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Folklore Thursday #2: Little, Big by John Crowley

June 10, 2021 /

My fourth novel The Good Neighbours is published today! It has taken its time getting here and I’m not just talking about delays due to COVID. Right from the beginning, The Good Neighbours was an elusive, troublesome book that – like the fairy folk that skitter between its pages – needed a great deal of persuasion to reveal its true form. I loved working on the novel though, even as it played its tricks on me, because the characters of Cath and Alice, Shirley and Johnny – especially Johnny – seemed to be counting on me to get their stories told. I hope you enjoy them, and that the book speaks to you, leading you along pathways you might not have explored otherwise.

As The Good Neighbours makes its way out into the world, I thought I would celebrate its arrival with a deep dive into the world of what must count as THE work of fairy literature, John Crowley’s perplexing, genre-defying, mind-expanding, World-Fantasy-Award-Winning novel Little, Big.

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When celebrated literary critic Harold Bloom, author of The Western Canon, described the Harry Potter books as ‘rubbish, only fit for the dustbin’, and decried Stephen King as ‘an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis,’ he stirred up a backlash that is still ongoing, even in spite of Bloom’s death in 2019. His polemic has often been seen as a denouncement of speculative fiction in general, although those with more than a passing interest in Bloom’s pronouncement will quickly discover that his expanded canonical lists include many works of science fiction and fantasy, including H. G. Wells’s scientific romances, David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, Thomas Disch’s On Wings of Song and most famously John Crowley’s 1981 novel Little, Big, which Bloom described as ‘a neglected masterpiece… the most enchanting twentieth century book I know’.

When I look at The Western Canon and Bloom’s unbending defence of his entrenched position on what counts as ‘important’ in literature I tend to feel sad and vaguely troubled rather than outraged. Bloom’s passion for literature is self-evident: he spent a lifetime reading it, studying it, writing about it, defending it. Yet his determined rejection of all schools of criticism other than his own led him ultimately towards a blinkered understanding of how fiction works. The defence of any so-called canon over and above another will always run the risk of becoming little more than a defence of one’s own personal taste over someone else’s. Goodness knows it is difficult – I myself have often found it difficult – to accept that objectivity in criticism, the idea of objective standards of literary excellence, is a chimera, but in order to progress as a critic one needs not only to accept it, but to take it as a starting point.

Bloom later disowned his extended lists, claiming they had only been included as an appendix to The Western Canon at the insistence of his publisher. I would dearly love to know which of the several hundred works Bloom cites in those lists were indeed his true choices, which he would stand by today if he were still around to argue. I cannot help believing that Little, Big would assuredly be among them. Bloom claimed Crowley’s novel as ‘the closest achievement we have to the Alice stories of Lewis Carroll’ – and it is surely no coincidence that one of Crowley’s key characters is named Alice. (There is an Alice in The Good Neighbours, too, but I swear that was an accident.) On a sentence-by-sentence basis, to paraphrase Bloom, I would find it impossible to categorise Crowley’s novel as anything but a masterpiece. For any sad soul out there who might still be willing to insist that fantastic literature is not literature, I would like to see that person tying themselves in knots trying to put the screws on Little, Big.

Is Little, Big the ultimate fairy fiction? Probably. When he was asked in a recent interview why he chose the fairy world as the secret subtext of his novel, John Crowley answered thus:

It might be more true to say that the fairies chose me. I was trying to write a long family chronicle novel, and I wanted my family to have some sort of special thing, some secret knowledge passed on from generation to generation. I couldn’t think what it could be. I can remember the day when somehow thoughts about the book intersected in my mind with some Arthur Rackham fairy pictures I’d seen, and the two just fell together. I can almost remember the street I was on.

I first read these words on Saturday June 5th, in the course of preparing this article, yet they conveyed themselves to me as an uncanny post-figuring of what I myself had written here at this blog last week about the fair folk nudging their way into The Good Neighbours. So this is where we are, and Little, Big is exactly that kind of book.

Like so many family sagas, Little, Big opens (more or less) with a wedding. Our protagonist, Evan ‘Smoky’ Barnable, has fallen instantly in love with Daily Alice Drinkwater (you want to know why she’s called that, read the book) a very tall, very unusual young woman he happens to meet at the house of his friend, George Mouse, who is Alice’s cousin. Invited to meet the family at Alice’s home, Smoky is given some very strange instructions on how to get there. The home in question is called Edgewood, an upstate mansion originally designed and built by Alice’s great-grandfather, John Drinkwater. Drinkwater was an architect, (in)famous for his monograph The Architecture of Country Houses, an abstruse and complicated thesis that argues for the existence of a parallel realm. Drinkwater’s theory of faerie, if I may call it that, posits that the visible world of human beings is but one ‘circle’ of the Earth’s existence, the outer ring in a concentric maze of worlds, each more magical and harder to penetrate than the last.

There are doors between worlds, Drinkwater believes, doors not everyone believes in and few will find. The further in you go, the bigger it gets.

For Alice and her sister Sophie, their magical inheritance – the ability to see fairies – is simply a part of life. For Smoky it is a troubling facet of his beloved he would rather ignore. As with all family stories, the further in you go, the more complex it gets, and though Smoky’s love for Alice and hers for him is never brought into question, that does not mean their allegiances will not be tested. Meanwhile, in the world beyond Edgewood, troubling changes are taking place. As the balance of power between kingdoms threatens to tip from light to dark, the struggle for political ascendancy in the human realm turns deadly. The repercussions are terrible, for ordinary people most of all. For Smoky and Alice’s youngest child Auberon, adrift in a New York that has become almost an alien city, the youthful quest for independence quickly becomes a struggle for ordinary survival:

It was all upside down now. At Edgewood, upstate, night held no terrors, the woods there were tame, smiling, comfortable. He didn’t know if there were any locks that still worked on the many doors of Edgewood, certainly he’d never seen any of them locked. On hot nights, he’d often slept out on open porches, or in the woods themselves, listening to the sounds and the silence. No, it was on these streets that you saw wolves, real and imagined, here you barricaded your door against whatever fearful thing might be Out There, as once the doors of woodsmen’s huts were barred; horrid stories were told of what could happen here after the sun has set; here you had the adventures, won the prizes, lost your way and were swallowed up without a trace, learned to live with the fear in your throat and snatch the treasure: this, this was the Wild Wood now, and Auberon was a woodsman.

The shattering disjuncture between the first half of Little, Big and the second brings to mind another great family chronicle, J. B. Priestley’s Time and the Conways, a 1937 stage play that follows the fortunes of a family from the years immediately after the first world war up until the eve of World War Two. In the first act, the Conway family celebrate the birthday of Kay, the eldest of the Conway children, as well as the return of Robin, who has just been demobbed. The prevailing mood is one of optimism and energy as they look towards the future and the fulfilment of cherished ambitions. The second act takes place twenty years later, and everything has changed. As the clouds of war begin to darken the horizon yet again, no one’s life has turned out as they envisaged, and the waste of potential and squandering of dreams is a palpable grief. Alan, the quieter and more reflective of the two Conway brothers, comforts Kay by explaining his theory that time is not linear, but spatial, that all time exists simultaneously and nothing good is ever truly lost.

