What exactly is a Booker book? According to the Booker website, the prize is awarded each year ‘to what is, in the opinion of the judges, the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the UK and Ireland.’ A definition that is frustratingly, deliciously and deliberately vague, open to any interpretation a panel of judges – or an individual reader – cares to place on it. That weasel-word ‘best’, which can only ever be subjective, and as mutable as time and literary fashion might allow.
The only answer I can give, then, is bound to be a personal one: what exactly is a Booker book, for me? I would say that what I want to see in a Booker book more than anything is boldness. The voice of an author who, whilst being aware of current literary trends, fashions and discourse, does not allow them to influence their output. Who goes their own way, yet who speaks to readers in their present. Whose work is intensely personal, yet timeless, universal. A novel that takes account of literary history and past excellence yet delivers something new. A novel that is – without question – literary, yet has the power to excite. The page count need not matter, but the true Booker book should be big, a future classic.
Among the lists of winners and nominees I would single out as being ‘true’ Booker books: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea, JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, AS Byatt’s Possession, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, James Kelman’s How Late it Was, How Late, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, JM Coetzee’s Disgrace, Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, Nicola Barker’s Darkmans, Martin MacInnes’s In Ascension, Anna Burns’s Milkman. There are others, of course, plenty of them – I am snatching titles more or less at random. Equally there are so, so many books on those longlists one looks back on and can only think: whaaat?
Why am I going on about all this? Well, because I’ve been thinking about David Szalay’s quietly moving, brilliantly executed and distinctly timely novel Flesh and trying to decide if it truly is a Booker book, for me. In the quality of its writing, sure – it’s flawless. In its relevance to our present moment, again, yes. My hesitation – my inability to answer the question – lies in the sense that this book is – like its protagonist – too private to be a Booker book, too closed in upon itself, too much alone. And I don’t mean any of that as negative criticism. I think this book is superb.
We first meet Istvan at the age of fifteen, living with his mother in a post-Soviet apartment block in their native Hungary. He is like any other teenage boy: recalcitrant, vaguely lazy, finding his level among his coevals. Then an upstairs neighbour – a woman around the same age as his mother – starts paying him extra attention. Istvan is bemused and slightly repulsed, a feeling that soon shifts first into excitement and then attraction. The odd, imbalanced relationship between the two of them has tragic consequences – and the course of Istvan’s life is changed in a single second.
We then follow Istvan through the final decades of the twentieth century, and through the various twists of fate that bring him first into the army and then to London, where his fortunes take an upward turn – or so it seems. Whether rich or poor, married or single, the essential Istvan remains the same: resilient, guarded, resourceful, emotionally withdrawn. He is not lonely so much as alone – even when he is with someone. In Flesh, Szalay shows us modern masculinity in all its contradictions as Istvan’s potential for openness, for self expression and self realisation is stymied again and again by the background hostility of a world that refuses to allow him a seat at the table. Keenly intelligent and almost preternaturally observant, Istvan is patronised by his wife Helen’s rich friends, who automatically assume that a man ‘like him’ – just flesh – will be uncultured and uncouth.
One particularly beautiful sequence sees Istvan showing Helen around the BMW museum in Munich. He has a close-to-photographic memory, and knows everything about the cars: history, make and model. Here, for the first time, we see him animated, openly passionate about something, though for Helen the cars are just cars. Leaving the museum, Istvan guides them to the U-Bahn. He wonders when was the last time Helen found herself having to use public transport.
Flesh is a novel about the fallout of trauma – Istvan’s time in the army and his inability to talk about it is a recurrent theme – but more than that, it is a novel about the tragic mismatch between the male human animal and the world he has constructed for himself. The title of an earlier work by Szalay – All That Man Is – would have fitted Istvan’s story equally. At the surface level, a more different character than Ben Markovits’s Tom is difficult to imagine – but dig a little deeper, and it becomes evident that they share many of the same problems.
At a certain point in the narrative (you’ll know it when you get to it) I found myself comparing Flesh with Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, shortlisted for the Booker back in 2015. The two novels share a broadly similar trajectory, yet could not be more different. A Little Life is all high drama and torrid emotion; Flesh is cool, pared back, reticent. Both novels make an impact through the quality of characterisation – but in terms of its economy, pathos and flawless technical control of the words on the page, Flesh is the better novel, or at least it is for me.
Could it be a contender?
I guess the question is: does this novel feel big enough? The answer will depend on the reader – and of course the judges.
The narrator of Audition is a famous actor. Not Hollywood-A-List-famous, but famous enough to be recognised, by those in the know, in a public place. At the novel’s opening, she walks into a restaurant and is shown to a table where a young man is already seated. The two have not met in person before, yet already there is tension between them. The young man – Xavier – has asked for a meeting, because he has something important to tell her. Xavier believes that he might be her son, a piece of speculation our narrator immediately rejects as being impossible. In the moments following Xavier’s dropped bombshell, our unnamed narrator is shocked to see her husband, Tomas, entering the restaurant. Tomas does not normally frequent this part of town, so what is he doing here? Our narrator is immediately filled with anxiety, that Tomas will see her sitting with Xavier and jump to the wrong conclusion.
Part Two of Audition sees us entering what might be an alternate world, a timeline in which Xavier really is the grown-up son of Tomas and the narrator. The narrator is still a famous actor, with a recent, ongoing success in a feted new stage play. Xavier is working as personal assistant to the play’s director, Anne. Then Xavier asks if he can return for a while to live in the family apartment and everything goes Roman Polanski (Repulsion/Cul-de-sac era) pretty damn quick.
A couple of years ago I reviewed Ian Reid’s third novel, We Spread, in which recently widowed Penny finds herself trapped in a sinister care home whose other occupants appear to have been subsumed into some sort of group identity. To be honest, I preferred Reid’s earlier novel – and its brilliant film adaptation by Charlie Kaufman – I’m Thinking of Ending Things. But We Spread is expertly done, a novel that makes perfect sense on its own terms, tautly imagined and strongly achieved by a writer fluent enough in genre conventions to successfully undermine them. Audition feels as if it’s working from some of the same tropes – fear of stasis, erosion of identity, one’s life being encroached upon and taken over by exterior forces. Are we to intuit that we are all playing parts – accustomed roles – within our own lives, that we are ‘auditioning’ for a part that has been pre-ordained for us? Are we the version of ourselves that we present on the ‘stage’ of public life, or is there a deeper, hidden reality that is only kept within bounds by the forces of convention? Is the whole thing just a play within a play??
Yeah, probably. But to my own unbelieving horror, the peerless expertise in undermining the tropes of detective fiction that made Kitamura’s earlier novel A Separation such a landmark text for me is a total no-show in Audition. Even the title – which must for horror fans immediately summon the ghost of Takashi Miike’s brilliant and unsettling 1999 screen adaptation of Ryu Murakami’s 1997 novel of the same name – hints at riches that are never delivered.
