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Some books

When I reviewed Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things for Strange Horizons back in – my goodness – 2015, I described it as ‘unendurably slow’ and wrapped my arguments in a slew of niggles about ‘is this good SF??’ and suchlike, questions I seemed genuinely concerned with at the time but that now seem irrelevant. I think I knew even then that at least a portion of my apparent dislike of the book was rooted in the discomfort I felt while reading it. Not because of ‘bland characterisation’ or ‘wrongheadedness’ but because that novel really got to me. The unknowable alienness of the planet Oasis was something I experienced as a terrible homesickness, the sense that we were destroying our own world while fully aware of the fact that there was nothing better out there and no way back.

I find it mysterious and barely explicable and utterly right that The Book of Strange New Things, no matter its weight or size or unlikability, has survived every book cull we enacted in the years since, and there have been a few.

I think about Faber’s novel more or less every day now. Not just because of the subtext about his wife Eva, but because it seems clearer and clearer to me that the books that stay with you, that provide fuel for the onward journey, are so often those you have to fight to understand and come to terms with. The books that confound and confront you. The books that pick away at your insecurities and that feel most difficult.

Just about a month ago I finally bought and read Undying: A Love Story, the cycle of poems Faber published in 2016 about the death of his wife, the artist Eva Youren, from cancer.

I cannot now imagine a book coming closer to me than that one.

Other books I have been reading these past weeks include:

The Iceberg by Marion Coutts

Ti Amo by Hanne Orstavik

In Love by Amy Bloom

A Scattering and Anniversary by Christopher Reid

The other day on the train on my way back from Glasgow I found myself picking up Strange Loyalties, the third book in William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw trilogy. It seemed like something I wanted to read just then and I didn’t know until I began it that it too was about grief. Jack Laidlaw is seeking the truth about what happened to his brother Scott, who has been killed in a hit-and-run, because seeking the truth – what he does for work – is the only way Jack Laidlaw can deal with his grief. It is a wonderful novel – well wrought, honestly told, so keenly alive and for me at least perhaps the best of the three.

Somewhere around halfway through, I was knocked to the ground by the following passage, in which Jack speaks with the dying mother of one of his suspects:

She had a face like a handful of bones and those pilgrim eyes of the dying. Most of the essential luggage of her life had gone on ahead and here she was waiting at a wayside station among strangers who had other business. The living are all strangers to the dying. It’s just that they’re too polite to tell us so. They are kind to our crass familiarities that mistake them for someone else. They do not tell us that we are the bores who have crashed a party for one, seeking company for our own terrified loneliness we have suddenly recognised in their eyes. The dying arrive at true politeness. Even if they scream, they only scream in so far as it is necessary. For who else can establish the rules for what is theirs alone? They cannot be unkind to us, for they leave us alive when they are not. She was kind to me.

I am working. I am doing OK.

Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors

From what I can remember of that time, I think I saw him as some kind of integral role model. Incautious, unfettered, improper, untethered. But also… getting the work done.

At this blackened, stub end of the year, it is hard to express what a comfort this book has been for me during the greyish hours between four and six when I have not been sleeping. Because of what it says. About art, about German culture, about death. About the missing link, as Penman puts it, between one era and another.

Because of what it says and because of its sentences. Because of the sense this book gives me, that if I could write something even halfway comparable then I would have succeeded in expressing something of the kind of writer I aspire to be.

Did I ever wonder: why are so many of the things I love either French or German? Did I ever think: how European is it? Or why does the UK feel so parochial and un-European? Why are we so time-stranded and small-c conservative? Such a hidebound culture at the time; plenty of newspapers and small magazines and arts programmes but all of them so Oxbridgey and middlebrow. Absent a whole education in European culture, ancient and modern. I don’t recall ever feeling particularly English or British or Anglo-Saxon or Celtic or whatever; this may partly have been the punkish, puckish spirit of the time, and partly a result of my own, wildly dispersed, non-settled, non-linear childhood, which had nothing like a home town or immediate circle or anything like a secure sense of nationality.

You don’t have to know Fassbinder to love this book. I have seen only a couple of his films: Effi Briest (which I remember as a claustrophobic vision of Bismarck-era Prussian propriety as if viewed through the lens of an unsuccessful film maker from the thirties, thinking about going over to the Nazi party), Die Ehe der Maria Braun, bits of Berlin Alexanderplatz. (Of course I want to see more now. I want to binge-watch.) You don’t need to know Fassbinder to love this book, because this is really a book about how to write biography – your own, someone else’s – and I have been thinking about that a lot recently.