J. B. Priestley was fascinated by time as a dramatic element, and by the theories of J. W. Dunne in particular. I first encountered Priestley’s Time Plays in a Radio 4 adaptation of Dangerous Corner in 1984, followed by a BBC production of Time and the Conways a year later. Priestley’s treatment of his themes – the treachery of time, the shifting sands of memory and the double-edged outcomes of the choices we make – had a profound effect on me, and I’m pretty sure that for me as a writer the Time Plays have left as great a mark as any other work of literature I have encountered.

Crowley’s genius in his use of fairy mythology is his insistence – like Priestley’s – of treating the two impostors of fantasy and mimesis just the same. In Priestley’s Time Plays, we see layers of time unravel as one version of the future is played off against another. We are never told, exactly, which outcome is ‘real’ – only that the potential for both exists simultaneously and is balanced on a knife-edge. In Crowley’s Little, Big, Smoky Barnable struggles to come to terms with the conflicting versions of reality experienced by himself and by his wife, Alice. Smoky sees his lack of belief as a lack, period. For Alice, the matter of belief is unimportant; what is, merely is, and time – like the concentric realms described in her great-grandfather’s magnum opus, like the theory of non-linearity described by Alan Conway – is circular and therefore infinite.

The final chapters of Little, Big, in which Crowley describes how the Drinkwater family leave the world of Edgewood and pass into another, still more secret realm, are as elusive and brilliantly imagined as anything I have encountered in the literature of faerie. But Little, Big is greater even than that. A work of deep metaphysical imagining that poses as a soap opera, a mythical perspective on our own troubled century, an examination of class and privilege, a Tale of true love(s)? Truly, the further in you go, the bigger it gets…

Folklore Thursday #1: The People Under the Hill

June 3, 2021 /

June 10th sees the publication of my fourth novel The Good Neighbours. By way of celebration, I’m going to be posting an essay a week through the month of June under the #FolkloreThursday hashtag, delving into the magic and mystery of the fairy mythology that forms one of the book’s defining strands. To begin, I’m going to cast an eye over humanity’s timeless obsession with the fairy world, as well as sharing a handful of my own favourite fairy fictions.

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Most of us learn about fairies at an early age. It seems strange, when you think about it as an adult, that our parents and grandparents, from whom we most commonly hear our first fairy tales, are so eager to impart to their young children stories of an eldritch otherworld that might swallow them forever. A secret kingdom that exists in tandem with our own, from which magical beings might emerge to visit us, to spy on us as we sleep, to trick us into dangerous behaviours or, on occasion, to steal us for themselves. What were they thinking? we might ask ourselves now, even as we ourselves pass on similar stories to our own best friends, cousins, step-brothers, children or children’s children. Because fairy tales are strange tales, designed to give us pause for thought, structured to demand our deeper engagement with what we really believe, parables that teach us, more than anything, that appearances can be deceptive, that the world we see before us may be more than it seems. Such duality can be frightening. It teaches us that our human lives are built on shifting sands.

I loved – no, rather, I was obsessed with fairy stories from the time I could first understand them. Happy to consume dark, sordid tales such as The Snow Queen and Rumpelstiltskin alongside Arthur Rackham’s rapturous fairy paintings, Enid Blyton’s Your Book of Fairy Stories and Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies of the Garden, my first encounter with fairies in the real world came with the loss of my first milk tooth, and my parents’ immediate insistence that I offer it as a gift to the tooth fairy. You might get a reward, they hinted, and I can still remember the excitement I felt, slipping my hand beneath the pillow as I awoke, the feel of that bright piece of silver, different somehow from other money and what with that nagging mystery tugging at my brain – how on Earth could anyone get that coin under my pillow without waking me up? – it never occurred to eight-year-old me to wonder what were the fairies doing with all the teeth?? If I were to consider the question now, the story I would tell would have something to do with biological data capture, with the fairies’ collating of human code for nefarious purposes. And we give it over voluntarily, you see, that’s the horror of it. Our children’s DNA, sold for a shilling… 

You can see how my imagination is apt to fly away with me, how the subject of fairies still exercises its mystical allure. As a writer, what I love about the fairy world is its dark ambiguity. Even as children, we learn that fairies grant wishes but they also throw curses, that lurking behind every fairy godmother is a bad fairy at the christening. Be careful what you wish for, in other words, and a deeper, more considered dive into fairy mythology reveals that the fair folk are neither good nor bad, only themselves. We humans are the alien invaders, clod-hopping beasts in a numinous realm we cannot hope to safely navigate, or understand.  

I believe in fairies as the imaginative embodiment of the unknown, the kingdom we enter in dreams or glimpse at twilight from the corner of an eye, the promise inherent in all of art that there are other worlds than these. At a more prosaic level, fairies are symbolic of the fact that we often fail to notice what is under our noses. My first published story ‘The Beachcomber’ might be classified as a piece of fairy fiction. ‘Fairy Skulls’, written ten years after that, identifies itself. My fourth novel, The Good Neighbours, started out as a mystery novel loosely inspired by a family murder in the West Country. It was not until I began writing about Johnny Craigie, the taciturn carpenter who everyone has pegged as a murderer but who might just be a genius, that the little people – the Good Neighbours of the novel’s title – began inveighing themselves into the narrative, and I realised I had embarked upon a journey still more difficult and more mysterious than the one I’d first imagined.    

It was almost as if I’d been tricked – pixie-led – into writing The Good Neighbours, as if the fair folk themselves were demanding to be included in what turned out to be, after all, their story.

Over the next few weeks I will be delving deeper into fairy mythology, exploring more of the works and ideas that make these stories so compelling and so perennial. In the meantime, I will leave you in the company of five of my favourite works of fairy fiction – disturbing and beguiling in equal measure, these are books to spirit you away to another world.

The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue. This 2006 novel tells the story of a boy who is taken from his home by fairies and forced to become one of a gang of changelings. These wayward creatures mature in mind as the years pass, though their bodies remain frozen in childhood, at the moment of their abduction. Henry Day, or Aniday as he is rechristened, roams the countryside in search of food and shelter, becoming increasingly forgetful of his human self. Meanwhile, the changeling left behind in his place begins to develop memories of a time before his abduction, when he had a place and a rightful future in the world of humans. Chilling, beautiful and poetic, Donohue’s novel was inspired by Yeats’s poem ‘The Stolen Child’, a magnificent piece of fairy fiction in its own right.   

