We had a phenonmenal turnout for our joint PS/Eibonvale/Chomu launch last night. It was wonderful to see so many people, some of them writers I have known almost since the days of my first short story publications in Dark Horizons. Thanks to everyone who turned out – I know some of you travelled quite some distance and it was thrilling to have you there – and thanks especially to Evie Wyld and her crew at the Review bookshop in Peckham, who provided such brilliant support and of course the excellent venue without which none of this would have been possible. You were amazing.
Category: events (Page 3 of 5)
Rustblind and Silverbright is here! Every good book deserves a proper send-off, and I’m delighted to announce that Rustblind will be launched upon the world with all due ceremony – not to mention generous amounts of alcohol – at 7pm this coming Thursday, July 4th, from the excellent Review bookshop at 131 Bellenden Road SE15. That’s just 5 minutes’ walk from Peckham Rye station – head down Bellenden Road to the junction with Choumert Road. The bookshop is opposite The Victoria pub – you can’t miss it. Review is a wonderful independent and independently-minded bookshop, situated in a beautiful, tree-lined South London street (and any of you North Londoners out there about to protest that there is no such thing, just come along and see for yourselves!) with a designated events space and a selection of great cafes and pubs in the immediate vicinity. In short, it’s the perfect venue and we’re delighted that Review is hosting us.
Rustblind and Silverbright is David Rix of Eibonvale’s first solo editing project, and if this auspicious start is the way he means to go on, then the world of horror and slipstream is in for some fine treats in future, that’s for sure. I’ve had a sneak preview via the proof pdf, and I can tell you that the selection of stories on offer is really rather special. Clearly David is not the only one who keeps the subject of trains close to his heart, because the contributors to this railway-themed anthology flaunt their affection, fascination and obsession with the railways in every word they write. There have been railway anthologies before of course, but I seriously believe there’s never been anything quite like this one. Rix’s attention to detail in the original cover art, formatting and interior layout is the icing on the cake.
And that’s not all! This ‘evening of the uncanny’ will also see the official London launch of Quentin Crisp’s Defeated Dogs (Eibonvale Press), P. F Jeffery’s Jane (Chomu Press) together with two new titles from PS Publishing, Rosanne Rabinowitz‘s captivating Machen-themed novella Helen’s Story, and my own story cycle Stardust. In celebration of the launch, PS are currently offering a special deal on joint purchases of Helen’s Story and Stardust, so those who aren’t able to get to the event won’t miss out.
The evening will feature a series of readings by authors, who will be happy to answer your questions and of course sign your books! Please do come along and say hello, have a glass of wine with us and get involved in all things uncanny. We’ll look forward to seeing you on the night.
You can read more about the event at the Review’s events diary here.
We’ve just returned from Paris, where I’ve spent the last couple of days meeting the press and having my photo taken as part of the run-up to the publication of the French edition of The Silver Wind at the end of August. I’ve just this morning received my author copies of the book – entitled Complications in French – and I for one think it looks fantastic. The cover design couldn’t be more beautiful or more appropriate!
And the initial response to the book has been overwhelming. I gave four in-depth interviews to four highly competent journalists – Christine Marcandier of Mediapart, Macha Sery of Le Monde, Frederique Roussel of Liberation, and Clementine Godszal of Les Inrockuptibles – all of whom had not only read the book very closely, but had interesting and insightful things to say and ask about it, too. I was blown away by their natural enthusiasm for speculative fiction in general and for Complications in particular. The experience of meeting and talking to them was deeply energizing.
Complications is being published by Editions Tristram, an independent imprint founded in 1988 by Jean-Hubert Gailliot under the slogan: ‘What changes literature is literature itself’. The people who run Tristram are in love with books and with ideas. They quite clearly see it as their mission to seek out and promote the work of writers who come at things from a different angle, who work at the boundaries of genre, who produce work that is an individual expression of an original or contrary worldview. To say that I am thrilled to be associated with them is an understatement, and when you look at their catalogue – which includes work by J. G. Ballard, Joyce Carol Oates, Arno Schmidt, Pierre Bourgeade and Patti Smith – you will very quickly understand why.