In his previously discussed masterpiece One Boat, Jonathan Buckley achieves his desired atmosphere of uncanniness, of underlying doubt through specificity: his diamond-bright evocation of a particular landscape makes its shadows deeper, the narrator’s own ruthless self-examination reveals a grief that may never be fully describable but is nonetheless felt. Audition appears on the surface to be similarly rigorous in its approach, similarly pared-back; in fact it is mushy, non-specific, a woolly, careless mass of might-bes and perhapses. The game-changing cameo role that cements the narrator’s reputation is never described, just as the play she is acting in now remains just a title. What kind of a ‘writer’ is Xavier? Or indeed Tomas? Who did the narrator have an affair with in the hinterland of Part One? In terms of language as well as action, Kitamura falls into the trap that is the undoing of many would-be horror writers in equating vagueness with subtlety. We don’t really know what’s going on here – but worse, we don’t really care.
A couple of days ago, I was discussing with some friends this recent review of Audition by Adam Roberts. Not having yet read the novel, I came out hotly in defence of Kitamura: Adam, I felt convinced, just didn’t get her. Turns out he was right, and I was wrong. Given how much I have loved and admired A Separation and its follow-up, Intimacies, Audition is a significant disappointment.
Could it be a contender?
No, just no. I could waste the rest of the morning listing books that would have been more interesting and worthy additions to the Booker longlist. To put an overused but in this case appropriate question: what were they thinking??
Tom Layward is a lawyer. He didn’t set out wanting to be a lawyer, but in the end it seemed the safest option: easier than following his ambition to play professional basketball, more secure than his other pipe dream, to become a writer. Thirty years down the line, Tom is married to Amy. Their son Michael has left home, their daughter Miriam is about to go to college. Tom has been asked to take a sabbatical from his law firm while a delicate workplace situation is resolved. He has not told Amy, though. Twelve years earlier, Amy had a brief affair with a guy she knew from synagogue. The Laywards’ relationship has been in emotional limbo ever since. After dropping Miri off at college, Tom keeps driving. His plans are vague. Perhaps he’ll go and see his brother, Eric. As for what happens after that, he’s undecided.
The Rest of Our Lives is pure reading pleasure – if it were a car, you’d say it handles like a dream. There are no bad guys in this book (except for the racist, conspiracy-theorist basketball player Tom briefly meets with – and silently rejects – as a possible client) but that’s the point.
I thought, what if I moved in with Jill and became friends with these people, so that the last thirty years of our lives turned out to be just an interruption. Would Katie eventually think of me as her father? The thought made me… It wasn’t even a feeling of guilt, it was a deeper horror than that. (Miri, Michael.) I don’t even mean that it seemed impossible, because this is basically what my dad did. There’s almost nothing you can’t do to yourself, that’s what I thought. And whatever it is, you’ll probably survive and maybe even end up happier than you were before. But that doesn’t make it less terrible.
I don’t often read novels like this these days. But when I happen to stumble upon one as good as this, I feel a quiet, deep-seated joy that there are still writers out there who are capable of this kind of solid, no-frills, intelligent, introspective, perfectly executed, honest, old-fashioned writing. The Rest of Our Lives could almost be a Philip Roth novel, only without the sexism and merciless egotism. Markovits is less biting, less frenetic, possibly because he is more self aware. Certainly more aware of women. Alive and attentive to the world through which he moves.
This book does nothing new. It is just a very good book. I have loved my time with Tom and with Amy, Michael, Miri, Eric, Jill, Betty and Brian, the complex, immersive network of their friendships and problems. The Rest of Our Lives is an engrossing, involving novel of character: restrained, reflective, nourishing, and not a word out of place.
Could it be a contender?
Ideologically, I’d probably argue against it, because it doesn’t challenge. But if Markovits won, I’d say good on him, and be secretly pleased.
It’s a shame, in a way, that I succumbed to the temptation to read this so early in my journey through the Booker longlist. Because I doubt very much that the longlist has anything better to offer me. I doubt I’ll read anything better for the rest of the year.
Jonathan Buckley’s slim novel – poised, elegant, restrained, every word chosen and placed with knowledge and intent – embodies the Platonic ideal of good writing. One Boat also demonstrates the far extremes to which the ‘mystery novel’ template may be stretched, and yet still be successful in promoting a state of enchantment.
A wide river, smooth, with long flights of bright stone steps on both banks, and people processing down to the water. Overhead, large low-flying & slow-flying birds, one per person, as if each person has a designated escort. At the river’s edge, the people do not pause. They walk down the steps, which extend a long way into the water, and when the people are in the water they continue to descend, untroubled. I take my place in the procession.
Nine years after the death of her mother, a woman returns to a seaside town in Greece to mourn the loss of her father. Teresa, who works in contract law, claims not to be a writer but makes notes constantly: her impressions of the town and how it has changed, the people she meets (and has met before), even her dreams. On her previous visit, she had recently separated from her husband, Tom, a split that brings back memories of her own parents’ divorce, to which it bears similarities. Nine years later, Teresa’s memories of Tom have taken on a more abstract quality, and it is the town itself – and a story she was told when she was there before – that preys on her mind and may even be having an impact on her future.
Some days, he told me, he argued with himself, making the very same points that I had made, ‘if not so eloquently’, but reasonableness could never prevail. The fire is never completely extinguished. He had come to think that people never change their minds because they’ve been persuaded to. If they change their minds, it’s because they want to. The door only opens if it’s already unlocked… He smiled as he shook my hand, but his eyes, I noted later, made me think of a man going into exile – to his execution, even.
Though it is a fraction of its length, the book that kept coming to mind as I read One Boat was John Fowles’s The Magus. The Greek setting, of course, but more than that – the nature of mortality and the aftershocks of violence, the sense of a deeper mystery buried. Of a clear-eyed narrator from whom truths remain hidden, of histories that turn on the result of a single decision. Buckley reveals how much of the art of the mystery lies in making a virtue of the unresolved, of the unresolvable. Of the art of fiction itself, and how it is finally inextricable from the conflicted, exterior fact of the writer’s life.
If you like Chris Priest’s novel The Glamour, you will like this. If you like Alain Resnais’s film Last Year in Marienbad, you will like this, too.
There will be a particular tranche of readers who will rise up in opposition to the final chapter, complaining about having the rug pulled, about being ‘thrown out of the narrative’. This book was not written for you, it was written for me.
With his previous – and equally brilliant – novel Tell shortlisted for last year’s Goldsmiths Prize, it is wonderful to see Jonathan Buckley finally getting some of the recognition he has long deserved.