The Iron Dragon’s Daughter by Michael Swanwick. Jane is a human slave in a dragon factory managed by elves (which is all you need to know, right?) After forging a relationship with one of the sentient machines, she bands together with some other changelings and plots their escape. Released into a world of unstable factions and multitudinous dangers, Jane travels deep inside the fairy realm in pursuit of her true identity and ultimate purpose. Swanwick’s exploration of fairy mythology is dark and original and desperately real, made all the more frightening by the glimpses of our own world – Jane’s world – that are briefly offered up to us before being ripped away. The Iron Dragon’s Daughter is simultaneously a thrilling adventure and a philosophical investigation of reality itself.

The Good People by Hannah Kent. Kent’s second novel has its roots firmly in historical reality as we meet Nora Leahy, an Irish countrywoman who inherits the care of her grandson Micheal when her daughter tragically dies. Once a healthy, well developed child, the little boy who comes to live with her seems utterly changed, and utterly impervious to Nora’s desperate attempts to love and care for him. Convinced that her real grandson has been replaced by a fairy changeling, Nora enlists the help of Nance Roche, a local wisewoman, in forcing the fairies to return the boy. The results are horrific and disastrous for both women. Kent’s use of language in summoning a world of rural isolation – a world in which ancient beliefs and superstitions have as much influence on people’s everyday lives as the weather and the local priest – is a miraculous intersection between the keenly observed and the fearfully imagined. Most of all, her summoning of changeling mythology as a tool with which to interrogate the entrenched misogyny of the period makes The Good People an essential work of feminism as well as a cornerstone of fairy literature. I reviewed the book for Strange Horizons here.  

Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng. An original and marvellous twist on the missionaries in space trope, Under the Pendulum Sun gives us missionaries in fairyland. Laon Helstone has journeyed deep into Arcadia, the kingdom of the fae, in search of new understanding and new converts. Nothing has been heard from Laon in some time, and so his sister Catherine, desperate for news of him, decides to follow in his footsteps. Arriving at the castle of Gethsemane, Catherine finds herself a virtual prisoner, with the mansion’s strange and secretive inhabitants reluctant to reveal even the smallest amount of information about the whereabouts and wellbeing of her absent brother. Ng’s novel is one of the most interesting and well achieved fantasy debuts since Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, drawing on classic gothic tropes, the lives and literature of the Bronte sisters as well as philosophy and theology to deliver a story that is striking in its literary ambition and in places genuinely chilling.

The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox. A modern, sharp-eyed take on some classic tropes, Knox’s epic takes us on a journey that sees the fairy realm invaded by demons with our own world held to ransom. Taryn Cornick is still desperately grieving for her dead sister. She believes Beatrice was murdered – but has no idea why. She especially has no idea about the finer details of her own past, or the true nature of the house at Prince’s Gate, from which all her most precious memories ultimately stem. Knox’s fairyland can be a dangerous place, but then so can our own world, and as Taryn struggles to overcome her own demons she is not always a safe person to be around. The Absolute Book is a rich and complex achievement, a new masterwork of fantasy, which I reviewed for the Guardian here.  

Weird Wednesdays #17 (with apologies for it being Thursday): Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann

May 13, 2021 /

The first known appearance of the joker-vagrant Till Eulenspiegel in German literature comes with the publication of an anonymous chapbook in 1510, though his origins in folklore and oral storytelling most likely date back still further. Since then, his incarnations have been multitudinous and varied, including operas, comics, novels and films. To get some idea of the importance of Till Eulenspiegel to German culture, a British audience might find it useful to think of the centrality of Robin Hood to our own myth-making and storytelling, most especially in the protean, elusive nature of such a character, neither wholly hero nor villain, always on the move, forever reinventing himself as befits the time and place.

Daniel Kehlmann’s most recent novel Tyll, translated from the German by Ross Benjamin and shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, sets the action at the time of the Thirty Years’ War. Tyll Ulenspiegel is born the son of a miller, Claus, who finds himself a miller more by disagreeable luck than critical judgement. Claus Ulenspiegel’s true passion is for ideas – ideas that, with witchfinders roaming the land and a religious war on the horizon, turn out to be dangerous not only for him but for the entire village. Tyll, who from a young age shows a perspicacity and insularity that sets him apart from other children, is quickly forced to rely on his own resources. Brute twists and turns of fate, combined with Tyll’s mercurial and essentially unknowable nature, make for a picaresque narrative of unexpected happenings and unusual daring.

As is usual and ever-delightful with Daniel Kehlmann, the story does not proceed in a straightforward fashion. Instead, we are offered a series of discrete snapshots, shuffled like a deck of cards, dropping us in and out of Tyll’s life and times at irregular, non-linear intervals, so that even as we reach the end there are still gaps that can only be filled by our own imagination. As in a painting by Bruegel, certain figures dart forward to capture our attention, before sloping off into the background, making space for someone else. And the story is as much about the troubled social and political landscape in which it takes place as its eponymous hero. The Thirty Years’ War left many thousands dead, and was responsible for the deaths of millions more through the poverty, displacement, disease and starvation that it inflicted. One of the most powerful effects of the COVID pandemic, for me, has been the way in which it has revealed our residual closeness to events that previously seemed quite distant. Hilary Mantel has been brilliant at evoking the strong political parallels between our own time and the time of the Tudors. In Kehlmann’s hands, history is similarly pliable, similarly present.

Most of all, it is Kehlmann’s deft and original approach to the fantastic that illuminates this novel, that lends it the timeless allure and magical slipperiness of its jester protagonist. The land our little troupe travel through is alive with spirits and goblins, witches and will o’ the wisps, with hunches and premonitions, with gods and monsters that are as much the creatures of a nation’s troubled psyche as of her boundless forests, things only half-seen that still cannot be unseen because we know they are there. Kehlmann’s evocation of a magical landscape is nothing more and nothing less than the conjuring of a time in which magic and religion, alchemy and science mixed freely among the crowds, sowing their own brands of dissent and chaos, of healing and treachery among the people of a world – as continues to be proven – not so very different from our own.

In his refusal to provide answers or pass judgments, Kehlmann proves himself as tricksy and light-fingered as his shadowy hero. Tyll is a distillation of wonderland, a casket of ambiguous treasures. Beware his Midas touch – it may leave you with asses’ ears.

SF Classics: The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

April 28, 2021 /

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.” (Matthew 10: 29.)

As we patiently wait for this year’s Clarke season to get underway (we have been reliably informed this will happen soon) I have been travelling back in time to revisit some older works of science fiction, some of them past winners of the Clarke, some of them now ascended to the status of classics. I like to do this periodically because I enjoy it, because I have never failed to find it instructive and fascinating. The field of science fiction is now so big and so diverse it would be impossible to encompass all of it in a single lifetime; nonetheless, there are certain works that keep cropping up, works you hear about so often there is often the sensation of having absorbed them by osmosis. Which cannot compare with having actually read them, a fact illuminated for me this week as I finally caught up with Mary Doria Russell’s landmark novel of first contact, The Sparrow.

