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My new office is the perfect size, by which I mean perfect for me.

The office I had in our previous home was just that little bit too small. Most of my books had to be housed elsewhere in our home, a fact that was somewhat made up for by my magnificent view of the firth and of the ferry terminal, but it gave the room a feeling of incompleteness, and led to the annoying side-effect of having thirty to forty books piled up either side of my computer at any one time.

For someone who prefers their surroundings to have a semblance of order, this was not ideal. The office I had before that, in Devon, had room for my books, which blanketed the back wall like a layer of secondary insulation, but as a space was even smaller, almost a box room. The office I had in Hastings had the opposite problem – it felt too big. I like rooms that feel like burrows, enclosing and human-sized. The large, high-ceilinged rooms of our previous, Georgian home always felt overwhelming to me, as if I were a guest in them, or simply camped out. I never felt we properly owned that house, or ever could.

There is a rightness to my new office that makes it seem like the room I have been waiting to discover all my writing life. From my desk, which is immediately inside the doorway as you come in, I can see the firth, the ferry – more distant now as it ploughs its way to and from the harbour but still present, still essential, still ours – the Cowal hills beyond. My books fill the wall opposite and half of the wall that abuts it, and there is room for them all. Our bookshelves were made for us by a local carpenter. We had them dismantled so we could bring them with us from our previous home, in the first instance because we could not bear to part with them, though as it turns out the escalating price of timber means we would not have been able to afford to replace them, had we left them behind. Lucky.

My office is a warm mustard-yellow, the colour of gorse. It has crept up on me over the years, that yellow is my favourite colour for rooms. I feel enclosed, protected, energised. Warmed by the sun, through even the bleakest of Scottish winter days.

During the twenty years I spent working in retail, I was always aware that in order to write it was essential for me to have the kind of day-job where I could clock off at the end of my shift and not have to think about the work, at all, when I wasn’t there. This inevitably meant low pay, but the up-side – the essential up-side – was freedom of thought. During these past ten weeks of arranging our move and project-managing the renovation of our new house, it has been brought home to me, with bells on, how correct I had always been in this instinctive assumption. The move was timely and right. Giving the house an overhaul has been a landmark experience, a labour of love. But for the life of the mind it has been crushing, and uniquely stressful. The more or less absolute inability to think about anything else – an experience I have been referring to as ‘brain-wipe’ – has taken its toll on me and on those around me.

Thankfully, this mental burden has been lifted. Just a week after moving in, I find myself back at my desk, picking up not where I left off, exactly, but somewhere close to it. The work feels exciting, re-invigorated, above all, possible. Given the state of the wider world, there have been moments these past months when I have found myself wondering if it was in fact possible, if there was a point to it – the kind of feelings I have been lucky enough, for many, many years, to have entirely escaped.

To have felt them again, even for a day or two, has reminded me of what is at stake, if not for me then for thousands of others, daily, hourly.

While I can, I will. While we can, we must.

Thank you for being here. Reading, writing, thinking – it’s who we are.

A Season in Null-Space: Transit by Rachel Cusk

A book such as Julian’s was far more palatable. It always surprised him, how people lapped it up, extremity, how eager they were to consume what lay far outside the compass of their own experience, their relish for it if anything increased by the absence of the very thing, he, Louis, was abjured for removing – the screen of fiction. People believed that Julian didn’t need to make things up because the extremity of his experiences was such that it released him from that obligation.

Working on my current manuscript, I have been thinking a great deal about the weight we attach to ‘true’ narratives, and how objective truth might be said to differ from experiential truth.

If I say: ‘This happened to me’, is that enough to prove that it really did?

Since 2016, our experience of the world has become fragmentary and unstable, no longer measured in years, but in seasons, weeks and days. As a writer I feel I have become less capable and less desirous of constructing grand illusions. I have instead become obsessed with small details, with exploring the imaginative potential in day-by-day, sometimes minute-by-minute experience, with tracking the potential answers to the question: what really happened? My growing interest in true-crime narratives is both a response to and a driver of this. And precisely because much of the drama of such narratives lies in the mundane.

‘I don’t really believe in character,’ says Rachel Cusk in a recent podcast conversation with Sheila Heti, ‘I believe in moments of truth.’ In the second instalment of her Outline trilogy, Cusk demonstrates how the quotidian, when fully inhabited, can spiral outwards into a poetic hyperrealism, into the fire of language. How daily reality is never banal, but rather the greyish-brown outer crust of the entire luminosity of existence. The dinner party that forms the climax of the novel is, in its own subversive way, as revelatory and as disturbing as the family get-together that forms the subject of Thomas Vinterberg’s seminal 1998 movie Festen. Reading this book, in which ostensibly dull things happen in such a way as to make them seem life-defining, is to see reality, elusive as the leopard, changing its spots before our eyes.

Cusk’s writing truly is superlative. She has not only raised the bar for British literary fiction, she has opened up a new arena for the discussion and contemplation of what fiction is, and how it works.

*

Meanwhile and elsewhere, this marvellous essay by Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky articulates brilliantly the shock, terror and heartbreak of these anxious days.

Cloak and Dagger 2022 – a crime reading challenge

2021 is a difficult year to describe. 2020 felt fraught, urgent, dangerous and tense. 2021 has felt more nebulous, more fractured, characterised by uncertainty and an increasing sense of restlessness. In terms of personal achievement, I delivered a new manuscript, a book that for me feels very much like the product of 2020, seamed and studded with all the furious contradictions that year brought but referenced obliquely rather than colliding with them head-on. It’s a novel I’m hugely proud of, and one I look forward to sharing with you in 2023.

In the months since completing that book, I have begun inching my way towards the next work, a transition that has felt more complex and troublesome even than usual. The times we are living through throw up searching questions; as a writer, it does not seem altogether surprising if those questions end up being framed around the process of writing, not just the how but the what and the why. There is never any doubt in my mind that writing – art – has value, that whatever trauma is being addressed, the practice of reflection and analysis, of creative re-imagining inherent to all art is intrinsic to the experience of being human.

Such knowledge should not prevent us from being robust in our seeking out of our own best practice. I count myself fortunate in that this period of not-knowing – familiar in its outline, yet different in its particular details every time – has always felt energising to me. I never quite know how I will come out of it, or what will result. If I can feel certain of anything, through this time as all times, it is the joy I find in the power and the talent of other writers. Discovering new works, new directions, new attitudes, visions and modes of expression – the excitement and the gratitude never lessens.