For I do not exist: there exist but thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms reflecting me increases. (Vladimir Nabokov, The Eye)

The book’s epigraph, from the novella by Nabokov that only VN completists ever read, a postscript to Dostoevsky’s The Double, a precursor to VN’s own Despair, the most Dostoevskian of his novels, this from a writer who was forever insisting how he hated Dostoevsky, how cheap his sentiments, how gaudily lit his scenes. VN, estranged from Dostoevsky as from his own twin brother. A kind of self-hatred, the classic Fassbinder material, the rain across the opening credits neither the ecstatic catharsis of the rain that enshrines Solaris nor the terrifying downpour that powers Suspiria. The grey pouring-out of winter, somewhere in-between.

Watched two episodes on Netflix of the Spanish crime series Bitter Daisies, including now almost obligatory scenes of the detectives’ wall of clues and photos, linked together by differently coloured bits of wool or string. Later that night I dream that eventually I am going to have to assemble this book the exact same way. But what is the underlying mystery or transgression here, crying out to be solved?

A biography of the film-maker, an excavation of self. Writing as if it matters, which it does.

If you loved this book

Or this book

Then you will love this book too.

Lamb

Today sees the appearance of Matt Hill’s long-awaited fifth novel. Lamb is published by the Liverpool-based independent press Dead Ink, the home of Naomi Booth’s Exit Management, Gary Budden’s London Incognita and Missouri Williams’s The Doloriad, provocative, unsettling works that challenge every aspect of the status quo. Given the nature of Hill’s literary identity – northern, speculative, discomfiting yet humane – it seems inevitable that this writer and this publisher would come together eventually.

Hill made his presence felt from the moment he arrived on the scene in 2013 with The Folded Man, which was a runner-up for the Dundee International Book Prize. Set in a disturbingly near-future Manchester and ‘starring’ the superbly dislikeable Brian, The Folded Man presents a fertile clash between gritty Gibsonian futurism and a distinctly home-grown eco-noir, an ambience that persists throughout his tangentially related 2016 follow-up Graft, which was a finalist for the Philp K. Dick Award.

The two novels that followed are equally distinctive. Climate change and the post-work environment become major themes in Zero Bomb (2019) in which grieving father Remi becomes drawn into a murky world of government surveillance and anarchist plots. The Breach (2020), published on the eve of lockdown and thus denied much of the attention it deserved, is a potent mix of evocative landscape writing and post-Brexit paranoia.

Indeed, what Hill’s books have in common is an obsession with the enforced inequalities and social divides – north and south, worker and manager, government and citizen – that have come to define our disunited kingdom in the present century. Hill is too young to have fully formed memories of Thatcher in government, but his political and literary consciousness have clearly been shaped by and within the long and continuing fallout from the 1980s.

This new novel Lamb, the latest chapter in Hill’s evolving oeuvre, is as brilliant as anything he has yet written, keeping faith with his core themes of future-shock, environmental degradation and the structural imbalances tearing at the fabric of our post-truth society. Following a family tragedy, teenager Boyd and his mother Maureen flee north from Watford to the village of Sile, an eerily closeted community where Boyd feels not just out of place but actively threatened. He knows there is something amiss here, whilst amongst certain elements of the townsfolk, the suspicion begins to surface that what is wrong in Sile is Boyd himself, or more specifically his mother Maureen.

With Lamb so newly published, it would be wrong of me to reveal much more about the exact nature of Boyd’s catastrophe, except to say that the journey he embarks on is one of radical transformation. The truth of who Boyd is – WHAT Boyd is – has far wider implications than the fate of one family, and as always with Hill, the vision presented to us within the pages of this story has more to say about our unreliable present than any possible future.

One of the most arresting aspects of Hill’s fiction is its boldness in incorporating dramatic speculative ideas into deeply human stories. From The Folded Man onwards, Hill has seemed compelled to place his characters in extreme situations, to test their resilience, and thinking about this today, the book that keeps coming to mind is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Like Shelley, Hill writes about responsibility, about cause and effect and the price of human arrogance. About technology run out of control, about the costly repercussions of moral failure.

