We have moved house. Or rather, we find ourselves between houses, in temporary accommodation while we do work to the house we have just bought, two miles down the road from the house we just sold, smaller in scale but already, for me at any rate, larger in the imagination.
We were very happy in the house we have now left. This was the house that brought us to the island, the house that sheltered us through lockdown and that features, in various guises, in several of our novels. The decision to sell it was difficult and arrived at only gradually, founded upon the fact that the house was too big and too expensive for us to maintain, that its unsuitability would only increase with the passage of years.
The past six weeks have seen us undergoing all the familiar, unavoidable, anxiety-inducing accompaniments to moving house: the sense of disjuncture, the inevitably upsetting process of dismantling a home and the queasy feeling of unreality that comes in its wake. There has also been the intensely practical problem of downsizing our library of books, CDs and DVDs. It has been incredibly important to us that they find their way into the hands of readers and listeners who will appreciate them, which has meant several trips into Glasgow in order to donate them. I am terribly glad we did this, but it has, in the midst of the numerous other chores and missions of madness, been exhausting.
Keeping me sane through the whole process has been Laura Thompson’s unusually candid and spontaneous biography of England’s most famous crime writer, Agatha Christie: An English Mystery. I am sure there will be those who find Thompson’s approach too open, too opinionated and too personal, but Thompson’s singular willingness to put her own heart and soul on the line has been precisely what I like and admire about the book, a hefty volume that nonetheless has been stimulating and thought-provoking through the whole of its length, and that I have always felt eager and grateful to return to at the end of another tiring day.
Now begins the process of building back up. I love our new home. I feel especially lucky to have retained my cherished view of the Firth of Clyde, albeit from a different angle. I cannot wait for us to move in properly, to get back to work. My current work-in-progress seems like a distant, unfamiliar land. I will need to reacquaint myself with it. I know there will be changes, because I have changed. I look forward to finding out exactly where I have arrived.
2021 is a difficult year to describe. 2020 felt fraught, urgent, dangerous and tense. 2021 has felt more nebulous, more fractured, characterised by uncertainty and an increasing sense of restlessness. In terms of personal achievement, I delivered a new manuscript, a book that for me feels very much like the product of 2020, seamed and studded with all the furious contradictions that year brought but referenced obliquely rather than colliding with them head-on. It’s a novel I’m hugely proud of, and one I look forward to sharing with you in 2023.
In the months since completing that book, I have begun inching my way towards the next work, a transition that has felt more complex and troublesome even than usual. The times we are living through throw up searching questions; as a writer, it does not seem altogether surprising if those questions end up being framed around the process of writing, not just the how but the what and the why. There is never any doubt in my mind that writing – art – has value, that whatever trauma is being addressed, the practice of reflection and analysis, of creative re-imagining inherent to all art is intrinsic to the experience of being human.
Such knowledge should not prevent us from being robust in our seeking out of our own best practice. I count myself fortunate in that this period of not-knowing – familiar in its outline, yet different in its particular details every time – has always felt energising to me. I never quite know how I will come out of it, or what will result. If I can feel certain of anything, through this time as all times, it is the joy I find in the power and the talent of other writers. Discovering new works, new directions, new attitudes, visions and modes of expression – the excitement and the gratitude never lessens.
By this same time last year, the document on my hard drive entitled ‘Books 2021’ was already filling up with upcoming works of fiction and non-fiction I was eager to read. Many of them were books whose publication dates had been postponed, pushed over from 2020 into 2021 in the hope that by the time they were released, in-person events and book festivals would be happening again. This turned out not to be the case, and on the far side of 2021, I cannot help noticing that the number of books on my ‘Books 2022’ list is considerably smaller. There is a sense of uncertainty affecting all of us: what shall we be reading, what shall we be writing? There is an eerie sort of silence.
Here also, there is opportunity. Not knowing – feeling less sure of what I’m going to be reading leaves more space for new discoveries. It also leaves space for me to go back and read more of the books I did not manage to get to in 2021. A year of regrouping, maybe. A year of finding out what is important.
I enjoy reading challenges because they give my reading a focus. This can be especially valuable if the challenge is related in some way to a problem or question that has a bearing on my work in progress. I also enjoy reading challenges because they provide me with a framework for talking to readers. With all of this in mind, I have created my own crime reading challenge for 2022. As regular readers of this blog will know by now, I am always on the lookout for original, challenging and imaginative approaches to genre archetypes, with the mystery archetype foremost among them. For pure reading pleasure, there’s nothing to beat a mystery. There is also no stronger template for withstanding the often punitive process of literary experiment.