By this same time last year, the document on my hard drive entitled ‘Books 2021’ was already filling up with upcoming works of fiction and non-fiction I was eager to read. Many of them were books whose publication dates had been postponed, pushed over from 2020 into 2021 in the hope that by the time they were released, in-person events and book festivals would be happening again. This turned out not to be the case, and on the far side of 2021, I cannot help noticing that the number of books on my ‘Books 2022’ list is considerably smaller. There is a sense of uncertainty affecting all of us: what shall we be reading, what shall we be writing? There is an eerie sort of silence.

Here also, there is opportunity. Not knowing – feeling less sure of what I’m going to be reading leaves more space for new discoveries. It also leaves space for me to go back and read more of the books I did not manage to get to in 2021. A year of regrouping, maybe. A year of finding out what is important.

I enjoy reading challenges because they give my reading a focus. This can be especially valuable if the challenge is related in some way to a problem or question that has a bearing on my work in progress. I also enjoy reading challenges because they provide me with a framework for talking to readers. With all of this in mind, I have created my own crime reading challenge for 2022. As regular readers of this blog will know by now, I am always on the lookout for original, challenging and imaginative approaches to genre archetypes, with the mystery archetype foremost among them. For pure reading pleasure, there’s nothing to beat a mystery. There is also no stronger template for withstanding the often punitive process of literary experiment.

I have created thirty prompts, some of them leaning heavily towards my particular interests, others designed to take me into less familiar territory. Thirty seems like a good number – big enough to make the challenge interesting, not so huge that it becomes burdensome, squeezing out all other reading. The individual challenges can be completed in any order, and can be based around any aspect of crime writing: fiction, true crime, journalism, history or memoir can be considered and included for any of the prompts. I am hoping to have completed and blogged all thirty by the end of the year. Here are the prompts. Let’s see how we get on:

  1. Published in 2022
  2. By a debut author
  3. Translated from the French
  4. Translated from the German
  5. Translated from the Italian
  6. Translated from the Spanish
  7. Translated from the Japanese
  8. Set in South America
  9. Nordic
  10. Set in Australia
  11. By an author based on the African continent
  12. By an African-American author
  13. Historical mystery
  14. Experimental published since 2000
  15. Experimental published before 1980
  16. Published by an independent press
  17. Classic noir
  18. Neo noir
  19. Golden Age
  20. Nineteenth Century
  21. Published before World War 2
  22. By a Scottish author
  23. Legal thriller
  24. Financial or military
  25. With a speculative element
  26. Award-winning
  27. Has been adapted for the screen
  28. Woman detective
  29. Based on real events
  30. Any crime but murder

I have some ideas already for how I might fill some of the categories, books I have been wanting to read for a while and now have the perfect incentive to tackle. Others I have not yet started to think about. Mainly I am hoping to be surprised. Surprised and inspired. Here’s hoping we can all find something of the same in 2022.

Happy New Year, everyone.

The End of the Whole Mess: the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2021

“People keep claiming we’re trying to be the Booker, but they’re wrong. If there’s any prize we’re looking at right now, it’s probably the Turner. I wanted to counter a perceived wisdom about how the Clarke Award harboured a not-so-secret ambition to defy the gravity of its own genre and head out for loftier, more literary stars.”

These are the words of Tom Hunter, the current director of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, in an essay he wrote recently for Parsec magazine on the subject of his first fifteen years in office. He jotted the words down on impulse, he says, as a handy comeback to the kind of question he might get asked at a science fiction convention. And yet, Hunter insists, the lines have stuck with him, ‘copied from notebook to notebook’, because they hold ‘an accidental grain of truth’ about how he views the Clarke, especially with regard to the open-ended brief it sets itself each year, to select the ‘best’ science fiction novel of the preceding twelve months.

“It’s that slippery definition of science fiction that reminds me of the equally heated debate that surrounds the art world,” Hunter continues, “with Frieze art fairs standing in for our own conventions, and the definitions of science fiction and contemporary art forever shifting in a way I would suggest the Booker Prize doesn’t.”

This is the perceived wisdom about the Booker Prize, that it’s a staid and immovable behemoth, churning out endorsement after endorsement for establishment-approved worthies, upholding the literary status quo forever and ever amen. But repeating an untried thesis does not make it true. By sheer coincidence, the beginning of Tom Hunter’s reign as Clarke Award director roughly coincides with the time when I first began taking notice of the award, not just in a casual way but as a framework for considering the state of science fiction more generally alongside other arbiters of literary quality such as the Booker. I remember fifteen years ago being thrilled at M. John Harrison’s Clarke win for Nova Swing, and looking back at the 2007 shortlist now, we see it comprises three books of genuine and lasting stature, together with a further three interesting choices from authors of note.

When we look at the Booker shortlist and especially the longlist from 2007, what we notice most of all is a shift towards progressiveness yes, but a continuing uncertainty about how, exactly, progressiveness might be defined. The Booker’s speed of evolution towards a genuinely inclusive mindset whilst developing a more adventurous attitude towards literature generally has been both fascinating and marvellous to witness. 2021 might actually see a science fiction novel winning the Booker for the first time – a pretty radical shift, given that the chair of the Booker judges Richard Cobb went so far as to veto JG Ballard from winning back in 1984.   

But what of Hunter’s notional pairing of the Clarke Award with the Turner Prize? As a writer who was passionately interested in both contemporary art and experimental forms of literature, there is no doubt that Ballard would have been keen to affirm such a brave comparison – if only it were true. From its inception in 1984, just three years before the Clarke Award, the Turner has been one of the most progressive, contentious, radical, no-fucks-given arts prizes out there, certainly in the UK. The Turner is constantly pushing boundaries, questioning not only the nature of art but the nature of art criticism, promoting the value of art for society and campaigning for increased access and diversity at every level. Rather than shying away from controversy, the Turner has courted it, embracing its role as the enfant terrible, the award that actively encourages disagreement. It is only later – sometimes years later – that as a society we come to understand just how prescient, how far ahead of the curve an earlier shortlist selection actually was.

“It is unfortunate, of course, but science fiction has become indelibly identified with interplanetary travel, time machines, Star Trek and Star Wars, that sort of Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon school,” said JG Ballard in a 1988 interview with James Verniere for The Twilight Zone. “I have my lonely struggle trying to get a broader definition of science fiction, a definition that incorporates Gulliver’s Travels, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson, on through H. G. Wells, on to that great genius William Burroughs, who uses huge elements of science fiction in his novels because it’s part of the air we breathe.”