In the Cafe Les Editeurs, with Sylvie Martigny and Jean-Hubert Gailliot of Editions Tristram
While in Paris, Chris and I had the additional thrill of staying in the hotel La Louisiane on the Rue de Seine. Situated just a minute’s walk from the Boulevard Saint-Germain, this historic building has played host to many artists, musicians and writers – John Coltrane and Miles Davis, de Beauvoir and Sartre, Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller to name just a few. (How amazing is that?? I’m still having difficulty taking it all in, to be honest. I was particularly thrilled to discover that in more recent times the hotel has also been the preferred Parisian overnight resting place of Quentin Tarantino… )
Finally though, I really must say a few words about my amazing translator, Bernard Sigaud. With translations of works by J. G. Ballard, M. John Harrison and Paul McAuley (among many others) in his portfolio, Bernard is no stranger to the world of British science fiction. His first encounter with my work came through reading my story ‘Microcosmos’ in Interzone, and it was Bernard who brought The Silver Wind to the attention of Editions Tristram in the first place. Without Bernard and his tireless enthusiasm for speculative fiction, this project would not be happening, and I owe him an enormous debt of gratitude. French readers might notice also that Complications has more pages than The Silver Wind, and this is because it contains an extra story. Here again it was Bernard who became interested in the peculiar sideways connections between my story ‘Darkroom’, first published in Elastic Press’s Subtle Edens anthology, and the stories that make up the original English edition of The Silver Wind. When he emailed and asked me if ‘Darkroom’ might be included in the French edition I was happy enough to agree, but also surprised. It is true that I wrote ‘Darkroom’ while I was working on the other ‘Martin stories’, so I knew some material was likely to have seeped across. But it was only this last week, when I reread all the stories in preparation for the Paris trip, that I fully appreciated the wisdom and happy insight of Bernard’s idea. The connections between the stories are tight, and strange, and illuminating. I’m delighted to see ‘Chambre Noire’ lead off this wonderful venture, and pleased with the thought that future French readers of my work will be getting something a little different, something new.
With Clementine Godszal, Cafe de Flore
'Say cheese..!' Having my photo taken in Cafe de Flore
How time flies at Cafe Les Editeurs - all photos by Chris Priest
I first encountered Joe Hill’s fiction through a PS Publishing sampler – I’m pretty sure it was in a FantasyCon goodie bag – that featured his story ‘Best New Horror’. I read it more from curiosity than anything. This was just around the time that Joe was ‘outed’ as Stephen King’s son, and of course there was a lot of talk of the kind you might expect from those who don’t really know or understand the writing business, about how having a famous father would probably make things easier for Hill to get on in the world. I could hardly think of anything worse, personally. To be the child of the greatest and most successful horror writer in many generations – and then to have it dawn on you that you yourself wanted to be a horror writer? I couldn’t even begin to imagine the pressure that might exert.
The fact that Hill had broken through entirely anonymously, as it were, that he’d sent his stuff off to magazines just like any other beginning writer, that he’d been determined to make his name entirely on his own merits – this act of bravery signalled his seriousness and commitment right from the outset and earned him my immediate respect. But what of the writing? Did he have the chops? Could it be even remotely possible that Joe Hill could be anywhere near as good as his dad?
I respected him, but I was afraid for him, too.
I loved ‘Best New Horror’. I can still remember the sensation of delight that began seeping through me as I read it (I think it might have been on the train on the way back from that very convention), that feeling of ‘yes!’ that always rises up, like a shout, when I read something I know is good, a feeling of triumph almost, of solidarity with that writer. I loved ‘Best New Horror’ because it read like a dream, with that easy, swinging rhythm, that facility with dialogue common to the best American writing that I love all the more because I know I can never emulate it. There was more to ‘Best New Horror’ than pure reading pleasure, though. It was also a damn good horror story that knew about damn good horror stories. The way Hill played with the tropes, the way he had a ball with them – that story had me laughing out loud with pleasure at its nudge-wink self-awareness every bit as much as it held me in suspense. It was clever, it was artful, it was beautifully written. It showed skill, and pleasure in skill’s exercise. Most of all it showed that here was a writer who knew his own mind and had his own voice. I was so impressed by ‘Best New Horror’ that I immediately went out and bought Twentieth Century Ghosts, the collection that launched Hill’s career, published by PS long before anyone had a clue who Joe’s dad was.