I have created thirty prompts, some of them leaning heavily towards my particular interests, others designed to take me into less familiar territory. Thirty seems like a good number – big enough to make the challenge interesting, not so huge that it becomes burdensome, squeezing out all other reading. The individual challenges can be completed in any order, and can be based around any aspect of crime writing: fiction, true crime, journalism, history or memoir can be considered and included for any of the prompts. I am hoping to have completed and blogged all thirty by the end of the year. Here are the prompts. Let’s see how we get on:
Published in 2022
By a debut author
Translated from the French
Translated from the German
Translated from the Italian
Translated from the Spanish
Translated from the Japanese
Set in South America
Nordic
Set in Australia
By an author based on the African continent
By an African-American author
Historical mystery
Experimental published since 2000
Experimental published before 1980
Published by an independent press
Classic noir
Neo noir
Golden Age
Nineteenth Century
Published before World War 2
By a Scottish author
Legal thriller
Financial or military
With a speculative element
Award-winning
Has been adapted for the screen
Woman detective
Based on real events
Any crime but murder
I have some ideas already for how I might fill some of the categories, books I have been wanting to read for a while and now have the perfect incentive to tackle. Others I have not yet started to think about. Mainly I am hoping to be surprised. Surprised and inspired. Here’s hoping we can all find something of the same in 2022.
Earlier this summer I had the great joy and privilege of creating a piece of work based around an interview with the disaster risk engineer Josh Macabuag. The resulting story, ‘Forces and Loads’, is now live as part of the Inventive podcast initiative from the University of Salford, which places writers together in creative collaboration with workers in STEM.
I found Joshua’s interview and the insights it gave me into his work to be instantly inspiring, and I hope I have conveyed some sense of the power of his story through my own interpretation of it. ‘Forces and Loads’ runs in Episode 2 of the second series of Inventive, and you can listen to that episode here.
I am hugely grateful to Anna Scott-Brown and Adam Fowler of Overtone Productions for their help and expertise in making the experience so enjoyable and of course to Josh himself for allowing me an insight into his world. As I say in my own portion of the interview, I found enough material here for an entire novel and ‘Forces and Loads’ is a story I might well find myself revisiting in the future.
A couple of weeks ago I had the great pleasure of talking with writer and folklore enthusiast Mark Norman, the creator and host of the very excellent Folklore Podcast. We had a wonderful conversation about The Good Neighbours, diving deep into the original inspiration behind the novel and the long tradition of fairy folklore within literature. The opportunity to talk about this aspect of the book with someone so deeply attuned to it was especially welcome, and if you’d like to find out more you can listen to the episode here. While you’re at it, you might also want to check out the wealth of resources available at The Folklore Network, including all previous episodes of the podcast. It’s an inspiration.
Talking of which, now seems like an excellent time to give a shout-out to Mark’s latest book, Dark Folklore. Written together with folklore historian and playwright Tracey Norman, this book is an exploration of the more sinister side of folklore and looks like an absolute must for anyone interested in folk horror, either from a reader’s or writer’s perspective. You can buy the book here.
I recently had the pleasure and the privilege of recording an episode of The Tiny Bookcase podcast with the show’s wonderful and talented hosts, Nico Rogers and Ben Holroyd-Dell. Their approach, so far as I am aware, is unique: guests and hosts each write a short story especially for the podcast, based around a prompt selected (by the guest) from a choice of three. The first half of the podcast consists of readings of all three stories, followed by a discussion. In the second half of the podcast (which will go live next week) the hosts interview the guest about their life, work and any upcoming projects.
I found the whole experience highly enjoyable and one of the most interesting gigs I’ve yet taken part in, not least because the word limit for the story – 1,200 words – presented me with a challenge I had not attempted before. My stories tend to sprawl, rather, and so getting the job done in less than 2,000 words? Not easy. The prompt I chose was ‘Empty Tank’, feeling lucky because the story idea came to me more or less instantaneously. As you’ll discover if you listen to the podcast, the guys interpreted the title very differently – and that is the beauty of this kind of exercise. I have always maintained that one hundred writers sat in a room working from an identical first sentence will each produce a completely different piece of writing and here, in microcosm, is the proof of that.