To have a Clarke Award that bears legitimate comparison with the Turner Prize? That would be Ballard’s dream come true – and mine. As things stand, we have reached a point where for the second year running, the Clarke Award shortlist is fifty percent dead wood: books that should never have reached the shortlist either because they are badly written, derivative, insufficiently challenging or, in the case of two titles from last year’s shortlist, all three. As in 2020, the remaining three novels form a sadly curtailed line-up of the book that should win (The Animals in That Country), the book that could win (The Vanished Birds) and the book you could construct an argument in favour of but would make for a disappointingly trad-SF outcome if it did win (Vagabonds). Hardly enough to form a decent shortlist on their own.

The only valid comparison with the Turner Prize would be if the Turner judges unaccountably decided to shortlist a group of salon-approved genre painters rehashing popular bucolic scenes from the last decades of the nineteenth century. Only if they did, we could be sure they were being ironic. This year’s Clarke shortlist is anything but.

All this might be forgivable – understandable even – if the radical, ground-breaking work in science fiction were not being done, or remained the province of one or two pioneering souls like Ballard, fighting a losing battle against the forces of reaction. It would be understandable – forgivable even – if the Clarke Award submissions list did not include works of sufficient calibre to draw up a quality shortlist. That the work is both being done and being submitted for the consideration of the Clarke Award jury can only provoke the question of why the most interesting, certainly the best written science fiction novels of the year are being ignored in favour of derivative genre works that are inconsequential in the present, and certainly won’t be remembered fifteen years hence.

I am not going to comment on individual titles from recent Clarke shortlists. The authors of these works did not ask to be shortlisted, and do not deserve criticism or censure for celebrating their success. That their novels have been read and doubtless enjoyed by a large number of people is not the problem, indeed the quality of particular novels is not the point. What bothers me is the quality of critical discourse, not just on the part of the Clarke judges but within the larger confines of the science fiction community. If the overall quality of the shortlist is this poor, not just once but time and again, and there is no sustained wider discussion of that fact, this would suggest not only that the process of reasoning by which the shortlist is arrived at is substantially flawed, but also that the majority of readers primarily interested in science fiction are satisfied that journeyman works – back-slapping space operas, cute science fantasies and indifferently written post-apocalypse novels – are properly representative, the high point of achievement, the ‘best’ that science fiction has to offer.

Either that, or the very idea of engaged criticism, of substantive textual analysis as opposed to unexamined positive reinforcement has become so much an anathema within the science fiction community that the discourse around the literature has been irretrievably corroded. (On this point it is discouraging to note that for the first time in more than a decade there has been no long-form review of the Clarke Award shortlist at Strange Horizons.)

Of those works submitted for consideration for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2021, a generous handful is of outstanding quality, novels that demonstrate a rigorous engagement with a wide range of ideas and a level of literary ability that changes minds and attracts new readerships. Were a novel as original, urgent and brilliantly achieved as Martin MacInnes’s Gathering Evidence to lose out on a shortlist place in favour of a novel of equal originality and brilliance I’d have no complaints, but that is not what has happened. I have alas not yet had time to finish Rian Hughes’s monumental debut XX, but I have read enough of it to appreciate how deftly it riffs off much older scientific romances – The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle is the book that springs most immediately to mind – in pursuit of a whole new way of imagining science fiction, a novel in which the printed word itself becomes a speculative, dangerously mutable commodity. Given what did make the final cut, how this ambitious, formally innovative colossus was knocked out of the running beggars belief.

But to reiterate, I do not want to harp on the virtues or deficiencies of individual books so much as point to a wider deficiency in the overall discourse. When I was writing about Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country last week I quoted from an interview she gave on the subject of what makes speculative fiction both relevant and attractive to her as a way of thinking about the world and about writing. “I thought my next novel was a gritty realist story,” she said. “But the problem is if you write gritty realism now (in the way we usually think of realism), you’re writing historical or at least nostalgia fiction; and anything that used to be speculative is now realist. So what I’m working on has become rather speculative. I keep using that term – it’s not my favourite, but it’s what we have to describe what I think of as sideways fiction.”

There will be more than a few writers of sideways fiction who have felt so blindsided by the pace of social and political change in the last decade and since 2016 especially that the idea of writing about ‘the future’ has come to seem not just redundant but escapist. Like any other form of creative expression, for science fiction to survive and remain relevant as literature it needs to evolve, and the truth is that many of the traditional ways of framing science fiction, of imagining the future have become outmoded, derivative, decadent, a kind of comfort food. You can alter the baseline demographic of a starship crew all you want, but it’s still a bloody starship crew, travelling FTL into a vision of the future that might as well be a fairy story. Twiddling with the edges of things does not make them radical, does not render them any less risible than the Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon school Ballard was fulminating about thirty years ago.

The real future is very much with us, and its demands are urgent and frightening. They need a literature, and a critical hinterland, that is capable of seriously engaging with the questions we face, both as individuals and as a society. When Ballard claimed science fiction as the true literature of the twentieth century, he would have known the requirement he felt for literature to reinvent itself would only become more pressing in the twenty-first. I do not think he would have been surprised to see a rapidly increasing awareness and acceptance of speculative ideas among mainstream critics, a demand and enthusiasm for speculative ideas among the reading public, because this is what is happening, right now. It is a discomfiting fact, but one we are increasingly having to accept, that much of the most challenging and innovative work in science fiction – the ‘best’, if you like – is being published outside the genre imprints. Would Ballard have been surprised by this? Given that he understood the innate tension between science fiction and the science fiction community better than most, I doubt it.

Sharke’s Choice #4: The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay

“I thought my next novel was a gritty realist story. But the problem is if you write gritty realism now (in the way we usually think of realism), you’re writing historical or at least nostalgia fiction; and anything that used to be speculative is now realist. So what I’m working on has become rather speculative. I keep using that term – it’s not my favorite, but it’s what we have to describe what I think of as sideways fiction. ” (Laura Jean McKay, Write or Die November 2020.)

Jean works as a guide in an animal sanctuary. She is what might best be termed a tough cookie, battered by life, abandoned by her husband Graham and a barely functioning alcoholic. There are two things in life that keep her going: her passion for animals, and her love for her young granddaughter, Kimberley. Those, and her general bloody-mindedness. As this remarkable novel opens, Jean’s instinctive rapport with animals and her capacity for survival are both about to be tested in ways she could never previously have imagined.

There is a new disease sweeping the country, the so-called zooflu, a strain of influenza that clears up quickly but that leaves those infected with the ability to understand and intuit the thoughts and language of animals. Unlike simple hearing, this new form of understanding is bone-deep, felt in the skin and in the brain. For some, it takes on the aspect of a new religion; for others – many others – it is the gateway to madness. Driven insane by the ceaseless communications of insects, birds and fish, the worst afflicted resort to extreme measures to keep the psychic white noise out of their heads.