Lamb is a unique blend of the personal and the political, the kind of work that reminds us how radical science fiction can be, how well it retains the power to shock and to surprise. A road trip like no other, Lamb will leave you thrilled, changed, unsettled, and still asking questions.

Just sayin’

When I reread Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home a month or so ago I found it astonishing to remember that the book was published in 2012, more than a decade old already and yet still, in my head at least, so enmeshed in and essential to our literary present.

The same could be said of Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation, published the same year and which I have finally, belatedly caught up with. I remember reading the press at the time, intrigued by the outrage the book seemed to be causing, though not enough to dive in immediately. I felt instinctively on the side of the writer, who seemed to have committed no other sin than have the temerity to say what she thought.

That writers say what they think seems to cause outrage rather too often, especially if the writer is a woman.

I feel amazed, disappointed, tired as I reread the reviews of Aftermath from the week of publication. Frances Stonor Saunders and Julie Burchill damning with faint praise, their responses inadvertently, embarrassingly sexist and profoundly un-literary. Burchill finds the final chapter of Aftermath ‘baffling’; Saunders thinks it ‘bizarre’ and feels it ‘should [have been] dumped altogether’. Most of the discussion seems to revolve not around Cusk’s astringent analysis, her mastery of language and form, but – as with Julie Myerson’s The Lost Child – whether or not she ‘should’ have written the book at all.

Aftermath is one of the most powerfully interrogative, furiously honest and boldly imaginative texts I have read. The final chapter is what makes the book a masterpiece. Always, but especially now, I feel grateful, inspired, humbled to have such talent to look up to, to show me what can, with sufficient courage, be achieved.

Shining a light

Earlier this summer, I reread Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. This was the first time I’d revisited the book since seeing Bennett Miller’s film Capote when it was released in 2005. Capote is a favourite film of mine, one I rewatch frequently and with undiminished admiration. Of course, Philip Seymour Hoffmann is out of this world in it. But it’s not just him. From the opening frame, there’s something about the texture of this film, the evocation of sense of place most of all, that keeps me coming back to it, wishing that there were more true crime dramas that accorded their subject matter this level of attention and restraint.

Over time and with repeated viewings of the movie it was perhaps inevitable that book and film had become inextricably enmeshed in my imagination. This was a good part of the reason I chose to revisit the novel. I have read a significant amount of true crime literature in the almost twenty years since first encountering Truman Capote’s magnum opus. How would it have fared in the onrush of time and memory?

If anything, it was better than I remembered. Not just a masterpiece of true crime literature but a masterpiece full stop. The attention to detail, the restraint, the beautifully jointed, watertight sentences. In Cold Blood is rightly called a novel, not simply because it goes beyond the reporter’s brief in imagining scenes, dialogue, alternative scenarios but because it is a novelist’s feel for structure and for narrative form that Capote brings to his material. The thing that surprised me most – the thing I’d forgotten – is how little Capote inserts himself into the text. There is just that one line near the end, in which he refers to ‘the journalist’, a person that can only be him, but who is neither named nor referred to again.

I have read criticism of In Cold Blood that suggests Capote’s obsession with the two perpetrators and his uncomfortably close relationship with Perry Smith in particular makes the book unforgivably unbalanced, that he ‘did not do right by the Clutter family’. Though one has to take account of and respect the views of those who knew the Clutters as neighbours, I would have to disagree with this assessment. Whatever his private turmoil, Capote does not in any way ‘favour’ the murderers. His summoning of an entire community and way of life, very much including the personalities and daily lives of Herb, Bonnie, Nancy and Kenyon Clutter is a act of imagining – I almost want to say resurrection – that favours nothing but the truth insofar as he was able to discover it, an inextricable tangle of opposing truths, contrary points of view, accidents of fate that are as horrifying today as they were in 1959.

More than sixty years ago and still, this story. There is nothing that can forgive or make right the evil act that ended the lives of a blameless family. But in literature as in life, the line between ‘evil acts’ and ‘evil men’ is a notoriously tricky one to navigate or to describe. That Capote attempts to do so is his job as a writer and he succeeds brilliantly. The only certain thing is that the death penalty helps no one, and solves nothing.

