalling gender politics – the scene where Duffy seduces Gloria is the worst-written in the entire novel – which, again, do not come across  as ‘gritty analysis of how sexist things were in the 1970s’ so much as just… sexist. However, there’s something about this author’s voice that made the novel extremely, likeably readable. Duffy’s a bit of a dick but I still got on with him. The police work– when we’re not in that final shoot-out – is interesting and makes for a good detective story. The sense of place is excellent in spite of too much clunky political exposition. While I Hear the Sirens in the Street cannot compete with the sheer writerly excellence of a novel like Laidlaw, I were in the mood for an ultimately pointless but pleasurable procedural I could well find myself choosing another in this series. McKinty has flair. And some of his jokes were actually funny, so kudos for that.

Moving from the gritty, city police procedural to the provincial detective story, I found interesting comparisons to be made between Peter May’s The Blackhouse, set mostly on the Isleof Lewis, and Reginald Hill’s On Beulah Height, set in Yorkshire. I found On Beulah Height to be a very good police procedural. Intelligent,forensically detailed, great sense of place and an entirely convincing portrayal of small-town life – it’s immediately clear why Reginald Hill garnered so many fans. There’s nothing groundbreaking here, at all – but with this kind of attention to detail and overall respect for craft, a book like this can be amply enjoyed for what it is, which is a good story, well told. My expectations for May’s The Blackhouse were similarly high. Unfortunately they weren’t met. While the writing about the island and its traditions is good, solid stuff, the plot is a great lolloping mess of a shaggy dog story. Murder, bullying, paedophilia, repressed memory,death of parents in a car crash, death of aunt from cancer, death by plummeting from a rock (father and son), fake rape confession – is there anything that isn’t in this book?? It’s all very pat, very generic, and that’s without the rampant,unconscious sexism on the part of the author – the objectification of women is constant and boringly consistent, and guess what? Not one woman has a real role or genuine agency – such dullness should be outlawed. Far more of a problem in police procedural terms is that The Blackhouse simply doesn’t deliver: there is way too much soul-searching-via-flashback (the whole novel is ultimately one giant flashback) while the murder itself turns out to be mostly irrelevant. (The original murder in Edinburgh that kickstarts the whole business is indeed never mentioned again!) I think it’s fair to say that I was disappointed.

Far more interesting to consider are the two novels I read in the ‘author I’ve not tried before’ category. Both giants of crime writing, I had hitherto read a great deal about David Peace and James Ellroy without actually having sampled a novel from either one of them. It was time to break that duck. In both cases I’m glad I did, though for differing reasons. I consider the Channel Four adaptations of Peace’s Red Riding novels to be masterpieces of the small screen, some of the best British TV since Peter Flannery’s Our Friends in the North. There’s an interview with Peace that I’ve read multiple times, in which he states the importance of creating crime fiction that stems from lived reality. For me, pretty much everything Peace says about writing and crime fiction in particular is inspirational and thought provoking in the most constructive way possible –which is why I felt surprised and not a little cheated to find him breaking some of his own rules. The background to Red Riding 1974, the sense of place and time is, as we might expect, impeccably drawn, yet the violence and torture involved in the crimes at the heart of the novel are gratuitous and have little to do with the times, incorporating precisely the kind of serial-killer-thriller tropes so rightly decried by Peace in his interview. His portrayal of women is just a joke, with ‘our hero’ Eddie no hero whatsoever in this respect. Also how come Eddie himself is so ready with his fists? He’s meant to be a journalist. We learn next to nothing about him, about his motivations, and his readiness to resort to insane levels of violence and misogyny undermines any belief we may have in his fight for justice. It’s hard to escape the impression that this is yet another novel about men using their supposed (and mostly unconvincing) rage at the death of female children as an excuse to get into it with each other, which makes me sad, because Peace’s writing is compelling and plays merry havoc with the established formulae of the police procedural.

