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Christopher Priest 1943 – 2024

My beloved Chris passed away this evening. He was completely peaceful, and surrounded by love.

Ceremonies for Candlemas Eve by Robert Herrick

Down with the rosemary and bays,
Down with the misletoe;
Instead of holly, now up-raise
The greener box, for show.

The holly hitherto did sway;
Let box now domineer,
Until the dancing Easter-day,
Or Easter’s eve appear.

Then youthful box, which now hath grace
Your houses to renew,
Grown old, surrender must his place
Unto the crisped yew.

When yew is out, then birch comes in,
And many flowers beside,
Both of a fresh and fragrant kin,
To honour Whitsuntide.

Green rushes then, and sweetest bents,
With cooler oaken boughs,
Come in for comely ornaments,
To re-adorn the house.
Thus times do shift; each thing his turn does hold;
New things succeed, as former things grow old.

Books of the Year 2023

2023 has been, more than any other I can remember, a year of two halves: the first productive, forward-looking, full of excitement over new projects; the second blackly surreal with Chris’s cancer diagnosis and the gradually encroaching impacts of the disease.

I want to say first that Chris’s resilience, fighting spirit and wickedly subversive sense of humour have been in evidence throughout. He is a rare individual, a deep thinker, a very brave man.

I want to say also that books have proved if anything even more important to us this year than they have always been: reading them, writing them, talking and thinking about them. One of the hardest things to bear has been Chris’s increasing inability to find refuge in books, not through lack of desire but through simple tiredness.

Hearing him read aloud the opening pages of The War of the Worlds for a French documentary film segment back in November is a memory that will remain with me for a long time to come.

The ten books I read in 2023 that have meant the most to me are:

In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote. One from the first half of the year, and mind-bendingly good. So well made the joins are flawless. For anyone interested in true crime, whether as reader or as writer, this remains the gold standard.

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes. I’ve followed MacInnes’s work from the beginning and for me he is one of the most interesting and important younger British writers working today. In Ascension – humane, provocative and radiantly beautiful – is a book everyone should read.

The Last Supper: a summer in Italy by Rachel Cusk. As a woman writing, Cusk has always been fearless in putting her intellect on the page and for this alone she is a hero to me. This book is about everything – art, time, mortality, belonging – and the kind you could reread every year and gain something new. Her forthcoming novel Parade is one of my most anticipated publications of 2024.

Wish I Was Here by M. John Harrison. The writer’s anti-Bible. There is nothing about this unique exploration of memory, autobiography, place and the fantastic that I do not love.

The Lost Child by Julie Myerson. This is the first book in a long time that I have just sat down and read, cover to cover, when I’ve not been on a train. Like Cusk, Myerson is a writer who has often found herself reaping the whirlwind simply for being a woman who examines her own experience with an unflinching eye. Her pursuit of the forgotten watercolourist Mary Yelloly is every bit as compelling as her account of her son Jake’s cannabis addiction, which is precisely what makes The Lost Child a masterclass in autofiction.

The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis. Even though the overblown dramatics of its final section annoy me, I still count this book among my most enjoyed of 2023 as it combines those two rare qualities: propulsive readability with effortlessly beautiful sentences. Can I call this a crime romp? Yes I can.

Babysitter by Joyce Carol Oates. The opposite of a crime romp – Babysitter is too dark and tense for that – this is nonetheless another Oates classic, garnering way too little attention at the time of publication. Dreamlike, nightmarish, a fascinatingly original treatment of true crime themes.

Possession by A. S. Byatt. I am so glad I decided to finally catch up with this one. A beautifully wrought novel, everything a Booker winner should be and worthy of its literary godfather Umberto Eco. The poems alone are a significant achievement. So typical of the industry that the editor initially implored Byatt to cut them out.

Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman. I thank God for this book. It reminds me of who I am and what I want to do.

Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies by Elizabeth Winkler. Forget all the other conspiracy theory books – if you want to get under the skin of cognitive dissonance, go and read this one. Superbly researched and articulated, this exploration of author identity and why – in defiance of Barthes – it does actually matter is as entertaining as it is important.

Wishing everyone a fruitful and spiritually prosperous 2024. May it be a more peaceful space to inhabit than 2023.

The 10 Best Books from the past 10 years

As I watched a recent Booktube video in which Eric Karl Anderson aka Lonesome Reader celebrates a decade of book blogging by naming his ten favourite books from the past ten years, I found I couldn’t resist the temptation of following in his footsteps . Of course, it is inevitable that the choices I make right now will be governed by what I am drawn to right now, rather than what might have seemed more important to me back then. But that makes things, if anything, even more interesting. It has been a little over a decade since I first started keeping detailed records of the books I read – and what I think of them. Every year at around this time I open a new Word document where I can make a note of upcoming releases as and when I hear about them, a document that will eventually become my tally of books considered and discussed and read in the year to come. These lists act as a reminder not only of those books I do actually end up reading, but also of those that catch my interest, however fleetingly, books that I might return to in subsequent years. Each of these documents as I look at them now powerfully brings back the literary flavour and texture of the year in question. As a record of the changing literary landscape, of how my interests as a reader and writer have evolved in new directions, I find them fascinating.

2013 – the year Eleanor Catton won the Booker for her superbly achieved megatext The Luminaries. But my pick of the year – then and now – is Richard House’s The Kills, which made the Booker longlist but should have gone further. It remains as strong in my mind in 2023 as during the month I spent reading it a decade ago.

2014 – a weirdly awful reading year, in which much of what I read seems in retrospect to be of zero consequence. Among the few titles from 2014 that still resonate, Joyce Carol Oates’s The Accursed is the one I still think about with love and awe.

2015 – another depressingly inconsequential reading year in which I was clearly struggling to find direction. Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border, with its piercingly beautiful landscape writing and impassioned defence of personal freedom remains a favourite. The fact that I can still remember where I was when I was reading it – on the train to and from Cornwall sometime in late summer- stands testament to that fact.

2016 – a fascinating reading year, in which my current interests are clearly beginning to solidify. A toss-up between Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser and Martin MacInnes’s Infinite Ground.