Could it be a contender?
What was it John Banville said the year he won? It would be nice to see a work of art winning the Booker Prize. Going by the current state of things, it’ll probably not make the shortlist…
The Booker longlist was announced on Tuesday. This is a moment I always look forward to as I love the discussions about books, prizes and literature in general that invariably arise during Booker season. As to the actual list, after the initial rush of discovering who is actually on it, I often find myself feeling disappointed. I don’t think there’s ever been a year where there hasn’t been at least one book that snags my interest, that feels like a choice I myself would have made – some years, that book might even go on to win! And maybe that’s the point of the Booker, that it showcases a whole spectrum of literary styles, attitudes and concerns, that the longlist really does provide ‘something for everyone’. Fair enough – that’s not a bad mission to have. But as someone notorious for enjoying a ‘statement’ prize list, a shortlist that coheres around a particular vision, the Booker longlist has often felt a bit flabby, a bit medium, dominated by books that are ‘about’ something but that don’t do anything exciting at the level of text.
This year’s longlist, I was delighted to find, feels rather different.
Not only did it include books by two of my favourite writers – Katie Kitamura and Jonathan Buckley – but it also included a generous handful of other books I have been genuinely interested in reading. Books and writers that push the boundaries a little, that do stuff with form and that take a few risks. I like this longlist. And so I’ve decided to try and read as much of it as I can before the shortlist announcement, and post my findings here. First up is…
UNIVERSALITY by Natasha Brown
I still haven’t got round to reading Assembly, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity to discover Brown’s work. My initial impressions weren’t great. But this book won me over. I love it when that happens!
Universality opens with what purports to be a piece of longform journalism investigating an act of violence at a farm in Yorkshire. An experiment in ‘intentional living’ seems to have gone badly awry, culminating in a clash between two would-be eco-warriors that leaves one of them in hospital with a severe concussion. The weapon? A gold bar, net worth half a million and current whereabouts unknown. Is what happened at Alderton Farm a microcosm of society’s wider conflicts, or just some stupid fight?
Reading this, I was finding it difficult to understand why someone would spend time satirising the kind and class of people who write opinion columns for The Spectator. I was also becoming wearied by the multiple iterations of the words ‘late capitalism’ – we have opinion columns in the Guardian for that. But the deeper I dived into this book, the more I found myself smiling, raising my eyebrows in delight and admiration. Universality is relentlessly satirical – not always my bag – and it is, relentlessly, about a certain milieu, and relentless in a way that risks tipping over into caricature. The fact that it does not – quite – is a measure of Brown’s confidence as a writer, her passion for her subject and her adept handling of her material. She is showing us a particular stratum, the place where a lot of soft power lies and where, deliberately or arbitrarily, decisions are taken about ‘what we think’ and how ‘opinion’ and thus society will be steered.
The ending, for me, was genius. And that moment between Richard and Claire is proof that the book has a beating heart beneath its corporate sheen.
It is a smart book, and it is a funny book. But it’s more than that. There’s muscular writing, some genuinely wonderful sentences, entire flocks of acute observations. It is a disturbingly accurate portrait of Britain today – or at least some parts of it. Universality is a slim novel – less than 200 pages – but it does plenty of heavy lifting. Hats off.
Could it be a contender?
It’s pertinent. It’s relevant. You know, I really think it could.
‘Not so long ago this book might have been about Bill Evans rather than Erik Satie,’ Penman writes in his new, strange and cumulatively addictive book. ‘A time when I was lost inside a kind of willed solitude, fenced in by self-destructive habits and unassuageable longings. No visible horizon, everything in lifeless tones, handfuls of soil thrown onto a premature coffin. You come to accept it as just the natural way of things. Longing as a state of being. Saudade gone terminally wrong. A kind of exasperated bliss that becomes unhealthy, stuck, congealed.’
Penman’s 2023 book Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors became for me almost instantly the kind of literary touchstone or lifebuoy that I can only liken to a jagged tooth of rock, offering a handhold in a raging sea. The sense of absolute resonance – especially then – in terms of both how the words were put together and what they said was so intense for me, appropriate to my needs and interests in a way that, as one struggles with one’s own work and doubts, becomes increasingly rare, that I was initially perplexed by this new thing. I almost, dare I say it, felt disappointed. What the hell was it and why had Penman written it? The first part, entitled ‘Satie Essay’, read like I could have written it myself (for me this is never a good sign) and then what on Earth was the point of his ‘Satie A-Z’?
It seemed to me as if he had picked his subject almost at random then doodled around with it, a strategy that worked, just about, because Penman is a brilliant writer and writers of that calibre can make something of anything. But why?? I kept going because this was Penman and so how could I not. What happened for me was like opening a package, like playing pass the parcel: the exterior layers of ‘knowing’ were really covers for what was inside, Penman’s ‘Satie Diary’.
I had been feeling frustrated with the book for not being personal enough – what had been the trigger? – only to be confronted with what is, in fact, a form of confession.
It is a lovely, lovely thing. The kind of writing one dreams of. It’s – it’s a bit like Satie.
Everything in this book comes in threes, a kind of occult numerology originating – of course – from its source material: ‘Trois Gymnopedies’, ‘Trois Gnossiennes’, ‘Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear.’ Penman describes Satie’s most popular pieces – now so ubiquitous they would be instantly recognisable even to those who have never heard the composer’s name – as sounding like ‘pieces composed by someone who knew there would one day be recording studios, CDs, downloads.’ It’s so startling and so true, like almost everything else you will find here. Penman worries occasionally about his lack of grounding in music theory and all I can say is, you don’t need it, mate. The language of musicology, for the writer, is like most other academic forms: you can slip into it without realising what you’ve stepped in and then spend most of a lifetime trying to get it off your shoe.
Penman’s observations about Satie’s musical influence – Satie = Eno = Glass, Satie = Cage = Feldman – are spot on, the kind that can come only from listening, from the kind of understanding that is alchemical, that cannot be taught.
Again and again while reading this book I had the sense that Penman and I had been journeying towards Satie from opposite directions. He speaks – and I guessed this even before he mentioned it – of his being turned off classical music entirely as an adolescent through the ostentation, the insatiable, overbearing genius of the big beasts of the classical canon, the very idea of Wagner. Huge symphonies, ‘show-off’ piano concertos – they were just noise for him, a teachery view of music that felt not just irrelevant but actively repellent, the language around it – the behaviour – a deliberate act of gatekeeping.
For me at the same age, all that stuff was my safe space, a thing I knew about and could talk about and was therefore protected by. I didn’t hear Bill Evans until I was in my thirties. I listened to jazz at first with a kind of guilt, the sense that I was betraying something essential not only to myself but about myself.
