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The work goes on

January 18, 2019 /

This week saw the announcement of Hannah Sullivan as the winner of this year’s T. S. Eliot Prize for her collection Three Poems. Sullivan is 39, and much of the commentary around her win has been centred on the fact that Three Poems is her debut collection. Prior to its publication, she was a virtual unknown.

One of the delights for me in reading the T. S. Eliot Prize longlist was the realisation of how difficult it must have been to call a winner. The shortlisted collections were radically different in terms of approach, subject matter and background, yet in terms of ability, standard of achievement, originality, depth and above all seriousness of intent there seemed barely a hair’s breadth between them.

Reading work of this standard offers a profound joy, most of all in its confirmation that such work – in the midst of everything writers face in the current climate – is still being done.

This week’s unveiling of the longlist for the Republic of Consciousness Prize – a relatively new award for works published in the UK by independent presses – offered a similar surfeit of joy. Presses like Stinging Fly and Galley Beggar, Carcanet and Charco and Splice are increasingly where the risks are being taken in British publishing, where the work is being done, where the idea of experimentation and revolt is actively welcomed. It is also interesting to note that of the thirteen books listed, almost a third are works in translation.

The work goes on, and that is cause for joy.

The 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize longlist is here. You can hear an interview with Hannah Sullivan at the Guardian books podcast here. I found it inspirational, and Sullivan’s previous book The Work of Revision sounds tremendous.

Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz

January 10, 2019 /

This is what I mean by a work of literature.

When I was writing about my books of the year at the end of December I remember saying that Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s The Shape of the Ruins is ‘the best kind of autofiction – the kind that is actually about something’. Vasquez’s book is the most complex web of stories – the author’s own life history and passions woven inextricably with the lives of others and the historical events that threaten their sanity. Die, My Love occupies a smaller, tighter canvas but – like Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You, the novel it brings to mind for me most forcibly – it is equally ‘about’ something. I’m not just talking about its overt subject matter – imprisonment of the self, female anger, the violent contradictions that are implicit in becoming a mother – but the ways that Harwicz’s novel (and Kandasamy’s) are also ‘about’ language.

Die, My Love is a dense mat of language, all the more miraculous through having its vividness so boldly captured through the medium of translation. The book’s translators, Carolina Orloff and Sarah Moses, have achieved something profound and beautiful in bringing this work intact to an English-speaking audience.

The close interchange between the literal and the metaphorical, the mundane and the phantasmagorical in Die, My Love has the heart-pumping and energising effect of a cold shower. People have been comparing Harwicz’s work with Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream and I think that if you enjoyed one you will definitely enjoy the other. Their effects are different, though. For me, Fever Dream was just that: creepily languorous, a rising increment of terror (that novel’s impact only increases with time). Die, My Love is insistently immediate, spiky, jagged. If I were forced to choose, it would be my favourite of the two.

There are novels you read and are so impressed by you immediately start lusting after the writer’s next, as-yet-unwritten book. Martin MacInnes’s Infinite Ground was like that for me. So is this one. Die, My Love is the kind of novel that makes you feverishly excited about writing. It reminds you of what should be possible, if you pay proper attention to what you are doing. It is about that.

2018 Reading Roundup Part 2 – and onward to 2019

December 27, 2018 /

For the past five years now I’ve been keeping a formal tally of the books I’ve read throughout the preceding twelve months, allocating each of them a mark out of ten and a paragraph or so of notes and observations. These scorecards act as informal aides memoires and are strictly for my eyes only, though taken as a whole and year on year, they provide a fascinating insight into the onward progress of my own reading. Failed projects, wilted enthusiasms, sudden insane passions, they are all charted here in these sequential Word documents. The very randomness of these reading journeys has served to frustrate and annoy me in previous years, leaving me with the sense that I could have done better, that I should have been more organised, that I didn’t stretch myself enough. I have resolved to do better in future, but in spite of all best intentions have rarely done so.  