When Jean’s errant son Lee goes on the run with Kimberley, Jean is determined to find them and bring them home. She travels in the company of Sue, a dingo bitch she rescued as a pup, and who is capable of tracking Kimberley from hundreds of miles away. Ahead of Jean lie many obstacles, not least the toxic fallout from her own inner demons. But for once in her life, she is determined not to cock up.

I had a hard time getting to know Jean. She’s damaged, often illogical, a slave to her addiction. She’s also smart and ruthlessly determined, and by the time I reached the end of her story she and I had reached a better understanding. The fact that I found Jean difficult to like, not to mention bloody annoying at times, I count as testament to the skill of the author in creating a uniquely human, porous, breakable and thoroughly believable character. There are thousands of Jeans, and they won’t all make it. McKay does a magnificent job of fleshing out the why. Jean is unforgettable, though even more affecting is McKay’s imaginative rendition of animal thought-language, a feat of literary virtuosity that for me is the absolute highlight of this book, a form of rough, driven poetry that is as luminous as it is convincing.

The scenes with the pigs and cows. The Animals in That Country – the title is drawn from a poem by Margaret Atwood – would be necessary reading for those passages alone.

I suppose in that respect I am this novel’s natural audience. The ways in which the animals expressed themselves, hinting at sentient lives and independent consciousness beyond and apart from the human sphere, an alien realm in our midst did not seem at all unlikely to me. Rather, the thought-speech felt utterly right, an act of translation rather than imagination. (I guess I’m there with the spider.)

In talking about the novel’s use of speculative materials, it’s all in that quote from McKay that I’ve posted above, really. She has taken the threads of the life we are in the midst of and twisted them, just a little, to reveal the hidden trajectory of our realworld predicament. This, for me, is exactly what science fiction should be about, especially now. McKay wrote and sold Animals long before we knew what 2020/1 had in store for us; when she talks about the wearing of masks, the disinfecting of whole environments, the division of communities, the sudden, indelible shift in perspective that crisis brings, there is an extra frisson of the uncanny, a looming prescience that will colour and shape our understanding of her work.

It is this kind of prescience – a deep reading of the musculature of society, rather than a fixation on surfaces, on ‘stuff’ – that, again, makes The Animals in That Country radical and innovative science fiction. Its politics – a terse and unsparing examination of social and environmental inequalities – is integral to its being, its warp and weft. Not grafted on as a ‘theme’, but realised through keenly observed characterisation and active inter-character relationships.

This novel is as daring in its literary experimentation as in its speculative premise; proof, if any were needed, that no element of literary excellence need be sacrificed in the pursuit of science fictional innovation.

If only we could have seen James Bradley’s Ghost Species sitting alongside Animals on this year’s Clarke Award shortlist. And what is it about Aussie SF right now that seems to put it so far ahead of the curve?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Voyage to Arcturus: a celebration

On Thursday November 19th I had the pleasure of taking part in a panel presentation and discussion to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of David Lindsay’s novel A Voyage to Arcturus. The event was organised by Dimitra Fimi under the aegis of the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic and my fellow panellists were the Lindsay and Tolkien scholar Douglas A. Anderson and Professor Robert Davis of the University of Glasgow, who specialises in religious and cultural studies and has a longstanding interest in speculative fiction.

The event was well attended and hugely enjoyable, and ended with the feeling that the discussion could have gone on much longer. I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to everyone involved in making it such a success. Several people have asked me if I could make the text of my personal presentation available through my blog, and so here it is (an appropriate subtitle might be: me making trouble as usual). Thanks once again to Dimitra and the Centre for Fantasy, and here’s hoping our next meeting will be in person.

A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS: A CELEBRATION?

My relationship with A Voyage to Arcturus is a strange one. I first read the novel more than thirty years ago, sometime during the period of my mid-to-late teens, when I was hoovering up science fiction more or less indiscriminately. My memories of it from that time are indistinct – I remember a wandering, quest-like narrative rather in the manner of Jules Verne (his Journey to the Centre of the Earth was one of the first science fiction novels I ever read) only much weirder. I knew nothing about the book’s author, David Lindsay – I had no idea he was Scottish, and I hadn’t realised how much earlier Arcturus had been written than some of the other novels of the fantastic I was reading at the time.

Something of the book’s poetry and mystery must have stayed with me, however, because when I came to write my novel The Rift I knew at once and almost subconsciously that one of its key sections would carry Lindsay’s title. The Rift tells the story of two sisters, Selena and Julie, who are reunited after a separation of twenty years, during which Julie claims to have been living on an alien planet called Tristane. Of course not everyone believes Julie – even her sister is uncertain of whether her account can be trusted – and I think it was this sense of ambiguity around what had happened to Julie that made me remember Arcturus. I was attracted by the poetic synchronicity between my novel and Lindsay’s, the lack of closure around what really occurs. Did the voyage take place, or not? Was it all in the mind? Also I loved the title, just the feel of the words, the chilly elegance of them. I don’t think it’s any accident that when Julie first arrives on Tristane she finds herself in a cold place – the word ‘Arcturus’ was resonating with me even then.

What a surprise to me then when I discovered that A Voyage to Arcturus was not the book’s original title! Lindsay’s working title for his manuscript – some ten years and more in the writing – was Nightspore in Tourmance. His publishers were afraid that sounded too obscure, so encouraged him to change it. A Voyage to Arcturus was first published in 1920 – the same year Isaac Asimov was born, a fact that helps us to remember perhaps just how new science fiction still was as a genre, how original and shockingly outlandish A Voyage to Arcturus must have seemed to readers at the time.

Rereading the novel some three decades after first encountering it, I was immediately struck by how closely Arcturus chimes with the fantastic literature of the age, yet also stands apart from it. Lindsay was known to have read and admired writers like Jules Verne and Rider Haggard as well as his fellow Scots Robert Louis Stevenson and Walter Scott, and their influence is clear: A Voyage to Arcturus is an adventure narrative like no other – its protagonist, Maskull, states from the outset that he is ‘in search of adventure’ – and it’s not hard to find within the narrative echoes of novels such as Ivanhoe, Kidnapped, King Solomon’s Mines and Journey to the Centre of the Earth.  But that is where meaningful comparison ends. Although A Voyage to Arcturus might usefully be grouped with science fiction’s early essays in ‘scientific romance’ – the novels of HG Wells being the most obvious example – it is not really like them. Where Wells and Verne style their novels as genuine attempts to imagine or to extrapolate how human society might develop, what wonders and dangers humanity might encounter in exploring the cosmos, the unsolved riddle of our own Earth, even, what Lindsay attempts in A Voyage to Arcturus might be claimed as one of science fiction’s earliest voyages into innerspace.