All that being said, I will return to Peace and I will complete my reading of the Red Riding Quartet, because the sense of place, the texture of his reality is Gordon-Burn-good. In addition to that, there is the sense with Peace that he is self aware about his blind spots, that he is constantly pushing himself towards new levels of insight. Which is more than I can say for James Ellroy and The Black Dahlia. Ellroy is famous as a monster of ego, which for me makes that ego itself a trope and therefore dull.So he owns thirty guns and thinks he’s the Beethoven of crime fiction, so what? Ellroy’s writing is as tight as a drum and on that level he really is the natural heir to Chandler. But his attitudes – which I’m guessing are meant to shock us with their retrograde offensiveness, a constant tirade of ‘this is how it was, guys, so suck it up’ – are so unexamined and so much a barrel of cliché– mean streets, tough cops taking it to the lowlifes and paedos and (mostlyMexican) scum, trouble at t’ LAPD mill where it’s hard to tell the heroes from the villains in a world where women, unless they’re madonnas, whores, or murdered bodies don’t exist at all – that reading this book becomes almost laughably tedious. To paraphrase another stroppy American, he cannot be serious. The scene where one of our heroes is driven to psychotic levels of outrage by… the existence of lesbian sex had me totally bemused. To use a well worn phrase, it’s like watching a child throw its toys out of the pram. I’m kind of interested to read one of his more recent novels, just to see if Ellroy has grown up at all, but it might be a while. I cannot stress how much betterJonathan Ames handles a similar milieu and street scene in You Were Never Really Here, and if you are interested in how to write effectively and with genuine impact about violence against women then Cara Hoffman’s So Much Pretty is excoriating,brutal, brilliant, as well as being one of the most accomplished crime novels I’ve yet read. If it’s noir you’re after, you could do a lot worse than return to the heartland. James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity is a beautifully crafted mystery with a satisfying simplicity and economy of style that many more modern practitioners would benefit from taking note of. You could read this in almost the same time it takes to watch the movie and enjoy it just as much.     

Myencounter with Josephine Tey, in the audio book category, was interesting. Teyis often portrayed as the overlooked outsider, a master of Golden Age crimefiction whose visibility has been overshadowed by the perennial popularity ofAgatha Christie. It just so happened that Radio 4 Extra were rerunning PaulYoung’s unabridged serialised reading of Tey’s The Daughter of Time earlier in the year, which made for a perfectopportunity to discover this important and underappreciated writer for myself. The Daughter of Time features Tey’sregular detective, Alan Grant, as he researches a cold case while laid up inhospital after an accident with a burglar. The cold case in question is themurder of the two Princes in the Tower, supposedly ordered by their uncle, thefamously dastardly bastard Richard III. But is the case as open and shut as thehistory books would have us believe? This novel is at its heart an explorationof the way in which history is created after the fact, and I have to say Iloved Tey’s investigative approach, her use of detective fiction to tackle animportant subject, her obvious passion for the misrepresented ‘hero’ at theheart of her novel. I actually preferred this treatment – that energising linkbetween past and present – to Hilary Mantel’s brand of needlepoint reimaginingin Bring Up the Bodies, which I alsofinally got around to reading this year and found rather static. Tey is sharp,acerbic, funny. If it weren’t for the painful layers of internalised misogyny, The Daughter of Time would be theperfect bedtime detective read.     

Another unexpectedly perfect procedural was Ben Winters’s The Last Policeman. An investigation that takes place against the background of Armageddon-by-meteor, this turned out to be a really excellently put-together book that works equally well as a police procedural and a work of science fiction. The claustrophobic atmosphere is striking, the characterisation of our protagonist, obsessive cop Henry is great. As science fiction, The Last Policeman impresses precisely because the SF is approached from a sideways angle. A sad, affecting novel that speaks to our times. I’ll definitely be coming back for the sequels. More disappointing to me was Attica Locke’s Southern procedural Bluebird, Bluebird. I’ve heard such great things about Locke’s novels and many of them are true. As an examination of race issues in the South and the trauma and inequality and personal danger involved in being a Black cop not just within a racist society but within a persistently racist law enforcement apparatus, Locke’s voice is essential and important. But although the characters are solidly crafted – what a welcome change it makes to read about a policeman who goes against the ‘troubled cop’ stereotype – in essence, Bluebird, Bluebird is just a standard whodunit. From the ecstatic reviews I’d read of Locke’s work I’d imagined something deeper and more game-changing, more interestingly written.

I have to say that Ray Robinson’s Jawbone Lake disappointed me a little, also. Robinson’s feeling for the Peak District is intense and real and he does not shrink from revealing the stark divisions within the community. For those who live on the Nether Tor Estate and work in the local ice cream factory, the climate is harsh and unforgiving and it is only those with means and leisure who are able to rejoice in the landscape as it appears in hotel brochures. Rabbit especially is an interesting character – her talent for mathematics, the way we see her gradually begin to heal after the death of baby Jasper – but the great hole at the centre of this book is the wealthy Arms family. Joe is a blank slate and a real pain, we barely get to know Eileen, Bill is well drawn but there are leaps in logic. CJ’s crimes themselves are boringly predictable and we never really get an ‘in’ as to why he went down that road or what he was like. There is some excellent writing about Joe in Hastings but the eventual denouement is too simplistic –Joe’s money solves everything, which feels like a cop-out. Also, the gun battle in the hotel room is just plain stupid. I kept wondering, above all, what inspired Robinson to write this novel because ultimately it felt like a hollow book and I much preferred his earlier mystery, Forgetting Zoe.