For those of you who have read The Rift, I’m excited to tell you that ‘Empty Tank’ is a brand new creef story. For those who haven’t, welcome to their world!
Huge thanks to Ben and to Nico for inviting me on to the podcast, and for making me feel so welcome. I had a great time.
The shortlist for the 35th Arthur C. Clarke Award has landed. The six titles are:
The Infinite by Patience Agbabi
The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez
Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang
Edge of Heaven by R. B. Kelly
The Animals in that Country by Laura Jean McKay
Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes
For the first time ever, all six shortlisted titles are debuts, which is interesting. If I were to use one word to describe this shortlist, it would be unexpected. Every shortlist is different, of course, but there’s something about this one that makes it more different. Because none of the authors here have previously featured, there is a quality of newness, of unparsability. And I like that. I like not knowing exactly what I think.
There are three books on here that are already on my to-read list, which is great, because I now have a definite context in which to read them. There are two books on this list I don’t know much about, which again is great, because I’ll be coming to them with no preconceived opinions. There is one book on this list I think I can safely say I would not have thought of reading, had it not been shortlisted, and that’s good too, because now I will.
The winner is being announced in September, which – I am delighted and relieved to say – gives me a good eight weeks to read everything, I shall be blogging my findings here. Sharkes take no prisoners.
Simultaneously with the shortlist, the Clarke Award’s administrator Tom Hunter released the full list of books submitted to the Clarke Award, all published in 2020, all given equal consideration by the jury. There were 105 books this time around, a good number, though not the highest. I have perused this list with great interest, as I always do, noting the increasing diversity and expanding definition of science fiction, year on year. I think it would be true to say that SF is as various and unpredictable as its many readers, each of whom would doubtless have their own list of priorities, their own ideal version of what science fiction could and should be.
The longer I read SF, the more I demand from it. I demand rigour, not in relation to scientific accuracy but in intellectual engagement. I demand beauty, not in terms of sense of wonder but in relation to language and form. I demand ambition, not in relation to copies sold, but in terms of how far the author is prepared to push against the boundary of their own abilities. I want books that risk failure in their pursuit of excellence. I want science fiction that fulfils the radical potential that is inherent in the very idea of SF. Will all the books on this shortlist meet these criteria? I can live in hope. Will I ever stop banging on about this? Never.
If I’d been picking the shortlist myself, here’s what it would look like, bearing in mind I’ve not read everything (nowhere near) and the impact of my own very specific biases:
Hinton by Mark Blacklock (one of the toughest but best achieved novels I read last year)
Ghost Species by James Bradley (Bradley is ridiculously underappreciated, one of the most committed speculative fiction writers out there)
The Silence by Don DeLillo (people are going to argue with me over this – I know some who think this book is empty, pared down so hard it barely exists – but if there’s a novel that better sums up our current state of unease I have yet to find it)
Gathering Evidence by Martin MacInnes (except maybe this one – MacInnes’s first novel was a best-of-year for me and this, his second, is if anything even better)
The Animals in that Country by Laura Jean McKay (my most anticipated novel on the actual shortlist, I’ve sampled the prose, straining with wild energy, and McKay has chosen an epigraph by Helen Garner – say no more)
Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin (a fantastic novel by a writer who remakes speculative fiction every time she puts pen to paper)
These are all novels I could read repeatedly, finding new insights each time. This also is a quality I demand from my SF. When I think of the books I return to time and again, in my mind as well as on the page, they all have about them the quality of mystery, of infinite possibility together with a certain inscrutability that is the hallmark of timeless classics in any genre. Here’s to discovering more of them, and good luck to all the shortlisted authors. Meet me back here soon for the first of six exciting voyages into the unknown.
My fourth novel The Good Neighbours is published today! It has taken its time getting here and I’m not just talking about delays due to COVID. Right from the beginning, The Good Neighbours was an elusive, troublesome book that – like the fairy folk that skitter between its pages – needed a great deal of persuasion to reveal its true form. I loved working on the novel though, even as it played its tricks on me, because the characters of Cath and Alice, Shirley and Johnny – especially Johnny – seemed to be counting on me to get their stories told. I hope you enjoy them, and that the book speaks to you, leading you along pathways you might not have explored otherwise.
As The Good Neighbours makes its way out into the world, I thought I would celebrate its arrival with a deep dive into the world of what must count as THE work of fairy literature, John Crowley’s perplexing, genre-defying, mind-expanding, World-Fantasy-Award-Winning novel Little, Big.