2017 – the year of the Sharke, and many fond recollections. Memories too of reading Paul McAuley’s Fairyland while on the Paris Metro. No contest though for book of the year, which is Katie Kitamura’s A Separation, a touchstone work and one I am planning to reread very soon. Kitamura’s expert manipulation of the mystery template continues to be inspirational.

2018 – reading through this year’s list brings back powerful memories of what was clearly a breakthrough year for me in terms of thinking about my own writing. With a dozen titles at least in contention, I am going to plump for This House of Grief by Helen Garner, if only because I very recently read her novel The Spare Room, which reminded me so powerfully of how much I love and admire her, and how much territory she has conquered for women who write.

2019 – on trains a lot, doing stuff for The Dollmaker. Also the Dublin Worldcon, reading all of Ben Lerner and discovering the genius of Mary Gaitskill. Top pick though goes to The Porpoise by Mark Haddon, which is a glorious and wonderful feat of experimental storytelling and didn’t get anywhere near enough attention.

2020 – as with 2018 I find it almost impossible to single out one book as emblematic of what was a stellar reading year, with so much achieved in terms of thinking and writing. It would be wrong of me not to mention my beloved Katherine Carlyle by Rupert Thomson, Born Yesterday by Gordon Burn and Strange Hotel by Eimear McBride, which closed out the year on a wave of pure joy and inspiration. But if I have to make a choice I’m going to declare the book of 2020 to be a dead heat between Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry and The Spire by William Golding. Both are, of course, masterpieces.

2021 – to be remembered for a journey from Liverpool to Glasgow that kept me trapped on the train – several trains, in fact – for long enough to read the entire second half of David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet, mostly while crammed into a luggage rack between York and Edinburgh. But the top spot would still have to go to Beyond Belief by Emlyn Williams, a peerless reconstruction of the social, political and cultural landscape of the Moors Murders that should be cited in every true crime aficionado’s top twenty.

2022 – bit of a weird reading year – bit of a weird year full stop, illuminated by points of particular brightness, including Heather Clark’s magnificent landmark biography of Sylvia Plath, Red Comet, and especially Optic Nerve, by Maria Gainza, which rescued me at a moment of particular darkness.

I have today opened and named my document ‘Books 2024’.

Mid-year thoughts

This year started very normally but has become deeply strange. Chris has not been well. Plans have had to change suddenly. I have been caught mid-thought, at that peculiar moment of transition between one book and the next. This has happened to me before but never, I don’t think, which such violently immediate effect.

Something good has always come out of such derangement in the past, so I am keeping faith with that knowledge. In the meantime, books.

The best, the most impactful, the most personally significant book I have read so far this year has been Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. If I could hold up one book and say this is the kind of thing I want to write, the level of achievement I intend to keep before me as my perfect example, it would be this one. I think about it most days. The quality of the writing. The vision. The timelessness, which is the stuff legends are made of. A book that both transcends and suitably honours its source material.

Second comes a reread: Swimming Home, by Deborah Levy, which I read when it first came out and found slight, and vaguely annoying. This time round I got it, and it’s a masterpiece. Again, I think about it most days. Please read this wonderful article, if you haven’t already.

Third would have been The Shards, by Bret Easton Ellis, a great bollocking romper stomper of a book that helped keep me going through the earlier part of this month, the most perfectly addictive long novel I’ve read since first discovering the Stephen King doorstoppers – Salem’s Lot especially – that The Shards is at least in part a homage to. Then, like King, Ellis blows it in the final quarter. I am convinced he rolled with this thing right into the last hundred pages without properly understanding how he wanted it to end. So he stuck in a stupid knife fight. Heavy disappointment. But it’ll stick with me, I guess, and the guy can write, so.

Honourable mentions go to Julie Myerson’s brilliant The Lost Child, Rachel Cusk’s The Last Supper, Gordon Burn’s inimitable Alma Cogan, Benjamin Myers’s Cuddy and of course M. John Harrison’s Wish I Was Here, which is more than an honourable mention, it’s in its own category. So far as weird precursors go, it is the epitome.

Looking forward to the Booker longlist, as I always do. Hoping to post here more often as the year progresses.

Turning the page: first thoughts on a new year

The first book I read this year is John Darnielle’s Devil House, his third novel to date and one I had on my reading list even before 2022 got started. You may remember how much I loved his second novel, Universal Harvester, a book that continues to haunt and inspire me five years on. In some ways, you could almost imagine Devil House as the direct continuation of that book – look what happened to that video store when it started losing business! – though in fact it has no connection at all, save being the next chapter of Darnielle’s incredibly personal literary project. The way in which Darnielle uses the small town canvas to illustrate larger themes and examine important moral questions is laid almost painfully bare in Devil House. Darnielle has said in interview that his third novel took five years to write. It is easy to see why, and we should feel grateful that he allowed himself the time this book required. Devil House has a lot to say, and it says it beautifully.

“It matters which story you tell, it matters whose story you tell, it matters what people think even if it doesn’t matter to the people who needed it before the disaster hit. That’s the thing, those of us on this side of the disaster, we get so dazzled by the fireworks, by the conflagration I want to say, that we don’t see the gigantic expanse over there on the other side of the flames, but, you know. People have to live there.”

The premise of Devil House is simple and – as with Universal Harvester – it can trick you into thinking you know what’s coming. Gage Chandler is a true crime writer. His first book, The White Witch of Morro Bay, was an instant bestseller, and set him up for future successes. When his editor presents him with a new storyline and a novel approach to it, Chandler is initially sceptical – purchase an actual murder house? Go to live there? – but in the end he is unable to resist. He has personal links to the location, and location, above all, has always been intensely important to him. Also, there is a sense that this particular case has been brushed under the carpet.

The book we are reading, Chandler tells us early on, is the book he eventually came up with. It is not exactly the book he set out to write, not the book his regular fanbase might be expecting. Those who enjoy metafiction were always going to love this. Those who like straight thrillers, probably not so much. But what captivated me most about Devil House is the true subject of the book, that is, the problematical nature of true crime literature: why do we read it, should we be reading it and why do these questions matter? They are questions that have been on my mind for a while now, not least because I read and enjoy a lot of true crime literature.