It’s all incredibly personal. My journey in music is as deeply internalised and as intellectually significant to me as my journey in writing, my finding of a subject. But how strange it is, that coming from different directions, Penman and I, we meet in the middle: Tallis and Palestrina, the Goldberg Variations, odd end-of-century minimalism and electronica. Gesualdo. The kind of stuff you hear on Night Waves. Biber’s rosary sonatas.
I’ve just been listening to the Satie three piece suites again. There is something lonely about them. (Because in spite of his capacity for friendship, Satie was lonely – that room of his, stuffed with trash and unopened letters, says it all.) Something chilling – music for the end of time. (Messiaen – he’s another one.) Limpid. Eerie. Excruciatingly lovely. Music that makes me think of Chris Marker’s La Jetee, the stills in the museum. (Penman refs Marker in passing and how could he not?) Music that makes me ache with a sadness that can never be resolved.
I might never feel confident enough to write about Bill Evans or Thelonius Monk or Chick Corea – I don’t have the language yet. I would feel on safer ground writing about Gubaidulina or Saariaho. My feelings about Wagner, now, are too complicated for me to bother trying to unravel and suffice it to say that the man was and is a pain in the arse. I still think Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis is one of the most glorious structures in all of Western music – the sonic equivalent of a cathedral – but it comes from a time we have forfeited, flickering by us in disjointed frames from the Pathe newsreel of history. To an extent at least, the experience of listening to it can only ever be one of nostalgia.
Those little pieces of Satie’s, though. They’re a hundred years old, more or less. But they’re infected with the germ of our own time and that – well, there’s something terrifying about it.
Paul Kincaid wrote recently about his response to a review of his new (and excellent) essay collection Colourfields, and how that review had made him take a closer look at what constitutes ‘his’ science fiction, and what that might say about him both as a reader and as a writer.
It’s a ruminative, almost elegiac post, looking back at a forty-year stretch as a science fiction critic. It includes a lovely anecdote in which Paul approaches Chris at a convention – the first time they’d met – and asks him to sign his copy of Inverted World. Chris, apparently, brushed him off and told him to go and get the book signed by the illustrator instead. Given the thousands of copies of his books that Chris was more than happy to sign in the years following, I can confidently say to Paul that his reaction at that early stage of his career would have been entirely down to feeling overwhelmed and vaguely embarrassed that someone had actually read a novel of his and thought enough of it to initiate contact. Chris was just thirty when Inverted World was published, Paul Kincaid twenty-two. You see what I mean about elegiac.
The deeply considered, wide-ranging and thoughtful review of Colourfields Paul is addressing is by Roseanna Pendlebury, who clearly gained much in the reading and – more importantly – was prepared to engage with the book on its own terms even when those terms diverged from her particular interests. She then went on to write a follow-up essay in which she gave more personal insights into her own version of science fiction. It’s this kind of investigative, text-focused writing that has always characterised the best criticism within SF as well as beyond it, that has been a primary source of inspiration in my own critical practice. ‘My’ SF – both in the kind of writing I’m interested in and the frame through which I view it – is much closer to Kincaid’s than to Pendlebury’s, but it is nonetheless a source of gladness and relief to know that there are younger critics coming down the line with the talent, wit and rigour to continue with the job of building SF’s critical hinterland. (Yes, I am still using that phrase, and yes, said hinterland is still as important as it ever was.)
Though the books Kincaid and Pendlebury list and discuss as best examples of what constitutes their personal science fiction are markedly different and say equally different things about SF, one thing I noticed about both critics’ posts was that they each made reference to a book that precipitated a radical change in their understanding of science fiction, what it could do and how they related to it. For Pendlebury it was her reading of Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, ‘the hinge upon which all this turns’, and which happened to coincide with ‘a shift in my own awareness of genre, where I began to genuinely pay attention.’ For Kincaid, it was his encounter with Keith Roberts’s Pavane, the novel that switched him on to science fiction as a mode of literature with an identity all its own.
Kincaid mentions also a period of childhood illness that necessitated him spending several weeks at home in bed, away from school and outside of his normal routines. It’s interesting, how many writers share this experience. Chris wrote more than once about a cycling accident at the age of fourteen, which left him with a concussion and a two-week ‘memory gap’. He often cited this sudden insecurity around the subject of memory as the germ of all his future fiction. Versions of the accident itself – or enforced periods of absence from school – crop up in several of his novels. In a recent interview on Radio 4, the novelist Maggie O’Farrell speaks eloquently of a serious childhood illness that led to her being hospitalised for several months, territory she has previously explored through her 2017 memoir I Am I Am I Am. Her premature awareness of the nearness of death, together with the physical separation from others of her peer group, completely altered her view of the world and pushed her to examine her thoughts and emotions through the medium of writing. When I was twelve, I unexpectedly developed pneumonia, and was away from school for most of the Easter term. I was already a compulsive reader, but this period of enforced isolation had a significant effect on me. My English teacher sent me a package of reading material that included Alan Garner’s The Owl Service as well as other books I might not have come across otherwise, or at least not then. This was also when I first started listening to Radio 3, hour after hour of ‘secret education’ that laid the groundwork for all my future interest in classical music.
There was something else about that time, though, something less immediately identifiable or tangible but profound in its effects. Time to think and time to be. Time to reflect and form opinions. Time to get to know oneself and one’s opinions as distinct from the crowd. I have heard others say similar things about a week at a writers’ retreat, a religious retreat or even just time away in a different location.
It is easy to become locked into patterns, into established ways of thinking, and most especially in the compilation of lists of significant books! I have made so many of these during my life as a writer. I enjoy creating them and I find them interesting – other people’s as much as my own. It’s no secret that I’m a lists kind of person. But in recent years especially an element of doubt has begun to creep in. Either my choices seem pre-ordained – books I have chosen before, and so gravitate immediately towards, as one might automatically assume the same position on a well-used mattress – or they reflect nothing so much as the most recent shift or enthusiasm in my current reading and writing. Not that this is uninteresting or without value, but looking at it from the inside it can be laughably predictable.
Which books have really, really changed me? I know that Chris’s A Dream of Wessex did. It was the first book of his I read, on a recommendation from a friend. This was in my middle twenties, and I had not yet started writing seriously for publication. I had not heard of Christopher Priest either, and before reading A Dream of Wessex I had no idea that this kind of science fiction was even possible. I wanted more of it – more especially of books by Christopher Priest. This was long before Amazon or Abebooks and getting hold of titles not currently in print was a much more difficult, some might say a more exciting challenge than it is today. It was mostly a matter of stumbling across them – in second hand bookshops, in the local library, both of which I made use of in my search for Chris’s backlist. Each new find was a source of delight and minor celebration. By the time Chris and I actually met, I had read everything of his with the exception of Indoctrinaire, which was impossible to find. In an echo of his earlier equivocation around signing Inverted World for the young Paul Kincaid, it was some time before I finally persuaded him to give me a copy.