*
When celebrated literary critic Harold Bloom, author of The Western Canon, described the Harry Potter books as ‘rubbish, only fit for the dustbin’, and decried Stephen King as ‘an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis,’ he stirred up a backlash that is still ongoing, even in spite of Bloom’s death in 2019. His polemic has often been seen as a denouncement of speculative fiction in general, although those with more than a passing interest in Bloom’s pronouncement will quickly discover that his expanded canonical lists include many works of science fiction and fantasy, including H. G. Wells’s scientific romances, David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, Thomas Disch’s On Wings of Song and most famously John Crowley’s 1981 novel Little, Big, which Bloom described as ‘a neglected masterpiece… the most enchanting twentieth century book I know’.
When I look at The Western Canon and Bloom’s unbending defence of his entrenched position on what counts as ‘important’ in literature I tend to feel sad and vaguely troubled rather than outraged. Bloom’s passion for literature is self-evident: he spent a lifetime reading it, studying it, writing about it, defending it. Yet his determined rejection of all schools of criticism other than his own led him ultimately towards a blinkered understanding of how fiction works. The defence of any so-called canon over and above another will always run the risk of becoming little more than a defence of one’s own personal taste over someone else’s. Goodness knows it is difficult – I myself have often found it difficult – to accept that objectivity in criticism, the idea of objective standards of literary excellence, is a chimera, but in order to progress as a critic one needs not only to accept it, but to take it as a starting point.
Bloom later disowned his extended lists, claiming they had only been included as an appendix to The Western Canon at the insistence of his publisher. I would dearly love to know which of the several hundred works Bloom cites in those lists were indeed his true choices, which he would stand by today if he were still around to argue. I cannot help believing that Little, Big would assuredly be among them. Bloom claimed Crowley’s novel as ‘the closest achievement we have to the Alice stories of Lewis Carroll’ – and it is surely no coincidence that one of Crowley’s key characters is named Alice. (There is an Alice in The Good Neighbours, too, but I swear that was an accident.) On a sentence-by-sentence basis, to paraphrase Bloom, I would find it impossible to categorise Crowley’s novel as anything but a masterpiece. For any sad soul out there who might still be willing to insist that fantastic literature is not literature, I would like to see that person tying themselves in knots trying to put the screws on Little, Big.
Is Little, Big the ultimate fairy fiction? Probably. When he was asked in a recent interview why he chose the fairy world as the secret subtext of his novel, John Crowley answered thus:
It might be more true to say that the fairies chose me. I was trying to write a long family chronicle novel, and I wanted my family to have some sort of special thing, some secret knowledge passed on from generation to generation. I couldn’t think what it could be. I can remember the day when somehow thoughts about the book intersected in my mind with some Arthur Rackham fairy pictures I’d seen, and the two just fell together. I can almost remember the street I was on.
I first read these words on Saturday June 5th, in the course of preparing this article, yet they conveyed themselves to me as an uncanny post-figuring of what I myself had written here at this blog last week about the fair folk nudging their way into The Good Neighbours. So this is where we are, and Little, Big is exactly that kind of book.
Like so many family sagas, Little, Big opens (more or less) with a wedding. Our protagonist, Evan ‘Smoky’ Barnable, has fallen instantly in love with Daily Alice Drinkwater (you want to know why she’s called that, read the book) a very tall, very unusual young woman he happens to meet at the house of his friend, George Mouse, who is Alice’s cousin. Invited to meet the family at Alice’s home, Smoky is given some very strange instructions on how to get there. The home in question is called Edgewood, an upstate mansion originally designed and built by Alice’s great-grandfather, John Drinkwater. Drinkwater was an architect, (in)famous for his monograph The Architecture of Country Houses, an abstruse and complicated thesis that argues for the existence of a parallel realm. Drinkwater’s theory of faerie, if I may call it that, posits that the visible world of human beings is but one ‘circle’ of the Earth’s existence, the outer ring in a concentric maze of worlds, each more magical and harder to penetrate than the last.
There are doors between worlds, Drinkwater believes, doors not everyone believes in and few will find. The further in you go, the bigger it gets.