The Sparrow won the Clarke Award in 1998, the same year Mary Doria Russell was awarded the Astounding Award for Best New Writer and the BSFA Award for Best Novel. She had already won the Tiptree Award in 1996, The Sparrow’s year of (US) publication. A big winner then, a big hitter. Looking at the 1998 Clarke Award shortlist now and in the light of having just read The Sparrow, Russell’s win seems obvious, a no-brainer. Reviews at the time universally praised the novel for its humanity, its depth of vision, its refusal to provide the reader with easy answers. I would describe The Sparrow as absolutely classic second-wave, social SF, as close to the Le Guinian ideal as you could get without actually being Le Guin. Reading it was enough to make me fall hopelessly back in love with this kind of close focus, unironic, problem-based science fiction, to remind me not just of the point of it but the sense of urgency it can carry, especially in our current times.

The Sparrow is a deep, dense, difficult novel that stands equally as a classic of political fiction, philosophical fiction or social commentary. Yet the question that nagged at me most persistently during my reading was as to whether The Sparrow would get published today, in its current form, by a science fiction imprint?

The Sparrow is the story of Emilio Sandoz, a young Jesuit priest from a poor background in Puerto Rico who has experienced trouble and violence throughout his childhood. His talent for languages has taken him into many other disadvantaged communities all over the world, and when the SETI program at Arecibo begins to pick up verifiably alien radio communications, Emilio is stricken with the passionate desire to travel to their source, to meet the aliens for himself and come to a greater understanding of God’s purpose.

The mission to Rakhat, organised under the aegis of the Jesuit Society, seems at first to be astoundingly successful: Emilio and his comrades make a safe planetfall, soon coming into contact with peaceable rural hunter-gatherers called the Runa. Through a series of increasingly complex interactions and misfortunes , the travellers become aware that they have barely scratched the surface of the planet’s culture and reality. When Emilio eventually returns to Earth, he is not at all the same man who left. The novel offers a tense and thrilling chronology of what really happened; it equally examines the question of whether Emilio will ever be able to come to terms with that.

Commentary on The Sparrow tends to focus on the question of faith: what is it, and can it be maintained in the face of one’s own error, wrongdoing or personal suffering? Mary Doria Russell was brought up a Catholic, though she later declared herself an agnostic before converting to Judaism. Matters of faith and the nature of the religious experience have preoccupied her throughout her writing life and the delicate, empathetic, wholly non-judgmental way these issues are handled in The Sparrow makes for a profound and thought-provoking reading experience. The novel is equally a powerful meditation on the erroneous and damaging assumptions of ‘enlightened’ colonialism, the harm that can be done to others simply through ignorance; the humans contaminate the ecology of Rakhat simply by being there, and their uninvited presence in the lives of the Runa community has ramifications they cannot even guess at. That Russell introduces these questions without seeking to apportion blame makes The Sparrow doubly powerful and three times as interesting.

For The Sparrow is, above all, a novel of character. The first third of the novel is spent exploring the lives and complex histories of the principal characters, their relationship to one another and how they came to be involved in one another’s fates. There is an intricacy here, a willingness to sit down with people and learn about them, that is absolutely central to the success and impact of the novel as a whole. If I were to draw a comparison, it would be with the densely layered character work undertaken by Emily St John Mandel in Station Eleven: without the complexity and detail of the sections set before the Georgia flu pandemic, Station Eleven would be just one more post-apocalyptic ‘band of brothers’ novel. It is Mandel’s centring of character, of individual psychology that lifts it above and beyond, that makes the book extraordinary. So it is with The Sparrow, and I can only hope that if a new writer were to produce a comparable work today, they would meet with the kind of editor prepared to fight for the book on its own terms, rather than conceding to a commercial pressure that certainly exists, to ratchet up the tension, to keep the action moving, to get to the point.

In the very best fiction, the journey very often is the point, what it reveals about a set of characters in a particular environment. You could argue that science fiction especially is precisely about that. The Sparrow is a magnificent achievement. Russell’s novel is now a quarter of a century old, yet feels timeless in its storytelling. It absolutely did make me fall back in love with this idea of science fiction, and I would like us to see more of it.

Stay At Home Literature Festival 2021

April 23, 2021 /

Just a reminder that I will be discussing my new novel The Good Neighbours as part of the Stay At Home Literature Festival at 7 pm this coming Monday, April 26th. You can book your Zoom invite here, and the good news is not only are tickets free, but they’ll give you access to the whole festival!

The event I’m taking part in is entitled The Scene of the Crime, and my fellow panelists are William Shaw and Rebecca Wait. William’s most recent novel The Trawlerman is a compelling murder-mystery set in and around Dungeness, on the Kent coast. I visited Dungeness many times while I was living in Hastings and it is wonderful to see this unique landscape being brought so vividly to life in William’s excellently plotted, skilfully told story. Rebecca’s most recent novel Our Fathers is set on a Hebridean island and centres itself upon a shocking act of murder within a small community. Becky evokes the island landscape and sensibility with sensitivity and insight and the story she has to tell is powerfully dark.

William, Becky and I will be talking about our various approaches to writing place, the importance of landscape in fiction and what attracts us to the mystery and crime genres. It should be a great discussion, so consider yourself invited!

Do check out the rest of the festival, too. There are some incredible writers taking part, and this is a unique opportunity to listen to their stories from the comfort of your own armchair. See you there!

Beyond Good and Evil: a Golding symposium

April 9, 2021 /

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of taking part on an online symposium on the work of William Golding, organised by Arabella Currie and Bradley Osborne, under the aegis of the University of Exeter (nice to be back there, if only via Zoom!) This turned out to be one of the most inspiring and energising events I have yet taken part in, with engaging contributions from everyone involved and some excellent discussion. The artwork and storyboarding shown to us by Adam Gutch, who is developing an animated movie of The Inheritors, left us all feeling more than a little eager to see that project come to fruition. And the paper on the science fictional sensibility of Golding’s sea trilogy from poet and scholar William Stephenson was another highlight in a day that was all highlights. I had not realised Exeter boasts such a rich treasure trove of original Golding material, and the wonderful presentation from head of heritage collections Christine Faunch made me determined to visit the archive personally in the future.

My own part in the proceedings came soon after lunch. You might remember how my interest in Golding was reignited by the Backlisted podcast’s discussion of The Inheritors last year, in particular the contributions from Una McCormack on Golding’s place in the history of British science fiction. It was a real joy to be able to carry on those discussions with Una in person during our joint presentation, ‘Beyond Gaia: Golding and Science Fiction’. Una gave a fascinating talk on how Golding kicks away the genre scaffolding and dives deep into the heart of speculative ideas, and I followed this up with my own short paper on what some have claimed to be Golding’s most enigmatic novel, Darkness Visible, the full text of which is below.

I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to everyone involved in making our event such a success – organisers, speakers and audience – and here’s hoping we can someday meet again in person for more discussion and fruitful sharing of ideas.