More even than Wells, I find it interesting to compare Lindsay’s work with Alexei Tolstoy’s 1923 novel Aelita, the first full-length work of Russian science fiction and as important to Russians as Wells’s War of the Worlds is to us Brits. In Aelita, a maverick engineer who has constructed a spacecraft to take him to Mars advertises for a resourceful travelling companion to accompany him on his journey. His eventual comrade is a Bolshevik soldier who is finding it hard to readjust to civilian life in the wake of his experience fighting in the Russian civil war. The metal sphere in which they make their fantastical journey is not at all unlike the crystal torpedo used by Krag, Nightspore and Maskull in their voyage to Arcturus. But whereas Tolstoy uses his scientific romance to further illuminate and explore the harsh ideological landscape of revolutionary Russia, David Lindsay, once again, is doing something rather different.

As Alexei Tolstoy’s experiences in the Russian civil war strongly influenced the writing of Aelita, A Voyage to Arcturus bears the marks and scars of having been written against the bloody backdrop of World War One. If Arcturus could be said to have a central question it could perhaps best be summed up as what makes human existence meaningful, and how do we bear the essential nihilism of a world in which death and suffering are all around? In matters of style and formal approach, there are useful comparisons to be made between the work of David Lindsay and HP Lovecraft. But whereas Lovecraft is obsessed with the terminal nature of everything, the inescapable madness of the howling void, the vision Lindsay offers up is more transcendent than nihilistic. Death comes to all, but in feeling ourselves at one with the universe, in surrendering our selfish desires, we can gain insights into a truer, more spiritual reality, and voyage there without fear.    

For me, the most successful aspect of A Voyage to Arcturus is Lindsay’s landscape writing. His visions of an alien planet are incandescent, wildly strange and often inspiringly beautiful. The breadth and depth of imagination on display in his descriptions of the terrain, flora and fauna of Tormance, not to mention its people might almost persuade the reader that Lindsay is describing his own dreams.

There is a Wagnerian grandeur to Lindsay’s vision, and I wasn’t entirely surprised to discover that the composer and pianist John Ogdon had written a large-scale operatic composition based on Arcturus, bringing excerpts from the text into consort with passages from the gospels – Ogdon, like others, clearly saw Arcturus as a religious work, somewhat akin to John Bunyan’s A Pilgrim’s Progress, with Maskull in the role of Christian.  

Equally fascinating is the new musical adaptation of this impossible novel. Its Australian creator and director, Phil Moore says he was actively drawn to Arcturus because of its philosophical underpinning and because it was ‘a real drama’ as opposed to satire or comedy, in the manner of earlier science fiction musicals like The Little Shop of Horrors or Rocky Horror Picture Show. He has cleverly cast Maskull as a young, attractive, sensitive man as opposed to the pedantic, sexist and peculiarly priggish character we meet in the novel.

For this is where we must ask ourselves how successful, exactly, Lindsay is in his ambition. The cult writer and alternative thinker Colin Wilson was a famous admirer of A Voyage to Arcturus – he called it a masterpiece of the twentieth century – but devotee though he was, he found his patience increasingly tested by what he saw as the stodginess of Lindsay’s style:

The man was a towering genius whose mind is cast in the same mould as that of Dostoevsky… [But] ordinary technical ability, the literary talent that so many third-rate novelists possess in abundance, was denied to him.

As a one-time Russian scholar with a particular interest in Dostoevsky, I found this quote from Wilson enlightening – because it’s not far wrong. Lindsay’s total commitment to and pursuit of an idea – not to say an ideal – is vividly apparent throughout Arcturus. Though his approach is radically different, Lindsay seems to be fired with the same epistemological zeal as the great Russian, and his work likewise offers a vast and tantalising array of possible meanings and interpretations. Dostoevsky though could write character, and did so with passion, as anyone acquainted with Rodion Raskolnikov or Ivan Karamazov would surely attest.

As a novel of character, A Voyage to Arcturus is an embarrassing failure, in which the demands of a simplistic quest narrative are the entire determinant of character action. For me it is not so much the style of Lindsay’s writing that is a problem – Lindsay was possessed of a vivid and singular imagination – so much as its peculiar turn of priggishness and rampant sexism. Lindsay does make some startlingly modern observations about gender and sexuality, even going so far as to invent a set of nonbinary pronouns for one character as he gropes towards a broader understanding of their nature, engaging with these issues in a way that prefigures writing by Ursula Le Guin or John Varley fifty years later.

However there is nothing to explain or excuse the all-round direness of his attitude towards women. In our journey through the landscape of Tourmance we meet Joiwind the angelic helpmeet, Oceaxe the temptress, Tydomin the jealous harpy and Sullenbode, who ‘is not a woman, but a mass of pure sex. Your passion will draw her out into human shape, but only for a moment. If the change were permanent, you would have endowed her with a soul.’

Lindsay has read Nietzche and Schopenhauer and boy it shows. DH Lawrence can get away with a lot when it comes to being a patronising sexist because he’s one hell of a writer. In A Voyage to Arcturus, Lindsay’s prejudices are embarrassingly on display.

Having reread the novel, I would have to frame its relationship to my own novel as ironical. In The Rift, Selena is faced with the choice of believing her sister and cutting herself adrift from her conventional worldview, or clinging to what logic tells her must be the truth and dismissing Julie’s experiences as post-traumatic madness, and I find a renewed satisfaction in the fact that these philosophical arguments are conducted between women – men here are strictly an optional extra. As we turn the final page of Arcturus, we find ourselves faced as readers with a similar dilemma: did any of it happen? Or are we back where we started, on the north east coast of Scotland on a stormy night, wondering why we came here and where we are going?

A Voyage to Arcturus is a singular, frustrating, baffling and ultimately rewarding book – rewarding precisely because of its obscurity, its own inner conflicts and confusion, its refusal to be typecast. It is possibly unique in science fiction, and shines a revelatory light on science fiction’s early development. Once you read it, you may not like it, but you’ll never forget it. I for one will be queuing up to see the musical!    