And bugger me if the 14 other stories in there weren’t just as good! They showed a remarkable variation in tone colour, too. Magical realism, touches of SF, straight horror, weird horror, ghost stories – all demonstrating both a hand-on-heart love of the genre and a technical understanding of it that went way beyond the ordinary. My favourite? Probably the novelette ‘Voluntary Committal’, but ‘My Father’s Mask’ is amazing too, and I would be happy to see ‘Best New Horror’ re-anthologized from here into the next century.
Anyway, yesterday evening I had the pleasure of attending an event at Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road to celebrate the launch of Joe’s new novel N0S4R2. Joe gave a reading from the book, followed by an interview and Q&A in which he showed himself to be as comfortable and generous with an audience as his father. (Perhaps having writing as your ‘family business’ does at least offer some help in dealing with the public aspects of the job.) He was great fun to be with, and I think the audience would have happily sat there and listened to him read for most of the night. Best of all though, he knew what he was talking about. Anyone still curious about the secret of Hill’s success need look no further than his insightful and hardworking attitude to both the art and craft of writing.
I was very pleased to report back to Chris (who sadly couldn’t be there last night because of a previous commitment) that ‘this man writes proper second drafts!’ (And third drafts, and fourth drafts.) When you hear a writer explaining how even work that might have seemed good to him first time round usually needs to be completely rewritten, you know he means business. I was especially impressed by Hill’s attitude to his early rejections, how he believed that his prentice manuscripts were ‘rejected for the right reasons’, and that it was those very rejections that helped him learn how to ‘finally write a book that other people would be excited about publishing.’
His acknowledgement that inspiration is only the start.
It was a marvellous evening, and one to remember. I am very much looking forward to reading N0S4R2.
Last night I enjoyed the privilege of being a guest of the Magic Circle! Chris was invited to be a judge of the Circle’s Stage Magician of the Year Award, and fortunately for me that invitation allowed for me to accompany him. It was an amazing evening. The acts were superb – I’d never attended a live magic show before and so the whole experience was very special. Added to that there was the excitement of being inside the Magic Circle’s club house itself. Tucked away invisibly in a side street close to Euston station, the place is a treasure trove of legend, atmosphere and magicians’ memorabilia. Going backstage after the show I had the opportunity to chat to some of the magicians, and to hear stories of past members and their incredible exploits.
What struck me most was how true to life The Prestige turns out to be! Stage magicians really were and are that passionate and that dedicated. Their interest in each other’s exploits, both past and present, is real and ongoing and I totally love that. Magic is clearly addictive – and an addictive subject for stories. I left the house on Stephenson Way on a high, and very much inspired.
The eventual winner of the 2013 Stage Magician of the Year Award was John van der Put, aka Piff the Magic Dragon, with his hilarious dragon-and-dog mentalist act. In second place we had James More, a dynamic and distinctive stage presence with a genuine touch of the sorceror about him. But for me the absolute highlight of the evening was seeing Oliver Tabor, who took third prize in the contest, working with his doves.
Seeing a white dove produced seemingly from nowhere is one of the basic staples of the visual vocabulary of stage magic and as such you might think it would be old hat – but seeing it done live on stage is utterly enthralling, and I was completely captivated. Oliver has a stage presence that is all his own – mystical, elusive and just a touch ethereal. In fact he reminded me just a little of Mr Eisenheim, in Steven Millhauser’s story ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’. What impressed me most was the obvious empathy he enjoyed with his beautiful Java doves.
When I spoke to him afterwards, he told me that he looked on his birds not as stage props, but as workmates, and his love and respect for these creatures was clearly apparent. Oliver has seven of the birds, which he began training when they were just a few months old. He very generously and trustingly let me hold one of them. The experience was one I will treasure.