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Alien Country: William Golding’s Darkness Visible and the anatomy of the strange

In his review of Darkness Visible for the London Review of Books in 1979, the Oxford scholar and critic John Bayley summoned the spirit of Borges to describe Golding’s fiction:

“Borges​ has written that the writer is like a member of a primitive tribe who suddenly starts making unfamiliar noises and waving his arms about in strange new rituals. The others gather round to look. Often they get bored and wander off, but sometimes they become hypnotised, remain spellbound until the rite comes to an end, adopt it as a part of tribal behaviour.

A simple analogy, but it does fit some novelists and tale-tellers, preoccupied in the midst of us with their homespun magic. They are not modish, not part of any literary establishment. Nor is there anything of the showman about them: Dickens was a magician in another sense, the sense that goes with the melodrama and music hall, and tribal magicians are not creators as Dickens and Hardy were. Their appeal has something communal, as the Borges image suggests, and the shareability of a cult. America lacks this type of magician – the shamans there are grander, more worldly, more pretentious – and the German-style version of Hesse or Grass is too instinctively metaphysical, not homespun enough. Richard Hughes was one of Britain’s most effective local magicians; John Fowles has become one; William Golding has had the status a long time.”

We might choose to quibble with Borges’s use of the term ‘primitive tribe’; we might equally dispute Bayley’s summary dismissal of American and German novelists as purveyors of magic. What makes Bayley’s review of Darkness Visible interesting to me – aside from the fascination of reading a piece of criticism contemporaneous with the novel itself – is how closely it coincides with my own view of Golding as one of what I have come to think of as the maverick strain in British fiction: novelists who, though seldom regarded as such, reveal a secret stratum of the fantastic amidst a literary geology more commonly described in terms of its obsession with novels of social mores, its tendency towards mimesis.  

When American critics talk about the genealogy of science fiction they present us with a lineage that begins with the pulp magazines of the 1920s, that pays homage to the holy trinity of Campbell, Asimov and Heinlein. Fantastic literature written earlier – or that does not accord with a set of fuzzy and increasingly spurious set of definitions – is too often dismissed as ‘proto-SF’ or ‘not really SF at all’. Long before I had ever heard the name of Hugo Gernsback, or had any inkling that science fiction was supposed to adhere to any specific set of arbitrary man-made criteria, I was beginning to discover for myself a more home-grown, or to echo John Bayley homespun genealogy of the fantastic that appeared to have grown up organically, not from any pre-determined magic spell but from the independent-minded, endlessly curious and – yes – maverick spirits of the writers themselves.

I didn’t know Beowulf then but I did know Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights and The Woman in White. I knew H. G. Wells and his Time Machine, Aldous Huxley and his Brave New World, John Wyndham and his Kraken. As I grew older and read more widely I was delighted to discover echoes and resonances of these elder gods in the work of George Orwell, Iris Murdoch, Rumer Godden, Mervyn Peake and JG Ballard, John Fowles, Doris Lessing and Christopher Priest. These writers, it seemed to me, offered me a view of my native landscape and cultural background that seemed to accord more closely with my imaginative experience than either American science fiction writers – mostly aliens! – or the British mainstream literary canon.  

An early and immediately beloved discovery in this hierarchy of misfits was William Golding. I would not like to guess at the number of times I read Lord of the Flies between the ages of twelve and twenty – I can only say that the story horrified, bewitched and inspired me in equal measure. I quickly went on to read Pincher Martin, equally wondrous and, to use a Golding word, weird. I have not counted Golding’s uses of the word weird in Darkness Visible; perhaps I should have done, given that no other word seems as apt to describe it.

Darkness Visible is thought of by many as the most enigmatic of Golding’s novels, which is interesting, given that it is unarguably the most modern. Published in 1979, Golding actually began writing it in 1955. In its first, tentative incarnation it was actually a science fiction story entitled Here Be Monsters, set in the future amidst a landscape of accelerating nuclear proliferation. It is famously the one work of his he consistently refused to discuss. It tells the story of Matty, an orphan child who stumbles from a burning bomb site at the height of the London Blitz, Sophy Stanhope and her twin sister Toni, prodigiously intelligent yet morally adrift, and Sebastian Pedigree, a paedophile teacher who is both disparaged and sheltered by the institution that employs him. The action centres upon the town of Greenfield, a suburb of London situated on the fault-line of post-war austerity and modernising, multicultural Britain.

Matty’s origins and parentage are never discovered – his constantly misplaced surname is used to symbolise the mystery of his fiery origins. As he grows towards adulthood, the facial scarring he incurred as a result of the bombing is a constant visual reminder of his apartness. Yet Golding leaves no doubt that Matty’s essential separateness from his fellows runs much deeper than physical appearance.

Matty’s vision of the world is as a mysterious other, a realm in which good and evil fight for supremacy, symbolised for him in the perfect shining roundness of the spherical glass paperweight in the window of Goodchild’s Rare Books. When he becomes unwittingly drawn into the simmering conflict between Sebastian Pedigree and the school’s headmaster, the fallout is tragic, impacting itself not only on Matty’s immediate future but ultimately on the fate of every character in the novel. 

By contrast, the Stanhope twins Toni and Sophy view the world through a lens of cynicism shading to nihilism, the fruits of parental neglect combined with an innate surfeit of self-awareness. Toni runs away from home at the age of sixteen, quickly becoming involved with a terrorist group perpetrating outrages in Europe and the Middle East. Sophy’s spiritual rebellion appears more subtle, yet its end results are scarcely less disastrous. In literary terms, Matty and the twins are opposing devices; the scarred outcast Matty touched by the divine, the preternatural physical beauty of the Stanhope twins standing in pointed contrast to their moral vacuity.

For me though, Golding resists such simplistic analysis, and Darkness Visible is infinitely more complex, more ambiguous. Matty is morally good, but he is not a freethinker. He ‘does not get the code’ and so his goodness is rather like that of Frankenstein’s Monster: an innate innocence that is also rigid, shaped by and subject to the rules and rhetoric of organised religion and with a similarly unexamined outcome. Sophy Stanhope is a symbol not of evil but of existential disenchantment. She struggles within the bonds of existence as it is, strains towards something greater, a larger meaning to everything. She seeks in a way that Matty cannot – because she comes from a place of larger understanding, of participation in the world.

As a writer who veers instinctively towards the multi-stranded narrative, I find Darkness Visible to be a miracle of construction, its strands linked together not just through the reappearance of familiar characters but through the interacting perspectives of those characters. Hence we are told that Matty first encounters Sophy and Toni Stanhope as ‘two enchanting little girls’ gazing into the window of Goodchild’s Rare Books, or that Sebastian Pedigree’s return to Greenfield after his first spell in jail coincides with their mother Muriel Stanhope’s leaving.