The past eighteen months have taken this one stage further, though, because I have been working with a true crime narrative as part of my novel-in-progress.

It was Darnielle’s own obsession with true crime as a younger reader that kick-started Devil House – he has a lot to say about this here, and it’s a marvellous interview. I think it’s important to remember that true crime has changed and evolved a great deal since the days of the more blood-soaked, sensationalist and killer-obsessed narratives that tended to dominate the genre in the 70s and 80s when Darnielle was first consuming it. In the decades since, we have not only seen the pioneering work of writers such as Gordon Burn and David Peace, novels and creative non-fiction that takes on the subject of crime and particular criminals in a markedly different way, but more latterly the work of writers such as Sarah Weinman, Hallie Rubenhold, Nona Fernandez, Alice Bolin, Selva Almada, Rachel Monroe and Natasha Tretheway have made still further progress in revealing particular events and people more fully within the context of their social and political background.

None of which makes the stories they tell any less compelling. But they do ask us to consider why we are drawn to these narratives, a powerful and necessary question that deserves to be at the centre of any true crime story, no matter who is telling it.

Reading Devil House just as I am starting work on the second draft of what should hopefully be my next novel has been a fascinating, often startling and occasionally sobering experience as I stumble up against a deeply admired writer’s narrative responses to questions I have been asking myself. The story I happen to be working with is almost a century old; realistically speaking, anyone with a personal connection to the case must now be dead, a fact that does make some of these questions easier to deal with, though it does not make them irrelevant, especially as my treatment of the material is unorthodox. I do have other material on my hard drive, a project-in-embryo relating to a much more recent case. I am letting it lie for now, firstly because it’s still far from complete, secondly and more importantly because I don’t think it would be right to publish it yet.

The question of when it would be right is one I am still grappling with. Which is as it should be. All of this stuff comes up in Devil House, which is a huge part of why I love it.

I don’t have a particular plan for my reading in the year ahead. But I would like to steer towards books that feed, that seem to comment on, that feel in tune with my own evolving process and areas of interest. My new novel Conquest, which comes out in May, feels to me like the beginning of a new phase in my work, one I am excited about and challenged by. People have sometimes asked me if writing a book is something that gets easier with time, and there are ways in which it does, or at least it should do. You know you can go the distance, and you know you can always write more sentences about pretty much anything. But in the deeper sense, I would say no, it does not. With time comes the knowledge that writing good sentences is only the beginning. For writing to mean anything, it has to go further, into areas that might not feel comfortable, or easy. You have to make your writing count for something.

Which is terrifying, but entirely as it should be.

10,000 and counting

This weekend saw the return of the Bute Highland Games, a wonderful community occasion made all the more special this year both for the fact that it was the first time back since COVID, and that the weather actually saw fit to behave itself this time around. I took part in the 10,000-metre road race, something I have been wanting to do ever since we moved to the island and my first ever participation in any kind of sporting competition. It was tough – I’m used to running first thing in the morning when the weather conditions are always cooler – but I was enormously pleased with my finishing time of 55:55, which placed me fifth out of sixteen in my age and gender category and 21st out of 54 women over the line.

Photo by my mum!

I hesitated over whether to post about this – it has nothing to do with writing, at least not directly, and talking in public about personal issues does not always come naturally to me – but then I thought what I have to say might encourage others, and therefore be valuable.

My running means a great deal to me and brings me much joy. It kept me sane during the pandemic – the one time of day when everything felt normal was when I was outside first thing, running along the coast road whatever the weather, listening to my music and feeling especially aware of my body as a living organism. Early on in the terrible conflict in Ukraine, I read about a group of older runners in Kyiv who see their daily outing as an act of solidarity with their fellows, an insistence that they exist and remain defiant. I often think of them as I run, wonder how they are getting on. Problems and questions that have arisen with my writing flow through my mind, and are often unravelled, seemingly without effort on my part.

Above all, the weather, the landscape, the feel and smell and taste of the open air. These grounding things, these precious things – to have this sense of freedom as a daily tonic is not so much a commitment as a necessity.

The point is, when I started school it was simply assumed that because I was visually impaired I would never be able to take part in sport. It didn’t seem to matter – I was doing well academically, so no biggie, and I never expressed any particular regret or worry over this cordoned-off area of the curriculum. Any half-hearted attempts to involve me in PE ended pretty dismally. Of course they did, because most of what was on offer were team sports, ball games needing a high degree of hand-eye coordination, and one of the weird things about my sight is that I don’t have binocular vision – pretty crucial for depth perception, and judging distances at speed. (Anyone who’s ever been with me at a convention and noticed me testing the edge of an ‘alien’ step with my toe before I go down it? This is why.)

I did swim well from an early age, though, and – oddly not oddly – I was one of the few who did not react with abject horror when told we were off for a cross-country run. I always had good breath control, and what I now recognise as good core strength and stamina. None of these things were noticed, or encouraged. I am not blaming anyone – I went to school in the 1970s, they did things differently there – but nonetheless I think it’s important for me to say it, in case anyone reading this has similarly been made to believe they have no sporting aptitude, or ‘can’t’ do something because they have a disability.

From my own experience, it is not a matter of can’t; it is simply a question of discovering which sport or activity best suits your particular abilities, and your passion.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, I have always enjoyed watching sport on TV. I was heavily invested in the Hunt-Lauda rivalry in Formula 1 back in the day. I started watching and loving Wimbledon when Borg, Connors, Wade and McEnroe were all still young. I vividly remember the excitement of watching my first Olympics – Montreal, 1976: Nadia Comaneci, Lasse Viren. I watched one hell of a lot of Champions’ League football matches through the 1990s. But it wasn’t until the 2000 Olympics in Sydney that something clicked personally, for me. Watching the Romanian athlete Gabi Szabo win gold in the 5,000 metres, something about this tiny, steel-nerved blonde woman and her famous sprint finish spoke to me, inspired me, reminded me that wasn’t running something I had always wanted to try but felt was out of bounds?