The last days of November saw a final rush to place votes in the Locus All-Centuries poll before it closed at midnight on the 30th. I can’t say I blame anyone for leaving it to the last minute, because getting those lists finalised and then ranked added up to a pretty steep time commitment. I hope these eleventh hour participants, together with the consequent surge in online publicity for the ballot, did manage to up the voting figures a bit – I read somewhere that the response to the poll had been disappointing up till then. This is sad to hear, because of course the fewer the votes cast, the less meaningful the final result (shades of BFAs 2011 – either that or the recent Tory police privatisation bill… ) It seems to me that part of the problem in the case of the Locus poll has been the sheer size of the thing – the voting form looked daunting, even if in reality it needn’t have been. This issue could have been offset considerably by the introduction of two simple measures: 1) the poll ‘rules’ should have made it clearer that you didn’t have to fill in all the categories for your vote to be eligible – if you just wanted to vote for novels, or for SF and not Fantasy, for example, that was perfectly OK, and 2) the category for novelette should have been expunged (or, as I saw someone more memorably put it, killed with fire). The novelette is a pretty worthless category in any case – basically it’s just a long short story – and given that it’s difficult, not to say impossible, to obtain the word counts for eligible works outside of the Locus suggestions lists, it made the whole novelette segment feel not only superfluous to requirements but also an active discouragement to people filling in those massive voting forms.
The ballot is a good thing, because it’s interesting to see what the SFF hivemind is thinking, and it deserves to flourish, so let’s hope that Locus learn from their mistakes this year and make the next grand poll a little more user-friendly.
These issues apart, it’s been great to see some voters posting their ballots online. The selections have been genuinely interesting, and it’s been heartening to note how readily those people who did vote have been departing from the suggestions lists to include works more personally important to them. Niall Harrison, Ian Sales, Cheryl Morgan, Rich Horton and Martin Lewis have all posted their excellent lists, there’s another great one at SF Strangelove, and the whole business was discussed extensively on the Coode Street podcast. My own ballot, if you missed it earlier, is here. But the biggest round of applause must go to Matthew Cheney, whose ballot – so imaginative, so ambitious – was a balm to my soul. How wonderful to choose Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (raises fist and yells with delight). And Straub too! (I dithered long and hard between The Buffalo Hunter and The Juniper Tree in the 20th century novella category, eventually plumping for The Buffalo Hunter, so it’s good to see MC’s vote go to The Juniper Tree instead, although actually anything from Houses Without Doors would be a worthy candidate – I still feel bad for not including ‘A Short Guide to the City’ in the short story category, because I love it to bits.) Cheney’s choices could quite easily serve as the basis for a 2013 reading list as they include a good amount of stuff that I’ve had my eye on for some time: Thomas Disch’s 334 (I read the title section in the anthology Anticipations years ago and thought it was amazing), Lydia Millet’s Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (I saw a ref to that just the other day and noted it down TBR pdq), Brian Francis Slattery’s Liberation, and of course Delany, Delany, Delany, who I’ve not read anywhere near enough of and yet feel should be essential to me.
Matt Cheney’s ballot brings so many exceptional works and writers to the forefront of the mind – which should surely be the whole point of the Locus poll in any case – and comprises exactly the kind of radical and unorthodox thinking SFF readers, writers and critics need to be aiming for. Bravo.
I just wanted to say a massive thank you to everyone who came to my ‘thing’ at the BSFA meeting in Holborn last night. You were a marvellously generous audience and it was a delight to be there. It was great to put some more faces to some more names, and many apologies to those people (too many) that I never got to say hi to or spend enough time with – see you for more chats at Eastercon I hope.
Huge thanks to the BSFA for inviting me to be a guest – it was an honour and a privilege. And thanks most of all to Niall Harrison, whose thoughtful preparation for the event, insightful questioning and calm presence did everything to make me forget how nervous I’d been and simply enjoy a conversation and discussion on those subjects that mean most to me in an environment that couldn’t have been friendlier or better informed.