There is similarly much to contemplate in two more recent works of true crime, both published this year. Francisco Garcia’s We All Go into the Dark revisits the Bible John murders that took place in Glasgow in the 1960s – less than a decade after the Clutters were murdered – while Cristina Rivera Garza’s Liliana’s Invincible Summer recounts the murder of Garza’s twenty-year-old sister Liliana in Mexico City in 1990. In the case of Patricia Docker, Jemima MacDonald and Helen Puttock, no one was ever charged with their murders and the identity of Bible John remains a mystery. In the case of Liliana Rivera Garza, the identity of her murderer is all too clear – but he, similarly, has never been charged.

Francisco Garcia admits up front that he has little to add to the Bible John narrative as it is already known. His intention in writing the book is to examine the effect the crimes had on Glasgow at the time, their treatment by the media and the ultimately unsuccessful attempts of detectives to shine a light on the identity of the killer for decades afterwards. While I might have liked a little more commentary on the harshly constrained lives of Glasgow working class women in particular, Garcia’s work is honest, thorough and captivating and I like his book a lot. His unsensationalist, self-questioning approach to writing true crime should be noted and applauded. I hope his next book will push this envelope still further.

I know Cristina Rivera Garza’s work from her strange, elliptical 2012 novella The Taiga Syndrome. It would be impossible for her not to insert herself into the text of Liliana’s Invincible Summer – whole tracts of this heartbreaking narrative are inevitably her story, too – but the miracle she performs in allowing her sister not only to be properly seen for who she is but in some sense to be the narrator of this remarkable book is no less an act of literary resurrection than Capote’s. As an examination of coercive control, intimate partner violence and the only recently named and acknowledged crime of femicide, Liliana’s Invincible Summer is an essential addition to the library of true crime literature. As an elegy for a lost beloved it is equally indispensable.

Reading this excellent interview with Eliza Clark over the weekend – Clark is the author of the smartly original novel Boy Parts and has recently been named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists – I was particularly struck by what she says about what it is that attracts her to true crime narratives:

“I’m just interested in people’s lives and the histories of places… True crime, done well, feels like one of the only times you get to read nonfiction about day-to-day lives.”

This chimes so exactly with my own reasons for being interested in true crime literature, why I think it’s important. It’s good to see new voices entering this arena, even better to see the inventiveness, seriousness and respect with which they approach this difficult and sensitive material. I cannot wait to read Clark’s new novel, Penance. And while I’m waiting, I have my own research to be getting on with…

Girls Against God #7: I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel and Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex by Oksana Zabuzhko

What he is, is greedy and lazy, selfish and a coward but what he also is, is clear and when he gives me a way out, I refuse to take it.

Readers and critics alike have described the unnamed narrator of Sheena Patel’s I’m A Fan as an ‘unlikable character’, one of those Moshfeghian millennial bitches we love to hate. I have problems getting to grips with this designation. To me, she’s simply real. If angry and uncomfortably honest makes you unlikable, I guess that’s just more of the shit we’re having to wade through.

As in Anna Burns’s Booker-winning novel Milkman, with which Patel’s debut shares more than a strand of literary DNA, no one is named. Characters are ascribed a function within the text: ‘the man I want to be with,’ ‘the woman I am obsessed with’, ‘his wife’, ‘my boyfriend’. This is both alienating and strangely intimate, as if we too are engaged in spying on these people, as if we too are complicit with what is going on. As, if you are a woman, you will be. Because in one way or another, you will have been there.

If I had been writing about this subject at the time when similar stuff was happening to me, the resulting text’s internal furniture would have been different: street maps instead of Google maps, telephone boxes instead of iPhones, newspaper articles instead of Insta. The sentences would have unfolded differently as a result, more formally structured and punctuated in keeping with the times. But the story would have been the same, or broadly similar. That tortuous tract of time when one’s internal weather is mainly dictated by the narcissistic, self-seeking actions of another person. The madness of knowing that, but still sacrificing one’s agency. The pointless suffering that – with a portion of luck and a fuckton of time – you eventually wrest yourself free of and pick up your life.

What cannot be wrested free of are the adjacent pitfalls, the systemic inequalities of class, race and gender Patel’s unnamed narrator catalogues and interrogates with matter-of-fact, intimate knowledge and brutal precision.