I decided that there was literally no reason it should be out of bounds, and started from there, running around the block in an old pair of Adidas trainers and feeling vaguely embarrassed. The embarrassment stopped after about a fortnight, as I began to build up my staying power. I have run in fits and starts ever since, though it did not become a daily habit until we moved to the island. With a course that is safe and free of traffic and has start-to-finish views of the Firth of Clyde, how could it not?

I spend many hours of every day sitting at my desk. The practice of writing calls for stamina of a different kind – the ability to sit with an idea until it becomes something, to keep faith with my work even when it feels flat, or disorganised, or beyond my control. It can be mentally exhausting and occasionally dispiriting. To be able to get outside, to let my mind unclench itself – I can honestly say that taking up running has benefited every aspect of my life, both my physical and mental wellbeing. It offers a rest from the intensity of writing, as well as a spur to it.

Running is my hobby, the thing I do for myself alone and with no other aim in view than to enjoy the experience. I’m not at all competitive about it, and that is part of the joy. But can I beat my own time next year? If I weren’t already wondering about that, I wouldn’t be me.

Books of the Year 2021

Another strange year leading to another winter solstice, a moment of hiatus in which I unerringly find it helpful and cheering and fascinating to look back upon the books I have read in the past twelve months. I didn’t have a particular reading project or structure in mind through most of 2021, which is probably why I feel driven to set myself a new challenge for 2022, but more on that in the next post. That being said, the books I have felt most drawn to this year do seem to have grouped themselves into two distinct categories: true crime and crime-ish fiction, and a broad swathe of novels that might loosely be defined as autofiction and autofiction-inflected. The reasons for this, I suspect, have to do with my current work in progress and my evolving interests as a writer.

But first, the outliers. The best two novels of speculative fiction I read in 2021 were firstly The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, a huge, brave, questing book that gathers you into its mystery and won’t let go. This is philosophical science fiction at its most committed and complex, a book that stretches the possibilities of the form and reminds us of what science fiction is actually capable of. It’s so beautifully written, a landmark novel that should be talked about more than it is. Second comes Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, which I was thrilled to see take the Women’s Prize for Fiction earlier this year. It is the timelessness of Piranesi that most impresses, the sense that this novel has existed for a long time and will continue to endure. It is written with a pure mastery of form and content that comes only with time and experience, with long hours of sitting with an idea, patiently exploring its corridors, finding out its secret chambers, honing the language of its expression to a lustrous shine. Thank you, Susanna Clarke, for this beautiful gift, and for adding to the pantheon of fantasy literature such a peerless pearl.

I encountered two similarly enthralling pieces of historical writing in 2021; both happen to be by German authors. First comes Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann (English translation by Ross Benjamin), an audacious picaresque set during the Thirty Years’ War and loosely following the career of Till Eulenspiegel, the legendary jester and chaos-bringer who may or may not have existed as a real person. Each of Kehlmann’s books is a law unto itself, yet remains indisputably, indivisibly his. You never know from one novel to the next what you’re going to get from him – only that it will be brilliant, and memorable, and inspired. Tyll is a masterclass in revealing how the mundane world can be rendered fantastic, how starkly the present can be illuminated by the past. Goodness knows how, but this book about a brutal conflict that proved disastrous for the whole of Europe also manages to be funny.

Horst Krüger’s searing Bildungsroman The Broken House was originally published in Germany in 1966 and now appears for the first time in English translation (by Shaun Whiteside). The Broken House is a work of creative nonfiction that deals with the author’s experience growing up in Nazi Germany, and the impact of such a childhood on the rest of his life. This is a brilliant book, a masterpiece of economy, precision and passion, of the deployment of language in the structure of resistance. The unflinching clarity of Krüger’s vision, his hunger for truth and above all for the truth of art offer reflection and a warning for our own troubled times.

Of the crime books I read, those that made the deepest impression were firstly The Treatment by Michael Nath, a fictional reimagining of the circumstances and personalities involved in the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry and its seismic aftermath. The scope of this book is huge; the language, which gives knowing and erudite nods to the revenge tragedies of Marlowe and Webster, is scintillating and a thing of wonder. I continue to feel a genuine bewilderment, that a novel of this calibre should escape award notice. I would also need to mention Beyond Belief by Emlyn Williams, an imaginative chronicle of the Moors Murders that is as tensely compelling as it is devastating, a direct precursor of the documentary crime writing of Gordon Burn and David Peace. Beyond Belief was a best-seller when it was first published in 1967, yet it is rarely spoken of now, a bemusing oversight that needs to be remedied.

In 2021 I found myself both delighted and inspired by autofiction. Along with everyone else I read and enjoyed Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler, No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood and Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett. I also fell in love with two older works of autofiction, The Lover by Marguerite Duras and Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux. Of particular note for me, however, were two works that see their authors go a step further in what they choose to do with their material, setting their own experiences in direct counterpoint with the language or literature of another. My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jen Shapland is a both a personal and biographical exploration of a classic writer by her literary descendant. I fell for this book, and for Carson and Mary’s story, hook, line and sinker. Shapland has written something important, not only about McCullers, but also about women writers and queer writers and the ways in which they have so often been denied or erased. I am doubly interested by her project because of what it says and proves about the ways of writing (auto)biography, the freeing of a subject through allowing her the space to step forward and reveal her own truths. I loved this book and I actually think that for this one time only Rachel Cooke, a reviewer and critic I admire tremendously, missed the point.

I also loved Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton, a work of memoir exploring the author’s spiritual love affair with Japan, her real-life affair with a Japanese man, and her experience of learning to be a translator of the Japanese language. As someone who has felt a similar sense of personal identification with both the German and Russian language and people, I found this book resonant, moving, revealing and exquisitely felt. Barton’s examination of language as a transformative experience, almost as a physical substance, is so personal and so brilliant. I’d read this book again in a heartbeat and will be seeking out Barton’s translations as a matter of priority.

