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Category: writing (Page 3 of 15)

Night Boat to Tangier

January 26, 2020 /

I begin each reading year curious about which will be the first truly great book I stumble across and how long I’ll have to wait before that happens and this year I’m lucky: less than a month of 2020 has elapsed and I’ve already encountered Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier, his third novel, longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize and as I’m turning the last page I’m wondering to myself how the judges could have had the hearts or minds to dismiss it from the running. It was a good longlist, I get that, a strong set of interesting books. Half of it had to be dispensed with, one way or another, but even so.

Night Boat to Tangier is not just a book about two Irish ex-gangsters. It’s a book about freedom and imprisonment, love (of course), exhaustion, despair, mental illness, the iron grip of history and personal trauma. Magic and folklore. Landscape, landscape and landscape. Poetry – because Night Boat to Tangier is an epic poem. If the definition – or a definition – of a work of art is a conceived artifact that is at one and the same time dreadfully specific yet utterly universal then Night Boat to Tangier is a work of art. (I keep thinking about John Banville, that quote of his just after he won the Booker about it being about time a work of art took the prize. I love it when writers come out with stuff they shouldn’t.)

Night Boat to Tangier fits wholly, sublimely into the song-tradition of Irish writing. But the feeling it gives me as I finish reading is – illogically, incongruously, absolutely – the same feeling I get reading or seeing a performance of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.

Barry’s interpolation of magical elements into his text is the capstone of genius and I am coming to think that Barry must be a magician. At the very least, he reminds us with every sentence why writing matters. A book to sear the heart and thrill the mind.

Day of reckoning

December 12, 2019 /

The end of the year has yielded some marvellous reading. I’ve been saving Helen Oyeyemi’s Gingerbread until now, because the very title makes me think of Christmas (the parts of it I still enjoy, frost and music mainly, and, well, gingerbread) and because her close-knit, somehow private prose has a wintry feel, at least for me, by which I mean the scent of woodsmoke and the way Rothesay Bay looks – like the lagoon in The Land that Time Forgot – when it’s shrouded in mist.

Oyeyemi’s Gingerbread is all those things. It’s also a novel that is supported by an undercurrent of deep anger, wrapped about so tightly in coloured lights and party games you might not notice it. There’s a scene in the book where a bunch of helpless girls are being bullied by a bunch of other, momentarily more powerful girls, who make the tormented ones laugh and smile while they’re being pinched and manhandled, so the adults (and the watching cameras) will not realise what’s actually going on. The whole of Gngerbread is like this, and this is its subject matter.

I could call Oyeyemi a clever writer or a subversive writer or a writer of startling originality and while she is all of these things, what she is most is a writer who is intent on following her own interests, her own concerns, her own manner of expression, with barely a thought for the ‘literary establishment’ or what might be popular or acceptable or ‘now’. Her work is discursive, densely wound as a ball of wool and sometimes as difficult to untangle. There are moments when it’s tiring to read, to stick with it, because it’s so much its own thing, showing so little concern for what I might be thinking or feeling, but that’s what makes Oyeyemi’s writing rewarding, that’s what makes it important. I’m also guessing that’s what makes it so much less talked about and discussed and rewarded with prizes (am I mistaken in thinking that Oyeyemi has never yet been shortlisted for a major prize?) than it should be.

We have a magician in our midst. I know she won’t care about prizes, which is why I’m giving myself permission to care on her behalf. What she cares about is the writing, the doing of it, the thinking, the following of a thread of an idea (or a trail of breadcrumbs, if we really must) wherever it leads her. The placing of one word in front of another, an outpouring of imagery so rich and so personal it might communicate to some as dissonance, but that is in reality as careful and considered and skilful as the aligning and mortaring of bricks to build a fortress wall.

She is unique and she is wayward and she is to be treasured. I watched an interview with her recently on YouTube in which many of those qualities shine out strongly, most of all her insistence on being allowed the head-space to say what she actually means, rather than being pushed towards repeating the slew of steady, ready answers to familiar questions that inevitably accrue in our minds when we’ve done even a couple of author events, let alone a book tour. Again, treasure. I was interested, though afterwards not surprised, to hear her mention Jesse Ball as a favourite writer. Just a week or so ago I read his most recent novel The Divers’ Game, and though opposite to Oyeyemi in some ways – so pared down it’s like glass, or granite, with the immaculate sheen of poetry – in the quality of its writing it possesses that same waywardness, that same fierce, you might even say stubborn insistence on being what it is, that is, an almost icily accurate representation of what the writer is actually thinking, actually feeling.