The Cry by Helen Fitzgerald is a great deal better as a novel than in its recent BBC screen adaptation. The TV series works by withholding crucial information for almost half its length. I’m not a fan of withholding as a narrative technique and it is to Fitzgerald’s credit that her original novel does not make use of it. As readers, we learn the brutal facts of this case within the first fifty pages. The suspense is generated – as it should be – through character and relationships: what will happen to whom when the truth becomes known. There’s nothing flashy or particularly evocative about Fitzgerald’s writing but she knows how to get inside the skin of a person and the situation in which she places her characters makes for compulsive reading. If it weren’t for the stupid ending – the too-convenient dispatch of the most odious character (not that they don’t deserve it, it’s just a cheap move) – The Cry would score highly with me as an original and thought-provoking thriller. 

Some of the my absorbing and satisfying reading this year has come in the form of true crime – indeed I am constantly on the lookout for new or previously overlooked works at the high end of this category. Anyone interested in crime writing should be reading Helen Garner. I read This House of Grief and JoeCinque’s Consolation in close succession and found them dauntingly good, onso many levels– clarity of vision, self-analysis, factual detail, sentence structure, social comment, characterisation, the showing, the telling, sheer writerly beauty. I’m intending to read everything Garner has written. One’s heart breaks for Michelle McNamara, who devoted more than a decade to what can only be called a private detective’s quest to discover and unmask the true identity of the Golden State Killer. McNamara died before she was able to complete her book detailing these investigations, and less than three years before the killer was finally arrested. The book – I’ll Be Gone in the Dark – was posthumously completed by crime writer Paul Haynes, a journalist, Billy Jensen, and McNamara’s husband Patton Oswalt. We can feel grateful for their dedication and close attention and respect for what McNamara wanted and as a unique entry in the annals of true crime, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is indispensable. We cannot ignore the fact though that McNamara’s tragically untimely death means the book is flawed. It is only really the sections McNamara completed that glow with intent and commitment, that feel fully realised. The rest read like bridging material, which of course and through no fault of anyone’s is exactly what they are.   

The most satisfying books in crime as in any area of literature tend to be those that do not fit easily into any category, that confound expectations. Tony White’s The Fountain in the Forest contains some of the best police procedural writing I have encountered – gritty, dense with detail, obsessively forensic – and on the level of a detective story it is entirely satisfying. That it also works as an experimental novel of the OULIPO school, and as a work of political and social commentary gives it a denseness and what I can only call composure that few novels in any genre can hope to emulate. Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s The Shape of the Ruins is the very best kind of autofiction – the kind that is actually about something. It is also an important account and interpretation of historical events, an investigation of conspiracy and obsession, an immensely satisfying chunk of effortlessly beautiful writing (brought to non-Spanish speakers in Anne Maclean’s effortlessly beautiful and idiomatic translation) and – of course – a dark and disturbing murder mystery. Vasquez is one of the most interesting and important writers working. The narrator of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Pledge would have us believe that all detective fiction is a waste of time – before plunging us into a detective story we cannot help but consume in a single sitting. The Pledge is part of Pushkin Press’s Vertigo imprint, devoted entirely to crime fiction in translation, a goldmine of fascinating titles, many of them available in English for the first time. Leaving the best till last, Rupert Thomson’s Death of a Murderer might almost be described as an anti-crime novel. The action, if it can be called that, takes place over a single night,as a police officer is sent to guard the body of an unnamed murderer (it’s Myra Hindley) on the eve of her funeral. As he looks back to the time of the original crimes, strange truths and darker memories begin to be revealed. Thomson explores the lives most of us lead – ordinary tragedies illuminated by moments of danger and hubris and daring. Beautifully judged, humane, dignified,unusual, subtle, sad and uplifting, Death of a Murderer is quite simply a stunning book, perfectly understated and immaculately told. It also shines a necessary light on our love for detective fiction, on our own motives and ambitions for reading and for writing it.  

Well, that was my year in crime fiction, a journey that has been informative, inspiring, compelling, sometimes frustrating, occasionally ludicrous, always fascinating. A journey I am intending to continue in 2019 as I seek out ever more challenging and weird examples of detective fiction as well as revisiting some old favourites. In the meantime, I aim to return here later this month for Part 2 of my End of the Year reading summary, in which I’ll talk about books that aren’t about murder, or at least not specifically, aswell as reading and writing plans for the year ahead.  

Grodek

November 11, 2018 /

Am Abend tönen die herbstlichen Wälder
von tödlichen Waffen, die goldnen Ebenen
und blauen Seen, darüber die Sonne
düstrer hinrollt; umfängt die Nacht
sterbende Krieger, die wilde Klage
ihrer zerbrochenen Münder.
Doch stille sammelt im Weidengrund
rotes Gewölk, darin ein zürnender Gott wohnt
das vergoßne Blut sich, mondne Kühle;
alle Straßen münden in schwarze Verwesung.
Unter goldenem Gezweig der Nacht und Sternen
es schwankt der Schwester Schatten durch den schweigenden Hain,
zu grüßen die Geister der Helden, die blutenden Häupter;
und leise tönen im Rohr die dunkeln Flöten des Herbstes.
O stolzere Trauer! ihr ehernen Altäre
die heiße Flamme des Geistes
nährt heute ein gewaltiger Schmerz,
die ungebornen Enkel.