Golding’s breaking of the fourth wall is a subtle thing, a slipping glimpse of postmodernism rather than a full immersion, yet it is a beautiful thing nonetheless and contributes significantly to the novel’s weirdness.   

Darkness Visible takes place in the real world and has a sharp realworld awareness of contemporary politics and changes in society. Though the novel does contain turns of phrase and outdated usages that come across as dated and paternalistic in a modern context, Golding’s desire not only to reflect but to understand a rapidly changing world is powerfully apparent. The disenchantment and disillusion felt by the novel’s younger characters – with time on their hands and aching for purpose – seems both echo and indictment of the realworld violence perpetrated by European fringe organisations of the time, such as the Red Brigade in Italy, the Baader Meinhof gang in Germany, and the IRA in Belfast and on the British mainland. Sophy is an astonishingly vivid character, and Golding’s portrait of an exceptional woman is still something out of the ordinary. Similarly, his portrayal of Pedigree – ‘the sort of man whom a policeman feels in his bones should be moved on’ – is as shockingly direct as Nabokov’s depiction of Humbert Humbert in his masterpiece Lolita.

Yet Golding’s central literary purpose seems a million miles from social commentary. There is a mythic, interior quality to his narrative that renders it timeless. Sophy’s ‘desire to be weird’, her ‘hunger and thirst after weirdness’ is both an invigorating necessity and a deadly curse.  Both Sophy’s narrative and Matty’s come suffused with the ‘homespun magic’ of which John Bailey speaks in his 1979 review. Even Frankley’s ironmongers – ‘a fine old establishment’ – has a feel of Steven Millhauser about it, or the porcelain showroom in Richard Adams’s ghost story The Girl in the Swing. Its infinite spaces, its cavernous lofts, its cobwebby rooms stacked with useless treasures seem suffused with the ability to become or to conceal a whole world, a snow-globe cosomorama of a life long past. Eventually, symbolically, we see the Frankley outbuildings being demolished in the novel’s Part 3.

The trajectory of the narrative – the overall story arc – is finally an affirmation of the novel’s weird nature, the fulfilment of its own prophecy. Edwin Bell, retired teacher and former colleague of Sebastian Pedigree at Foundlings School, believes Matty to be some sort of prophet, a Delphic oracle for our troubled times. Sim Goodchild, the proprietor of the bookstore whose business is failing, believes no such thing. For Goodchild, modern life is all hard logic. And yet we cannot help remembering Matty’s encounter with an official who tried to help him during his earlier ill-fated sojourn in Australia, a man who treated Matty as an equal, whilst at the same time warning him that his sacred message – his prescient foreboding of a planet in crisis – would forever be doomed to fall upon deaf ears.

The secretary takes Matty’s gestures seriously, yet stands apart from them. When he asks Matty if he has the second sight, if he ‘sees’, Matty replies: ‘I feel!’ an impassioned declaration that works equally as a vindication of the novel as a whole.

O Brave New World 2: Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

March 30, 2021 /

(NB: HEAVY SPOILERS AHEAD for Klara and the Sun.)

We could choose to speculate on why it is that two of the 1983 group of Best of Young British Novelists – frequently singled out by critics and commentators as the golden generation – happen to have brought out novels about artificial humans less than two years apart. Most likely it’s just one of those things: coincidence, a communal grappling with new ideas that are, as it were, simply around. Less to be debated is the fact that, in science fictional terms at least, the idea at the heart of the most recent novels by both Ian McEwan (Machines Like Me, 2019) and Kazuo Ishiguro (Klara and the Sun, 2021) is not new at all. Those who share an interest in such things mostly agree that the ‘threat’ from AI has much less to do with robot uprisings than with coporate data harvesting and the gradual shift within the workplace from human to artificial labour, with the seismic changes and potential inequalities this would and will bring. The idea of human beings coming under existential threat from actual AI replicants? Not going to happen. That both Ishiguro and McEwan have spent hundreds of hours and hundreds of pages heading down this particular ‘what if?’ rabbit hole brings us face to face yet again with the weird propensity of mainstream literary writers for reinventing the science fictional wheel.

A good part of the reason for this is that writers like McEwan and Ishiguro probably don’t read much SF. Most mainstream consumption of science fiction is through TV and cinema, which tends to lag behind the curve of science fiction literature by several decades. There is also the fact that McEwan especially has a habit of straining for topicality through battening on to shouty headlines and received opinion. Machines Like Me seems more interested in denouncing Brexit than in exploring AI; it is a weird novel, mostly irrelevant as science fiction and with a curiously old fashioned feel. Reading Klara and the Sun is a similarly confounding experience, though for different reasons. Ishiguro never chases after ‘relevance’ the way McEwan does, and in many ways this new novel feels uncannily similar to the seven that precede it. From the beginning of his career, Ishiguro has been singularly preoccupied with themes of appearance and reality, and so in Klara and the Sun we enter the land that is Ishiguro-world: a calm, apparently stable version of reality in which interactions proceed with courtesy and a certain caution. The surface reality of Ishiguro-world is unruffled, almost stagnant, yet beneath this surface we intuit hints and then increasingly larger glimpses of a scarier truth.

Ishiguro also has a penchant for not so much unreliable as partially informed narrators, people who are very much embedded in Ishiguro-world but who never fully understand it. In Klara and the Sun, our guide is Klara herself, an Artificial Friend who possesses the computational abilities of an advanced AI, whilst exhibiting a view of the world that is curiously child-like, unformed. AFs are in some respects similar to the Kentukis in Samanta Schweblin’s (much more interesting) novel Little Eyes: a consumer fad, the kind of expensive consumable you purchase for your kids, who then quickly become bored with it. In other respects, Ishiguro’s AFs are more complex and more sinister. We first meet Klara as she stands with her fellow AF Rosa in a shop window, hoping to attract the attention of potential customers. She is eventually purchased as a companion for a teenage girl, Josie, who lives with her mother outside of the city and who is suffering from an unnamed illness.

Klara has been specifically designed to serve and protect the child that chooses her. She never questions the world she inhabits, nor her role within it. As a solar-powered machine, she has a reverence for the sun, which for her is imbued with an almost god-like power. Throughout the entirety of the novel, we see only what Klara sees, go where she goes, though as her understanding and experience increases, so does ours. Through Klara’s immaculate recall, we get to overhear conversations between the adults in her orbit – Josie’s mother Chrissie and Josie’s father Paul, Chrissie’s friend Helen and her former lover Vance, the ‘artist’ Capaldi. Through these conversations, we come to learn that this is a deeply divided society, one in which genetically engineered or ‘lifted’ humans are offered every advantage in terms of education and prospects, with unlifted humans consigned to mass unemployment and more or less barred from higher education.