Not a summary, not a pruned-back, dumbed-down approximation, but the real deal. A brutal and terrifying portrayal of dystopia and moral laziness and yet at the same time – can I even say this? – still somehow hopeful, The Divers’ Game should win every science fiction award out there in 2020. My prediction is that it won’t be shortlisted even for one.

I am thinking of these two writers especially today because they give me courage. They give me courage to believe that it is possible, as a writer, to enter the places you need to enter, to explore the realms of thought and language you feel bound to explore.

To say what we have to say, regardless of how it might be received, what worth might be placed upon it by others. To follow what we believe to be true, and to keep on going.

Pure love for words

November 25, 2019 /

‘The poem, like most of my poems, and like the story I’d promised to expand, conflated fact and fiction, and it occurred to me – not for the first time, but with a new force – that part of what I loved about poetry was how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction didn’t obtain, how the correspondence between text and world was less important than the intensities of the poem itself, what possibilities of feeling were opened up in the present tense of reading.’

(Ben Lerner, 10:04)

In a recent episode of BBC Radio 4’s Open Book, an interview with the American writer Ben Lerner about his new semi-autobiographical novel The Topeka School could be heard back-to-back with a discussion between Olivia Sudjic and Meena Kandasamy on the nature and rise of autofiction. I read Sudjic’s Exposure earlier this year. At the time of listening to the programme I had just finished reading Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 in preparation for reading The Topeka School. As I write these words now, I turned the final page of Kandasamy’s third novel Exquisite Cadavers about half an hour ago.

Kandasamy has spoken of how Exquisite Cadavers is in part a response to the response surrounding her second novel, When I Hit You, much of which had the effect of relegating this singularly audacious, virtuoso autofictional essay on the radical power of literature to the domain of misery memoir. As part of the discussion on Open Book, Kandasamy was upfront about the repeated frustration she has experienced in being subjected to this kind of commentary:

‘When I wrote my second novel and it was very personal, people would reduce the whole thing to “oh, she just wrote about what happened to her”. Most of the emphasis was on the ‘what happened to her’ part of it, as opposed to the fact that ‘she wrote about it, and she’s creating a work of art here’. The fact that you’re a woman, the fact that this is an artistic endeavour that’s taken years to write is just erased.’

Sudjic was quick to confirm that her experience as a writer has thus far been very similar and I could have listened to their conversation for hours:

‘Autofiction when it’s written by women is often seen as this indulgent thing where they’re writing about themselves, and I find that so strange, because what they’re really doing is drawing attention to the frame. It’s a technique that sits next to metafiction really, which is drawing attention to how it’s all constructed, and I find it very frustrating that that’s what gets ignored when it’s women doing it, whereas for example with Ben Lerner, everyone’s very on board with reading those books as real, structural, artistic works, rather than constantly asking him what his mother thinks about the way she’s represented in them.’

Exquisite Cadavers is a brave and important work on so many levels. With a structure partly inspired by Derrida’s 1974 novel Glas, it presents a fictional story of a mixed-race couple living in contemporary London alongside margin notes detailing the ideas, events and research that inspired it. As the book progresses, the invented story and the autobiographical elements begin in their own strange way to coalesce, each illuminating the other in a way that reads as a genuine representation of the way fiction is actually created. It’s a brilliant achievement, and what I love most about it – as with When I Hit You – is its visceral revelation of the power literature can still wield, not in spite of its ‘literariness’, but because of it. The ‘lived experience’ is the creation of these words, these sentences, this body of work, not the facsimiles of experiences described, which may or may not be ‘true’ but who the hell cares? What we care about is what is on the page, the experience that brings reader and writer closer together.

The irony, as Sudjic points out, is the extent to which she and Lerner and Kandasamy are engaged in similar literary endeavours, as set against the peculiar distance that is drawn between them by many readers and commentators. I loved Lerner’s first two novels so much I found myself weeping in gratitude. I cannot imagine a more important writer right now than Kandasamy. I found Sudjic’s polemic in Exposure vitally enlightening and, safe in the knowledge that her second novel Asylum Road is coming down the line soon from Bloomsbury, I am about to begin reading her debut, Sympathy.