We also learned last night that Elisabeth Hand, Lavie Tidhar and Aliette de Bodard have already been scheduled as guests for upcoming BSFA meetings in 2013. How great and how special is that? Those dates go straight in our diary and I hope in yours, too.
Just to mention that I’m (very proud to be) the guest at this month’s BSFA London meeting on Wednesday. The venue is the cellar bar of The Argyle pub on Leather Lane, just 2 minutes’ walk from Chancery Lane tube. (NB: the food there is excellent value.) The meeting kicks off at 7pm. I shall be reading a short extract from What Happened to Maree, following which I shall be interviewed by Niall Harrison, editor-in-chief of Strange Horizons. Hopefully there’ll also be time for a Q&A.
I’m very much looking forward to this event. Niall’s knowledge of SFF is legendary, and he’s always had insightful things to say about my stuff, so we should definitely find plenty to discuss.
Do come along and say hello if you’re in the area – this looks like being fun!
Back from FCon, which was, if anything, even more enjoyable and exhausting than last year’s. It was wonderful to spend time with friends (though it passed too quickly), to put more faces to more names – this last is for me always a particular delight. I want to say a huge personal thank you to Maura McHugh and Graham Joyce, who made my first experience of moderating a panel so much less daunting than it might have been, and to Joel Lane, who helped to make my participation in the ‘My Favourite Ghost Story’ panel a convention highlight for me. (Thanks, Joel, for not nabbing Aickman! I’d have been doomed else.) Above all, thanks once again to Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane for giving so much of themselves to all of us in making it happen. FCon 2012 was a great one. The quality of the panel discussions and programme events in particular this year was outstanding. It’s good to know that the World Fantasy Convention in 2013 is in such safe hands.
It’s also good to know we’ll all be gathering in Brighton again because I just love being there. It’s a magical place, not just beautiful and singularly atmospheric (though it is both these things) but also crammed with overlapping timelines and shades of nuance. The Brighton I was taken to as a kid is not the Brighton I visited in my twenties is not the Brighton I am finally coming more fully to know now. These several Brightons are light years from the Brighton that existed between the wars and afterwards, the Brighton of the trunk murders, the place Graham Greene immortalised in Brighton Rock, yet – and this is what I love about urban landscapes – all these cities occupy the same physical space, all are, in some essential fashion, still there. I snatched an hour before the announcement of the British Fantasy Awards on Sunday to wander around Kemptown and suddenly, without meaning to look for it and not even thinking about that time particularly I found myself standing outside the house where good friends of mine lodged in the 1990s when they were studying for their TEFL certificates. (They did eventually gain those qualifiications, though as I remember it a lot of their time seemed to be taken up with scripting and shooting home horror movies.) Coincidences like that always please me greatly because they seem to prove something or other, the thing (whatever it is) that I’m constantly trying to examine in my stories. Memory, and the permeability of time, the way the two are linked, perhaps. These are special moments.
The much-publicized revamp of the British Fantasy Awards seems to have been highly successful and looks set to continue as such, especially now that the weird anomaly of the Best Novel category has been sorted – it’s been decided (a vote was taken at the AGM) that as of next year there will be two separate shortlists, one for Fantasy and one for Horror. In his speech at the awards ceremony James Barclay took every opportunity to emphasise how much he (and the other jurors) had enjoyed being involved, how he’d been inspired by the shortlisted works and reminded of just how exciting it can be to have the opportunity and the excuse to get stuck right into a goodly pile of brand new books. Sarah Biggs (Rob Holdstock’s partner) inaugurated the first Robert Holdstock Award for Best Fantasy Novel with a moving personal reminiscence, a fine and fitting end to a fabulous weekend.
The very first Holdstock Award was won by Jo Walton’s already much-garlanded coming-of-age novel Among Others. This interested me, because this book really does seem to have touched people and it’s fascinating to debate and analyse why that might be. Among Others was one of the first books I read this year. I’d heard a lot of good things about it and the premise attracted me. In the event, the novel divided my opinion. I would say that Michael Levy summarized the problem perfectly in his sensitive review of Among Others at Strange Horizons:
What I would and could say about Jo Walton’s new novel, Among Others, in a less specialized venue, like a newspaper or a general review magazine such as Publishers Weekly, is very different from what I can and will say about it here, in Strange Horizons. Walton’s story is very much one for insiders, for us—the initiated, the Slans, or, to be a little less egomanical, for those of us who grew up lonely among non-readers, non-SF readers or, well, among others.