*

No, I would really like for someone to explain to me, why the hell would one come into this world a woman – and in Ukraine, yet! – with this fucking dependency programmed into your body like a delayed-action bomb, with this craziness, this need to be transformed into moist, squishy clay kneaded into the Earth’s surface…

You’re a woman. And that’s your limit./Your moon sleeps like a silver fish lure./Like spices off the edge of a knife/Dependency sprinkled into your blood.

Oh, this book.

So there it was, girlfriend – you fell in love. And how you fell in love – you exploded blindly, went flying headfirst, your witch’s laugh ringing to the heavens, lifted by the invisible absolute power of whirlwinds, and that pain didn’t stop you – although it should have – but no, you cut the juice to all your warning signs that had lit up with their red lights flashing and screaming “meltdown” – like before the accident at the atomic station – and only your poems, which switched on immediately and rushed forward in a steady, unrelenting stream, sent out unambiguous signals of danger: persistent flashes of hell, and death, and sickness.

Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is as much about language as physical intimacy. The vexed and now murderously abusive relationship between Russia and Ukraine, between the Ukrainian language and the Russian language, runs through this novel like a sword, as its true subject matter, the matter of language not so much a metaphor for sexual politics as the other way around.

Zabuzhko’s work contains some of the most thrilling, innovative writing at the sentence level that I have ever read, and I want to give particular mention here to the novel’s translator, Halyna Hryn, who has conveyed the raw force of the original with a facility and passion that keeps English-language readers as close to Zabuzhko’s furious rhythms, her sardonic humour and dextrous word choices as is possible.

The way this novel is freely punctuated with poetry. The way there is no redemption, save the hunger for freedom.

Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is most likely the most important novel I will read all year. The fact that it was written in 1996 should make us all ask ourselves questions about the gaps between the real and the imagined in our attitude to nations, peoples and individuals threatened with existential as well as physical annihilation.

Stalking the Atomic City

Even the floors in the houses are ugly. Old boards were ripped out to be used as construction materials, and you have to try hard to find a place where you can jump into your sleeping bag, zip up, and zonk out. The locals burned all the villages next to the wire with the enthusiasm of the thugs from Toretsk who dragged fragments of the downed Malaysia Airlines Boeing to local scrapyards – like a carcass, a mammoth, prey, whatever.

In 1972, a novel was published that is arguably one of the most influential science fiction stories of all time. Roadside Picnic, by the Russian writer-brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, tells of a world forever altered by a chance visitation. As readers, we never get to see the aliens – if there were any aliens – but we are offered glimpses of the things they leave behind. Objects saturated in mystery whose purpose is unknown, whose effects can be lethal, whose wider influence on Earth’s history and culture is incalculable and lasting. The contaminated zones are forbidden territory, fenced and guarded; for the stalkers who risk their lives and their sanity to penetrate these zones, they are something in the nature of an addiction.

In 1979 came Stalker, the film adaptation of Roadside Picnic, scripted by the Strugatsky brothers and directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. In the years since, the Zone has continued and deepened its hold over the imaginations of games developers, film makers, musicians, artists and writers. Especially writers. M.John Harrison’s 2007 novel Nova Swing, the second book of the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy and winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, is an open letter to Roadside Picnic; Jeff VanderMeer’s bestselling Southern Reach trilogy equally so. There is something in the premise that seems uniquely magnetic and eerily mystifying, a postmodern spin on the trope of the ‘lost domain’ as first made explicit by the French writer Alain-Fournier in his 1913 classic Le Grand Meaulnes. Roadside Picnic offers a vision that is both beautiful and cruel, prosaic in its essence – some aliens do a pit stop, dump some trash – and yet shimmering with a sense of wonder that can never be extinguished or fully explained.

I first read Roadside Picnic in the early eighties and it has remained a touchstone text for me ever since, one of those few works of science fiction that I read – eagerly and indiscriminately – as a young person that has followed me into my life as an adult writer. I have read it half a dozen times and love it almost beyond reason. I need only to open its covers to fall immediately back under its spell. For me, it is the way in which the prosaic is enmeshed with the seemingly miraculous – with the vexed and corrosive nature of those miracles – that makes the novel so special for me. Add to that the unconventional manner of its storytelling, its moral ambivalence, the fact that it is a classic of Russian literature.