(And of course I found it remarkable, his portrait of the artist as a young man.)
I had a similar experience reading Mike Harrison a number of years later. Signs of Life was the first book of his I read – it had not long come out – and I knew instantly that Mike would be an ‘auto-buy’ writer for me from now on. But it was his short fiction collection Travel Arrangements, published in 2000 and more or less at the exact time I first began sending my own stories to magazines, that opened up a new awareness of what one was allowed to do in fiction, if one had the gall to try. These strange, elliptical stories had no easily definable narrative – yet they immediately felt like a part of me, of what I understood to be the meaning and function of writing as a vocation. Their effect on my ability to read was similar to what had happened to me with Eliot’s The Waste Land, some fifteen years before.
There are three writers in particular whose whole oeuvre has cemented itself in my consciousness as indispensable to the way I see not so much the world at large but the business of being a writer who lives in that world. Iris Murdoch always wrote in the knowledge that ‘the mundane’ is a kind of myth, removed from the miraculous by the narrowest of margins. This, to me, has always seemed self-evident, and it is probably for this reason that Murdoch is a writer I can always drop everything else to read and then for however long I choose to linger in her world find it difficult to pay attention to anyone else. Vladimir Nabokov was a life-changer for me, the summation of my love affair with Russian literature but also my mentor and my guide. For Nabokov, writing was the thing, the only end, the life choice. Critics tend to get so wrapped up in his mastery of language that they often fail to mention how many of his novels are encoded autobiographies, the story of himself, told in different voices, the ultimate autofiction.
Chris and I discovered Roberto Bolano together and fell equally in love, which is its own set of memories, but Bolano for me – like Priest, like Harrison – opened a door into a new way of writing, and thinking about writing. His apparent looseness of style, his discursiveness – the polar opposite of VN – which is really a diversion, a unique construct through which Bolano approaches his subject matter, which is writing, writing, always writing. His repurposing of generic archetypes – the science fiction story and in particular the detective story, both of which he loved – to suit his own ends, which are invariably tied up in his obsession with form.
I always used to say to Chris, that if I were stuck on a desert island with only books by Murdoch, or Nabokov, or Bolano then they would definitely keep me going until I was rescued.
I have now been writing professionally for twenty years. My relationship with reading has changed, or rather, it has evolved, becoming both more urgent and less innocent. It is impossible simply to read; as a writer, one reads with the unspoken question: how is this done and what can I learn from it? And yet those high-wire moments of joy are no less forthcoming. I still think most days about Maria Gainza’s novel Optic Nerve, which I happened to turn to during a moment of acute foreboding. It showed me what could be done with fact inside fiction and through its discussions of art literally gave me back my sense of why I am on this planet. I think all the time about Emlyn Williams’s great, great true crime novel Beyond Belief, the darkest of subject matter set against the most brilliantly evoked urban landscape of lived reality, the ultimate masterclass in what this kind of writing should be and why it is necessary. Reading Gordon Burn’s Sex and Violence, Death and Silence and loving how he wrote about art as urgently and as brilliantly as he wrote about the subjects he is best known for. Seeing how such apparent contradictions are a continuum, how knowing this is important, especially to me. Understanding, every time I pick up a book by Helen Garner, that I will never come close to her naked and unflinching deployment of the pronoun ‘I’. Having to try and find my own way around that, but feeling through each moment of reading her an overwhelming and dizzy gratitude to be sharing space-time with this extraordinary writer.
‘What is it we’re reading for? I mean, why do we keep reading and rereading a particular novelist? When I think about Bolano – and I think about him often – invariably I find my way to the conclusion that what I’m primarily in it for is friendship.’
‘I read The Dispossessed when I still suspected that my anarcho-punk friends might be right about everything. While the novel rammed home the ways in which capitalism mutilates us, life in the anarchist ‘utopia’ of Anarres – hard labour, dust and aggressively policed mediocrity – made me wonder if capitalism wasn’t the best of a bad lot.’
‘Although I sometimes tantalise myself with the idea of moving to London again, I don’t need Heraclitus to remind me that you can’t step into the same river twice. The London where I lived no longer exists, any more than a dream exists upon awakening – a dream in which you were happy, in which life lived up to its promise.’
‘PROBLEMATIC: A judgement generated by the demand that art avoid describing what is and express what ought to be, and that we admire only art that issues from a stainless soul and a clean rap sheet. Everything in the human being that is messy, vital and interesting; everything shadowy, unconscious, offline.’
‘London Fields failed to make the 1989 Booker Prize shortlist, cock-blocked by two feminist judges who disapproved of the depiction of women. Even if you feel they had a point, can we nonetheless agree that in its architectonic splendour, visions of megacity entropy and unrelenting lingual charisma London Fields stands damn near the summit of modern novelistic achievement?’
‘Ballard was such a superb commentator on his own fiction, one wonders whether the fiction was needed at all. Might he not have simply pretended it existed, then given us books of pure ideation?’
*
In 2019, Rob Doyle was commissioned to write a weekly books column for the Irish Times, a ‘year of rereading’ that would be a journey back through the novels that had meant the most to him. There were two rules: books chosen were to have been published no later than the year 2000 and each column would run to a maximum of 340 words. Within three months of the final column being published, the COVID lockdowns began. With previous plans put on hold, Doyle found himself reflecting on the wider implications of his fifty-two book columns. What had his choices said about him, both as reader and writer? And what did such choices mean, precisely now?
It would be wrong to call Autobibliography a diary of the pandemic, though it sort of is, just as it is also a partial memoir of Doyle’s progress to date. What it is mostly though is a declaration of allegiance to the practice of art, an impassioned defence of a particular kind of writing – ‘the kind of novel with as much essay in it as narrative, the kind you can read with a pen in your hand’ – and why such writing matters.
Doyle loves Houellebecq, Cioran, Nietzsche, Dyer, Mailer, Didion (sort of), Carrere, Bolano, Lispector, Sarraute, Markson. His choices are eclectic, but with a certain unity. The commentary on the books themselves – like Doyle’s always brilliant reviews – rise far above the practised, easy argument it is so easy to fall into when you’ve a limited word count. The passages of memoir and reflection woven between offer a commentary upon that commentary, an autobibliography, a portrait of a writer in fifty-two books.
It’s also very funny. If you enjoyed Mike Harrison’s Wish I Was Here then you will probably love this book, too. That I am in sympathy with Doyle on most of what he says here is beside the point. Thank goodness there are writers writing who write like this, writers who understand what the gig’s about, who have the courage and talent to put that knowledge to practice, who are still young.