I found much delight in a tranche of novels that begin with the feel of lived experience but swerve off into the wilder and more elusive terrain of fiction. Early in the year I experienced the weird synchronicity of reading Olivia Sudjic’s Asylum Road and Jakuta Alikavazovich’s Night As it Falls (translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman) back to back. Both novels feature protagonists dealing with the fallout from the war in the former Yugoslavia; both examine themes of alienation, family, the failure of intimacy and the trauma of war on future generations. For novels that could be twin sisters in terms of their subject matter, they are each strikingly, almost unnervingly different in terms of how they express themselves, the emotional restraint and tightly honed language of the Sudjic sitting in stark contrast with the fraught, hallucinatory vision of the Alikavazovich. Both are equally superb. I also loved LOTE by Shola von Rheinhold, an experimental novel of huge power, originality and humour that calls into question the elision of black artists and writers from the history of modernism. Whilst it would not be altogether inaccurate to describe LOTE as a black Secret History, this novel truly is unlike anything I’ve read before and I can’t wait to see what von Rheinhold comes up with next.

Top billing in the not-autofiction category though goes jointly to My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley and Intimacies by Katie Kitamura. I cannot praise highly enough Riley’s precision and observational skill, her merciless portrayal of what it is like to be a writer who comes from a non-literary background, the eternally sparring forces of guilt and entrapment. The sequence when the father takes his daughters to a Chekhov play is magisterial, and resonated so starkly I had to laugh out loud. Riley is rapidly becoming a favourite author for me, one whose work offers a piercingly accurate portrait of a Britain I feel I’ve inhabited all my life, one whose novels will be read and analysed for many decades to come. Meanwhile, Kitamura’s Intimacies is a profound and searching novel about truth and lies, confrontation and evasion, freedom and commitment. The different forms of intimacy – some distasteful and corrosive, others life-sustaining – are explored amidst a web of changing perspectives and realities that shades towards the hyper-real. The tiny elements of detective fiction put me joyfully in mind of Kitamura’s previous novel A Separation, and play right into my particular area of interest. A beautiful piece of work, which I loved exactly as much as I hoped I would.

Whatever else it has been, in terms of its reading material 2021 has proved fascinating, challenging and varied. I feel I’ve learned a lot, that I might even be making progress. I want to take the opportunity to wish all of you who read this blog a wonderful Christmas, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing. Be safe, be well, and be of good heart.

2020: a year in reading

I bang on about this every year I know but for me December really is the cruellest month. It’s not the cold so much as the dark, which is why I’m already feeling my spirits lift a little even in advance of hogmanay as we pass the winter solstice and there is the merest perceptible hint of lengthening evenings. Christmas this year felt different too – so much quieter and in keeping with the season somehow, a time of reflection and abatement rather than the month-long blaring insanity of conspicuous consumption. We were lucky of course, my mum and Chris and I, the three of us together for a lovely lunch and our usual post-pudding Scrabble tournament. I am so sorry if you didn’t get to see your relatives this Christmas.

I remember the final few days of 2019 as the days in which I read Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School. This is a novel whose clarity and strength of achievement felt to me at the time like a point of anchorage, a steel tent peg pinning down the tail-end of December, an intellectual full stop, bringing the reading business of the year to a satisfying close. It feels weirdly appropriate to be closing out 2020 with two short novels that are akin to The Topeka School in that they are the work of two post-post modernist writers roughly of the same generation as Lerner and similarly in the process of cementing and furthering their considerable gifts. Yet in their expression of liminal uncertainty, their ghostliness, their sense of hiatus these two books are the polar opposite of Lerner’s and perfect analogies for 2020, a year in which everyone waited, everything stopped.

All of which is my long-winded way of sneaking two extra books into my top ten reading highlights of 2020, David Keenan’s Xstabeth and Eimear McBride’s Strange Hotel, both strangely beguiling yet achingly sad, both novels of ineffable loss, both daringly innovative books from writers I admire tremendously and intend to keep keeping up with as new works appear. As for the rest, here they come, listed in the order in which I read them. I remember last year my top picks were chosen according to which books happened to have scored 10/10 on my own highly subjective and no doubt weighted book-score-ometer. This year I am varying the selection criteria slightly by going for the ten books that for whatever reason have stuck around to pester me. Many of these will have scored 10/10, though not all of them. Similarly not all the books I read in 2020 that did score top marks have made the final cut.