I also love Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which I approach as an entirely separate work, an adaptation of the Strugatskys’ novel in the true sense of the word, that is, a wholly new artistic endeavour inspired by an original. Tarkovsky does not really do characterisation – the people in Stalker are archetypes, a point underlined by the fact that the cast list does not give them names but designates them simply as ‘writer’, ‘professor’, and of course ‘Stalker’. It is the atmosphere of the film that compels, the mingled sense of beauty and threat, captivity and unbounded freedom that offers a hyper-real visual translation of what the Strugatsky brothers convey through the written word.

Anyone who comes into contact with Roadside Picnic seems to grasp instinctively that the book is important, that it offers a commentary on human existence, on the danger and pain and wonder of being alive. What then can I say about Stalking the Atomic City, a book that is as much a naked homage to Roadside Picnic as Stalker or Nova Swing but that has the distinction of being a work of non-fiction?

The book’s author, Markiyan Kamysh, is a Ukrainian writer. His father was a nuclear physicist and one of the ‘liquidators’ who risked their lives in order to clear up and lock down the exclusion zone surrounding the Chornobyl nuclear reactor following the catastrophic explosion and meltdown in 1986. Kamysh’s father died in 2003. Kamysh describes himself as ‘a writer who represents the Chornobyl underground in literature’. He might equally be called a stalker, one of the many dozens of adventurers, thrill-seekers, scrap metal looters, tour guides and misfits who since the turn of the century have been venturing into the exclusion zone, hiking and mapping, photographing and itemising its vast and hazardous spaces, often at risk of ruining their health, both physical and mental.

Most of them, perhaps predictably, are men; there is an element of stalking that seems to be little more than a dangerous and elaborate form of cock-measuring contest. There is more to it than that, though. There is poetry and there is horror. There is a vitality, a rawness, a sense of contact with an utterly new and uncharted space, a enclave of strangeness that might as well be an alien planet. There is, above all, the freedom that comes with casting off the directives of a world too heavily circumscribed by outside command.

Reading Kamysh’s book – part ballad, part Bildungsroman, part psychogeographical investigation – has offered me my most uncanny reading experience of the year, because it appears to reflect a version of reality first described in a novel of the imagination written fifty years ago, first lived by a film director who died from the cancer caused by the toxins that pollute the site of his most famous movie. The layers of literature contained within it – for Stalking the Atomic City is both a wholly new homage to Roadside Picnic and a demolition of it – now find themselves cloaked in a new, still more terrible reality as the zone itself has become part of a new battleground, a frontline in the war launched by Putin’s forces against the people of Ukraine.

Stalking the Atomic City reads as a dirty love poem to Roadside Picnic, just as Roadside Picnic reads as a shuddering premonition of Atomic City. Each seems to contain the other – not just in the likeness of the experiences they describe but in the beauty and intelligence of their language, their radical vision, the correlation of the word ‘stalker’ with the word ‘writer’.

The war in Ukraine is grounds both for anger and for deep grief. In its own impassioned, mysterious way, Stalking the Atomic City is an expression of that anger and that grief, as well as an undaunted assertion of Ukrainian identity. This book thrilled me and chilled my blood, even as I fell helplessly in love with it. I hope Markiyan Kamysh is doing OK, and that he is writing.

Weird Wednesdays #19: Treacle Walker by Alan Garner

I have frequently been surprised, these past couple of weeks, by the way in which even seasoned literary commentators still slip into the habit of referring to Alan Garner as a children’s writer. I am sure I’ve said this somewhere before, but I continue to think of my first encounter with Garner’s work – The Owl Service, which I first read when I was around twelve – as among my most significant primary encounters with adult themes in literature. I found the book utterly compelling – but if you had asked me then what it was about I would have found it hard to answer. There was simply a feeling I had, a palpable sense of having touched something mysterious, timeless and possibly dangerous. I experienced the same feeling, albeit with a greater understanding of what was going on, both in me and in the book, when I belatedly caught up with Red Shift, some years ago.

As regards the Booker commentators, what on Earth is wrong with saying that Alan Garner is a writer who often centres young protagonists?

Which is exactly what he does in his 2021 novel, Treacle Walker, recently shortlisted for the Booker Prize, a fact that has made me feel more personally excited about the award than I have done since Anna Burns won it for Milkman back in 2018. The Booker has become generally much more innovative, inclusive and interesting in recent years, and I follow the annual discussion surrounding it with great enjoyment. Garner’s shortlisting though speaks to me personally. It counts, for me personally,. This is simply a feeling I have.