Some have cited this aspect of the novel – its insiderness – as a luminous strength. I am forced to admit that personally I perceive it as the book’s chief weakness. As a reader and as a science fiction reader since way back when, I enjoyed the novel rather a lot. But all the time I was reading it I couldn’t help wondering how it might come across to someone who’d read little or no SFF. Rather than try to communicate to an outsider exactly what it is about science fiction that sets her on fire, Walton’s narrator Morwenna seems simply to name-drop, to scatter the titles of books and the names of writers willy-nilly, barely brushing the surface of their textual significance. Perhaps my concern is misplaced – it could be that non-geeks can understand the spirit, if not the letter of this novel perfectly well, and if so then I’m glad, because in many ways it is, as Levy maintains, ‘a lovely book.’ But in either case there should be no special pleading. I believe very strongly that any serious work of SFF should aspire to stand shoulder to shoulder with mainstream literary works. A reader should not have to have prior knowledge of a ‘secret language’ in order to appreciate or understand it. Such narrow exclusivity would be to any novel’s detriment.
For me, the aspect of Among Others that shines out, that counteracts a lot of my objections, is the narrative voice. Mori feels alive and breathing from page one, and the particular Welsh lilt of the narrative, the lift and rhythm of Mori’s sentences, is an absolute joy. The book is beautifully written, the family relationships and the sense of place are wonderfully realised. There are flaws in the plot – the book’s climax, such as it is, feels weak – but that’s not what Among Others is about.
Perhaps the secret of this novel’s success is simply that people love books about books. I know because I’m one of them and it’s not something I’m going to argue against. It’s clear that Among Others was written with passionate commitment, that for its author it was a book that mattered very much. It’s for this reason more than any other that from this year’s BFA shortlist it was my preferred winner.
Oh, and before I post this post, so to speak, Ben and Jon at Solaris Books remind me to remind you that Lavie Tidhar, who very deservedly took the BFA for Best Novella with Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God, will be appearing at Foyles this Thursday to talk about his amazing novel Osama (the new Solaris paperback edition is being launched at this event) and the impact of 9/11 on his writing generally. The event begins at 6.30 and it’s free – just email the events department at Foyles to reserve a place.
I’m really looking forward to this one.
Something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is how the books I admire as a writer are not always the same books I want to read as a reader. The ideal – the point where the truly great books happen – is the nexus where these two vectors coincide.
I’m perplexed by this year’s Man Booker shortlist. Perplexed because although I successfully predicted four out of the six novels in contention (Mantel, Self, Moore, Thayil) the list still feels disappointing to me, insubstantial somehow. This isn’t just because I’m not a big fan of the two other titles on it (although I’m not – the inclusion of the paper-thin Levy is a total mystery to me, and although unfortunately I’ve not read the Eng the extracts I’ve sampled, both online and in bookshops, leave me with the impression that it is prone to purpleness, perhaps a bit saccharine) but because with the way the shortlist lines up it now feels as if there can be only one possible winner. It’s not even that I disapprove of that possible winner – he was my kind-of frontrunner from the start – but where’s the fun of the Booker without genuine debate?
I love Hilary Mantel – I think she’s one of the best writers working in this country at the moment and her novel Beyond Black is for me one of those ‘nexus books’, a novel that spurs me with envy as a writer and that engages me as a reader to the point of being seduced and ensnared from the very first paragraph. I haven’t yet read Bring up the Bodies, but I certainly will do, not just because I love Mantel but because I’ve been fascinated and horrified by the story of Anne Boleyn since I was about eight years old. The opening extract I read in The Guardian, with Thomas Cronwell flying his hawk, is a demonstration of everything high fantasy should aspire to, everything it could do and be if it tried harder and saw itself as literature, as writing, instead of just a churnforth of derivative stories. But in spite of knowing how much I’ll love Bring Up the Bodies, I can’t get excited by the thought of it winning the Booker. Mantel won in 2009 of course, with Wolf Hall. Bodies is a direct sequel to Hall. so as well as being the work of a writer who’s already won this prize, it’s work in the same mould. If BUtB were a completely different type of book from Wolf Hall, I’m sure I’d be cheering it on. As it is, in the context of the Booker, I just feel a bit lacklustre about it.