This year’s reading tally marks itself out as different in two distinct ways. Firstly, I have somehow managed to read getting on for twice as many books as what has come to be the norm for me. This might be partly on account of a lower average page count per book – I don’t know, I haven’t counted – but it is also the result of my having set aside more time specifically for reading. So whilst I am still well behind on what I would ideally have achieved, some progress has been made. 

The other way in which my 2018 reading year feels different is that – and perhaps this is also a by-product of having read more books – I feel invigorated by the lack of a core focus rather than disappointed by it. I feel I have learned stuff this year, as much as anything by reconnecting with those aspects of literature that resonate most with me. I feel that I have been changed by my reading just as my reading has changed. 

Something happened to me roughly halfway through the year, and that something was Eley Williams’s collection Attrib. It is difficult to articulate how hugely excited I was by these stories, which – rather like Camilla Grudova’s The Doll Alphabet last year – seemed to smash so many assumptions about what makes a ‘good short story’. Williams’s stories fall a long way from the Raymond Carver ‘slice of life’ archetype that has become the template for so many first collections and big competition winners. Rather, whilst never eschewing emotion – many of the stories in Attrib made me gasp aloud with their poignancy – they are mainly about language, about the many uses to which language might be put. They are about formal inventiveness, and they are never afraid to wear their intellect on their sleeve. 

Reading these stories set a fire in me to up my game. More, to keep seeking out work that would challenge and inspire me in similar measure. Thus began a period where I read in quick succession a series of works that have marked this year for me in indelible ways: Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, which I can honestly say is one of the most perfect novels I’ve ever read, First Love by Gwendoline Riley, Universal Harvester by John Darnielle, The Cemetery in Barnes by Gabriel Josipovici, Munich Airport by Greg Baxter, Missing by Alison Moore, Caroline’s Bikini by Kirsty Gunn, Milkman by Anna Burns and Berg by Ann Quin, the pearl of them all, which has attained a kind of ideal status in my mind as the point where the hallucinatory power of language and the nervous drive of story become perfectly fused. 

These works, and what I feel to be my collaboration with their authors in reading them, continue to resonate, working a profound change of mood and heightening of ambition within me and in my writing. In recent weeks I have also begun working my way through the T. S. Eliot Prize longlist, an experience that is proving similarly energising and instructive. In the raw power of words – the sounds they make – as well as the formal inventiveness on the page that sometimes only poetry can provide, I am stunned by the richness and erudition and energy of these collections, which have reconnected me instantly with the excitement and writing-hunger that overwhelmed me when first I read Eliot, Plath, Lowell, Szirtes, Fainlight. What I felt most on reading these new collections, some of them by new poets, was I’ve been away too long.  

The vast part of my energy this year has been spent in constructing my next novel, The Good Neighbours. This is a book I first began to write about four years ago, when we were living in Devon. It has been through monumental changes since then, but the important work of the last six months has been sped on its way – goaded forward – by the driving inspiration provided by the works I’ve mentioned above, by the changes and development in my own writing practice that have occurred through this reading year. I finished a complete third draft of The Good Neighbours just a couple of days ago. I’m thrilled to have the book mostly done by the close of the year. What thrills me most is that it is my most personal and – to me – most risk-taking book yet. What I can say for certain is that it represents, exactly, where I am as a writer right now, a piece of ground I want to build on. In this at least, the book is a success. Whether it is a success in more outward-facing, worldly ways will be for others to decide. 

Next year, my third novel The Dollmaker will finally be released into the world. What makes me most excited about this is that I am happy with the book, which sounds a simple and obvious thing to say but it really isn’t.  The Dollmaker took a long time to come together but it came right in the end. The book being published in April is the truest and best version of itself that I could possibly make it, which is all any writer can aim for, really. I hope that those of you who choose to read it will love it as much as I do. I’ll announce details of events and interviews about The Dollmaker as they become available. 

I am also thrilled to announce that in September Titan will be publishing a new and definitive edition of The Silver Wind. Titan have presented me with a wonderful opportunity not only to edit and revise the existing text, but to add new material. The new edition will include two previously uncollected Silver Wind stories as well as a brand new novella, which I always intended to be part of the original book but that never worked entirely to my satisfaction. I spent part of this summer redrafting that novella, and then re-editing the entire text as a continuum. I’m very happy with the results and hugely excited about having The Silver Wind out in the world in a form that feels complete and true to my intentions. I’ll be posting cover art here as soon as it’s ready, as well as a fuller description of the book itself.