I’m saving The Topeka School for the week between Christmas and Hogmanay. Far from being played out, the novel today is more exciting than it’s been for years.

100 Novels that Shaped My World

November 9, 2019 /

This year marks the 300th anniversary of the publication of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the work that is generally proclaimed as the first English novel. To mark this tricentenary, the BBC is launching a major new TV series exploring the phenomenon of the novel and the impact this art form has had, on our imaginative lives as individuals and on our development as a society. As part of its year-long celebrations, the BBC invited a panel of six well known writers and cultural commentators – Stig Abell, Syima Aslam, Juno Dawson, Kit de Waal, Mariella Frostrup and Alexander McCall Smith – to assemble a list of one hundred English-language novels they feel have exerted a major impact – both on them personally, and on our cultural life as a nation.

“We asked our prestigious panel to create a list of world-changing novels that would be provocative, spark debate and inspire curiosity,” explains Jonty Claypole, the director of BBC Arts. “It took months of enthusiastic debate and they have not disappointed. There are neglected masterpieces, irresistible romps as well as much-loved classics. It is a more diverse list than any I have seen before, recognising the extent to which the English language novel is an art form embraced way beyond British shores.”

A very conscious attempt to challenge the canon, then, which is much to be applauded. The list certainly encourages debate – there are titles here that almost everyone will agree on rubbing shoulders with titles that will leave some critics rolling their eyes and tutting about standards. This is all part of the fun of the thing, of course – and I’m greatly looking forward to all the upcoming documentaries, discussion programmes and author profiles the BBC is promising us.

The whole business has got me thinking, though, about the impossibility of assembling a list that will have meaning for everyone. The panellists have helpfully arranged their choices into ten broad categories: Coming of Age, Love and Romance, Crime and Conflict, Politics, Power and Protest, Identity, Adventure, Family and Friendship, Class and Society, Life, Death and Other Worlds and, tantalisingly, Rule-Breakers. It’s as good a way of organising one’s thoughts as any, but reading is, above all, personal, and so it is inevitable that everyone who encounters this list will respond with more enthusiasm to some categories than others.

There is also the perennially vexed question of how you choose, what criteria come into play when making selections. It would seem obvious that anyone compiling such a list as part of a curriculum for a course of study, say, or curating an anthology, or indeed setting down a framework for a BBC Arts series has a duty to be as wide-ranging and representative as possible. We would want such a list to encompass the novel across all periods in its development. We should also demand that such a list be inclusive – of women writers, LGBTQ+ writers, writers from diverse social, cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Lists that fail to be inclusive will – directly or indirectly – help to shore up existing boundaries and biases, leading to a lopsided, restrictive view of literature and the potential alienation of millions of new readers and writers.

If we are choosing just for ourselves, though, our choices will naturally reflect our personal biases, our life experiences as readers, and I would argue that this is a tendency that should not be stifled but actively celebrated. If I were to find myself perusing a list of Hilary Mantel’s favourite books, or Nicola Barker’s, or Will Self’s, I would want to get a genuine insight into their thought processes and working methods, their personal literary canon. The books that made them writers, in other words. I would not be nearly as interested in seeing a list of titles they believe might make them look politically acceptable, intellectually on trend, or – heaven forbid – a nice person. I want to get at the meat.

There is huge value in group discussions of what literature represents and who it is representing. When I look back at how my own reading might have been shaped by such discussions – or lack of them – within the British education system I find myself interested and disturbed in equal measure. But there is also value in individual response, in laying bare our personal proclivities and blind spots, the ragged and digressive path of our creative development. In examining our choices, we offer ourselves the opportunity for reflection, and, perhaps, change. In looking at what is important to us now, we begin to wonder what might be more important to us in ten years’ time.