I’m delighted to see Alison Moore on the shortlist. The Lighthouse is a deftly worked, tightly wound little book of real merit and – again – genuine readability. Moore writes very well indeed, and the thing about her shortlisting that pleases me most is that it will bring her some deserved recognition and (I trust) be of assistance in moving her forward with her career. But The Lighthouse to win? For me, it’s too slight a book for that accolade. It seems to me that we should be demanding Booker winners with a thrust of greatness, a touch of madness, and a win for Moore would be like Anita Brookner’s win in 1984, when Hotel du Lac – how? how? – triumphed over J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun.
I think what I’m missing is precisely that – that thrust of reckless greatness, that edge of madness. Will Self’s Umbrella – the book I’m tipping as the eventual winner – does seem to have both. From the extracts I’ve read, I sense that Umbrella is a genuine attempt to write a novel that challenges and surprises and rewards attention, a novel that (and here’s the point) has stretched its author to the limits of his ability and then some. It’s an earned book, a book that aspires to say something about literature as well as just telling a story. Is this not what we want from our Booker winners? I know I do. As a writer I admire hugely what Self’s done in Umbrella. But as a reader, the thought of it exhausts me. All that unrelenting ego, that insistent cleverness, for 400 pages. I just can’t – quite, yet – stomach the thought of it. I can’t help feeling that if I’m going to commit my reading time to a single book for an entire month there are so many other gaps in my reading – Gravity’s Rainbow, Infinite Jest, American Pastoral, Under the Volcano, Moby-Dick – that are in more urgent need of filling. When I read Adam Roberts’s review of Umbrella last month it made me shout with delight, so perfectly did it encapsulate the issues I have with a book like this. We know what Self’s doing, in other words, but do we care? I care, but not enough to leap upon Umbrella like unearthed treasure. If I can admire the ambition and worth of a book, but not feel desperate to read it, it’s only done half of its job. Which is sad. and this is something I feel bad about, because I want to love it.
Last week I read Nicola Barker’s 2004 novel Clear. Nicola Barker is special to me. She’s my almost exact contemporary, and whenever I think of her or consider her achievement I feel a deep-seated pang of guilt, that I somehow failed to get my shit together as early as she did, that I’ve spent the past decade of my life trying to catch up to where I should have been twenty years ago. Most of all though what I feel is pure admiration, thankfulness that such a writer as Barker exists, not just to inspire me as a writer but to create books that are such a blinding joy to read. I was reading Clear on our way to Brighton last Thursday, and Chris said I was making the whole railway carriage shake with my laughter. It’s true that almost every single page of the novel had its own laugh-out-loud funny moment. but Clear – like everything of Barker’s – isn’t ‘just’ funny. Where else but in Nicola Barker could you read an extended analysis of Kafka’s ‘The Hunger Artist’ and be having to stifle the giggles? Where else could London breathe and expand and erupt so magnificently filthily from its author’s devilish imagination without shedding its pristine glory? In Nicola Barker we have a writer who wears her (considerable) learning so lightly, with such impeccable judgement, that you can read any one of her books all the way through and simply enjoy it, revel in the linguistic dexterity and creative invention on every page without once feeling you’re been lectured at or talked down to or insisted upon. And yet Barker has more to say, more talent to demonstrate, than most of the ‘usual suspects’ put together. John Self, in his recent and very excellent review of Barker’s Booker-longlisted novel The Yips, said that ‘the central character is…. the finest character Martin Amis never created.’ Yes. And leading directly on from the same point, I was especially gratified to find John Self stating the following:
As in other Barker novels, The Yips is heavily populated with eccentrics and outsiders, the sort of people who struggle to fit into society – or into most fiction, for that matter. Fortunately, Barker handles them without going anywhere near the dreaded curse of whimsy. She does not look down on or mock her characters, and she takes the reader with her, sometimes literally.