2018 saw me publish criticism for the first time in The Quietus, a matter of particular satisfaction to me as I love that magazine. Its left-field and idiosyncratic approach to the arts feels particularly important in a world of increasing blandishment and I was especially pleased to make my debut there with an essay on the literature of 9/11 that necessitated a considerable amount of research and hard graft generally. Writing this essay, as well as another long one I wrote for Strange Horizons on the new TV adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock was an enriching experience that made me reassess my approach to criticism – not only the subjects I want to write about but the way I want to write about them.  I would like to make my criticism more personal, for one, more contiguous with my fiction writing. I would also like it to be more focused on subjects that actively interest me, as opposed to fighting battles that cannot be won and that are in any case false conflicts. My first revelation along these lines came last year, when I resolved never again to use the falsely opposing terms genre SF and literary SF. This year it was the appalling standard of some of the debate around Anna Burns’s Milkman, of which a particularly offensive and need I add ignorant piece in the Times marked the nadir. 

The fact is – and this should be obvious – that there is no conflict between books that focus on immersive narrative (‘a jolly good story’) and those that focus upon the ways and means by which such stories are created. One does not negate the other, any more than a reader who prefers one approach to putting words on a page should count themselves superior to those who prefer another. And yet I continue to see entire segments of the online debate around books polarising itself around precisely these non-existent issues. It’s tiresome and I’ve had enough of it. I won’t promise not to read any more of these articles (for the flesh is weak) but I am going to make a particular effort not to  write any. I would like to focus instead on criticism that actively engages with work I identify with as a writer and consider to be important. The kind of critical writing we find at sites such as Splice and This Space are beacons in this regard, as are the informed and in-depth discussions on offer at the Backlisted and Republic of Consciousness Prize podcasts. 

The ugliness and chaos of our current politics only serve to emphasize the necessity of writing and reading as far outside the box as we can bear to push ourselves. Writing is first and foremost the transmission of ideas and we should not doubt its importance. The work that readers and writers do together has always and will continue to form the building blocks of practical and philosophical change.

The Gift of Angels: an introduction

November 3, 2018 /

I have a new story out in the November issue of Clarkesworld magazine. You can read it here.

‘The Gift of Angels: an introduction’ was drafted in Paris last year, during my residency at Les Recollets. I finished the draft just three days prior to my departure – you could say the novelette takes place in real time. My return to Scotland was also an immediate return to work on the final draft of The Dollmaker and the then-current draft of the novel I am working on now, and so it was not until the end of this summer that I was able to complete the story and submit it.

Some readers might notice that ‘The Gift of Angels’ is a sequel, of sorts, to my 2016 story ‘The Art of Space Travel’, though the two works function entirely independently of one another.  ‘Gift’ brings together elements of memoir, criticism and complete fiction in a way I had not quite dared to attempt before but that is coming increasingly to preoccupy me. I wouldn’t normally say this, but I love this story. I hope readers will enjoy discovering it.

My huge thanks to Neil Clarke at Clarkesworld for being open to the story’s possibilities, and to my French publishers and the wonderful people at La Maison de la Poesie and Les Recollets, to whom ‘The Gift of Angels’ is dedicated.

The Cemetery in Barnes

October 28, 2018 /

One might most fittingly describe this novel as entranced, enchanted, trance-like. As in Alain Resnais’s 1961 film Last Year in Marienbad, there is a deceptive stillness over everything, as we obsessively revisit certain phrases, images, personages in an ever-tightening pursuit of an elusive truth.