Like much of McNamee’s work, his new novel is set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The bureau of the title is a ‘bureau de change’, where the shopkeepers and business owners who trade either side of the Irish border can exchange currency. This is only the surface layer of what goes on there, however. The bureau’s main business is in laundering the profits made from the less salubrious smuggling enterprises that form part of the natural ecosystem of the borderland, anything from cigarettes and alcohol to unlicensed diesel to human beings. The men who run the border trade are in permanent danger of death both from each other and from more serious criminals higher up the chain. The women involved with these men – whether wives or lovers – are on a hiding to nothing.
‘My writing has always been concerned with real events and making novels around them,’ McNamee says. ‘In this book, for the first time, they aren’t just public events but events specific to me and my family.’ Brendan McNamee is a solicitor. He opened the bureau after being struck off for embezzling funds. The clients he serves now are not the kind of people you would want to cross and it is not just Brendan who will be in the firing line if he oversteps his mark. On the other side of the counter is Paddy Farrell, who dreams of living ‘a sophisticated life’ in Florida or in Dublin, but who is unable to escape the pull of the border and the shadow life he lives there. Lorraine, a young woman whose intense and morbid spirituality seems at odds with her passionate physical desire for Paddy, longs for a time when the hostilities and underlying trauma of the border years will be behind them – except they never will be.
The events McNamee is writing about happened long before most newspapers began to be digitised and so to properly align fact with fiction you would have to consult the archives of the regional papers, as McNamee quotes them, or know your sources first hand, as McNamee does. If you’re as into this kind of literary mapping as I am, you can at least give yourself a virtual tour of the novel’s locations, glimpse the tracery of minor roads that are the back-ways across the border, see the hills and the forest laybys where deals were transacted, the churchyards, streets and houses where these people lived and died. The distance between Newry and Dundalk is about twenty miles via the main border crossing; in terms of what those miles once represented they span two different worlds.
The border is a liminal space, an uncanny valley between the two.
But The Bureau is not a history book, it is a novel; it’s interesting to wonder about the armature of facts on which this novel is based, but it’s by no means essential. Any book must stand or fall on its own internal merits, on its value as text, and it is as text that The Bureau shines brightest, that it lives in the mind. The Bureau is a poem in prose. From start to finish it holds the reader in a state of tension, of uneasy apprehension of what they know from the opening pages will be the final deadly outcome. Yet there is rapture, too – the inspiration and satisfaction one draws from being in the presence of a great work of art.
They drove away from the hospital, rain driven across the rear window as Owen looked back through the rain-tossed branches of the boundary trees, the hospital locked down for the night, Brendan not sleeping, the father in him awake and abroad in the corridors and hidden spaces, abroad in the vagrant dark. Picking his way through memory the way you’d pick your way through the streets and avenues of a burned-out city.
The vagrant dark. The streets and avenues of a burned-out city. The power and beauty of McNamee’s image-making so in tune with his subject matter. His grasp of darkness and of weather, both internal and external.
You want to place other people in the room. Shadowy figures. This was the era of shadows. This was the time when people disappeared without warning. This was the time of unexplained shootings, of clandestine alliances, zones of subterfuge, zones of dread. This was the border. There were set-ups, double-crosses, betrayal. Subterfuge was the currency, the game seen far into the future, the deep tradecraft.
It is often tempting to think of history as having moved on, but it is never that simple. Echoes remain, ripples spread, and in any case, history is not linear but cyclical. When someone asks what writing is for me I speak about my fear of time passing, my obsession with nailing memory into place and this would seem to be McNamee’s mission, too. To not forget. To say: this is how it was, this is what we went through. This is what we remember.
The novel that kept resurfacing in my mind while I was reading The Bureau was Death and Nightingales, by Eugene McCabe. Because both seem equally perfect, equally poised between rapture and terror, equally haunted. McCabe’s novel is set a hundred years before The Bureau and acts almost as a foreshadowing. The sense of place, so much an active element of both novels, is another point of union between them.
Reading a novel like The Bureau reminds me of what I am doing, or at least attempting. Writing as good as this is hard to find, but when you do, you feel grateful, you feel replenished. This is what’s possible, this is what it’s about. You know you’ll never be as good but you’re determined to try.
It is now just a little over two weeks before the publication of my new novel A Granite Silence. In the run-up to that, I would like to talk a little more about the background to this work – what inspired it, what it means for me as a writer. The question I have been asked a lot about this book already is: what is it? Is it historical fiction, is it true crime, are there any speculative elements involved? The simple answer is yes, yes and yes, but there’s nothing simple about this book, nor what led me to write it. A Granite Silence feels like a significant milestone for me as a writer. At the same time, it is a novel I have been gearing myself up to write for many years. Here’s an essay I wrote about that journey.
*
READING PEACE, WRITING GRANITE
‘As they left the Highbury pitch that afternoon, as
the sporting men of Fulham shook their hands, slapped their backs and wished
United luck, the very best of luck, Bobby had his head bowed, he did not speak,
a few folk even said he looked distraught, though they could not think, not
fathom why, why would he look distraught? United were in the final of the Cup,
the FA bloody Cup, doesn’t get much better than that now, does it, Bobby lad?
Come on, Bobby, smile, why don’t you smile? You scored a goal, you’re in the
Final!’
My mother remembered Munich; she was fourteen when it
happened. I first learned about the crash from when she happened to mention it
to me, years ago. I have forgotten exactly what she said, but I know she talked
about the Busby Babes, about the tragedy of what happened to Manchester United.
The odd England game aside, my mother is not a football person, never has been.
But she remembered Munich.
On the afternoon of February 6th 1958, the plane carrying the team home from their European Cup fixture against Red Star Belgrade crashed at the end of the runway at Munich airport. Of the forty-four passengers on board British European Airways Flight 609, only twenty-one survived. Of the twenty-three who died, eight were Man United players. The team’s manager Matt Busby was so badly injured he took months to recover.
At the time of the Munich Air
Disaster, David Peace’s father, Basil Dunford Peace was in London studying to
be a teacher. He attended the match United played and won against Arsenal at
Highbury the week before. He judged it the greatest game he’d ever seen. Though
Basil Peace was always a Huddersfield Town supporter, it was the Babes he
talked about. When his father died in 2022, David Peace set aside the book he had
been working on and began to write Munichs, a novel of the crash and of
its immediate aftermath, a novel about football but also – equally, tellingly –
about grief.