For Alice and her sister Sophie, their magical inheritance – the ability to see fairies – is simply a part of life. For Smoky it is a troubling facet of his beloved he would rather ignore. As with all family stories, the further in you go, the more complex it gets, and though Smoky’s love for Alice and hers for him is never brought into question, that does not mean their allegiances will not be tested. Meanwhile, in the world beyond Edgewood, troubling changes are taking place. As the balance of power between kingdoms threatens to tip from light to dark, the struggle for political ascendancy in the human realm turns deadly. The repercussions are terrible, for ordinary people most of all. For Smoky and Alice’s youngest child Auberon, adrift in a New York that has become almost an alien city, the youthful quest for independence quickly becomes a struggle for ordinary survival:
It was all upside down now. At Edgewood, upstate, night held no terrors, the woods there were tame, smiling, comfortable. He didn’t know if there were any locks that still worked on the many doors of Edgewood, certainly he’d never seen any of them locked. On hot nights, he’d often slept out on open porches, or in the woods themselves, listening to the sounds and the silence. No, it was on these streets that you saw wolves, real and imagined, here you barricaded your door against whatever fearful thing might be Out There, as once the doors of woodsmen’s huts were barred; horrid stories were told of what could happen here after the sun has set; here you had the adventures, won the prizes, lost your way and were swallowed up without a trace, learned to live with the fear in your throat and snatch the treasure: this, this was the Wild Wood now, and Auberon was a woodsman.
The shattering disjuncture between the first half of Little, Big and the second brings to mind another great family chronicle, J. B. Priestley’s Time and the Conways, a 1937 stage play that follows the fortunes of a family from the years immediately after the first world war up until the eve of World War Two. In the first act, the Conway family celebrate the birthday of Kay, the eldest of the Conway children, as well as the return of Robin, who has just been demobbed. The prevailing mood is one of optimism and energy as they look towards the future and the fulfilment of cherished ambitions. The second act takes place twenty years later, and everything has changed. As the clouds of war begin to darken the horizon yet again, no one’s life has turned out as they envisaged, and the waste of potential and squandering of dreams is a palpable grief. Alan, the quieter and more reflective of the two Conway brothers, comforts Kay by explaining his theory that time is not linear, but spatial, that all time exists simultaneously and nothing good is ever truly lost.
J. B. Priestley was fascinated by time as a dramatic element, and by the theories of J. W. Dunne in particular. I first encountered Priestley’s Time Plays in a Radio 4 adaptation of Dangerous Corner in 1984, followed by a BBC production of Time and the Conways a year later. Priestley’s treatment of his themes – the treachery of time, the shifting sands of memory and the double-edged outcomes of the choices we make – had a profound effect on me, and I’m pretty sure that for me as a writer the Time Plays have left as great a mark as any other work of literature I have encountered.
Crowley’s genius in his use of fairy mythology is his insistence – like Priestley’s – of treating the two impostors of fantasy and mimesis just the same. In Priestley’s Time Plays, we see layers of time unravel as one version of the future is played off against another. We are never told, exactly, which outcome is ‘real’ – only that the potential for both exists simultaneously and is balanced on a knife-edge. In Crowley’s Little, Big, Smoky Barnable struggles to come to terms with the conflicting versions of reality experienced by himself and by his wife, Alice. Smoky sees his lack of belief as a lack, period. For Alice, the matter of belief is unimportant; what is, merely is, and time – like the concentric realms described in her great-grandfather’s magnum opus, like the theory of non-linearity described by Alan Conway – is circular and therefore infinite.
The final chapters of Little, Big, in which Crowley describes how the Drinkwater family leave the world of Edgewood and pass into another, still more secret realm, are as elusive and brilliantly imagined as anything I have encountered in the literature of faerie. But Little, Big is greater even than that. A work of deep metaphysical imagining that poses as a soap opera, a mythical perspective on our own troubled century, an examination of class and privilege, a Tale of true love(s)? Truly, the further in you go, the bigger it gets…
June 10th sees the publication of my fourth novel The Good Neighbours. By way of celebration, I’m going to be posting an essay a week through the month of June under the #FolkloreThursday hashtag, delving into the magic and mystery of the fairy mythology that forms one of the book’s defining strands. To begin, I’m going to cast an eye over humanity’s timeless obsession with the fairy world, as well as sharing a handful of my own favourite fairy fictions.