  1. The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel. This was my first 10/10 book of the year and it took its time coming. I loved Station Eleven but The Glass Hotel is even better in my opinion, confirming Mandel as a writer whose next work I would be eager to pick up without knowing anything about it in advance. Whenever I think of The Glass Hotel I think also of Mark Haddon’s The Porpoise, which had a similar effect on me in being the kind of well made, imaginatively vast, gorgeously surprising book that depends on nothing but its own vision, its own surety of purpose, its own beautifully deft exploration of its guiding principles. The Glass Hotel is set around the time of the 2008 financial crash, but it speaks profoundly to our own time. A novel to reread and to treasure.
  2. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. I was thrilled to read this finally, a twentieth century classic that has been on my to-read list so long I was beginning to feel guilty every time I thought about it. As it turns out, Under the Volcano is everything everybody says it is: a masterpiece by any definition, The Waste Land in novel form. A cacophonous, parched, desolate, insane, stupendously beautiful, stiflingly oppressive work, a memoir of failure, tragedy and one moment of immortal triumph snatched from the wreckage. The experience of reading this book seemed interminable at the time and I never exactly looked forward to rejoining the consul but once back in his world the sheer power of Lowry’s language and vision proved irresistible. For all the copious amounts of alcohol consumed by almost everyone in it, Under the Volcano is no drunken outpouring; the form of the book is restrained and disciplined – weirdly, it kept reminding me of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, another modern classic I took a long time getting to but that changed my world. The literary allusions, the doublings, the assonances reveal in Lowry a knowledge and feeling for literature that echoes that of Nabokov. What. A. Book. It reaffirmed my faith and rekindled my resilience. If you need your appetite whetted further, do check out the Backlisted podcast discussion on Under the Volcano – it’s fantastic.
  3. Minor Detail by Adania Shibli. I think this is the shortest book on this list but it is massive in scope. The uncanny clarity, the sense of dread and doubt that characterises Minor Detail make it unforgettable and in places actively frightening while you are reading it. The dual form it takes – the first half an historical crime narrative, chillingly rendered, the second part an autofictional investigation of that crime, fraught with nerves and doubt and the potential for harm – is itself the perfect metaphor for a land divided. Reading Minor Detail, one senses the author’s personal investment in a literary project that is more to her than just a project, it is a matter of justice. I felt privileged to read it and will be looking out Shibli’s previous work.
  4. Nudibranch by Irenosen Okojie. This most recent collection of shorter fictions by Okojie has to be her most accomplished work yet. The power of the stories – who can forget ‘Grace Jones’, winner of this year’s Caine Prize for African Writing? – is more than equalled by the revelatory, revolutionary quality of the writing itself. Nudibranch was another book that felt tough to get to grips with on occasion but repaid every effort. It is a joyous thing, to see a writer so audacious, so in command of her powers. I am eager to see more attention being paid to black and minority-ethnic writers at the experimental end of fiction; happily Okojie is in their vanguard.
  5. Katherine Carlyle by Rupert Thomson. I don’t just love this book, I am in love with it, all the more so because it burns slowly. I found the protagonist deeply irritating at first; gradually I became one with her. Was it Russia, was it Svalbard, was it the haunting, irresistible power of Thomson’s writing? The ending is so beautiful, so moving, so perfect. Thomson has to be one of the UK’s most criminally underappreciated writers. I will be reading Katherine Carlyle again and it might – just – be my favourite book of the eighty-eight I read this year.
  6. The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell. Winner of the Clarke Award 2020 and bravo to the judges for coming to their senses and plucking this gorgeous rose from the thorns of that crazy shortlist. This novel is huge in both page-count and scope and some effort is required especially in the early stages to keep all the characters and their familial connections straight in your head. But keep the faith and you’ll find yourself beguiled and bewitched by a novel that is as intelligent as it is vast and that entirely lives up to its ambitions. One of my favourite aspects of The Old Drift is the extent to which it fulfils the radical potential naturally inherent in science fiction literature. More simply and less contentiously, The Old Drift is a great novel, one that deserves to stand the test of time. A modern masterpiece.
  7. The Ministry of Truth by Dorian Lynskey. I will always associate this book with being on Jura, the birthplace of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the novel that is the subject of this creative, vibrant and keenly insightful piece of literary biography. It is lucky I read The Ministry of Truth on Kindle as any physical copy of the book would have ended up with asterisks and stars and underlinings on every page. Lynskey’s powers of analysis – the ways in which he is able to draw a seventy-year-old work into potent, sizzling dialogue with our own time – are as commendable as the clarity and inclusiveness of his writing. It might sound odd to say it, but for me at least The Ministry of Truth was a real page-turner, a book I devoured in just a couple of days before diving into a reread of its subject-matter. I am happy but not surprised to report that it, too, scored a resounding 10/10 on my dodgy book-ometer.
  8. Born Yesterday: the news as a novel by Gordon Burn. Burn said in an interview that he hoped this novel would ‘bring back 2007’ to anyone reading it say twenty or thirty years in the future. Reading it in 2020 is a strikingly weird experience, not just because it does exactly that – I guarantee the events of that summer will feel instantly, eerily present to anyone who lived through them – but because of the way we have all ‘felt’ the news this year in a manner strikingly similar to that employed here, with a moment-by-moment immediacy that lends every individual, normally commonplace event the power of hyperreality . Born Yesterday is a powerful antidote to so much of the contemporary fiction we are told is ‘timely’ and ‘important’ but that is actually an empty construct, and I loved this book with my whole heart. Whenever I read Burn I find myself bitterly regretting his premature death, his keenly-felt absence from our literary lives. He challenges and inspires me like no other writer.
  9. The First Stone by Helen Garner. Another of my literary idols. The First Stone landed Garner in a pile of controversy back when it was first published in 1995 but that just goes to show how necessary a work it was and remains. What a brave, remorselessly self-examining, curious, questing, prescient book this is (I am guessing Garner’s own description of the ‘intellectual openness’ of US academe is making her laugh out loud right now). Should the point need stressing (as depressingly it probably does) whether one agrees with the stance Garner takes at the beginning of The First Stone is immaterial; what matters is Garner’s desire to interrogate a question as objectively as possible, to examine evidence, her honesty in doing so, her refusal to be cowed or bullied, her constant openness to the possibility that she might be wrong. I listened to a podcast interview with Eimear McBride recently in which she stressed that the one duty of the writer is not to be simplistic. That, in essence, is the true subject of The First Stone and it is impossible for me to overstate how much I appreciate Garner’s project, her writing, the force of her literary personality as expressed through it.
  10. The Inland Sea by Madeleine Watts. And talk of the devil, I came to Watts’s debut novel through an essay she published this year on the diaries of Helen Garner! (I love how these matters of interest so often join up.) The Inland Sea is a powerful, unusual and often discomfiting first novel that combines climate anxiety with memoir, a nation’s unsettled past history with the imminent near-future. The story of John Oxley and his search for Australia’s non-existent inland sea is compelling, dark and strange. The protagonist’s day-job as emergency services dispatcher offers a weird symmetry. Watts’s writing is sensitive and unsparing and her characters – Pat, Clemmie, Maeve and Lachlan – all spring vividly to life. As with all the best books, I was left feeling hungry for more and I cannot wait to find out where Watts goes next.

In spite of all obstacles and even because of them, 2020 has proved to be a fascinating, sustaining and fulfilling reading year for me, one in which the purpose and importance of reading has been stressed and re-stressed, the consolation, inspiration, energy and purpose that reading brings has been doubly precious. Next week and for my first blog post of the new year, I want to look forward into 2021 to some of the books I am particularly keen to be reading in the coming months. Until then, Happy New Year everyone – and take care out there.

2020: a year in writing

I am intending to post again next week with a rundown of the books that have most captured my imagination in 2020, but before that I thought I would share some words on how this strangest, most disorientating of years has played out within the context of my life in writing.