So in celebrating the tricentenary of Robinson Crusoe, I’m suggesting we all get naked! Here below you will find my own list – not of novels that shaped our world necessarily, but of novels that irrevocably, unequivocally shaped MY world. My main criterion in assembling this list has been that anyone reading it should be able to tell a lot, maybe everything, about who I am as a writer, how my literary interests have developed and what makes me tick. The one rule I set for myself was that no author could be represented on the list more than once. My selection parameters differ slightly from those of the BBC panel in that I have included works in translation. Novels written in languages other than English have been so central to my life and to my thinking that a list that did not include them would be practically meaningless. In similarly cheating vein, I have also included two poetry collections, and three short fiction collections. In the case of the Eliot and the Plath, these works have been so central to my literary outlook that leaving them off would feel like a lie. In the case of Oyeyemi and Wood, I wanted both these authors to be on my list, and these happen to be my favourite works by them. In the case of the Williams, her debut novel isn’t out yet and her collection Attrib. is too important to me not to be included.

In the case of the four series I’ve included, it’s simple tit for tat: if the BBC can have the whole of Harry Potter, I can have the Tripods.

After careful thought, I decided that rather than arranging my list alphabetically I would list the books chronologically, that is, the order in which I personally first encountered them. I cannot be one-hundred percent accurate about this – I no longer remember if I read Picnic at Hanging Rock before The Turn of the Screw or vice versa – but it’s as close to the truth as I can get. There are also authors I read other works from before the one cited – I read Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden when I was fourteen, for example, well over a decade before Enduring Love, but it’s the later novel that has left the most lasting impression, and so that’s the one I’ve chosen.

The earliest book cited here forms one of very first reading memories and my heart still clenches every time I see the cover. The most recent, I haven’t quite finished yet but I know already that it’s a keeper. Are there books I feel sad not to have included? Dozens.

It’s been a fascinating list to compile. One of the things that pleases me most about it is that it includes only two books – the scintillating and important Wide Sargasso Sea, the seminal Nineteen Eighty-Four – that happen to coincide with those selected by the BBC panel. Which only goes to show how individual a passion reading is, how many game-chamging, groundbreaking masterpieces we have to choose from, and be inspired by.

100 NOVELS THAT SHAPED MY WORLD

Borka: the Adventures of a Goose with No Feathers by John Burningham

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

Stig of the Dump by Clive King

Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer

Thursday’s Child by Noel Streatfield

‘Adventure’ series by Willard Price

The Ogre Downstairs by Diana Wynne Jones

Carrie’s War by Nina Bawden

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

‘UNEXA’ series by Hugh Walters

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

‘Changes’ trilogy by Peter Dickinson

‘Tripods’ trilogy by John Christopher

The Dolls’ House by Rumer Godden

The Chrysalids by John Wyndham

Watership Down by Richard Adams

The Magician’s Nephew by C. S. Lewis

My Cousin Rachel by Daphne Du Maurier

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

A Passage to India by E. M. Forster

The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

Pavane by Keith Roberts

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot

Ariel by Sylvia Plath

The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

The Drought by J. G. Ballard

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

The Search for Christa T. by Christa Wolf

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Doktor Faustus by Thomas Mann

Ada by Vladimir Nabokov

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay

The Book and the Brotherhood by Iris Murdoch

Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith

The Affirmation by Christopher Priest

Midnight Sun by Ramsey Campbell

Ghost Story by Peter Straub

The Brimstone Wedding by Barbara Vine

The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison

Enduring Love by Ian McEwan

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Personality by Andrew O’Hagan

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

The Gunslinger by Stephen King

The Iron Dragon’s Daughter by Michael Swanwick

The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe

Shroud/Eclipse by John Banville

My Tango with Barbara Strozzi by Russell Hoban

The Green Man by Kingsley Amis

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel

Shriek: an afterword by Jeff VanderMeer

Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald

Darkmans by Nicola Barker

Glister by John Burnside

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

The Kills by Richard House

A Russian Novel by Emmanuel Carrère

The Third Reich by Roberto Bolano

The Dry Salvages by Caitlin R. Kiernan

In the Shape of a Boar by Lawrence Norfolk

The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon

The Accidental by Ali Smith

Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burn

F by Daniel Kehlmann

Straggletaggle by J. M. McDermott

The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante

What is Not Yours is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi

The Loser by Thomas Bernhard

The Peppered Moth by Margaret Drabble

All Those Vanished Engines by Paul Park

Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson

The Infatuations by Javier Marias

Outline by Rachel Cusk

A Separation by Katie Kitamura

Satin Island by Tom McCarthy

Carthage by Joyce Carol Oates

This is Memorial Device by David Keenan

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

Death of a Murderer by Rupert Thomson

Lanark by Alasdair Gray

Falling Man by Don DeLillo

Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill

Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor

Attrib. by Eley Williams

Berg by Ann Quin

When I Hit You by Meena Kandasamy

Munich Airport by Greg Baxter

Caroline’s Bikini by Kirsty Gunn

Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz

The Sing of the Shore by Lucy Wood

Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

Ormeshadow

October 18, 2019 /

Priya Sharma’s new novella Ormeshadow has the quality of a story that has always existed.

