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Season of the Witch

October 31, 2019 /

Whilst the non-fulfilment of Boris Johnson’s ‘do or die’ pledge is being held up as one of those celebratory, gather-around-the-campfire moments we can all find some solace in, it has begun to feel increasingly to me like an evasion. I don’t want to say a pointless postponement because I’m hoping – along with millions of others – that this will not be the case, although what exactly I am hoping for becomes increasingly unclear. I’m a staunch Remainer who has come to distrust the word, not only because of the way it has been turned into a slur by the hardline Right, but also because of the way it sorts me into a camp, pitting me against others rather than allowing me to talk with and try to understand them.

I feel contempt and anger for the lies spread about by the ultra-Leavers, not just the lies about Remainers and how we’re all about corporate capitalism but the still more damaging lies about immigration, about what a trade deal with Trump’s US, for example, might actually look like, what it would inevitably do to the social and environmental fabric of the country those behind the Leave campaign believes they are being so vigorous in defending. Not that we’d be offered such a trade deal, except on terms so mortifying I’d hope even the ur-Slytherin Dominic Cummings wouldn’t dare to advocate for it, but still. The Remain campaign though – as throughout the referendum itself – seems to have become increasingly self-righteous, increasingly divisive, increasingly intolerant, with this week’s meltdown in the People’s Vote ranks being only the most recent example.

We have a breathing-space extension to the Hallowe’en Extension, great. But with a scant six weeks between December 12 and January 31 and with Christmas and Hogmanay slap in the middle, where exactly is the upcoming general election going to land us?

In an era where the very idea of the nation state is going to become increasingly irrelevant, we need Corbyn’s policies, need them badly – but with the deep seam of intolerance, secrecy, gaslighting and reverse-bigotry splitting the heart of Corbyn’s Labour, I can’t imagine the circumstances under which he’d be able to deliver on his manifesto or even be capable of holding a government together. What we need is not ideology but caution, tolerance, above all far-sightedness. My own electoral dilemma is easily solved, because I live in Scotland. I’ll be voting SNP no matter what, for their policies on education, health and social care and for their solidly progressive green agenda as much as for their stance on Scottish independence. But when I begin to get the sense that the only power we have up here is to shore up the metaphorical Hadrian’s Wall we have built for ourselves through our SNP mandate, that is not a good feeling. What might be coming for us from down south? Johnson’s contempt for – or indifference towards, depending on how you interpret it – Scotland is self evident, but then Corbyn sees us only as a bolt-on, another bloc vote to be corralled and subdued. (Some chance.)

I have no answers, only more questions. Not a comfortable feeling but perhaps that’s as it should be. On the up side, it is Hallowe’en, the last bright blaze of autumnal fire before the frosts of winter (although we’ve already begun with the frosts up here, thanks). So let’s gather around that camp fire and tell some ghost stories.

*

I read this article about the resurgence of witchcraft in literature just before the Worldcon and found a lot to think about. Witches do seem to be having a moment right now, which is a good thing, not least because witches are far more interesting in terms of story than vampires or zombies. Dare I say they bring us hope, a sense of something vital and necessary and important to our society. I agree wholeheartedly with Cosslett, that the witch is well worth celebrating and exploring both as a symbol of women’s power and resistance to tyranny as well as a deeply rooted aspect of fairy tale and mythology. The witch is currently in the ascendant, and goddess knows we need her. But on this day of all days, we would do well to remember the reality of what the word ‘witch’ can mean, not only for the women of centuries past but still – sometimes, some places – today. The word witch has not only been a slur, it has been an accusation, a means of control, a name for hatred, a prelude to imprisonment, torture and government-sanctioned murder. Some of our witches are still fighting to be remembered, to be seen in the eyes of the society that condemned and killed them.

And we should also remember not all of them were women.

Let’s light a Hallowe’en candle for the witch still living in fear as well as for those celebrating the timely revival of all the downtrodden voices they represent. In her superb poetry collection WITCH – my standout discovery from Cosslett’s piece in the Guardian – Rebecca Tamas has done just that. This cycle of poems draws inspiration from all aspects of witchcraft – the traumatic, the incandescent, the morally ambiguous, the self-renewing – to present a blisteringly brutal revelation of what the word means. I’ve been reading a lot of poetry in 2019 (bonus recommendation: Fiona Benson’s luminescent Vertigo and Ghost, which is also quite witchy) and WITCH looks like being one of my favourite books of the year.