(Georg Trakl 1914)

The Gift of Angels: an introduction

November 3, 2018 /

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.

All Hallows Eve!

October 31, 2018 /

In celebration of Hallowe’en, here’s the interview piece I put together for Black Static #65 about Catriona Ward’s scintillating second novel Little Eve – your Hallowe’en reading, sorted!

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Little Eve: an interview with Catriona Ward

 When I heard that Catriona Ward had a new novel coming out, I felt nervous as well as excited. Her debut had been exceptional. Set on Dartmoor during the tumultuous apotheosis of the Victorian age, Rawblood was a philosophical drama disguised in the costume of high gothic, exploding on to the British horror scene in 2015 as an instant classic. Rawblood expertly combined elements of the traditional ghost story – the isolated house, the family curse, the doomed quest for arcane knowledge – with a deeply felt social insight that, together with Ward’s expressive, lyrical writing and passion for story, set it apart from other essays in period horror and signalled the arrival of a major talent.

By her own admission, Rawblood was for Ward a passion project. Inspired by the landscapes that defined her childhood and the stories and novels that helped to form her both as a thinker and as a writer, her debut took more than seven years to write and went through dramatic evolutionary changes in the process. The end result reveals none of the doubts, reversals and sheer hard graft that would inevitably have accompanied its journey into print. In terms of its language, style and formal innovation, Rawblood feels so fully achieved it is difficult to believe it is a debut. But there is more to Rawblood than a great story, professionally told: the book also comes across as deeply personal, a genuine culmination of a writer’s vision. This is rarer than you might think, especially in genre fiction, where new writers are coming under increasing pressure from agents and editors to deliver novels that they feel will satisfy market expectations.

Rawblood found considerable success, both with genre aficionados and also with a more mainstream audience, readers who might not normally have felt entirely comfortable picking up a horror novel. I was proud to be a member of the jury that awarded Rawblood the 2016 British Fantasy Award for best horror novel. I was eager to see what Ward would produce next, yet at the same time I felt anxious for her. An author’s first book is written largely in isolation, and in most cases is not subject to a deadline. The follow-up – the ‘difficult second novel’ – is another matter. You won’t normally be given seven years to write it, for a start. And if you’ve done your job properly the first time around as Ward did, you might also have acquired some fans, all excitedly scouring the internet for news of your next publication date. You’re not alone any more – a fact that is deeply gratifying but also a pressure. Suddenly, there is a weight of expectation that, inevitably, some writers will struggle to fulfil.

The good news for all of us is that Catriona Ward has fulfilled it, in spades. Her second novel, Little Eve, is just as good as Rawblood, if not better. I was lucky enough to be sent an advance proof, and am delighted to report that for the six hours or so it took me to read it, I quite literally did nothing else. This does not happen often.

For writers, the increasing tendency to relate to books as text to be analysed, scrutinised and criticised can make it difficult to suspend disbelief, to recapture the pure reading pleasure that characterises our encounters with the novels and stories that made us writers in the first place. While reading Little Eve, I truly felt myself to be a reader again.

The stylistic achievement that marked out Rawblood as something special is equally assured. Ward’s sense of place, her rapturous, almost dream-like evocation of characters in a landscape is immersive and bewitching. But for all its beauty of language, Little Eve works equally successfully as a page-turning thriller. Again, this does not happen often, and Catriona Ward should be congratulated on producing another novel that will be beloved of both seasoned horror fans and more mainstream literary readers – those unfortunate souls who think they don’t even like horror – alike.

 

The action of Little Eve takes place over a period of some thirty years, from the penultimate year of World War One until the immediate aftermath of World War Two. We move some six hundred miles north, swapping the Dartmoor wilderness of Rawblood for the village community of Loyal and the small offshore island of Altnaharra, north of Inverness, in the Scottish Highlands. The island is home to John Bearings, a man who came north in search of sanctuary for himself and his adoptive ‘family’, a group shunned by the local community on grounds of their supposed immorality even as they are pitied for their material poverty. Early on New Year’s Day 1921, a local man, Jamie McRaith, makes a bloody discovery: John Bearings and his acolytes have all been murdered. The one survivor, a young woman named Dinah, insists that the murderer is her adoptive sister Evelyn, known within the family as Little Eve.