Many more years will need to pass before we can begin to accurately assess the full impact of 2020 – personally, politically, socially, environmentally. Until we are able to gain some distance, what we have is a combination of memory-flashes, baseline anxiety and news-montage. Chris and I live on a Scottish island and this fact alone has helped us withstand much of the practical awfulness of living through a pandemic: low population density, low incidence of the virus in the community, ample and safe opportunities for spending time outside, generosity of spirit and considerate adherence to the official guidelines from all who live here. We have also felt the unexpected benefits of being used to relative isolation: yes, we were completely locked down on the island for four months (and look set to be again any day now), but being lucky enough to work from home we were able to find a new routine and a sense of purpose even in spite of the restrictions. Not being able to travel brought its own strange benefits. As the winter comes on, we speak reassuring words to each other about not going across to the mainland much at this time of year anyway – even under normal circumstances, the clash of weather and ferries can make the threat of being stranded something of a deterrent.

We have friends down south who have contracted the virus but thank God none of them have suffered severe complications. The person closest to me who has been most impacted this year has been my mother. She has had her elective surgery cancelled twice, and with the current uncertainties around January lockdown – how severe will it be, how long will it last? – it is more or less impossible to estimate or discover when her operation might be rescheduled. My mother is an incredibly resilient person and has been remarkably upbeat through most of this year, but to see her in pain, her mobility increasingly affected is both worrying and upsetting. We understand there are many, many others in a similar position or worse, and here again we have much to be grateful for: my mum lives on the island, we have formed a social bubble/extended household and so I can spend time with her whenever I want to. Had she still been living in Cornwall, we would not have seen each other all year and as someone who suffers from anxiety she would have felt increasingly isolated.

Of course there are thousands of families, separated at this moment, who are not nearly so fortunate.

Though we have all of us come through this year together, seen and felt and cataloged its proliferating anomalies in a kind of Greek chorus of accelerating strangeness, each and every one of us will have experienced 2020 differently. Much of my own anxiety has been abstract, political, ambient: I am now middle aged, finally fully engaged in the work I love and cherish and was born to do and possessed of the kind of temperament – driven, obsessive – to be able to keep doing it even in spite of the mounting uncertainties. We are in a co-dependent relationship, my work and I, so it is lucky that we strengthen and encourage each other rather than engaging in mutually assured destruction. In terms of my own mental health and personal anxiety, certain years of my twenties, thirties and forties have been far harder to bear than this one. Had the events of this year taken place a decade ago, my situation – emotional, practical, financial – would have been very different.

This is something I remember and think about all the time, as I think about and internally rail against the myriad ways in which the government response to the epidemic – incomplete, uncoordinated, politically compromised as it is – has worsened the crisis, deepened social divisions and created an environment in which so many individuals and communities will find it even harder to recover.

If I were to try and articulate the feelings that have predominated and continue to define this year for me I would speak of existential nostalgia (in the Tarkovskian sense) for certainties that never existed, a constantly thrumming anger at the way political expediency has been granted ascendancy over societal need, a heightened, calamitous awareness of the entropic instability of the universe at large.

There is no doubt these fears and concerns have affected my writing, not in the matter of my ability to write but in my uncertainty over what might be relevant and what might be enough. At the beginning of 2020 I was well into the first draft of a new novel. I remember being fairly happy with the way it was developing, although that seems like a long time ago now, an isolated period now marooned on the further side of an insurmountable time-barrier. As the first period of lockdown came into being, I had just begun to write a portion of the narrative that was linked to yet discrete from the main body, an embedded text of the kind I love to create and that in this case immediately became suffused with all the anger and fear and disorientation of those first unbelieving weeks of the pandemic.

I redrafted this section recently and found memories of that time flooding back in a disturbing way. I am glad to report that this story has survived through to the current version of the novel in all its furious weirdness. The rest of that first draft was not so lucky. As I finished writing the embedded text and emerged again into the main stream of the narrative, everything about it felt wrong, insufficient, out of sync with my current thinking. It did not help matters that I suddenly became obsessed with pandemic literature – not zeitgeisty zombie apocalypses but older texts, writing that had arisen from the anxieties and social concerns of the time of writing: Camus’s The Plague, Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider. I now have a file of notes on all these and more, which I am sure is going to come in useful for some future project and that I fully intend to return to but caused me nothing but trouble earlier this year as I tried to knit some of these strands into a narrative already burdened with too many conflicting areas of interest.

I ended up dumping the lot, all 60,000 words of it. Discarding words is an inconvenience I have grudgingly learned to accept as a part of my process. I felt much better for having made this decision but starting completely from scratch brought its own problems and the novel had to undergo another heavy-duty realignment before assuming the form it now has, a form that finally bears some resemblance to what I have in mind. The draft currently stands at 68,000 words. I have another 20,000 words or so to write (some already drafted, the rest new material) at which point I will have what will amount to a complete working draft. This will then need to be redrafted as a continuum, the part of the process I find most rewarding (not to mention something of a relief) and that transforms the pile of dog-eared pages into a book.

This has seemed an incredibly trying, vertigo-inducing process at times. It has also been exciting, rewarding, thrilling, testing my abilities, stretching my ambitions and posing difficult yet energising questions about the kind of book I want to write, the direction I need to take, the type of writer I am endeavouring to become. It is both discomfiting and uniquely satisfying, to know that as a writer the answers to such questions are already within you. That as the writer of this particular book, you are the only one who can solve its problems.

I am hoping to have those problems solved, to the best of my ability, sometime during the first quarter of next year.

I am also happy to report that while all this was going on I also managed to complete two pieces of short fiction and draft most of a third story, to be delivered in March.

I feel incredibly lucky to do what I do, to love what I do, to be fit and well enough to do it to the best of my ability. If anything, the challenges and sobering insights of 2020 have redoubled my commitment to my work, re-ignited my passion and gratitude for the talent of others, reaffirmed my conviction that art absolutely matters. I hope that everyone reading this is able to find some joy, comradeship and peace this festive season, as well as the hope of better days to come. Stay safe, everyone. And see you back here next week for my best of the year.