*
Most
of us learn about fairies at an early age. It seems strange, when you think
about it as an adult, that our parents and grandparents, from whom we most
commonly hear our first fairy tales, are so eager to impart to their young
children stories of an eldritch otherworld that might swallow them forever. A
secret kingdom that exists in tandem with our own, from which magical beings
might emerge to visit us, to spy on us as we sleep, to trick us into dangerous
behaviours or, on occasion, to steal us for themselves. What were they thinking? we might ask ourselves now, even as we
ourselves pass on similar stories to our own best friends, cousins, step-brothers,
children or children’s children. Because fairy tales are strange tales,
designed to give us pause for thought, structured to demand our deeper
engagement with what we really believe, parables that teach us, more than
anything, that appearances can be deceptive, that the world we see before us
may be more than it seems. Such duality can be frightening. It teaches us that
our human lives are built on shifting sands.
I
loved – no, rather, I was obsessed with fairy stories from the time I could
first understand them. Happy to consume dark, sordid tales such as The Snow
Queen and Rumpelstiltskin alongside Arthur Rackham’s rapturous fairy paintings,
Enid Blyton’s Your Book of Fairy Stories and Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower
Fairies of the Garden, my first encounter with fairies in the real world came
with the loss of my first milk tooth, and my parents’ immediate insistence that
I offer it as a gift to the tooth fairy. You might get a reward, they hinted,
and I can still remember the excitement I felt, slipping my hand beneath the
pillow as I awoke, the feel of that bright piece of silver, different somehow
from other money and what with that nagging mystery tugging at my brain – how
on Earth could anyone get that coin under my pillow without waking me up? – it never
occurred to eight-year-old me to wonder what
were the fairies doing with all the teeth?? If I were to consider the
question now, the story I would tell would have something to do with biological
data capture, with the fairies’ collating of human code for nefarious purposes.
And we give it over voluntarily, you see, that’s the horror of it. Our
children’s DNA, sold for a shilling…
You
can see how my imagination is apt to fly away with me, how the subject of
fairies still exercises its mystical allure. As a writer, what I love about the
fairy world is its dark ambiguity. Even as children, we learn that fairies
grant wishes but they also throw curses, that lurking behind every fairy
godmother is a bad fairy at the christening. Be careful what you wish for, in
other words, and a deeper, more considered dive into fairy mythology reveals
that the fair folk are neither good nor bad, only themselves. We humans are the
alien invaders, clod-hopping beasts in a numinous realm we cannot hope to
safely navigate, or understand.
I
believe in fairies as the imaginative embodiment of the unknown, the kingdom we
enter in dreams or glimpse at twilight from the corner of an eye, the promise
inherent in all of art that there are other worlds than these. At a more
prosaic level, fairies are symbolic of the fact that we often fail to notice
what is under our noses. My first published story ‘The Beachcomber’ might be
classified as a piece of fairy fiction. ‘Fairy Skulls’, written ten years after
that, identifies itself. My fourth novel, The
Good Neighbours, started out as a mystery novel loosely inspired by a
family murder in the West Country. It was not until I began writing about
Johnny Craigie, the taciturn carpenter who everyone has pegged as a murderer
but who might just be a genius, that the little people – the Good Neighbours of
the novel’s title – began inveighing themselves into the narrative, and I
realised I had embarked upon a journey still more difficult and more mysterious
than the one I’d first imagined.
It
was almost as if I’d been tricked – pixie-led – into writing The Good
Neighbours, as if the fair folk themselves were demanding to be included in
what turned out to be, after all, their story.
Over
the next few weeks I will be delving deeper into fairy mythology, exploring
more of the works and ideas that make these stories so compelling and so perennial.
In the meantime, I will leave you in the company of five of my favourite works
of fairy fiction – disturbing and beguiling in equal measure, these are books
to spirit you away to another world.
The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue. This 2006 novel tells the story of a boy who is taken from his home by fairies and forced to become one of a gang of changelings. These wayward creatures mature in mind as the years pass, though their bodies remain frozen in childhood, at the moment of their abduction. Henry Day, or Aniday as he is rechristened, roams the countryside in search of food and shelter, becoming increasingly forgetful of his human self. Meanwhile, the changeling left behind in his place begins to develop memories of a time before his abduction, when he had a place and a rightful future in the world of humans. Chilling, beautiful and poetic, Donohue’s novel was inspired by Yeats’s poem ‘The Stolen Child’, a magnificent piece of fairy fiction in its own right.
The Iron Dragon’s Daughter by Michael
Swanwick.