In a time of radical hope…

Reading James Bradley’s daunting yet powerful essay on climate catastrophe for the Sydney Review of Books yesterday, I was struck most of all by a passage near the end, which seems to speak as much to the current situation with COVID-19 as to the overarching horror of the climate crisis:

Like deep adaptation, radical hope is a psychological practice as well as a political position. It requires us to accept the past is gone, and that the political and cultural assumptions that once shaped our world no longer hold true. It demands we learn to live with uncertainty and grief, and to face up to the reality of loss. But it also demands what Lear describes as ‘imaginative excellence’, a deliberate fostering of the flexibility and courage necessary to ‘facilitate a creative and appropriate response to the world’s challenges’ that will enable us to envision new alliances and open up new possibilities, even in the face of catastrophe.

If only there were more widespread recognition that simply getting back to how we were before should not be our overriding goal, the potential for change that has already been demonstrated could be effectively harnessed. This is a matter not of logistics, but of political will.

Bradley’s essay also chimed eerily with the novel I have just finished reading. Madeleine Watts’s debut The Inland Sea is a short, powerful work that hovers on the boundary between the mimetic and the speculative, combining personal, seemingly autofictional elements with issues of climate change and the embedded aftershocks of colonialism in Australia. The narrator is a writer, looking back from some unspecified time period at the year she spent working as a telephone operative on the 111 (read 999) switchboard, connecting incoming calls with the appropriate emergency service. The calls she has to deal with are acutely distressing, often coming from people in immediate danger of their lives. Yet the narrator is told – encouraged, even – not to engage with callers beyond the basic requirements of her job. The life of the office is conveyed with grim and often hilarious accuracy. Unsurprisingly our narrator frequently questions her suitability for the job, wondering aloud how long she will be able to keep going with it.

The atmosphere of transience – the sense that the life she is living is already in flux – is compounded by the steady accretion of climate events that are taking place in the background of the narrative: devastating fires (we hear the literal cries for help coming through the switchboard) unnatural floods and violent storms. The narrator’s destructive relationship with a tutor at the university further pushes the unreliability envelope. Significantly, we learn that the narrator’s great-great-great grandfather was John Oxley, a British explorer of the early nineteenth century who spent years in an obsessive search for the ‘inland sea’ he was convinced must exist at the heart of the Australian interior. Needless to say, he never found it. Watts points towards the futility of his quest as a metaphor for the settlers’ mishandling and misunderstanding of Australia generally.

As a chronicle of our current moment, with all its uncertainty, uprootedness, personal and political floundering and disquiet, The Inland Sea forms a fascinating and persuasive argument, a beautifully imagined, hauntingly memorable work of fiction that spoke to me deeply. It’s worth noting that I came to it via this essay Watts wrote about Helen Garner and the relationship between autofiction and lived reality. I loved the essay, both in what it said about Garner (whom I tend to hero-worship, just a little) and its exploration of writing the self as an imaginative act. I segued straight from this piece of non fiction into Watts’s novel and couldn’t have been more satisfied.

It is a comfort at least, to know that important work is still going on.

Weird Wednesdays #16: The Ministry of Truth

Earlier this month, Chris and I spent a number of days away, exploring our neighbouring islands of Islay and Jura. The trip had originally been booked for the end of June, to coincide with the summer solstice and the longest day. The summer nights up here are very precious to me, the quality of light is extraordinary and I wanted to experience that on Jura, a place that was special to us already without having seen it for reasons of its literary legacy. It is well known that George Orwell went to Jura to find the seclusion he needed to work on his final novel, unarguably his masterpiece. I knew it would be difficult for us to gain access to the house itself but I was determined to try.

Port Ellen, Isle of Islay, September 2020

As things turned out, we did not get to see Barnhill; neither did we get to spend the summer solstice on Jura. That we were able to reschedule our trip and almost get to Barnhill seems something of a miracle, given the circumstances. Staff at the hotel where we were staying made enquiries about us taking a boat trip down the coast so we could glimpse the house from the water but on our one full day in Jura, the weather was ridiculously inclement (always a possibility when you’re in Scotland) and the boatman was having trouble making even his scheduled trip across from the mainland.

Machir Bay, Isle of Islay, September 2020

We drove instead, as far as we could – twenty-five miles along an increasingly tenuous strip of road and into a landscape I had scarcely imagined. I knew in my head that Barnhill farmhouse was isolated and inaccessible, but it wasn’t until we were in the landscape that I was able to appreciate just how much. I think I’d been imagining a bumpy track along the coast, something like the farm roads we were used to in Devon. In fact, the road turns inward, away from the coast and into the vast, moorland interior of the island. Stags leap across the road in front of the car. Mist sweeps in like bolts of gauze. The colours – those quintessentially Scottish colours of ochre and sage and grey, contoured with purple. The heather – at its finest when I travelled north just a fortnight before (another trip, another story) – was still in evidence, still everywhere. That particular purple, with that particular grey – glorious, favoured, northern.

Craighouse, Isle of Jura, September 2020

In the end we reached the point where the road seemed so precarious it would have been foolhardy for us to continue. Chris parked, or rather, brought the car to a standstill overlooking the valley. I left him listening (appropriately enough, given my work-in-progress, but more of that another time) to Science Stories on Radio 4 while I got out and walked for an hour, up to and past the signpost that indicates the end of the public road with still four miles to go until you reach Barnhill. It was raining pretty hard but I was singing at the top of my voice into the wind. I felt utterly alone, and yet utterly seen, utterly alive. It might sound like a leap too far to say I felt Orwell’s presence – yet I think anyone who travels there must feel that they do. The spirit of the book has somehow become enmeshed with the spirit of place: not the grimness of the book’s contents, but the wildness, the intellectual courage, the poetic insight that enabled its creation.

I am determined to return to Jura, sooner rather than later, so I can walk the whole distance, so I can reach the moorland ridge (I have seen it in photographs) from where you can look down and see the white, elongated block of Barnhill crouched in the valley below, the glistening sea beyond. But for now the immense privilege and joy of being in that place, of seeing and smelling and tasting the landscape that Orwell knew and loved, that acted as a spiritual counterweight to the unrelenting harshness of the work he was composing – these are the memories I want to carry out of this year, a counterweight to the increasing instability and grimness of this time in all our lives.

The Paps of Jura, Isle of Jura, September 2020

*

The book I took with me to read on this trip was Dorian Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth, subtitled ‘a biography of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four’. Lynskey’s aim in this book is to provide a biographical and cultural analysis of Orwell’s masterpiece, showing how the book came to be written, and the independent life it has gone on to lead in the absence of its author. Lynskey is at pains to stress that Nineteen Eighty-Four came as the culminating achievement of what, in a parallel universe, might have been just the first part of Orwell’s career. Orwell’s experience in the Spanish Civil War set in motion a period of intense thinking, reading and conversation that funnelled itself into the creation of what is, in effect, the summation of Orwell’s ideas on totalitarianism and political ideology. As a foundation stone of twentieth century literature, we can count ourselves lucky that Orwell lived long enough to complete it.