The Cemetery in Barnes focuses on an unnamed protagonist, a translator who dwells recursively on three specific periods in his life: in Carlton Drive, Putney, with his first wife (in a flat in a two-storey Victorian house, the text informs us, though interestingly if you look at Carlton Drive on Google Maps you’ll see it’s mainly post-war apartment blocks with a scattering of three- and four-storey Victorian villas. The only two-storey Victorians are in the walk-through between Carlton Drive and East Putney station, Earnshaw Place. Yeah, this book really rubbed off on me…) in Paris, where he lived and worked for some years after the death of that first wife, and the farmhouse in the hills above Abergavenny, where he lived and threw convivial dinner parties with his second wife.  Whilst recalling these places and people, the translator grapples with the intractability of certain issues of translation – Italian to English (Striggio’s libretto for Monteverdi’s Orfeo), antique French to English (du Bellay’s Regrets), English to French (Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis).  An unassuming man, with few material needs. An otherworldly man, above all a self-absorbed man. A harmless man? Perhaps, perhaps not…

Josipovici’s novel is essentially a twisted retelling of Orpheus and Euridice. The protagonist’s first wife dies by drowning, the second by fire, both plunge ‘into hell’. In both cases, the protagonist – this botched Orfeo – is unable or unwilling to save them. What are initially presented as relationships of unswerving devotion gradually reveal aspects of themselves that do not fit. Was the first wife having an affair with ‘the bearded maths teacher, Frederick Aspinall’? How companionable is the continuous ‘banter’ between the protagonist and his second wife, and was this wife similarly being unfaithful with ‘the retired civil servant’, Wilfred?

It is interesting to note that the only people ever named in this novel are Frederick Aspinall, the retired civil servant Wilfred and his wife, the ‘horse-faced’ Mabel – a fact that strongly suggests these people are seminal, important. Is the protagonist actually a murderer? A double murderer? In the cases of both wives, we are offered alternative visions of what actually happened to them: the first wife slips down the river embankment in Putney but is able to scramble out of the water further down. She later dies, we assume, of pneumonia contracted through her immersion in the Thames.  The first wife slips down the embankment, plunging into the water to disappear immediately and permanently from our sight. The police question the protagonist about why he didn’t make any attempt to save her, and by the way, does he need a lawyer?

In the Brecon Beacons, the protagonist and his second wife watch as firefighters try to extinguish a blaze that is consuming a barn. The blaze burns out of control and the firemen are ordered to retreat. In the Brecon Beacons, the protagonist watches the farmhouse he shared with his second wife burn to the ground, unable to believe the ‘charred bodies’ he is shown were once people.

Indeed, the protagonist’s only quantifiable reality resides in words, the intricacies of language, the effect and difficulties of rendering one language into another. We have no idea if our translator truly ‘regrets’ anything – everything we learn about him sounds false or questionable to a degree, and we are reminded that the French words for translation and betrayal sit uncomfortably close together. An insistent reference to Emily Dickinson’s poem A Narrow Fellow in the Grass earlier on in the text comes back to haunt us – a snake in the grass, then, who is the narrow fellow?

I also could not refrain from asking myself: was this man ever actually married to either of these women or were they just a stalker’s fantasies? Read, read between the lines, see what you think. Whatever you come to believe, the stalker theory is certainly a possibility.  Beloved horrors, indeed. Well might our traducer dwell upon them. A further oddity I kept dwelling on was how persistently this novel brought to mind the equally beguiling and disturbing book The Life Writer, by David Constantine, also a translator…

Josipovici’s use of language and metaphor is as close to perfect as any writer might dare to imagine: unadorned, understated to the point of nihilistic, clear and limpid as a mountain stream, coursing invisibly through a cleft in the Black Mountains above Abergavenny. No extraneous words and few adjectives, the repetition of certain phrases and images take on the affect and mechanism of poetry. And so meaning is fashioned.

This is the kind of novel often referred to by detractors as ‘plotless’. It numbers fewer than a hundred pages. Just sit with it awhile, let it reveal itself. Once revealed, it is unforgettable, and a masterpiece.

Time and the Milkman

October 17, 2018 /

Last night was Booker night. We watched the highly enjoyable BBC Four documentary celebrating fifty years of the Booker before segueing more or less immediately to the announcement of the 2018 prize itself. When Anna Burns’s name was read out for Milkman, I found myself overcome with emotion in a way that has not happened to me during the thirty-five years I have taken an interest in the prize. I started reading Milkman at the end of last week. When people asked me what I thought of it, I had replied ‘I think it’s brilliant, but there’s no way the judges are going to let it win – it’s too experimental’. Rarely have I been over-the-moon happier to be proven wrong.