Treacle Walker tells the story of a boy, Joseph Coppock. Joe has recently been ill, and seems to spend a lot of time alone. Are his parents at work? Who looks after the house? We are never told. We live, for the duration of this short novel, entirely inside the world and mind of Joe as he encounters a mysterious rag-and-bone man, Treacle Walker, and falls into a daunting adventure that will alter his universe.

Treacle Walker speaks to Joe in riddles, an affectation he clearly finds simultaneously annoying and compelling. He is eager to learn the secrets the old man wants to impart to him, at the same time impatient, as any boy might be, to set his own stamp on the world, to interpret its signs and wonders in his own language. Most of the dialogue in Treacle Walker is conducted in the dialect of Garner’s native Cheshire, and one senses keenly Garner’s desire not to confuse or obfuscate but to set down, to save this unique language from annihilation in the twenty-first-century rush to refute the past. There is also a fierce feeling of privacy being accorded, the boy and the man who were always meant to come together sharing knowledge neither could fully fathom, until now.

It is notable that in the moments of highest tension and drama, the two cease with their mutual ragging and speak in terse, plain English. In these exchanges, it is almost as if the two are of a similar age and level of understanding.

As with all of Garner’s work, the action takes place against a vividly described, living landscape. One might almost say that Garner’s writing becomes the landscape, revealing it in all its aspects: peace, seclusion, discomfort, joy, alienation and terror:

But night was in the room, a sheet of darkness, flapping from wall to wall. It changed shape, swirling, flowing. It dropped to the ground and ruckled over the floor bricks; then up to the joints and beams of the ceiling; hung, fell, humped. It shrieked, reared against the chimney opening, but did not enter. It surged through the house by cracks and gaps in the timbers, out under the eaves. There was a whispering, silence, and on the floor the snow melted to tears.

This passage speaks to me particularly, both in its heady choice of words and in the symbols they carry. There have already been suggested many possible and plausible explanations of Treacle Walker’s meaning. For me, it is a book about the rising tide of chaos that accompanies change, the corresponding forces of growth and new imaginings that bring about progress. People have spoken of this novel as Garner’s last hurrah, a gathering together of his familiar themes, a farewell coda. It may be all of these things. Yet it is equally a work of bold experiment and dynamism, a book that makes use of ancient fable to speak to us in our own time with uncanny acuity.

Treacle Walker is tired, and Joe is ready and waiting to claim his future. As the two change places, or become one another, they mirror the unquiet yet seamless passing of one season to another.

Get well soon

“Literature is self-validating. That is to say, a book is not justified by its author’s worthiness to write it, but by the quality of what has been done.”

Salman Rushdie

In this stunning and prescient essay for the London Review of Books from 1982, Rushdie reminds us – if reminder were needed – how even at the start of his career he was already preoccupied with themes of identity, aesthetics, culture, the transformative power of the imagination and above all freedom of expression. We are so lucky to have him still with us. Everyone’s writing about Rushdie at the moment and that’s not surprising but what we are waiting for, really, is to hear from him again. Opinionated, fearless, controversial – writers like Rushdie are increasingly rare. If the past days have shown us anything, it is that voices such as his are more necessary and more valuable than ever.

Cat Brushing by Jane Campbell

Ageing is often presented as an accumulation, of disease, of discomforts, of wrinkles, but it is really a process of dispossession, of rights, of respect, of desire, of all those things you once so casually owned and enjoyed.

So reflects the narrator of ‘Cat Brushing’, the titular story of Jane Campbell’s original, engaging and important collection, out today.

In ‘Cat Brushing’, first published in the London Review of Books in 2017, a retired teacher now living with her son and daughter-in-law feels a bond with her Siamese cat that is a kind of spiritual twinning: the cat is getting on in years now but still feisty, still independent-minded. She enjoys praise and comfort but not at the expense of her personal autonomy. When the cat’s presence in her life is threatened, the story’s narrator senses a further forced reduction in her own sense of self:

So in the absence of being able to please I try to be useful. And not disgusting. The cat got sick yesterday. She does sometimes. She hunts, she has always hunted, but is, I feel, less successful than she used to be. There it is again, the loss. She catches the slower prey, and eats bits of it and it may already be ill or diseased.