British society after the war was slow to change. Deferential and still massively class-bound, it was a society in which the traditional hierarchies of family, church and community were strongly upheld. In Munichs, the second world war is still tangibly close. The older men – the football managers, the sports journalists – have fought in the war. Some of them have fought in two. Bobby Charlton and his friend Duncan Edwards are still doing National Service. All the young players are encouraged to learn a trade – bricklayer, builder, plumber, sparks – in case football doesn’t work out. The idea of taking their game into Europe is still very new, and they feel nervous about venturing ‘behind the Iron Curtain’. More than one of the boys who ended up on that flight would have preferred to stay at home.
Peace evokes a world in which
it is still not unusual for only one house on the street to have a telephone,
where families sit anxiously around the radio, waiting for news. Where women – especially
working class women – are really only expected to be wives and mothers. Where
young lads who’ve just been in an air crash are expected to be out on the pitch
winning matches just a fortnight later.
When you look at photos of Matt
Busby’s team, what hits you in the gut is just how young they were. Several of
those who died were barely in their twenties. Those who survived received no trauma
counselling. They were not encouraged to talk, even by their families, about
what had happened to them. And once they were home there were the match-day
chants, shouts that they ‘should have died at Munich’, accusations that they
burn-outs, selfish for standing in the way of fresher talent. Jackie
Blanchflower and John Berry, who survived the crash but who were too badly
injured to continue in the game, were quickly asked to vacate their subsidised
flats in order to make way for the players who would replace them.
There are intimations in Munichs
of the increasingly commercial route football would follow. Even before the
crash, Manchester United were sneered at for being ‘Hollywood United’, a team
more interested in big names, big money and foreign travel than the home game. Matt
Busby was criticized for taking the team into Europe in the first place.
In some ways, what happened at
Munich represents a dividing line between the 1950s and the 1960s. The more
open, socially permissive era that followed the disaster promised greater
freedom and openness but less security and fewer certainties. Less emphasis on
moral values, more on getting ahead. It is a harsher time, a more ruthless time,
and not just in football. Is it fanciful to suggest that Munich is where
Thatcherism begins? Worth remembering that Thatcher was selected as the
Conservative candidate for Finchley in April 1958, just two months after
Munich, that she was elected to parliament less than eighteen months after that?
There has to be something in
this, at least for a writer. And for a writer the story of Munich is not all
about Man United. Eight journalists as well as eight footballers were killed in
the crash – a horrible symmetry – men who had known each other for longer than
most of the players had been alive. In the world of sport they were famous. The
funeral of Henry Rose, the most-read football columnist the Daily Express ever
had, was bigger even than Duncan Edwards’s or Tommy Taylor’s. When these men
died, whole lifetimes of knowledge and memory went with them, gaps that could
never be filled and that marked the end of an era in British sports writing.
There is also the broader
question of what caused the crash. The inquiry into the accident went on for
years, undermined by disagreements and conflicts of interest between British
European Airways and the German airport authorities. The pilot, James Thain, was
a former RAF officer and an experienced flyer. Thain, who had just turned
thirty-eight at the time of the crash, was subjected to an ongoing barrage of
vitriol hurled at him by the press and by a public who were desperate for
someone to blame. BEA sacked him two Christmases later, anxious to cover their
backs; the German authorities were determined from the outset that Thain was at
fault. It took him ten years to clear his name. He died of a heart attack not
long afterwards, aged just fifty-four.
I could spend a lot of time reading and thinking about
this bitter aftermath. A large part of my passion for true crime literature is in
my hunger for knowledge, an obsession with the question of what really happened.
Munichs though is not so much an investigation as an exhumation, an
evocation of a time as viewed through the lens of a single event. The novel captures
the language and texture of a grief that is both national and personal,
personal not just for the fans and families of Manchester United but for Peace
himself. A means of replaying his father’s memories, reimagining the effect of
those headlines, that heartbreak, the abysmal sense of shock. Of bringing his
father back to life, even. A way to continue with a conversation that had been
cut short.
Peace’s present tense
narrative rolls in a slow wave between crash survivors and the victims’
families, shellshocked staff on the ground at Old Trafford, newspaper
reporters, doctors, older players coaxed back to the game by a desperate
management, teenage reserves hurriedly brought on side. Hostile supporters of rival
teams, keyboard warriors before their time. Taxi drivers, grieving brothers,
even a monk. And of course the Dead, who haunt Peace’s account from its opening
pages. Everyone has their own version of what happened at Munich. Some have
more than one, hence Munichs plural, though that is not the only meaning
of the novel’s title.
Peace never feels the need to
use elevated language. As a potter constructs a miracle from humble red clay,
so Peace achieves poetry through paying attention to the sound and rhythm of ordinary
words. The language heard on the street or down the pub. Of tabloid headlines,
the cliches of condolence, the gulf that exists between what is spoken and what
is felt. You hear this novel as you read it: the voices of the regions, the
heft and weight of sentences, the way words work harder and divulge more secrets
when they are put together in a particular way.
Munichs is as much a piece of music as it is a novel, a
battery of half-rhymes and assonance achieved through Peace’s habitual,
repeated process of reading aloud. A symphony of sorrowful songs, a hymn to all
of the Dead, including his dad.
*
I kept reading around David Peace before I actually
read him. I remember seeing him on the 2003 Granta list and feeling drawn to
what he was saying about how fact works in fiction. About how his first books
had been inspired by the years-long, error-strewn hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper.
I have always been interested in true crime for its detailed evocations of
particular memories, of particular times and places. I remember also the
feelings of guilt and uncertainty I used to have around reading it. True crime
was sensationalist and exploitative, the stuff of tabloid newspapers. It was OK
to read Crime and Punishment and talk about how it was really a crime
novel but reading about real murders was somehow taboo. At least if you were
serious, at least if you had taste.
Then I read an interview with Peace that upended my thinking and ultimately changed my direction as a writer. Speaking in 2010, Peace described the crime genre as ‘the perfect tool to understand why crimes take place, and thus tell us about the society we live in and the country we live in and who we are.’ I had heard similar arguments before, but Peace went further, saying that he was ‘drawn to when writers take on history, take on real crimes. There’s just so much that happens in real life that we don’t understand, that we can’t even fathom. I don’t really see the point of making up crimes.’
I remember feeling electrified when I read that. Peace was writing densely textured works that embodied the vision and freedom to experiment that fiction offers, but that were tied to experiential reality in a way that made them even more powerful. I felt energized and inspired. I was beginning to think in a new way about what I wanted to write. At the same time I felt deeply uncertain about whether I was truly capable of this kind of writing. Whether I could bring anything new to the table. Whether I could do justice to my subject matter.
Neither could I help noticing
that the field of work I was becoming interested in was dominated by men. Macho,
in-your-face men like Norman Mailer and Peace’s own literary idol James Ellroy.