Milkman was the novel on the Booker shortlist that no one was talking about.  In almost every online discussion of this year’s Booker, Burns’s was the book that was seen as an also-ran, almost an irrelevance in the betting stakes, actual or theoretical, that always accompany this most visibly contentious of UK book prizes. In those moments where it has been discussed, commentators have reached invariably and somewhat lazily for the adjective ‘Joyceian’,, yet MIlkman is not Joyceian in any truly comparable sense. Burns’s use of language is less joyous stream of consciousness than careful construction, a coded letter home from dystopia, an eloquently guarded articulation of the unsayable.

Nor is Milkman just – simply, dismissably – ‘about the Troubles’, though particularly in these farcical weeks and months of Brexit insanity there are many – way too many – who would do well to think more about the Troubles than they apparently are doing.  Milkman explores the ways in which not just armed paramilitaries but common or garden bullies, the bigot next door, can and will thrive during those times when democracy is in abeyance. It speaks eloquently to #MeToo, yes, but also to the way in which all minorities are sidelined, silenced and abused while those not directly affected turn a blind eye. It speaks, even, of what it is like to yearn for higher expression, to yearn to read books in a place and time where that activity is seen as somehow suspect – isn’t it always? – and to have that yearning twisted dangerously against you.

Most of all, Milkman is conspicuously, triumphantly, the work of a writer in mid-career, a writer who spends her days doing what she does, committed to what she does regardless of fashion or favour, regardless of what is going on out in the literary establishment. She clearly never saw Milkman as her ‘breakthrough’ – it was just her next novel.

This year’s Booker judges have been similarly committed, and courageous, right from the beginning. The longlist this year was outstanding, and the shortlist – unlike so many – did not contain one stick of dead wood. As I’m sure must be the ideal of every judging panel, any of the six books they chose had behind it a solid argument for its being the winner. That the judges carried the courage of their convictions right through to this most fitting of conclusions is not just unexpected, it is an affirmation of what literature – and the Booker Prize – should be about. What greater proof of this could there be than what Val McDermid said about her experience of being on the jury:

‘It has provoked a restlessness in me. I am thinking about how I can push my own writing in different directions and not do the same things again and again and again. If you’re a writer, everything you read gives you pause: You’re always looking for something you can steal or something you want to avoid. This has really taken me outside the usual tramlines of what I read.’

In the words of this year’s Booker chair of judges, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Milkman ‘is enormously rewarding if you persist with it. Because of the flow of the language and the fact some of the language is unfamiliar, it is not a light read [but] I think it is going to last’.

I think it is going to last. This should surely be the statement against which all potential Booker winners should be tested. Congratulations to Anna Burns, and well done those judges.

An American Story

September 7, 2018 /

This week marks the publication of Chris’s fifteenth novel, An American Story. As always, the business of living and writing alongside Chris as he worked on the book – seeing the novel take shape – has been a unique privilege. I’ve been party to some amazing discussions, watched some fascinating footage, discovered a renewed interest in a subject that, truth be told, should be preoccupying each and every one of us more than it does.

In common with many novels, An American Story had a peculiar and protracted genesis. Chris had long been interested in 9/11 as subject matter, with the factual anomalies that began to proliferate in the reporting of the attacks seeming almost as worthy of attention as the attacks themselves. However, it was not until personal circumstances intervened that he began to see a way to write about it. The dedicatee of An American Story, Don Greenberg, is an American magician Chris met when they were both serving as guest judges of the Stage Magician of the Year competition organised by the Magic Circle. Don also happens to be an airline pilot of some thirty years experience, a fact that proved even more interesting to the both of us than his life in magic. Over lunch one day while we were still living in Hastings, we took the opportunity to quiz Don about his work as a pilot, and so it happened that he began, almost as an afterthought, to tell us about his experiences on 9/11.