Amis can be funny, yes, but he always tends to look down on his characters. More than that, he is snide. Barker is never snide. She writes her people into being with a deep empathy, with fellow feeling. She isn’t poking fun at the world she’s revealing, she’s inhabiting it. She understands the modern world and she understands people at an instinctive and personal level. Amis just… doesn’t. In contrast with many, I enjoyed Nicola Barker’s review of Amis’s latest, Lionel Asbo, because it was a piece of writing as well as a review, and it wasn’t afraid to go against the grain of prevailing opinion. (She likes it.) But oh is Nicola Barker ever the better writer. And I hope that, her admiration for Amis notwithstanding, she secretly knows it.
What all this means, I suppose, is that I’m mourning the absence of Nicola Barker from this year’s Booker shortlist. I’m still devastated that she didn’t win with Darkmans – in my opinion one of the first English masterpieces of the new century – in 2007. I felt certain that this had to be her year, and here she is denied yet again. This pains me. A Barker vs Self Booker – now that would have been something to get excited about.
Another ‘nexus’ book of 2012 for me has been Sam Thompson’s Communion Town. (You’ll find my review at Strange Horizons here.) While I was reading it I was excited and admiring in equal measure and I was always eager to get back to it – another crucial test for a ‘nexus’ book. More than that though and unlike so many the book has grown in my imagination since then. I now feel it’s an even better book than I thought it was in the first place, and feel almost personally aggrieved by the rather middling critical response it has received in the press and online. It has beauty and daring and knowingness and yes, that essential touch of the insane too, and I think it’s a book that will last. I can imagine reading Communion Town ten, twenty years from now and finding new pleasures in it. It should have been on the shortlist, dammit.
Before I forcibly curtail this oddly meandering rant, I do want to mention one book that bloody well should have been on the shortlist, only the judges saw fit to exclude it from the action entirely. That book is Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn and Child. I started reading it on Sunday evening and it is brilliant. If M. John Harrison were to write a crime novel, this would be it. The writing is – exquisite is the wrong word, it’s too muscular for that, too restrained, but still its beauty, its sheer writerly competence, makes me shiver with excitement. And the way the book’s been written – the experiment and lesson in form it provides – is, for any writer worth their salt, just thrilling. Thrilling is what I mean, too, for this is a(n albeit very special and unusual type of) thriller. You can read this book and simply love it, or love it simply, for the story on the page. It’s a gem of a novel, literary riches. Were the Booker judges all in comas? Was it not submitted? What the hell’s going on?
And the absence of Kelman and Warner? Don’t get me started…
Oh well. One thing I learned around the time of the Clarke Award is that this kind of thing always happens. I spent a fair amount of time earlier this year, looking up previous Clarke shortlists and (where available) the lists of submissions, and what I discovered was that there have been notable exclusions in every single year since the award has existed. Even in those years where the shortlist seemed strong, there were always better books that were inexplicably missed off. And then every now and then you get a total cock up. Bound to happen. So it goes.
None of this is particularly surprising. I find it useful to remember when I’m ranting (or perhaps when I’ve finsihed) that the Booker judges (like the Clarke judges) are just six people, sat in a room. Compromises happen, trade-offs happen, shit goes down. An empirically ‘true’ shortlist cannot exist. Because it cannot exist, there are people who question the value of the Booker, of the Clarke, and of awards generally. I am not one of them. I love awards – not because I aspire to win them or because I set any exceptional value on the work of those who do, but because awards provide an arena for debate. I love to talk about books, I love to get angry about books, and something that gives me especial pleasure is to see other people getting passionate and just a little bit crazy about books also. The Booker provokes impassioned debate – every year it does it, regardless of whether people generally love the shortlist or think it’s a pile of pants.
And that always makes me very happy.