With the witch renaissance in full flower, there’s no shortage of crafty book recommendations for All Hallows Eve. Firstly, I’d like to focus attention once again on Sarah Maria Griffin’s Other Words for Smoke, which in terms of modern representation of witches is as powerful as anyone could hope for. The language is gorgeous and the story is compelling, the world evoked both terrifying and beautiful. I loved this book, which deserves to become as famous as Alan Garner’s The Owl Service (which is equally to be recommended and definitely witchy).

If you haven’t caught up with Catriona Ward’s Shirley Jackson Award-winning, British Fantasy Award-winning second novel Little Eve yet, let tonight be the night. Ward has a phenomenal talent, her feel for language so steadfastly in service of her riveting plotlines as to be inseparable from them. I read this book in a single sitting and found it genuinely chilling. Knowing that Ward is currently at work on a new book makes it doubly exciting to revisit this one.

If you’re already fed up with the cold, and enjoy a generous leavening of metafiction with your horror (I know I do) then William Gay’s masterful Southern Gothic Little Sister Death is your perfect match. I cannot overstate how much I loved this book, how closely it’s stuck with me since. The first chapter is one of the most exquisite feats of suspense writing I’ve ever come across, and the novel as it progresses does not renege on this initial promise. Like Little Eve, this is a story of cults and kinship and buried truths. It is also a novel about the implications and possible dangers of rooting out those truths. It’s a book about writing, and writing horror in particular. Little Sister Death is not just for Hallowe’en, she’s with you for life.

If you’re off to a Hallowe’en party and don’t have time to read a complete novel this evening, I would recommend you get yourself into the groove with a story or two from Georgina Bruce’s collection This House of Wounds. I’ve not quite finished reading it yet, but oh my goodness, this is something special. I don’t normally go in for these kind of overly simplistic comparisons but Bruce’s writing truly does read as if Eimear McBride and Livia Llewellyn had a baby! Bruce has been gradually building her reputation in weird short fiction for some years now and this collection marks a significant staging post in her career. The stories in This House of Wounds are richly allegorical, formally innovative, thought-provoking and ambiguous. All the things I love, in other words. If this isn’t on every awards ballot next year then the witches will be rising in rebellion…

If you’re heading to the cinema in search of Hallowe’en hell-raising, forgo the seasonal shlock-fests and reboots (fun though they always are on an evening like this) and go see Joker instead. ‘S all I’m saying.

For some musical accompaniment on your nightly revels, might I be so bold as to offer you this – a playlist for The Dollmaker that I recently compiled for largehearted boy. This is more wistful, mist-ful Hallowe’en than your full John Carpenter, but there are some ghosts here, some dark and twisted tales, an elf-queen or two. I loved picking out the tracks for this and I think that taken together they do convey something of the strangeness and longing that lie at the heart of Andrew and Bramber’s search for one another. I hope you enjoy them.

For me, it’s Cabin in the Woods (again) and a dram of single malt. Happy Hallowe’en!

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.

Episodes

July 11, 2019 /

Chris’s new book Episodes is published today in hardback and ebook. The cover art is striking and extremely handsome.

It’s billed as a short story collection, but this book, it seems to me, is so much more than that. Carefully curated, it presents a valuable and fascinating overview of Chris’s work to date. Here you will find stories from the early part of his career, one of which, ‘The Invisible Men’, has only previously been available as part of the special reissue of Chris’s first collection, Real Time World. What shocks me most about this fifty-year-old story now is how prescient it feels.

Here you will find a novella, The Ament, which was first published in a somewhat obscure anthology in the 1980s and has not been seen since – until now. It’s a powerful piece of work, replete with Priestian themes (identity, reality, twins) and an absolute must-read for fans of The Glamour and The Prestige.

Chris often insists that he doesn’t write horror, yet in I, Haruspex, a novella from the turn of the millennium that has been equally difficult to access until today, you will discover one of the most unnerving works of gothic fiction you have ever read, all twisted up inside a bizarre and compelling story of time travel and WW2 espionage.

Palely Loitering and An Infinite Summer, both key works from the Priest canon and nominated for multiple awards, are hereby made available also for the first time in some years.

The table of contents speaks for itself. What makes Episodes even more special and so much more than just a collection is Chris’s own personal commentary, presented in the form of an introduction as well as individual forewords and afterwords to each of the texts. The story of the stories, in other words, and an important contribution to the overarching and constantly updating history of British science fiction.