Mountain Road, Late at Night

Alan Rossi’s debut novel takes place in the days following a tragic road accident. Nicholas and April are travelling home following a party on campus. In a moment of inattention, their car skids off the road and flips over. April is killed instantly. Nicholas dies later in hospital. As readers, as spectators, we know this from the outset. In one sense, the central drama of the novel takes place before the novel begins. In another, quite different sense, that drama is just beginning.

Nicholas and April leave behind a four-year-old son, Jack. In the hours and days following the accident, members of their family attempt to come to a decision over who of them is best placed to care for him in his life without his parents. Nicholas’s brother Nathaniel and his wife Stefanie are convinced that not only are they best suited to be parents, they are also Jack’s rightful guardians as appointed by Nicholas and April. Nicholas and Nathaniel’s father David has other ideas – with their busy working lives, can Nathaniel and Stefanie really offer Jack the stability he needs? April’s mother Tammy, partially estranged from the family, feels she is being pushed out. She believes she shares an instinctive bond with Jack, the kind of bond that no amount of money or possessions can come close to replacing.

As the six people in this drama draw closer geographically, so the cracks and contradictions in their intertwined relationships begin to appear. In the end it is left to Nicholas – trapped and dying in the wreckage of his car – to imagine into being a future he himself will not live to see.

This novel is a difficult read in all the right senses: emotionally devastating, morally ambiguous, with questions left unanswered and no ideal solutions on offer. Nicholas’s section in particular is devastating, and given the psychological pressures of our current circumstances I would advise sensitive readers to approach with care. But I would, unequivocally, advise them to approach, for Mountain Road, Late at Night is an extraordinary achievement, and whilst it is a difficult book to come to terms with it is absolutely not a difficult book to read. Rossi’s narrative burns off the page – I kept thinking of it as a stream of lights, of cat’s eyes, illuminating each new stretch of the road it travels, offering partial but transformative glimpses of what is to come.

There are times you read a book and think: this writer loves and reveres the written word. This was one of those times for me. The imagery, the thought process, the densely articulated emotion, the lack of sentimentality, the heartfelt compassion and depth of empathy – these are the effects and attributes of Rossi’s writing and you will find this novel, slim though it is, circumscribed though it is in terms of its canvas and cast of characters, impossible to forget.

If you liked John Wells’s movie August: Osage County (brilliantly adapted for the screen from his own stage play by Tracy Letts) then you will love Mountain Road, Late at Night.

There is something curiously timely about this book. Watching its action unfold is somewhat akin to watching April and Nicholas’s accident unfold in slow motion: everything is happening now, and everything that happens in the days afterwards is also happening even as the car begins its fatal slide across the mountain highway. We cannot alter what is happening, but we can live in these moments, we can feel close to the protagonists – all of them, equally (though I loved Tammy best!) – and we can examine our thoughts, our feelings, our actions as if we, too, were a part of this drama.

We are a part of this drama. What we do matters. What we say matters. How we feel matters.

The current situation is of an extreme magnitude. The word everyone keeps using is unprecedented, a word too often put in play maybe, only in this case it’s true. At least for us, at least for now. I normally love this time of year – with the evenings getting longer and the light increasing, it is my favourite time of year, more beloved even than summer, because all the flowers are opening and summer is still to come. Seeing our little town so closed and so quiet at a time when it would normally be opening itself to the increasing sunshine and a growing number of visitors is heartbreaking. I worry especially for all the small traders and hospitality businesses and freelance individuals who depend on these visitors, as our town depends on them, on being visible, on being beloved. Yet at the same time there is a sense of relief, that this shutdown happened before the season got underway, increasing the risk to the town and to resident islanders.

It will take everyone a long time – years maybe – to process and recover from what has happened, what is still happening. We do not properly have the language to process it, not yet – hence the over-reliance on preconceived images of dystopia, which are inadequate and more especially mostly inaccurate. We must and will in time develop that language, and in constructing a narrative I hope also that we will think differently about what can be achieved – what we can achieve – if the political will is there. We have seen measures enacted over the past weeks and days that we would never have imagined possible. What if the same measure of political will were brought to bear in combating climate change? In helping marginalised communities? In protecting threatened environments and ecosystems?

There is a measure of disjuncture, in the present time, in reading books that were written and conceived before the present time. I am sure everyone reading this will have found themselves reading a novel or watching a TV drama and thinking: ‘ooh look, people in a pub!’ or something of that kind. People in a pub – like an image from deep time. A disjunctive and somehow shocking experience.

We might find it useful and even helpful to fully inhabit those moments of inner drama, to try and understand them, to discover what they mean for our ability to imagine.

Knowing that we will – on an individual as well as a societal level – be changed by this is frightening, estranging, humbling and utterly new.

Read what feels right for you. In a move that might seem counterintuitive, I found myself reaching for Countdown City, the second novel in Ben H. Winters’s Last Policeman series. Reading about a murder investigation taking place against the background of an impending asteroid strike might not seem like the happiest of impulses right now, yet the protagonist’s calm, compassionate, organised and professional attitude to coping with disaster has a curiously calming effect. I loved the obsessive attention to detail in the first volume – I love this kind of forensic writing – and it has been hugely enjoyable and energising to encounter it again.

Work is good, being in touch with friends is good. As through those dark and uncertain months that are the Scottish winter, running early in the morning is good. When I’m running, everything feels normal. When I’m reading, everything feels new.

I’d like to particularly thank all those writing and creating content – getting new stuff to read and watch and think about is even more important now than it is usually. A particular shout-out to Influx Press, who are planning to take some of their author events online as the lockdown continues, and to booktubers and podcasters Caroline, Eric, Simon, Mercedes, Jen, Sophie, Lauren, April, Rachel and Claire among many others – your passion for what you read and your resilience in continuing to make videos to keep us all going through this current crisis is a priceless gift.

For everyone reading this blog, please keep safe and well.

You can find a short and beautifully illustrated essay by Alan Rossi about the inspiration he finds in the Blue Ridge Mountains here.

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