Names and places have been changed, of course, but the tense and powerful sequence that grounds the events of An American Story in lived reality – Ben’s flight on September 11th from Charlotte to Detroit – is drawn directly from the story Don told us. Even the late-running Aussie passenger is real – many readers will remember how flight delays due to late boarding were not only a thing back then, but an annoyingly common one. Indeed what Chris found so compelling about Don’s story was the background normality of it, the irruption of the extraordinary into the routine. Here at last was a way to write about 9/11.

His original idea was for a non-fiction book, a diary of the day told from the point of view of people – like Don, like the passengers on his plane – who were not directly affected by the attacks but who found themselves nonetheless caught up in the seismic ripples the attacks generated. An exhibition on the theme of false memory at the Freud Museum in London altered the direction of travel – what if someone believed they had been involved in 9/11, but really hadn’t been – and with the proliferation of ‘fake news’ on both sides of the Atlantic it became increasingly clear to Chris that the subjects he wanted to talk about would be most effectively tackled through his more accustomed medium, fiction.

The result is a book of uncommon power that speaks uniquely to our times. I cannot think of any other novel in the still-developing literature of 9/11 that seeks to address not just the horror and tragedy of what happened – the facts on the ground – but the consequences even as they continue to affect and shape the political realities of the present day.

Readers should note that in the novel’s title, the words ‘American’ and ‘story’ are of equal importance.

Missing by Alison Moore

May 22, 2018 /

When, at the end of the story, the woman is on the verge of accepting that there will not be a relationship between them, when she is poised to leave the hospital room for the final time, abandoning the man to his coma, it is not at all clear whether she really will walk away or whether, pausing and looking back, she will give in and return. Jessie had put the question to the author, who might eventually reply and who would no doubt say that not knowing was the whole point… In each of the stories…there was a failure to connect, and the endings seemed to hang in the air; they were barely endings at all. 

I was skyping with a friend the other day and in the course of conversation we discovered we both happened to be reading the same book, Alison Moore’s newly released fourth novel, Missing. We agreed that Alison Moore was one of those authors whose books we acquire sight unseen the moment they come out. I devoured this latest in just two days. I could say that Missing is Moore’s best novel so far, but I am not entirely sure that would be accurate. One of the hallmarks of Moore’s writing is its consistency. Everything I have ever read by her is of a similarly high quality. I am convinced that Alison Moore is incapable of writing a bad sentence.

Missing tells the story of Jessie, a freelance translator in her late forties, living in the Scottish border town of Hawick. Her husband Will walked out on her some months ago and we don’t know why. Her cottage might be haunted, and there are ghosts from the past that keep rising up, ghosts that have largely defined the life Jessie is leading now.

To describe this novel as heartbreaking would seem to hint at drama, histrionics, yet much of the beauty and resilience of Moore’s novels lies in their avoidance of overt confrontation. Her characters’ worlds are focused inwards, their suffering, while not exactly secret, remains largely unspoken of, their tragedies translated into the thousand unceasing banalities of everyday life: a packet of frozen peas that will never now be retrieved from a neighbour’s freezer, a lost watch, an unmarked calendar. We cannot know the ending, and that, indeed, is the whole point.

There are books which, when you finish reading them, force you to stop everything for a moment to acknowledge their excellence, to mark a personal encounter with something special. Missing is one of those books, and it gives me great joy to say that it hit me hard. Alison Moore was famously shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2012 for her debut novel The Lighthouse. Missing deserves equal attention. More than that though, Moore deserves considerably more attention as a writer than she is currently getting.

Portrait of the Artist: Self & I by Matthew De Abaitua

February 23, 2018 /

“My mouth is full of blood but I’m not even angry. This is my true rite of passage: punched in the face I remain eminently reasonable. That is what marks me out as ready for the middle class: that I can defer gratification, stifle fury, for some putative future gain. I may be six foot two, fourteen stone of muscle and one stone of fat, but I will never be good at fighting because I will always have to calculate whether to hit back or not. Because there is no aspect of my life that a brawl improves, no problem that can be solved with violence. And yet, as a young man, you give up that aspect of your persona reluctantly, want to hint that you can put yourself about. Eddie could dish it out. In the riot at Cantril Farm, he fought hand-to-hand against the rioters for hours.”