In the second half of his study, Lynskey examines the impact of NIneteen Eighty-Four on both literary and popular culture: through the years of austerity and McCarthyism, the later years of the Cold War, the post-Thatcher crises in unemployment and national identity, right up to the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump. Lynskey reveals how Orwell’s masterpiece – like all truly great works of literature – reinvents itself for each successive generation. Orwell drew his original inspiration primarily from his experience of Stalinist communism, Trotskyite international socialism and the acts of blind obeisance committed by both the British government and the British Labour and Communist parties in effectively eliding the atrocities committed in the name of socialism. But Nineteen Eighty-Four is too big and too brilliant to remain associated with one specific time period alone; it’s a shape-shifting, mutable text, Lynskey argues, the major proof of which resides in the fact that it has been called into service by every shade of political opinion, often at one and the same time.

I was so excited and so energised by The Ministry of Truth I couldn’t stop thinking about it, couldn’t stop talking about it. Lynskey’s work is informative, original and addictively readable, one of my books of this year for sure. What it also does – as well it should – is drive you back to the original text. I first read Nineteen Eighty-Four when I was around fifteen years of age and still at school. I read it at least twice more over the following decade – but that was thirty years ago now and although I’ve thought about and referenced the book as often as anyone else, I haven’t reread it. I finished Lynskey’s book with a hunger to put that right – and I’m so glad I did.

When I first read Nineteen Eighty-Four, it was in the context of a lot of other dystopias. The novel that is closest to Orwell’s in terms of its genesis and overall impact is Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, which I read at almost exactly the same time (it changed my life, but that’s another story). However, my young-adult self never thought to bracket those two books together: in my mind, Koestler’s book was a historical text specifically about the Soviet Union, whereas Orwell’s was a ‘true’ dystopia, set in the future (only a couple of years in my own future by the time I read it, but still) and built around concepts that seemed undeniably science fictional. It felt more natural to me to bracket Orwell’s work with other similarly science fictional novels: Zamyatin’s We, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, even Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day, which no one else seems to have read but I was obsessed with at the time.

Rereading Nineteen Eighty-Four as a mature adult reveals how I was both right and wrong: Orwell’s novel is both horrifyingly realist, and one of the most perfect exemplars of the science fictional argument we have to draw on. Save for the unavoidable absence of computers, this novel could have been written yesterday. The fact that Orwell was not in a position to imagine the kind of digital infrastructure that would come to define our world is, in the context of this book, unimportant.

As a younger reader, the parts of Nineteen Eighty-Four that impressed themselves upon me most forcefully were those that were most outwardly expressive of the dystopian mode: the telescreens, the Thought Police, Winston’s hidden diary, the imprisonment and torture. Though my memory of the text proved near-photographic in places, I was astounded to discover on rereading that aside from casual mentions of hangings, and of course the ongoing war with Eastasia/Eurasia (take your pick) there is no overt violence in Nineteen Eighty-Four until someway past the halfway mark. What you get instead is an accumulation of circumstances, a portrait of postwar Britain, with all its griminess, everyday privations and grim sense of stasis that, although seventy years in the past now, will feel immediately resonant and present in our pre-Brexit reality to anyone born in Britain in the analogue age.

There are also minor yet touching details that draw directly from Orwell’s personal circumstances: the way Winston ‘hated using his hands, and he hated bending down, which was always liable to start him coughing’, for example, a detail that reminds us instantly of how the author was suffering from TB at the time of writing, and edging closer to death.

Orwell’s attention to detail extends even to minor characters, Winston’s neighbour Parsons for example, the exemplary Party man who ends up being denounced (for absolutely nothing) by his own daughter. We have all met someone like Parsons, nodded hello to him on a Sunday morning as he washes his car. He’s the kind of man who votes UKIP, the kind who sticks a note through his neighbour’s letterbox during lockdown, warning them that he’s seen them taking an extra exercise session and feels inclined to report them for it. Orwell doesn’t demonise Parsons – he just shows him like he is, pathos included. I especially admired his characterisation of Syme, the passionate stickler who works alongside Winston at the Ministry of Truth, a man whose intelligence has been corrupted into the service of a monstrous master yet whose obsessive interest in his work still makes him interesting to talk to:

In an intellectual way, Syme was venomously orthodox. He would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of helicopter raids on enemy villages, the trials and confessions of thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of the Ministry of Love. Talking to him was largely a matter of getting him away from such subjects and entangling him, if possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on which he was authoritative and interesting.

‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words,’ Syme asserts, before discoursing on the essential redundancy of synonyms and antonyms. ‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?’ he says. ‘In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.’ What struck me most profoundly on reading the novel this time around was how its subject, more than any other, is the importance of language, not only in resisting tyranny but also in maintaining any kind of personal integrity. Anyone who cares about language and words will find Syme’s proposition for the shrinking and coarsening of language literally shiver-inducing, especially as we are already bearing witness to such a transformation across large segments of political and online discourse. One need barely ask what Orwell would have made of phrases such as ‘alternative facts’ and ‘the reality-based community’. If it weren’t so appalling it would be funny. Reading Syme’s words, I also found myself thinking of the ways in which Anglophone culture has forcibly suppressed indigenous languages, gaslighting, devaluing and at the worst extreme obliterating the identity and means of expression of entire peoples.

If I were to pass a negative comment on any aspect of Nineteen Eighty-Four, I would have to say that Orwell is not particularly imaginative in his portrayal of women. Winston’s estranged wife Katherine is referred to as ‘stupid’ and moreover ‘too stupid to detect the unorthodoxy of [Winston’s] opinions’. Wherever prole women are mentioned – and with the exception of an elderly man Winston talks to in a pub the proles described by Orwell are all women – they are invariably described as ‘enormous’, or ‘monstrous’. The idea that these women might have inner lives is never contemplated, and it is only shortly before his arrest that Winston is able to connect a prole woman’s singing with the idea of beauty..