At the heart of each of the thirteen stories in Cat Brushing is an older woman. Some of these women, like the narrator of the title story, have been forced from their own environments into hostile domains. Others have so far escaped the attention of controlling relatives or concerned neighbours, determined to preserve their independence or to stake a new-found happiness on one final and possibly ill-advised throw of the dice.

The subject matter of these stories – ageing, dependency, loss, abuse, regret – is of the kind that will no doubt tempt some critics to describe this collection as ‘heartbreaking’. But while it is true that more than a couple of Campbell’s intensely private, thoughtful tales brought tears to my eyes, I am much more inclined to characterise her work as defiant, subversive, intelligent and singularly empowering. Even in their forgetfulness and physical frailty, Campbell’s women are garrulous, insightful and occasionally duplicitous. They never fail to retain agency over their own lives, even when that agency drives them, ultimately, to refuse what is on offer.

Stories such as ‘Susan and Miffy’ and ‘Lamia’ show older women in active possession of a vibrant sexuality. ‘The Scratch’ and ‘The Kiskadee’ touch on themes of abuse and control, but there are no neat answers, no tidy conclusions as Campbell opts for ambiguity rather than moral outrage. In ‘183 Minutes’, a story that might equally have been dreamed up by Ruth Rendell, the protagonist experiences a stark premonition of her own destruction yet still finds the hope of happiness trumping the fear of risk:

And she turned her face towards the window for she wanted to see if there was a reflection there of the woman she had suddenly become. But in the anonymity of the rushing fields she saw only her body dumped in an alley, at the bottom of a cliff, down a well, and then they flew under a bridge and against the momentary blackness she saw her face again.

Rather than taking refuge in the past, these characters are inhabitants of the modern world, equipped to deal with any challenges the future may hold. In ‘Lockdown Fantasms’, Campbell takes issue with the way older people have been further marginalised and forgotten during the COVID-19 pandemic, the key decisions about their ‘wellbeing’ taken by others. Social media and the metaverse in this story are magical, life-saving resources; in ‘Schopenhauer and I’ the reverse is true, with digital companionship used as a cover for surveillance and control.

How refreshing it is, to meet characters who are not careful about how they express themselves, who say what they think with relish and a crooked smile. The language of Cat Brushing, while spare and unadorned, is never simple. Literary allusions and philosophical experiment take their place alongside landscape writing that is richly imaginative and resonant, where a longing for lost realities is always tempered by mordant wit. The final story in the collection, ‘On Being Alone’, references Chekhov, and in its accretion of significant detail, its elegiac quality it has a distinctly Chekhovian melancholy about it:

As a child I already knew that I needed, craved, bathed myself in solitude. Being alone was my best place. As I grew through my teens I began to understand it better. I narrowed it down to a fear of belonging. Belonging to me meant losing something. not gaining anything. Losing individuality, losing, dare I say, specialness. I was a secretive and isolated child and I feared being identified with any other child as some people might fear the plague.

As so often in Chekhov, you don’t end up where you think you will. The past number of years have seen important conversations taking place not just about representation in literature but about who is doing the representing. While I would staunchly argue that one of the key skills of the fiction writer is imaginative empathy, that for the writer prepared to undertake the creative groundwork, no identity or set of experiences should be out of bounds, it seems equally important that in the portrayal of particular histories, experiences and worldviews we should amplify and pay attention to writers with first-hand knowledge of those situations and communities.

The increasing diversity of our prize shortlists and publishing schedules is both exciting and timely. How discouraging it is then, to see the matter of age so often excluded from these vital discussions, to see writers actively debarred from ‘first novel’ or ‘new writer’ awards or grant applications simply on the grounds of being over forty. On social media especially the increasing tendency is to tell older writers to shut up.

Age is not only the last taboo, it seems, but the last acceptable breeding ground for prejudice as well. For women especially, pressures relating to family and other gender-based expectations have often been contributory factors in narrowing down or closing off routes to publication. I have lost count of the number of post-war women writers I have come across in my reading and research whose careers have stalled or floundered, not through any lack of talent but through lack of opportunity or recognition.

All of which makes a collection like Cat Brushing doubly important. In their power and persuasiveness, their wily transgressions, their willingness to take risks, Jane Campbell’s stories reveal a reality that is relevant to all of us and too often ignored.

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