For Will Self, it was a strange interlude. For Matthew De Abaitua, it was the beginning of everything.

“In the Nineties, everywhere – from a system of sea caves to a transit van looping around the M25, from a ruined abbey on the Yorkshire Moors to a loading bay in Shoreditch – was a great place to have a party. And our social relations were conducted as if we were at a long party, always intoxicated, with nothing taken too seriously, and all unpleasantness put off until tomorrow. 

Andy had stumbled on the vital truth about the Nineties: it may have been a soft-headed, heaving mass of meretricious triangulation but it was also a great place to have a party.”

In 1994 and fresh from a year on Malcolm Bradbury’s famous creative writing program at the University of East Anglia, Matthew De Abaitua is offered the apprenticeship of his dreams: a six-month stint as amanuensis to Will Self, living and working beside his employer in a rented cottage in rural Suffolk. Self is on the Granta List, the newly anointed enfant terrible of English letters. Bogged down in the quagmire of publicity and celebrity journalism’s New Glib, he is anxious to get started on a new fiction project. De Abaitua has not published anything yet. He knows only that he passionately – desperately – wants to be a writer. He hopes the next six months will change his life.

Self & I is a little classic. A unique insight into the mindset and working methods of one of the key writers to have emerged from the post-Thatcher years, it is also a manifesto, in a sense, for beginning writers, a wrestling over some of the questions of what it means to be a writer in today’s Britain. De Abaitua provides stunning chapters on his brief stint as a security guard in Liverpool’s docklands, his complex relationship with his working class background and the inevitable, inexorable decay of adolescent allegiances. Above all, his search for a subject – the ever-present conflict, in young writers, between talent and inexperience – is related in pitiless detail. Will Self emerges from the narrative as a curiously lonely, driven individual, relentlessly in pursuit of his goals and harried by his personal demons – a typical writer, in other words. De Abaitua struggles with doubt, finally coming out on top but bruised from the tussle. For this writer at least there is no such thing as a redemption arc. The war is ongoing.

For anyone who experienced the Nineties in Britain first hand, there will be plenty of laugh-out-loud moments here. De Abaitua captures the ridiculous self-entitlement of the time, the blindness-to-impending disaster, with wit and accuracy. There is also much to interest the science fiction reader. One of De Abaitua’s tasks as Self’s amanuensis was to transcribe hours of taped interviews between Self and J. G. Ballard. Ballard’s pinpoint analysis of the intellectual decline of science fiction through the eighties – and De Abaitua’s ruminations upon it – provide some of the standout moments of the book for me, and anyone interested in current science fiction criticism should read this account.

Self & I is a candid and revealing portrait of a particular artist at a particular time. It is De Abaitua’s book far more than Self’s, and coming from a writer who has already provided us with some of the most original and brilliantly executed science fiction of the past decade, it should be counted as a significant achievement. We await his next project eagerly, and with anticipation.

Experiments in crime

January 15, 2018 /

There was a piece by Tim Lott in the Guardian recently in which he argued that in Britain at least ‘the form of storytelling and literary novel writing has become largely divorced’. How needlessly reductive can you get?  His argument seemed to me like a variation on the often rehearsed and entirely fake battle between genre fiction and so-called litfic, a ridiculous distraction from the job of proper criticism.

Writing is a peculiar business, and one aspect of writing that is rarely acknowledged is the fact that most writers have little control over what kind of writer they are. You are pulled inexorably, often mercilessly, in a certain direction. The writer of ‘literary fiction’ is no more necessarily an Oxbridge snob than the writer of popular spy thrillers is a money-hoovering philistine. The most successful bestsellers are written because the author loves and understands the form and wants to communicate their excitement to readers. Those writers who find themselves more drawn to exploring language are no different from the painters who, in the 1890s, began exploring the possibilities of paint itself – the medium, not the message. The work of Monet and even Cezanne hardly seems revolutionary to us now – we have absorbed it into our iconography, our collective understanding of what representational art can reach for and achieve. Fifty years later Krasner and Pollock, Frankenthaler and Motherwell would stretch the point further, doing away with representation almost entirely. Similarly, the paintings that outraged a generation of critics now adorn our coffee mugs and supper trays. We get it.