The ifs and buts around these issues remain unexamined. We come to understand that lifting carries some sort of extreme medical risk. Chrissie has already lost one child to the process – Josie’s older sister, Sal – though this has not dissuaded her from opting for the same treatment for Josie, and the mainstream acceptance of the dangers of lifting means that – presumably – death is now seen by society at large as preferable to not being lifted. There are tiny glimpses of hardship – a minor character called Beggar Man, a drab part of the city with a lot of barbed wire and boarded-up shopfronts, Chrissie permanently tired out from long hours at her job – though the characters we spend the most time with all live in spacious accommodation far from such deprivation and we never learn what Chrissie’s job actually entails. There is a depressingly facile passage about racially segregated outsider, i.e unlifted communities, though again we never get to meet any of these people other than Josie’s father. Paul is an engineer, and supposedly a man of uncommon intelligence, though that doesn’t prevent him from getting sucked into a preposterous scheme to cure Josie’s illness, a plan that should be patently absurd to anyone but Klara.

I was recently in the audience at an online event where Ishiguro described Klara and the Sun as the positive counterpoint to his darkly themed 2005 novel Never Let Me Go. I would go further, and say this book is Never Let Me Go, except with AIs instead of clones, eugenics instead of organ farming. There is even a wincingly uncalled-for repeat of Never Let Me Go’s central, fairy-tale premise of True Love offering a path to safety in a hostile world. Why Ishiguro considers the outcome of this new novel to be happier is a bit of a mystery, given what happens, and I’m not just talking about Klara’s ‘slow fade’. The conversations that take place between the adults in Klara and the Sun are conducted as a theatrical grotesquerie, using the kind of megaphone dialogue you might find in a particularly awful 1950s film, miles distant from what people might actually say to one another in real life. I have paused to wonder if such ineptitude might not be intentional, a kind of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt. This at least might have been interesting, though unhappily and going by past experience I think it’s more likely that writing dialogue is an aspect of his craft that Ishiguro simply does not much enjoy

I am the last person to criticise a writer for choosing a close focus approach to science fiction. I mostly find wide-screen SF unutterably dull; books in which warring factions subject each other to offensively unrealistic acts of violence in their efforts to uphold or upend ‘the system’, in which characters spend pages spouting political rhetoric at each other or acting out social archetypes in a depressingly two-dimensional way can all go straight to Netflix so far as I’m concerned. The science fiction that interests me is centred upon convincingly drawn characters in imaginable situations, provocative ideas, life as it might actually be lived, together with the kind of literary articulacy we find in books such as the aforementioned Little Eyes. What I equally expect from this close focus approach though is difficulty, not in the sense that a book should be wilfully obscure, but that it should present us with complex moral choices and genuine dilemmas, conflicted characters, a level of narrative ambiguity that challenges the intellect.

On the surface and in outline description, Klara and the Sun might appear to possess such qualities. In the reading it is a series of evasions, perplexing only in the question of why so much attention will inevitably be lavished upon a text that is so deeply flawed. Klara and the Sun is a swift, easily digestible, stylistically pleasant read, but therein lies the problem. A novel that lays claim to themes of social exclusion, state-sanctioned eugenics and enforced mass poverty should not be pleasant, it should be confronting. At the very least, it should make some attempt to examine the questions it purports to ask.

And as for the ending? It’s Toy Story 2. Tell me I’m wrong.

O Brave New World: Skyward Inn by Aliya Whiteley

March 18, 2021 /

The Skyward Inn was not always so called, but it is nonetheless flourishing. Under the management of Jemima and Isley it has become the hub of a small rural community, the place where people drink and socialise at the end of a working day, the place where meetings are conducted, business disputes are settled, community issues resolved. The locally brewed beverage it has become renowned for seems to have a particular way of drawing people together and if some of the villagers were suspicious of newcomer Isley when he first arrived, he is now accepted as part of the scene.

The lives of Jem and Isley are not as settled as they might appear on the surface, however. Jem is locked in an unspoken conflict with her brother Dominic over the rightful custody of her son, Fosse, born as the result of a brief liaison when Jem was still a teenager. As the villagers argue amongst themselves over whether an immigrant family should be allowed to take over the running of an abandoned farm, Dom feels increasingly concerned about balancing brute economics with the values of family, community and land that have sustained the locals through multiple generations. As the newest member of the community, Isley strives to be accepted even while struggling with the feelings of displacement and alienation that inevitably come with trying to make one’s way in a new environment. And for Isley, everything is new. An alien from a distant planet, he is literally not of this world.

The world of Whiteley’s novel is both futuristic and retrograde. A wormhole in space – known colloquially as ‘the kissing gate’ – has allowed the development of insterstellar travel and more specifically the exploration of a superficially Earthlike planet rich with resources, barely understood but almost certainly lucrative. Rather than risking invasion and possible destruction, the peaceful Qitans have opened their world to the human colonisers, who rapidly establish a trading outpost and dispatch teams of prospectors. A small number of Qitans – like Isley – have travelled in the opposite direction and settled on Earth.

In this possible future, Britain has fragmented. The larger part has joined the Consolidation, a federation of nations and peoples united in their desire for progress and alien trade. The West Country, already split off from the rest of the UK as the result of climate change, has followed an isolationist route. In the Protectorate, the population follow stubbornly in the footsteps of their forefathers. Travel to and from the Consolidation is severely restricted, new technology is spurned, and the region scrapes its living from selling the crafts, raw materials and organic produce for which it is still famous.

Is this Whiteley’s Brexit novel? Certainly it would be difficult for any British reader to read the first half of Skyward Inn especially and not remember comments made by Tory MP Andrea Leadsom in the wake of the 2016 referendum about how Britain was going to sustain itself on profits from home-made jam and Aberdeen Angus, or something. Seen through the clarifying lens of science fiction, the determination of the Protectorate to keep itself separate, Jem and Dom’s parents’ retreat to a gated community on a UKIP version of Lundy Island, the stubborn determination to ‘muddle through’ – these things appear wrongheaded rather than redoubtable, a wilful rejection of progressive attitudes and sustainable modes of living in favour of nostalgia and with inevitable shortages of medicines and essential services as a result. Working people are barely muddling through, if at all, and without an influx of new arrivals, communities are atrophying. Farm buildings are standing empty, fertile land is lying fallow with no one to farm it. Rather than bucolic utopia, the Protectorate is a lonely place, depleted and depressed. There is a feeling, above all, of things running down.

Yet Whiteley’s novel is too subtle, too multifaceted to fall into polemic. Skyward Inn highlights issues faced by England’s rural communities anyway, even without Brexit or alien incursion. Jem’s son Fosse has been born and raised in the Protectorate and understands both its uniqueness and its vulnerability. He is dismissive of attempts to recreate the region’s unique character in artificial simulations – he recognises these at a gut level for the rose-tinted idealisations they are – yet unlike older members of the community, he recognises the necessity of change, of building bridges with other communities and individuals, and it is from his perspective that we get to experience the strangeness and the beauty of an alien world.    