As we move back and forth along the narrative timeline, we discover that the story of what really happened on Altnaharra is stranger and more terrible than it initially appears. It is also far less straightforward. Little Eve is compellingly readable and rich in sonorous gothic sensibility. It is also a thought-provoking indictment of the British class system, the position of women in Edwardian society and the wilful blindness and skewed morality of enclosed communities. Ward has created an unforgettable cast of characters. Her vision is unflinching, the story she tells is wrenching and raw, which is not to belie the powerful lyricism of her writing. On finishing the novel, I found myself buzzing with theories and suppositions, alternative trains of thought. I sat down and wrote to Catriona with some questions about Little Eve, which she has been good enough to answer for us here.

 

NINA ALLAN: The first thing we notice about Little Eve is its setting. As with the Villarca house in Rawblood, the island of Altnaharra is an isolated outpost in an already inhospitable location. The Dartmoor of your first novel is a defining presence, and you have spoken many times in interview of the importance of Dartmoor in your personal and in your writing life. Both the village of Loyal and the island of Altnaharra are imaginary, yet the sense of place that permeates Little Eve is as vivid and as vital to the story as the real places of Rawblood. Why did you choose to set Little Eve in the Scottish Highlands, and what came first, the location or the story?

CATRIONA WARD: Dartmoor is deeply embedded in Rawblood, and vice versa. It’s part of my emotional landscape and the setting of many of my dreams. I wanted to infuse the text with that. Longing for and memory of place is such an important part of Rawblood, the novel is an extended hymn to home.

I don’t know the Highlands in the same intimate way. It was a lack of familiarity that Little Eve needed. There’s an unease to the characters’ relationship with their setting. The Children are strangers in Scotland, invaders and also prisoners. Also, Highland place names are so wonderful – some I invented, like Loyal, but others like Tongue, Altnaharra and Ardentinny I merely borrowed. From the first and for all sorts of reasons, the idea for Little Eve was inextricable from the Highlands setting.

NA: As well as the gothic elements, Little Eve also involves some of the tropes of classic golden age detective fiction. In Christopher Black we have the obsessive, ostracised investigator, whose career has been ruined by his relentless quest for the truth about John Bearings and his adopted family. The closed, intimate circle of suspects, the theme of mistaken identity – the spirit of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White hovers over this novel – are also key elements, with the truth about the murders remaining in question right up until the end. Do you enjoy detective fiction, and to what extent did writers like Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allan Poe and even Agatha Christie provide inspiration for Little Eve?

CW: Wilkie Collins is a big inspiration. The Moonstone is both an excellent gothic novel and the original detective story. Detective fiction is the most reassuring genre of all – it provides a problem with a solution and a culprit – an answer. I began Little Eve with a fully evolved detective plot, intending it for a conventional mystery. But you don’t always control what you write. It became something stranger. Agatha Christie meets The Wicker Man, maybe? Crime literature in general has some things in common with the gothic – both genres ask the reader to play detective, to follow a thread to a dark truth. I wanted to draw out some of those commonalities in Little Eve.

NA: The most sinister character in Little Eve is undoubtedly John Bearings himself, yet as readers we always see him at one remove, through the eyes of other, unreliable narrators. Was it a conscious decision of yours, to keep ‘Uncle’ and his monstrous crimes partly obscured by shadow, and if so, why?  

CW: I made a considered decision to deny him a narrative voice. John Bearings doesn’t deserve any time in the light. It’s a feminist act to exclude him from the narrative. Or perhaps I just didn’t want to inhabit him! In the end I found that Little Eve isn’t about him at all, really. It’s about how the women and children under his control suffer and try to survive. It’s about ingenuity, about kindness blooming amidst horror and about faith, though not the kind he peddles.

NA: The position of women in Victorian and Edwardian society is a dominant theme of yours, both in Rawblood and in Little Eve – indeed it could be argued that these novels represent a reclaiming of the gothic for the female voice. Have you ever found yourself frustrated by the way women are portrayed in horror fiction? How far is the balance being redressed now in contemporary works?

CW: I am frequently frustrated by how women are portrayed in all sorts of genres! Horror still relies heavily on portrayals of vulnerable women. There’s a prurience to a certain type of horror gaze. But I think the gothic sidesteps that quite cleverly and has always naturally lent itself to the female voice. It’s a knowing, sometimes quite wry genre that illustrates the horror of power, usually male power. I wish that as a society had we had outgrown the need for such fictional mirrors to be held up to life… but we definitely haven’t.

NA: Scientific explanations for supernatural phenomena, and the apparent conflict between faith and rational argument form key plot elements in both Rawblood and Little Eve. This conflict and the instability of its resolution has always loomed large in gothic writing – Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein springs immediately to mind, so does R.L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Do you see horror and science as natural bedfellows, and why might this be?

CW: Horror and science resemble one another so closely, at times. The history of scientific discovery, particularly in medicine and pathology, is truly horrible. James Marion Sims developed pioneering gynaecological techniques still used today – by performing experimental surgeries on twelve slave women without anaesthesia. Only three of the women’s names are recorded – Anarcha, Betsy and Lucy. We should remember them.