Gideon Belman learns the legend of the orme from his father John, who tells him of a great beast, a dragon, that once flew high across the bay before coming to rest with its head in the waves. The dragon fell into a sleep that seemed vast as death, but as John is careful to remind Gideon, sleep and death are not the same…

Ormeshadow is the story of Gideon, his father, mother and uncle and the many lives that intersect with theirs as they live out harsh lives on the farm held by both the Belman brothers, a plot of land loved by one, left behind by the other but not forever, the site of promises and betrayals and – ultimately – the birth of new futures.

The story is told through a series of discrete chapters, sections of a continuing narrative that take place sometimes years apart, sometimes a few scant days. This fractured form is both mosaic and multifaceted jewel, a sequence of prose poems that beguile and engross and accumulate and shatter the senses.

The urgent themes from Sharma’s earlier work are here – family tensions, social inequality, myth and magic. In Ormeshadow, we see her acquiring still greater confidence and authority in the art of storytelling. It is impossible to read this novella and not be affected by it at a gut level. It is still less possible to read this novella and not be overcome by admiration for what Sharma as a writer has accomplished here. Ormeshadow feels ageless, perfect. Yet it is a story that speaks persuasively for our time.

A powerful fusion of language (did I mention the language?) form and mythmaking from a writer whose work is constantly evolving and breaking new ground. Superb. Read it.

In these days of rain

September 12, 2019 /
In the Days of Rain: A Daughter, a Father, a Cult

A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate enough to catch the writer Rebecca Stott reading her essay ‘On Ghost Cities’ on Radio 4. Drawing on her early childhood, when her family were still part of the Exclusive Brethren, Stott describes her enduring fascination with urban spaces forsaken by their human inhabitants, either through gradual depletion or traumatic change. For Stott, the imagery of cataclysm was not alien, but something she had lived with as a daily reality. I found Stott’s essay beautiful and profound, full of ideas that resonated with me on a personal level. It also served to remind me that I had not yet read In the Days of Rain, Stott’s Costa-winning memoir of her family’s connection with and eventual severance from the Exclusive Brethren. Which is how I came to be reading it on the train this Tuesday as I travelled into Glasgow to attend a live screening of Margaret Atwood’s launch event for The Testaments at the NFT.

In truth, Ada-Louise’s face had come to stand for all those women who’d been shut up or locked up. Not just Brethren women, but all women who’d been bullied or belted by men who’d been allowed too much power in their homes. Her face haunted me. One day when my daughters were a bit older, I told myself, I’d talk to them about that, about patriarchy and how dangerous unchecked male power can be. I’d talk to them about Ada-Louise.

“Mum, you’ve read The Handmaid’s Tale,” Kez said. “You know we can’t ever take feminist progress for granted. They’ll take our freedom away again unless we protect it.”

One of those strange coincidences that feel like more than coincidence, when a particular text falls into your hands precisely at the time you need to be reading it. In the Days of Rain is more than just a memoir. Written when Stott was already mid-career and fully in command of her material, it is a furious and tender examination of faith, credulity, community, scepticism, love, folly and the human propensity for both the numinous and the monstrous. It is also a book about women and the numberless ways in which – then and now – they are set up to act as scapegoats for men’s greedy descent into violence and error.

There’s more, though. While Stott wholeheartedly condemns the psychological and latterly physical and sexual abuse that came to define and ravage the Exclusive Brethren, she remains determined to explore the more surprising truths of what it is like to have one’s formative experiences and imagination shaped by living in what is, in effect, a parallel universe.