In her previous works, Whiteley has been resourceful and imaginative in portraying the social, geographical and political dynamics of communities, both on a wider scale and in close-focus observation of individual and family relationships within them. Skyward Inn returns to this subject area with even greater power and precision, exploring the future-possible while remaining critically attentive – like all the best science fiction – of the here and now. Her descriptive writing is as clear-eyed and boldly evocative as ever, not just in summoning the West Country landscapes she knows so well but in the creation of alien sights and concepts that bring to the final third of this exceptional novel that edge of surrealism and the uncanny that mark Whiteley as one of the most original and provocative voices in contemporary science fiction.

The concept of the hive-mind, or ‘monoculture’, as Whiteley puts it, is not new in SF. We can point to the slave-minds familiar from The Matrix and from the Borg in Star Trek as illustration of the more destructive attributes of shared consciousness, but the benificent ‘children’ of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End and the intimate culture based around shared speech patterns as detailed in China Mieville’s Embassytown provide more progressive templates. Indeed, science fiction’s obsession with this particular trope in both its positive and negative permutations would seem to indicate that the subjects it embodies – individuality versus collectivism, loss of privacy and its impact on societies as well as individuals – have been of continuing and increasing interest to us as readers and as writers, through the dawn of mass media and into the digital age. If Whiteley’s novel has a core theme, it is communication – not only how we interact with one another at street level but how the collective imagination might be broadened to accommodate the perspective and worldview of those who think differently. The way she will happily use a small group of people as a kind of literary petri dish in which to work through the implications of an idea shows a creative approach to science fiction that put me immediately in mind of Ursula Le Guin.

 Most of all, it is Whiteley’s ability to mingle the marvellous with the quotidian that makes her work special. Like Peter’s sojourn on the alien planet in Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, Jem’s leap into the unknown in Skyward Inn is believable to us at least in part because the world she leaves behind is so intensely familiar. No matter how far we travel in Whiteley’s company, we never lose faith that the incredible sights she shows us are on some level real, and that they matter intensely.   

The Art of Space Travel – cover reveal!

March 12, 2021 /

The Art of Space Travel and Other Stories is a collection of my shorter fiction, bringing together stories written over the past two decades. None of these stories have been published together in the same place before. Some are being reprinted for the first time since they first appeared in my debut collection A Thread of Truth back in 2007. Others were originally published in small-circulation magazines and so have been hard to find. There is one brand new story, written in 2019 and appearing here in print for the first time.

The Art of Space Travel will be published on September 7th by the wonderful team at Titan Books. I shall be posting a full table of contents and more details closer to the release date, but in the meantime I have the pleasure of sharing with you the quite wonderful cover art, created for the collection by Julia Lloyd. For me, it sums up the mood and direction of the collection perfectly, and I could not be more thrilled by it. I am looking forward very much to sharing the stories themselves with you later in the year.

Girls Against God #6: Bernard and Pat by Blair James

February 4, 2021 /

I listened to the songs, and I didn’t know the words. I bowed my head where everyone else bowed theirs. I stood and sat on cue. And at one point, during a song, I turned my head to look at Lucy. I looked at her and her eyes were closed, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a vision of ardent faith. She looked as though she was not on this plane, but another, better and more peaceful one. Her face looked so beautiful. Pious. And it brought tears to my eyes to see someone so lost in love and belief and happiness. And I found it so admirable for her to have so much faith in something, when I had none in myself, or in anything.

If you like Eimear McBride, you will love Blair James.

I think Bernard and Pat might be the saddest story I have ever read.

Catherine’s life has been defined by two events: the death of her father when she was five and the time she spent as a child in the home of Christian childminders Bernard and Pat. We never learn what age Catherine is as she writes; we know only that in many ways she is still that child, still trapped inside that house.

One of the central questions asked by the book is not so much will Catherine escape from that house, but is escape from what happened there ever even possible?

There are other books that deal with child abuse and trauma but Bernard and Pat is made exceptional through the manner of its telling. James’s narrative unfolds through a series of vignettes, some several pages in length, others as brief and fleeting as a single line. The timeline is elastic and infinitely fluid, shifting and switching between Catherine’s fragmented memories of her beloved father – indeed she later questions if these are her own memories, or simply anecdotes she has heard so many times they have the feeling of memories – her partially-blanked recollections of Bernard and Pat, her uncertain, jagged present. Our understanding of ‘what happened’ is arrived at gradually, through a process not unlike stacking building blocks, or putting together a jigsaw puzzle: a particular piece may not make sense until we come upon the piece that fits beside it, sometimes many pages later.

The language of Bernard and Pat is what sets this book in its own category and above many others. Catherine’s voice is not a child’s voice, and little Catherine is not a child narrator. Rather, it is the juxtaposition of the hurt, damaged, unadulterated clarity of childhood perceptions with the mature vocabulary of the adult Catherine, someone who reads, concludes, remembers that makes an encounter with Bernard and Pat, more than anything, like reading a collection of poems.

The shattering of self, the helplessness, above all Catherine’s loneliness is palpable on every page.

Reading Bernard and Pat felt energising, exciting, like a blessing in the way that discovering such a fresh, original and dynamic literary talent always does; at the same time it felt and still feels almost unspeakably painful, like witnessing a terrible accident that can never be put right.

The concise nature of this book means you could easily finish it in a single sitting, yet its interior space is so large you will never entirely encompass it, or stop wanting to revisit it. In this also it is like poetry.

Blair James’s willingness and ability to convey ambiguity – not just the ambiguity surrounding events but the ambiguity surrounding character – is both necessary and daring. Catherine’s circumstances are not those of abject poverty, of a shocking one-off crime that makes newspaper headlines. Rather they are a slow accretion of need, of time stretched to breaking point, of carelessness, exhaustion, making-do, lack of insight or thought. James somehow finds the artistic bravery to make Bernard himself an ambiguous character, a minotaur who is half pathetic inadequate, half predatory monster.

This is not just truth-telling, this is great writing.

I referenced Eimear McBride at the top of this page. You might well read Bernard and Pat and think of McBride’s groundbreaking debut A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, but for me James’s novel equally shares elements of tone and structure with her more recent book Strange Hotel, which I read at the close of last year and loved so much it would have had a Girls Against God spot all to itself, had my encounter with it not coincided with best-of-year lists and all that stuff. Strange Hotel delivers its denouement through a list of place names, a formal flourish I found so joyous both as style and substance it still lifts my spirits when I think about it. I was not hoping for such a moment of closure from Bernard and Pat, yet in its final two brief pages – in its final word – there is, after all, something approaching if not consolation then at least a spark of hope. Brava.

I always look forward to the debut novelists feature that appears in the Observer towards the end of January. This year’s selection feels particularly noteworthy, important and progressive. There isn’t a single book on the list I wouldn’t be interested in reading, and I am especially gratified by the emphasis on more experimental forms. If I could, I would add one more name to this list and that name would be Blair James. Bernard and Pat is devastating, intense and brilliant. I cannot wait to see where James takes us next.

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