This is a book to be savoured and treasured. More even than that, it is a book to challenge and inspire.

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.

Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires

July 1, 2019 /

How to end such a story, especially one that is this angry, like a big black fist? The voice is off-putting. All the important action happens offscreen; we don’t even see the shooting or the actual bodies or the video. Like that one guy in fiction workshop said, meta is so eighties. The mise en abyme is cool but overdone. This is a story of fragments, sketches. Dear author: thank you for sharing this, but we regret.

And what a brilliant story it is, this first, titular entry in the table of contents of this flawlessly executed, arresting debut collection. Of course, the very features listed by Thompson-Spires as flaws – her irony deliberately self-conscious – are its key attractions. That ‘Heads of the Colored People’ is a story of sketches, fragments leaves us as readers all the more intensely involved with it, reaching for truth even as we look away, sickened by the horror of truth’s implications.

Not all the stories in this collection are so deliberately oblique. Each and every one makes for compelling reading. My favourites are the linked stories – ‘Belles Lettres’, ‘The Body’s Defenses Against Itself’, the superb ‘Fatima, the Biloquist’. The brilliant little duology that is ‘This Todd’ and ‘A Conversation About Bread’. But then there’s the shocking needle-sharpness of ‘Suicide, Watch’ and ‘Wash Clean the Bones’ – I admire them all.

This is the kind of collection you might feel driven to read in a single sitting, just to see where it’s going, just to make sure that at least some of its characters emerge from their narratives unscathed. And to enjoy the writing, of course, the author’s seamlessly dexterous control of voice and form. Thompson-Spires has talked about her reasons for training her gaze on the American black middle classes in particular – because the issues they face are often hidden and not openly discussed – and this is a book that will make you question tired assumptions just as often as it makes you laugh.

I think it’s brilliant. I am so eager to see what Thomspon-Spires writes next, because the second book is, more even than the debut, the proof of an author’s intent and future direction.

I am not sure whether I personally would have considered Heads of the Colored People as a typical Gordon Burn Prize contender, if there is such a thing and maybe there isn’t and maybe that’s the point, but for me these stories have a smoothed perfection about them – an MFA quality – that removes them from the jagged edge of immediacy I have come to associate with the prize. Maybe I’m talking tosh and it wouldn’t be the first time. In either case, I hope Thompson-Spires garners many more award nominations, because the significance of her achievement is not in doubt.

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

June 27, 2019 /

This novel opens with one of its twelve principal characters walking over Hungerford Bridge on her way to the National Theatre, and in one of those weird moments of synchronicity that happen more often than cold logic would give life credit for, that is exactly what I found myself doing the day I finished reading Girl, Woman, Other. How could I not think of Amma as I reached the bridge’s mid-point, stopping, as I so often do when making that particular transition, to gaze out at the lights of London, to meditate on where the city is headed, where I see myself now in relation to it?

This is a great symphony of a novel, one in which a number of story threads and character arcs are gradually woven together – or unravelled, if you prefer to see it that way – in a dense and skilfully designed tapestry of narrative. No character is random, no incident irrelevant. And though many of the book’s central characters live in London and the novel has a great deal to say about that city in particular this is far from being exclusively a London novel.

Reading Girl, Woman, Other is an experience not unlike wandering through the departure lounge of an international airport: you watch individuals, couples, families, hear snatches of their conversations, pick up intimations of their worries and dreams, experience fleeting visions of a hundred lives. All are different, yet all are connected. All, for those moments in which you encounter them, seem somehow intimately and uncannily connected with your own.

The way the book is written, the form it takes – an unstoppable river of words alternately close-packed and free-wheeling, skittish – is for me at least its greatest joy. In its disregard for conventional arrangements of paragraphs and cut-and-dried syntax, the novel offers an irresistible invitation to dive right in: to be with its people, to question your own choices, motivations and assumptions, to recognise the role you play in shaping the lives of others and of our body politic. The use of different Englishes and registers of English forms an inalienable part of the work”s innate musicality.

In its interest in the absolute now as the uppermost layer of the peculiar arrangement of time we know as history, Girl, Woman, Other is absolutely a Gordon Burn book. As an intense and vivid evocation of the lives of black British women, how they have always been here and have always mattered, this work is essential. I don’t mind admitting that I fell in love with it, and more than a little.

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