James Ellroy is about as far from British self-deprecation as you’re going to
get. But he has the goods to back up his words and in the end that’s all I care
about, the quality of the writing. If Ellroy feels OK comparing himself with
Beethoven then good on him, because he’s not far wrong. I wish I had his nerve.
I have since come to realise that my uncertainty had less to do with not being Norman Mailer than with not being ready. I didn’t feel I had the technical ability and I was probably right. I took the slow way round, feeling my way towards stories that made sense for me to tell, pushing the envelope of my abilities with each new thing I tried. When I finally came to write A Granite Silence it still felt like a risk, the most difficult and challenging project I had yet attempted. But I had come to a point where I sensed I might be capable of solving the problems the book presented, and where the writing itself – the words on the page – stood a chance of reaching a standard I felt I could live with.
I had arrived at the moment where the risk felt not just possible, but necessary.
*
In the autumn of 2021 I travelled to Liverpool to meet
up with a friend I hadn’t seen in person since before the first lockdown. Just
being in the city put me on a high. Rain fell heavily the night before I headed
home again, and when I went to catch my train I discovered that the West Coast
Main Line was partially flooded, that all services heading north were severely
delayed. I was told to take a train to Preston and await further instructions.
“What happens when I get to Preston?” I asked. No one could tell me, because nobody knew. When I got there the scenes I encountered were predictably insane. Trains arriving and disgorging hundreds of passengers with nowhere to go. People sweeping in tides from platform to platform as rumours of trains that might get us into Scotland flared up, spread like wildfire and then guttered out. The one that finally arrived had limped all the way from Plymouth. By the time it turned up in Preston it was three hours late. I crammed myself into a luggage stand, fenced in by people’s knees and a couple of bikes. As we crossed the border at Berwick-on-Tweed an announcement crackled through the overhead speakers that all passengers were now obliged to put on their masks. The woman sitting next to me – I’d managed to grab a seat just after Newcastle – asked me if I’d managed to catch what they were saying. She’d been on the train since Birmingham. I reluctantly broke the news.
“Jesus!” she groaned. I told her if she didn’t feel like complying with Scottish law that was fine by me. We’d all been breathing each other’s air for several hours in any case. I was exhausted. I was increasingly pessimistic about making the last ferry. But what I remember most about that journey is reading David Peace’s 1980 and 1983, in a breathless six hours of immersion that were still ongoing. And how strange it was, that I was passing through the places I was reading about: those hard-nosed northern moorlands and back-to-backs, streaming past beyond the windows in a reel of silent film.
*
From the Redbeck car park back into Castleford –
Silence
in the black of the back of the van –
Dim
lights down black back roads –
Sat in
the back of the black of the van –
Yorkshire,
1972:
You’ll
wake up some morning as unhappy as you’ve ever been before.
When David Peace started work on 1974 he did so
with the youthful ambition to write the best crime novel ever written. That the
Red Riding novels have become classics proves the strength of that ambition,
though Peace now feels ambivalent about the first movement of his quartet. Perhaps
he feels that it does not stray far enough from the roots of the genre. But
whilst it is true that some of those roots are showing – Derek Raymond, Ted
Lewis – how could it be otherwise? When you first start writing you’re lucky, not
to mention talented, if anything you produce is entirely yours. Peace had written
earlier, unpublished novels before finding his true direction, grounding the
story he wanted to tell in the Yorkshire of the seventies and early eighties, a
time that coincided with the beginnings of his desire to write and that in some
sense formed it.
He brought to it also some of
the kitchen-sink sensibility of the previous generation of northern writers,
whose novels he had been introduced to through his father’s book collection:
Stan Barstow, who lived just a few streets away from Peace in his hometown of
Ossett; Alan Sillitoe, who as well as being a novelist was also a poet. And
there was something else too, something extra: the gritty, poetic rigour that
marks Peace’s own style, a confidence around his material that increases as the
sequence moves forward.
The material by itself is
challenging enough. Peace’s portrait of a corrupt and increasingly beleaguered
police force offers none of the familiarity and consolation of traditional
detective fiction, and few writers have come anywhere close to confronting the traumatic
effects of violence and poverty as Peace has done. In terms of story, the Red
Riding novels are masterpieces of ambiguity. But what makes these books truly groundbreaking
is their insistence on being more than a story, on being words on a page. Peace’s
language becomes increasingly codified, more condensed, so close to poetry in
places there is really no difference. The language of 1983 especially
gains a kind of transcendence, hammering the page like rain on windows,
staining the paper like mould.
You can feel it being written.
*
I first read TS Eliot’s The Waste Land in English
class when I was fourteen. I count myself as lucky. I would bet the farm – if I
had one – that they don’t teach Eliot now. My mother has always loved poetry.
She used to read it aloud to me throughout my early childhood, and so I had the
advantage of being familiar with how poetry works. I think even at fourteen I
knew instinctively how to read The Waste Land, which I recognized as a
country of the imagination as much as a symbolic portrait of the postwar
landscape.
I was so excited by what I read it made my heart race. I felt angry and frustrated with my classmates, who did not get it, who kept flipping back and forth between the text and the notes at the end, trying to discover the poem’s ‘meaning’ from references they had no hope of understanding. I didn’t understand the notes either – they were too esoteric, notes from a bygone era even then – but I knew enough to know that I didn’t need them. There was something happening between me and the words, and that was enough. I was discovering phrases and cadences and – more even than that – a way of looking at language that was to become the central strand of my writer’s DNA.
To Carthage then I came
Burning burning burning burning
There was something about Eliot’s
images that made my teeth chatter. Over in my German class I was coming to know
the stories of Wolfgang Borchert, who had worked with similar raw material,
even though his register of language and lexicon of references are very
different. I began to understand how one work of literature could inform
another. Storming through Red Riding forty years later I became convinced that
Peace must have experienced a similar epiphany. That mental thrill, which is also
visceral. The narrowing of the gap between the thought and the word.
As an adolescent, Peace
harboured a secret fear that his father might be the Yorkshire Ripper, that his
mother might be the Ripper’s next victim. What is any writing but the stuff you
are most interested in or obsessed by? Ideas you keep having. Stories you keep
noticing. Ambitions that won’t keep quiet or go away.
Finding a path towards your
material can be a tortuous process. I had ambitions to write a novel based
around true events for most of ten years before I found myself at work on A
Granite Silence. It happened almost without my realizing it – as I describe
in the novel itself, the story I had set out to write was very different.
Allowing aspects of that story to keep resurfacing became essential to the narrative
as it developed.
Every novel is a set of
problems waiting to be solved. Paying attention to how other writers have
solved their problems may not help you solve your own – the problems you have
will be different, or should be – but it should at least hold out the hope that
a solution is possible. David Peace’s work continues to speak to me directly. The
chord it first struck was so powerful it has never died away.