The idea of a dialogue between the rational and supernatural, or faith and science, is part of the bedrock of gothic literature, as you say. But these are not discrete concepts. They all bleed into one another – and they are all attempts to circumvent mortality. The gothic recognises that all these strategies will ultimately fail. It looks uncomfortable realities in the face – which is why it’s such a powerful genre. It goes to the heart of things.

NA: What draws you particularly to historical fiction? Do you see horror essentially as period drama, or might you feel tempted to relocate to a contemporary setting at some point in the future?

CW: Historical fiction can serve as a lens, casting a particular light on the now. Period drama helps us parse today. And I feel a need to distance myself from my characters’ situations. Writing is so intimate and the further I remove the narrative from my own external concerns, the freer I feel to explore my protagonists’ inner ones. A good way of doing that is to embed the novel deeply in another time. But I’m trying something new, at the moment – I’m in the midst of my third novel, which is contemporary, and told from the point of view of a serial killer’s cat. I am really enjoying writing as a cat.

NA: You have spoken of your admiration for classic gothic texts such as Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre but who, for you, are the most exciting voices in contemporary horror?

CW: There seems to be horror in all good art – some of the authors I’m drawn to might not be perceived as strictly ‘genre.’ Kelly Link manages a powerful alchemy, mingling magical realism with everyday horrors and using the language of genre. I can never quite work out how she does what she does. Gemma Files is wonderful, as is Michelle Paver, and Lauren Beukes. Justin Cronin’s the Passage saga is epic and immersive – it was a wrench to leave that world, at the end. I was glued to my seat during ‘Get Out’ – what an original idea, brilliantly executed.

 

(Catriona Ward’s Little Eve is published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson)

The Cemetery in Barnes

October 28, 2018 /

One might most fittingly describe this novel as entranced, enchanted, trance-like. As in Alain Resnais’s 1961 film Last Year in Marienbad, there is a deceptive stillness over everything, as we obsessively revisit certain phrases, images, personages in an ever-tightening pursuit of an elusive truth.

The Cemetery in Barnes focuses on an unnamed protagonist, a translator who dwells recursively on three specific periods in his life: in Carlton Drive, Putney, with his first wife (in a flat in a two-storey Victorian house, the text informs us, though interestingly if you look at Carlton Drive on Google Maps you’ll see it’s mainly post-war apartment blocks with a scattering of three- and four-storey Victorian villas. The only two-storey Victorians are in the walk-through between Carlton Drive and East Putney station, Earnshaw Place. Yeah, this book really rubbed off on me…) in Paris, where he lived and worked for some years after the death of that first wife, and the farmhouse in the hills above Abergavenny, where he lived and threw convivial dinner parties with his second wife.  Whilst recalling these places and people, the translator grapples with the intractability of certain issues of translation – Italian to English (Striggio’s libretto for Monteverdi’s Orfeo), antique French to English (du Bellay’s Regrets), English to French (Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis).  An unassuming man, with few material needs. An otherworldly man, above all a self-absorbed man. A harmless man? Perhaps, perhaps not…

Josipovici’s novel is essentially a twisted retelling of Orpheus and Euridice. The protagonist’s first wife dies by drowning, the second by fire, both plunge ‘into hell’. In both cases, the protagonist – this botched Orfeo – is unable or unwilling to save them. What are initially presented as relationships of unswerving devotion gradually reveal aspects of themselves that do not fit. Was the first wife having an affair with ‘the bearded maths teacher, Frederick Aspinall’? How companionable is the continuous ‘banter’ between the protagonist and his second wife, and was this wife similarly being unfaithful with ‘the retired civil servant’, Wilfred?

It is interesting to note that the only people ever named in this novel are Frederick Aspinall, the retired civil servant Wilfred and his wife, the ‘horse-faced’ Mabel – a fact that strongly suggests these people are seminal, important. Is the protagonist actually a murderer? A double murderer? In the cases of both wives, we are offered alternative visions of what actually happened to them: the first wife slips down the river embankment in Putney but is able to scramble out of the water further down. She later dies, we assume, of pneumonia contracted through her immersion in the Thames.  The first wife slips down the embankment, plunging into the water to disappear immediately and permanently from our sight. The police question the protagonist about why he didn’t make any attempt to save her, and by the way, does he need a lawyer?

In the Brecon Beacons, the protagonist and his second wife watch as firefighters try to extinguish a blaze that is consuming a barn. The blaze burns out of control and the firemen are ordered to retreat. In the Brecon Beacons, the protagonist watches the farmhouse he shared with his second wife burn to the ground, unable to believe the ‘charred bodies’ he is shown were once people.