The Testaments (The Handmaid's Tale, #2)

What is clearly difficult and sometimes painful for Stott to explain is that not all of these experiences are negative. I found these parts of the book – Stott’s examination of the language, imagery and philosophy of visionary belief – affecting and thought-provoking. As I happen to be in the early stages of work on a novel that deals with some of the same themes I cannot help thinking and wondering about the recent crop of writers – all of them women – who have drawn vital inspiration from their experiences of life in faith communities: Tara Westover, Sarah Perry, Grace McCleen, Miriam Toews. Their work is luminous. The questions they ask are hard questions. Most remain unanswered.- .

Atwood’s interview with Samira Ahmed – witty, mischievous, deeply intelligent and fiercely timely – set a new standard in book events. It was a privilege to be present at its screening, heartening to learn afterwards that the multi-venue livestream topped the UK’s cinema box office takings for that day. Having Rebecca Stott as my literary companion in the hours before and afterwards provided a powerful poetic symmetry. I am still thinking about her book and what I can learn from it. I am still thinking about ghost cities, the many uncanny ways in which the future continues to leak into the present.

Still Worlds Turning

August 31, 2019 /

Still Worlds Turning is an anthology of new contemporary short fiction edited by Emma Warnock and published by No Alibis Press, an independent imprint run from a bookshop of the same name in Belfast. This was one of the books I decided to take with me to read at Worldcon, due to its firm (though by no means exclusive) focus on Irish writers.

Anthologies are strange beasts. At their best, they are genuinely eye-opening. At their worst, they are shapeless, uneven in quality and, occasionally, pointless. As with single-author collections, my taste in anthologies is very much for those that have a coherence about them, not necessarily in terms of theme (themed anthologies can quickly lose their appeal) but in terms of approach. They should have something to say, in other words – a sense of direction, a message to communicate about the state of fiction now.

Happily, Still Worlds Turning has all the radicalism and cohesion you could possibly wish for. Reading it is like being a fly on the wall at a gathering of talent so fresh and so furious it is almost gladiatorial.

Some of the writers included – Eley Williams, Joanna Walsh, Wendy Erskine, Sam Thompson, Jan Carson, Lucy Caldwell – were already familiar to me, the others new names. The quality was consistent throughout and while the the editor has deliberately shied away from imposing any overarching theme on Still Worlds Turning, what these stories have in common is a rawness and intensity of approach, a willingness to wrestle with the stuff of language. In the hands of these writers, the short story is cast not as a precious jewel, refined and entire unto itself, but as a living drama constantly evolving before our eyes. There is humour here, and pathos, where humour is a defining feature of resilience.

And for those who are into theme, it is there to be found. No doubt it was my own gothic sensibilities that led me to discern in this anthology a through-thread of the uncanny, not just in Sam Thompson’s appropriately named ‘Seafront Gothic’, but also in Lucy Caldwell’s disturbing and eerie ‘Night Waking’, Daniel Hickey’s brilliant and brutal – and very funny – ‘The Longford Chronicle’ (think/dream Boris Johnson meets The Hunger Games), Laura-Blaise McDowall’s strange and lovely ‘Balloon Animals’, and Mandy Taggart’s poignantly Faustian ‘Burn’.

There are stories here that I found challenging, not so much in the way they are written but in the vision they present. Judyth Emanuel’s ‘Tw ink le’, Jan Carson’s ‘The World Ending in Fire’, Dawn Watson’s ‘The Seaview Hundred and Fifty-Two’ and Lauren Foley’s ‘Molly & Jack at the Seaside’ in particular are viscerally raw snapshots of life at the margins but I count this very much as a plus because these are stories that need to be heard. I would point readers towards Lauren Foley’s account of Molly’s journey to publication for a sobering insight into how difficult it can be – still – to find publishers willing to take the risk with uncomfortable material, even when the editors themselves profess admiration for the work.

No Alibis and Emma Warnock should be commended for taking that risk. Still Worlds Turning deserves notice as a key reference point for what is happening in fiction right now. Here is a generation of writers delving deep into issues of community, poverty, sexuality and trauma whose work does not just feel timely, it feels urgent. Above all, these are stories that demonstrate the power and the beauty of language, in which the gaps in language say almost as much as the words themselves, in which form is as vital as content. Read and learn.