Writers write what they can and what they must. To insist that writing – arguably the most malleable of art forms – should universally strive for the ideals upheld by work that was no longer new even a century ago is just so much bunkum, just as it is bunkum to suggest that British literary fiction has ‘lost the plot’. Lott rightly cites Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (American, you see) as one of those works that appeal equally across supposed literary and commercial divides. I would raise him Barbara Vine’s Asta’s Book, Catriona Ward’s Rawblood, Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl, Ali Smith’s The Accidental, Christopher Priest’s The Prestige, Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project.  Some of these titles you will recognise from recent Booker shortlists. Many of them use elements of the thriller, detective fiction, horror fiction, science fiction to achieve their effects. All have propulsive plot lines. All reward a second, even a third reading.

Books, books, books. So much to read, so little time to waste arguing over what, exactly, writers should be writing. Lott would surely concede that the most interesting and rewarding works are to be found precisely at the margins of genre, where our expectations can be subverted and yet where – yes – we can continue enjoying the ideas and tropes of those stories and narrative archetypes that resonate with us most strongly. Yes, we are all still campfire dwellers. That does not mean we don’t enjoy it when the bard from another village wanders across to inform us we don’t know jack, that it’s really this story we should be listening to and so sit the hell down…

More interesting by far than Lott’s boringly prescriptive essay is Tony White’s choice of his Top Ten Experimental Thrillers, a piece that delves deep into why it is that we enjoy thrillers (I reckon Gertrude Stein for one would act pretty swiftly in calling out those who accuse crime writers of slumming it), as well as the ways in which detective fiction – perhaps the most enduringly popular of all literary genres – can still surprise us. Of course, any future ‘top ten’ list of postmodern crime fiction would have to include White’s own new novel, The Fountain in the Forest, which exemplifies his thesis pretty much perfectly, as well as killing Lott’s theory about British literary writing’s plotlessness stone dead.

By Lott’s reckoning, White’s interest in and practice of OULIPO techniques would place him firmly in the discredited ‘literary’ camp – read confusingly esoteric non-narrative with a snobbish insistence on obscurity – yet The Fountain in the Forest can be read with all the pleasure you might expect from a knotty police procedural, a knowledgeably detailed, intriguing and compelling police procedural at that. The story drives ever forward, even when it takes you backwards in time to take a look at the roots of the crime in question. Even when it flip-flops between two distinct time-streams and character identities within the space of a single sentence, the sense throughout is of a steady and satisfying accretion of significant information, i.e clues – exactly what you’d hope for from any good thriller.

The OULIPO stuff – elaborated upon in detail by White in his Afterword – is as significant to the narrative as you want to make it. You could read the novel with no knowledge of OULIPO and enjoy it just as well. Yet for those who feel like delving deeper, an examination of White’s methods and motives will reveal new layers, extra nuances and a background atmosphere that lends the novel an added eeriness and potency.

Anyone who enjoyed Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn & Child or Nicholas Royle’s First Novel will love this book. Anyone who is into Ian Rankin or Denise Mina will love it, too.

For me, The Fountain in the Forest has been made especially enjoyable through a web of strange coincidences that seem none the less prescient for that: my own concerns over the gentrification of London, obscure parts of Exeter that I happen to know well, a string of places in the south of France that mark significant childhood memories, even salt-glazed ceramics – it’s all stuff from my own life, stuff I recognise and might write about. To find it turning up randomly and all together in someone else’s novel is a delightful surprise. And weird.

Above all, there is the joy inherent in a book well made: language expertly deployed, place wonderfully evoked, ideas, characters, memories, theories, political subtext brought vibrantly to life, a good story well told. The Fountain in the Forest would be a worthy contender for the CWA Gold Dagger. It is equally the kind of book that might win the Goldsmiths Prize. Read, and enjoy.

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