Indeed, the protagonist’s only quantifiable reality resides in words, the intricacies of language, the effect and difficulties of rendering one language into another. We have no idea if our translator truly ‘regrets’ anything – everything we learn about him sounds false or questionable to a degree, and we are reminded that the French words for translation and betrayal sit uncomfortably close together. An insistent reference to Emily Dickinson’s poem A Narrow Fellow in the Grass earlier on in the text comes back to haunt us – a snake in the grass, then, who is the narrow fellow?

I also could not refrain from asking myself: was this man ever actually married to either of these women or were they just a stalker’s fantasies? Read, read between the lines, see what you think. Whatever you come to believe, the stalker theory is certainly a possibility.  Beloved horrors, indeed. Well might our traducer dwell upon them. A further oddity I kept dwelling on was how persistently this novel brought to mind the equally beguiling and disturbing book The Life Writer, by David Constantine, also a translator…

Josipovici’s use of language and metaphor is as close to perfect as any writer might dare to imagine: unadorned, understated to the point of nihilistic, clear and limpid as a mountain stream, coursing invisibly through a cleft in the Black Mountains above Abergavenny. No extraneous words and few adjectives, the repetition of certain phrases and images take on the affect and mechanism of poetry. And so meaning is fashioned.

This is the kind of novel often referred to by detractors as ‘plotless’. It numbers fewer than a hundred pages. Just sit with it awhile, let it reveal itself. Once revealed, it is unforgettable, and a masterpiece.

Time and the Milkman

October 17, 2018 /

Last night was Booker night. We watched the highly enjoyable BBC Four documentary celebrating fifty years of the Booker before segueing more or less immediately to the announcement of the 2018 prize itself. When Anna Burns’s name was read out for Milkman, I found myself overcome with emotion in a way that has not happened to me during the thirty-five years I have taken an interest in the prize. I started reading Milkman at the end of last week. When people asked me what I thought of it, I had replied ‘I think it’s brilliant, but there’s no way the judges are going to let it win – it’s too experimental’. Rarely have I been over-the-moon happier to be proven wrong.

Milkman was the novel on the Booker shortlist that no one was talking about.  In almost every online discussion of this year’s Booker, Burns’s was the book that was seen as an also-ran, almost an irrelevance in the betting stakes, actual or theoretical, that always accompany this most visibly contentious of UK book prizes. In those moments where it has been discussed, commentators have reached invariably and somewhat lazily for the adjective ‘Joyceian’,, yet MIlkman is not Joyceian in any truly comparable sense. Burns’s use of language is less joyous stream of consciousness than careful construction, a coded letter home from dystopia, an eloquently guarded articulation of the unsayable.

Nor is Milkman just – simply, dismissably – ‘about the Troubles’, though particularly in these farcical weeks and months of Brexit insanity there are many – way too many – who would do well to think more about the Troubles than they apparently are doing.  Milkman explores the ways in which not just armed paramilitaries but common or garden bullies, the bigot next door, can and will thrive during those times when democracy is in abeyance. It speaks eloquently to #MeToo, yes, but also to the way in which all minorities are sidelined, silenced and abused while those not directly affected turn a blind eye. It speaks, even, of what it is like to yearn for higher expression, to yearn to read books in a place and time where that activity is seen as somehow suspect – isn’t it always? – and to have that yearning twisted dangerously against you.

Most of all, Milkman is conspicuously, triumphantly, the work of a writer in mid-career, a writer who spends her days doing what she does, committed to what she does regardless of fashion or favour, regardless of what is going on out in the literary establishment. She clearly never saw Milkman as her ‘breakthrough’ – it was just her next novel.

This year’s Booker judges have been similarly committed, and courageous, right from the beginning. The longlist this year was outstanding, and the shortlist – unlike so many – did not contain one stick of dead wood. As I’m sure must be the ideal of every judging panel, any of the six books they chose had behind it a solid argument for its being the winner. That the judges carried the courage of their convictions right through to this most fitting of conclusions is not just unexpected, it is an affirmation of what literature – and the Booker Prize – should be about. What greater proof of this could there be than what Val McDermid said about her experience of being on the jury:

‘It has provoked a restlessness in me. I am thinking about how I can push my own writing in different directions and not do the same things again and again and again. If you’re a writer, everything you read gives you pause: You’re always looking for something you can steal or something you want to avoid. This has really taken me outside the usual tramlines of what I read.’

In the words of this year’s Booker chair of judges, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Milkman ‘is enormously rewarding if you persist with it. Because of the flow of the language and the fact some of the language is unfamiliar, it is not a light read [but] I think it is going to last’.

I think it is going to last. This should surely be the statement against which all potential Booker winners should be tested. Congratulations to Anna Burns, and well done those judges.

Holy Smoke!