The Pisces by Melissa Broder

August 20, 2019 /

I was trying to ask her in a roundabout way if it was worth it. We felt the same nothingness, of that I was sure. But I wanted to see if she knew we were going to be okay or not. Or, at least, if I was. I was asking life advice, couched in the language of suicide, from a friend in a mental hospital. This was the direction my life had taken.

I picked up this book just prior to going to Worldcon. My choice was no accident. I’ve been enjoying reader reviews of The Pisces for some months now – the way this novel has divided opinion has made me insatiably curious about it – and I thought it would be a suitable companion for my first trip to Ireland. I wasn’t wrong. ‘Perfect summer read’ is not the kind of descriptive language I would normally go in for but in all the best possible ways – it’s set in California, it’s about a holiday romance with a merman – The Pisces is exactly that.

Magical, provocative, hilarious. I loved this book so much more than I ever expected to.

Lucy has accidentally broken up with her boyfriend, Jamie. She’s also stuck – interminably stuck – on her doctoral thesis, an exploration of silence in the work of Sappho. When her sister Annika suggests she spend the summer dog-sitting at her home in Venice Beach, Lucy can’t think of a reasonable excuse to say no, not even when Annika enrolls her in a group therapy circle attended by women driven to distraction by their pursuit of unavailable men.

It is only when Lucy meets Theo that the stage is set for romance of a more mythic variety. Is Theo simply the best sex of her life, or the embodiment of what Lucy, Sarah, Claire and maybe even Dr Jude are all secretly looking for: perfect love?

Negative critics of The Pisces seems to fall into two distinct brackets: those who dislike the explicit and occasionally startling portrayal of sex and the body that characterises the first half of the book especially, and those who find the characters – Lucy especially – unlikable and ungenerous. There is no doubt that the tone of Lucy’s narrative is bracing, not to say caustic, but rarely have I found a novel or a protagonist that speaks so honestly and with such deft, dark humour about what it is really like for a woman to grow up and come of age in a society which values her attractiveness to men, her ability to get and keep a man – scrap that, shall we just say MEN? above all else.

Such a (hilarious) relief, to see men – naked – through the female gaze for once. So poignant, such a vindication to have the corrosive effects of love addiction and the low personal esteem at its root dragged out into the open.

If some have called The Pisces savage and unfeminist, I call it savagely healing and one of the most unapologetically feminist novels I’ve read.

That the novel simultaneously plays out as a mysterious and satisfying work of speculative fiction makes it doubly pleasurable. As an examination of the habits of mer-people – how they see themselves reflected in our literature and through the lens of the human gaze – The Pisces is a delight, a ludic romance of ideas and mythology. Our discovery that Theo’s siren call turns out to be just that – a calculated seduction, a descent into delusion with potentially deadly consequences – leads us ultimately towards an ending that feels rewarding and true.

It makes a certain kind of sense to group this book with recent novels by Ottessa Moshfegh (My Year of Rest and Relaxation) Laura Sims (Looker) and Halle Butler (The New Me) – novels that have all boldly examined the female condition from the inside out. What makes The Pisces my favourite of an exceptional bunch is its leap into the vaster spaces of the fantastic. Lucy’s thoughts on Sappho are marvellously rendered, the novel’s understated satire on the self-serving nature of academe both delicious and accurate. The Pisces was a delight for me in every way, a further revelation of the versatility and imaginative richness of speculative ideas.

I Am Sovereign

July 25, 2019 /

The Author suspects that this novella (which is in danger of becoming a novel so needs to end quite soon) is either extremely deep or unbelievably trite.

It’s impossible to tell.

The Author (Gyasi ‘Chance’ Ebo claims) will persist in calling it ‘unbelievably trite’ because she is fundamentally disingenuous.

The Author (the Author claims) will persist in calling it ‘unbelievably trite’ because – at some profound level – it is unbelievably trite.

There is little I feel I can say about this novel (and through its scope and form and effect I would persist in calling it a novel, regardless of word length) because for me it is perfect, yet I cannot not mention it because I loved it so much.

I was talking to Chris about Nicola Barker’s work last night and the reasons I love it – the equal facility with which she handles serious subjects and bright ephemera, the way she insists that nothing, truly, counts as ephemera because even the most throwaway cultural artifacts are peculiarly long-lasting, the effortless fusion of highbrow and popular culture in a manner that feels artless but is in fact high art.