The main female character Julia is bright and bold and courageous but again Orwell seems at pains to stress her physicality. “You’re only a rebel from the waist down,” Winston says to her – Julia is above all a sensuous being, showing no interest in the intellectual reasons behind her rebellion or the life of the mind generally. ‘She hated the Party, and said so in the crudest words, but she made no general criticism of it. Except where it touched upon her own life she had no interest in Party doctrine.’ In spite of his love for Julia, Winston remains fundamentally alone in his search for answers about the nature of the Party and its hunger for power. The idea that women might be equal partners in counter-revolution seems barely to occur to him. Considered on the terms we are offered, Julia is excellently characterised: a warm-blooded, vital creation with a life force that is pivotal within the novel as a whole. Orwell clearly has a blind spot when it comes to feminism, which is a shame. In this respect it is interesting to compare Nineteen Eighty-Four with Zamyatin’s novel We, in which the male protagonist is schooled in the concepts of revolution and intellectual independence by a woman.

Though it might seem incongruous, there are many moments of illuminating beauty throughout Nineteen Eighty-Four, moments that are not often mentioned or remembered but that form a crucial and definitive counterweight to the horror. Winston’s dreams of ‘the Golden Country’ for example, passages that in a sense represent the heart of Orwell’s vision, the necessity of ‘staying sane’ as an act of resistance. There is also much discussion to be had around the ending of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Certainly when I first read the novel all those years ago I had no doubt that Winston’s final assertion, that he loves Big Brother, was a statement of utter defeat, that every last scrap of his integrity had been torn away. This time, I’m not so certain. ‘White always wins’, Winston says, as he moves chess pieces across the board in the Chestnut Tree Cafe, and I had the sense that it was this assertion about the ultimate triumph of good over evil that held the most weight, a coded message almost, even at the last: Winston says he loves Big Brother, but does he truly?

We cannot know – or at least we can only know the answer that feels most true for us. What I do know is that Nineteen Eighty-Four is and remains a landmark work that deserves its fame and status. Not only in its prescience but in its historical acuity, not only in its polemic but in its literary assurance and raw beauty, this is an elegant, complex, mature work of fiction that rewards the reader’s attention on every level. Reading it again brought me not only intellectual satisfaction; I was equally excited to discover how well it has stood the test of time, how relevant this book still feels, precisely today. It also brought me uneasy dreams, a sense of being on the boundary between the known world and the most perilously unstable of futures. To share one’s fear with a like mind in this way is not merely a consolation, but a reason for hope.

Folio Prize shortlist

Each time this shortlist gets announced, I find myself wondering why the Rathbones Folio Prize isn’t given more attention. Is it because the award was founded as a riposte to the Booker, or rather to the Booker’s sporadic tendency to succumb to popular pressure (and I’m sure we can all find examples) around which novels or which kind of novels should be considered? Is the Folio Prize’s unabashed pursuit of literary excellence seen as unfashionable or – and I can’t believe I’m using this word – elitist? Or is it something as banal as the prize organisers not being massively clued up on publicity? (Or not having a massive publicity budget?) Whatever it is, it’s a shame, because the Folio Prize has produced some of the most consistently interesting shortlists year on year.

The 2020 selection is better even than usual. Fiona Benson’s Vertigo and Ghost is a masterpiece. There can be no questioning that fact, no suggestion that the use of the word masterpiece is yet another instance of book world hype. Vertigo and Ghost will be being read in a hundred years’ time and hopefully long after. It’s won prizes already but it absolutely deserves this further accolade. Ben Lerner is so good it’s fashionable to hate him now. After having read the whole of the Adam Gordon trilogy virtually back-to-back towards the end of last year, I’ve been wondering whether Lerner will get the Booker nod, hoping of course that he will, preparing to feel unsurprised if he doesn’t. All the better then to see his third novel The Topeka School featuring here. (And yes of course the book can be criticised, but only at the level where you know you’re nitpicking. Lerner’s writing – his thought process – is so advanced that it doesn’t matter about the nitpicks, which I guess is what the Folio Prize is all about.)

How lovely to see Laura Cumming’s beautifully written investigative memoir On Chapel Sands recognised. Cumming’s art criticism is so consistently excellent and On Chapel Sands is a joy: understated, refined, powerful. It’s not had enough attention, in my view, and so my heart leaped when I saw it on the Folio shortlist. James Lasdun is another underappreciated writer. I read his memoir Give Me Everything You Have last year, and found it an uncomfortable book to read on many levels, yet once again the writing is so good, the approach so thoughtful and self-questioning, that it’s worth the discomfort, and shouldn’t all literature aim to be this self-exposing? I’m hoping Lasdun will find more readers as a result of this overdue recognition for a major prize.

I’ve not read Grand Union yet, but I did read two of Zadie Smith’s essay collections last year and found such joy in them. Smith is one of our most assured writers, no doubt about it, but – like Lasdun – she is also one of our most reflective and self-questioning. The piece in which Smith explores her decision to keep away from social media (because she believes it is essential that a writer retain the ‘freedom to be wrong’) should be read and at least considered by every writer. As with Lerner, Smith has to an extent reaped the anti-rewards of literary fame, which has meant a tailing-off of engaged interest in what she is actually writing. This shortlisting will hopefully encourage a generous measure of re-engagement.

Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive. What can I say, except that it was a source of sadness and frustration to me, to see this important, formally innovative, searching novel dropped from both the Booker and the Women’s Prize at longlist stage last year (the Women’s Prize decision especially had me grinding my teeth). This fact alone might place Luiselli as my favourite for winning the Folio but we shall see. I have only read part of Constellations so far but the form of the book, the quality of thought and writing, makes Sinead Gleeson’s shortlisting a no-brainer and I’ll make sure I absorb her book in full before the year is out. Similarly, the Folio shortlisting for Azadeh Moaveni’s Guest House for Young Widows has put it back on my radar. Given the often-appalling discourse around Muslim women, not to mention the appalling (and illegal) treatment of Shamima Begum (could our government please remember that Begum was a child when she left Britain??? What she must have been through since can scarcely be imagined by those who have taken the decision to leave her stateless – that’s if they even tried) I would consider Moaveni’s book essential reading for everyone, now.

The Folio Prize shortlist is diverse in every sense of the word. It is also profound, and thoughtful, and interesting. If there is one quality – literary excellence aside – that could be said to unite these eight books it is that of being ruminative, of inviting a personal response. This desire, this ability, this courage to look inward even as we look outward, to make the political personal, is an approach I would hope to see more of on every prize list and it is inspiring, and a source of solace, to see it here.

2020 Folio prize shortlist

Guest House for Young Widows by Azadeh Moaveni

The Topeka School by Ben Lerner

Vertigo & Ghost by Fiona Benson

Victory by James Lasdun

On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming

Constellations by Sinéad Gleeson

Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli

Grand Union by Zadie Smith

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