October 1, 2018 /

I finished reading Simon Ings’s latest novel The Smoke last night. By coincidence, this morning’s Start the Week programme on Radio 4 featured a 45-minute interview with the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. Anyone with an interest in writing science fiction – or anything, really – should listen to the Harari interview, and then follow it up with a reading of The Smoke, in which Ings appears to explore an alternate future whilst actually detailing the same unfolding rupture in our realworld present that Harari describes.

I will be writing about The Smoke in greater detail soon. For the moment I just wanted to point out that this is one of the must-read science fiction novels of 2018, and that Simon Ings is one of the most original and accomplished science fiction writers working today. I would also highly recommend Jonathan Thornton’s interview with Ings for Fantasy Hive, packed with important and insightful thinking on The Smoke, the science fiction community and writing generally.

Notes from the roadside

September 19, 2018 /

Autumn in Scotland is possibly even more difficult for me than it always has been. I love the light of spring and summer in the north so much, when even at midnight there is still a residual brightness in the sky. I like to encourage myself by thinking of all the work I need to get done between now and next March! I’ve been rereading Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic this week, for a non-fiction project I’m working on, and I could feel my heart rate increasing as I turned the first page.

There are certain novels – and I’m sure it’s like this for every science fiction reader –  from which you only need revisit a couple of pages to be reminded of why it is that you’re crazy about science fiction. Novels that churn up memories so powerful they bring  tears to your eyes. You know there are no novels quite like this in mimetic literature, that in some incalculable yet inarguable way they articulate what being a reader and being a writer is about. Resistance to consensus. Provocation. The opposite of what Don DeLillo has called the corporatisation of the writing classes.

It could be something about the story itself, or the form the novel takes, or a combination of both. A rawness of purpose and of expression, a determination to say something unexpected and necessary, together with the urgency of saying it. Touchstone novels, the ones you would give a friend to read if they came to you with the question: why SF?

“The sidewalk was coming closer and the boot’s shadow was falling on the bramble. That’s it. We were in the Zone! I felt a chill. Each time I feel that chill. And I never know if that’s the Zone greeting me or my stalker’s nerves acting up. Each time I think that when I get back I’ll ask if others have the same feeling or not, and each time I forget.”

The same feeling I experienced the first time I set off with Will on his journey to the White Mountains in John Christopher’s Tripods trilogy, or sat down with the doctor and teacher to watch that first extraordinary demonstration of a new technology in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine.  That sense of apprehension and excitement that says the world is not, or not entirely, what we think we perceive.

An American Story

September 7, 2018 /

This week marks the publication of Chris’s fifteenth novel, An American Story. As always, the business of living and writing alongside Chris as he worked on the book – seeing the novel take shape – has been a unique privilege. I’ve been party to some amazing discussions, watched some fascinating footage, discovered a renewed interest in a subject that, truth be told, should be preoccupying each and every one of us more than it does.

In common with many novels, An American Story had a peculiar and protracted genesis. Chris had long been interested in 9/11 as subject matter, with the factual anomalies that began to proliferate in the reporting of the attacks seeming almost as worthy of attention as the attacks themselves. However, it was not until personal circumstances intervened that he began to see a way to write about it. The dedicatee of An American Story, Don Greenberg, is an American magician Chris met when they were both serving as guest judges of the Stage Magician of the Year competition organised by the Magic Circle. Don also happens to be an airline pilot of some thirty years experience, a fact that proved even more interesting to the both of us than his life in magic. Over lunch one day while we were still living in Hastings, we took the opportunity to quiz Don about his work as a pilot, and so it happened that he began, almost as an afterthought, to tell us about his experiences on 9/11.

Names and places have been changed, of course, but the tense and powerful sequence that grounds the events of An American Story in lived reality – Ben’s flight on September 11th from Charlotte to Detroit – is drawn directly from the story Don told us. Even the late-running Aussie passenger is real – many readers will remember how flight delays due to late boarding were not only a thing back then, but an annoyingly common one. Indeed what Chris found so compelling about Don’s story was the background normality of it, the irruption of the extraordinary into the routine. Here at last was a way to write about 9/11.

His original idea was for a non-fiction book, a diary of the day told from the point of view of people – like Don, like the passengers on his plane – who were not directly affected by the attacks but who found themselves nonetheless caught up in the seismic ripples the attacks generated. An exhibition on the theme of false memory at the Freud Museum in London altered the direction of travel – what if someone believed they had been involved in 9/11, but really hadn’t been – and with the proliferation of ‘fake news’ on both sides of the Atlantic it became increasingly clear to Chris that the subjects he wanted to talk about would be most effectively tackled through his more accustomed medium, fiction.

The result is a book of uncommon power that speaks uniquely to our times. I cannot think of any other novel in the still-developing literature of 9/11 that seeks to address not just the horror and tragedy of what happened – the facts on the ground – but the consequences even as they continue to affect and shape the political realities of the present day.

Readers should note that in the novel’s title, the words ‘American’ and ‘story’ are of equal importance.

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