Because she loves her material and her subjects and is never snide. This is one of the key things I noticed about Barker when I first encountered her through Darkmans, her Booker-shortlisted 800 pp monster from 2007, for me one of the most important English novels of the 21st century so far and still my favourite of her works.

She doesn’t put on accents. She lets people speak.

“She’s a bit of a Marmite writer, though, isn’t she?’ Chris said. I would be the first to admit that this is true, though as my editor remarked recently while going over the text of my next novel, I happen to have a fondness for the stuff.

I Am Sovereign takes place during a twenty-minute house viewing in Llandudno. Nothing happens. Worlds collide. You could read this book – easily – in an afternoon. There are readers who will find this novel annoying and wilful and deeply affected. I found it to be one of the most joyful works – both in terms of what it has to say and the sheer authorial delight in what is being created – I have read in a long time. It’s the light to H(A)PPY’s dark. I would argue that there are few books and fewer authors who are able to so perfectly articulate how it feels and what it is like to be alive in Britain right now.

Please read this marvellous interview with Barker in The Times here. She is phenomenal.

Sweet Home by Wendy Erskine

July 5, 2019 /

When he looked at the ceiling of the shabby room, the damp patch over in the corner and the crack around the lighting surround, and the repeated crescent stains where somebody had bounced a dirty ball on the ceiling the fragility of it all was overwhelming and the beauty, too, because there was Marty’s sweatshirt lying in illuminated folds like a sleeve from one of those old paintings, and there were the towels, brilliant white on the floor: centuries of people had cleaned away the dirt from sheets and towels, pummeling at the stains and the grime, rinsing it all away, the water circling down the drain, and endless lines of washing, high in the sky, billowing in a hard wind. (‘Last Supper’)

A good short story should reveal a corner of a world. It should tell a story, of course, but of equal importance to me when I am reading is the sense of a hinterland, of the author introducing us to places and to people who form part of a complete vision, with their lives and the lives of others continuing – perhaps in unforeseen directions – long after the final page of this particular story has been read.

Wendy Erskine’s debut Sweet Home is a collection of small masterpieces. It is a book about Belfast but in contrast with David Keenan’s For the Good Times or Anna Burns’s Milkman it shows us the fallout from the Troubles in slipping glimpses – Kyle, who falls into a life of violence after suffering trauma at the hands of his father, or Olga, a lonely teacher whose married lover’s death in a punishment shooting has made her come to hate even the colour green.

Like Lisa Blower’s stories in It’s Gone Dark Over Bill’s Mother’s, which I read earlier this year, the stories in Sweet Home demonstrate an affinity for the form that makes them appear effortless, whilst at the same time employing ingenious twists and tricks of form and narrative that reveal an author who is not only fully conscious of the tradition she is working in but more than fully capable of ascending into its first rank of practitioners (Trevor, McGahern) – one of the stories from this collection, ‘Inakeen’, has already been shortlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Prize.

Yet Erskine brings also a contemporary urgency and better still an empathy to her narratives that is all her own. Like so much of the great Irish short fiction writing, these are stories of ordinary working class people caught in the grip of everyday crises – and one never escapes the sense that Erskine is documenting rather than inventing, This is how it is, she seems to say. Given a twist or turn of fate, this could be you or me, maybe already is. These are stories of a society driven to breaking point, not just by the violence of armed conflict but by the more insidious, ubiquitous violence of unchecked capitalism.

In their pathos and in their power, these are stories of now.

I particularly loved ’77 Pop Facts You Didn’t Know About Gil Courtney’ – a life-in-fragments of an Ian Curtis-like musician – because come on, you know I love stories that do stuff like this with form. But the jewel in the crown has to be the title story, ‘Sweet Home’ itself, which apart from containing a real heart-in-mouth moment of horror, is a composite portrait of grief that manages equally to encompass all strata of society. ‘Arab States: Mind and Narrative’ also deserves particular mention for its stark and empathetic portrayal of a road-never-taken, as does ‘Lady and Dog’ for its neat nod to Chekhov. (I have faith that Olga does not realise her final, desperate act of imagining, by the way – there’s no way Erskine would do that to us.)

This is an involving and finely wrought collection and one that absolutely honours the memory of Gordon Burn. I only hope that Wendy Erskine is at work on a novel because I can’t wait to read it.

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