Jane is a human slave in a dragon factory managed by elves (which is all you
need to know, right?) After forging a relationship with one of the sentient
machines, she bands together with some other changelings and plots their
escape. Released into a world of unstable factions and multitudinous dangers,
Jane travels deep inside the fairy realm in pursuit of her true identity and
ultimate purpose. Swanwick’s exploration of fairy mythology is dark and original
and desperately real, made all the more frightening by the glimpses of our own
world – Jane’s world – that are briefly offered up to us before being ripped
away. The Iron Dragon’s Daughter is simultaneously a thrilling adventure and a
philosophical investigation of reality itself.
The Good People by Hannah Kent. Kent’s second novel has its roots firmly in historical reality as we meet Nora Leahy, an Irish countrywoman who inherits the care of her grandson Micheal when her daughter tragically dies. Once a healthy, well developed child, the little boy who comes to live with her seems utterly changed, and utterly impervious to Nora’s desperate attempts to love and care for him. Convinced that her real grandson has been replaced by a fairy changeling, Nora enlists the help of Nance Roche, a local wisewoman, in forcing the fairies to return the boy. The results are horrific and disastrous for both women. Kent’s use of language in summoning a world of rural isolation – a world in which ancient beliefs and superstitions have as much influence on people’s everyday lives as the weather and the local priest – is a miraculous intersection between the keenly observed and the fearfully imagined. Most of all, her summoning of changeling mythology as a tool with which to interrogate the entrenched misogyny of the period makes The Good People an essential work of feminism as well as a cornerstone of fairy literature. I reviewed the book for Strange Horizons here.
Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng. An original
and marvellous twist on the missionaries in space trope, Under the Pendulum Sun
gives us missionaries in fairyland. Laon Helstone has journeyed deep into
Arcadia, the kingdom of the fae, in search of new understanding and new
converts. Nothing has been heard from Laon in some time, and so his sister
Catherine, desperate for news of him, decides to follow in his footsteps. Arriving
at the castle of Gethsemane, Catherine finds herself a virtual prisoner, with
the mansion’s strange and secretive inhabitants reluctant to reveal even the
smallest amount of information about the whereabouts and wellbeing of her
absent brother. Ng’s novel is one of the most interesting and well achieved
fantasy debuts since Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, drawing
on classic gothic tropes, the lives and literature of the Bronte sisters as
well as philosophy and theology to deliver a story that is striking in its
literary ambition and in places genuinely chilling.
The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox. A modern, sharp-eyed take on some classic tropes, Knox’s epic takes us on a journey that sees the fairy realm invaded by demons with our own world held to ransom. Taryn Cornick is still desperately grieving for her dead sister. She believes Beatrice was murdered – but has no idea why. She especially has no idea about the finer details of her own past, or the true nature of the house at Prince’s Gate, from which all her most precious memories ultimately stem. Knox’s fairyland can be a dangerous place, but then so can our own world, and as Taryn struggles to overcome her own demons she is not always a safe person to be around. The Absolute Book is a rich and complex achievement, a new masterwork of fantasy, which I reviewed for the Guardian here.
Just a reminder that I will be discussing my new novel The Good Neighbours as part of the Stay At Home Literature Festival at 7 pm this coming Monday, April 26th. You can book your Zoom invite here, and the good news is not only are tickets free, but they’ll give you access to the whole festival!
The event I’m taking part in is entitled The Scene of the Crime, and my fellow panelists are William Shaw and Rebecca Wait. William’s most recent novel The Trawlerman is a compelling murder-mystery set in and around Dungeness, on the Kent coast. I visited Dungeness many times while I was living in Hastings and it is wonderful to see this unique landscape being brought so vividly to life in William’s excellently plotted, skilfully told story. Rebecca’s most recent novel Our Fathers is set on a Hebridean island and centres itself upon a shocking act of murder within a small community. Becky evokes the island landscape and sensibility with sensitivity and insight and the story she has to tell is powerfully dark.
William, Becky and I will be talking about our various approaches to writing place, the importance of landscape in fiction and what attracts us to the mystery and crime genres. It should be a great discussion, so consider yourself invited!
Do check out the rest of the festival, too. There are some incredible writers taking part, and this is a unique opportunity to listen to their stories from the comfort of your own armchair. See you there!
The Art of Space Travel and Other Stories is a collection of my shorter fiction, bringing together stories written over the past two decades. None of these stories have been published together in the same place before. Some are being reprinted for the first time since they first appeared in my debut collection A Thread of Truth back in 2007. Others were originally published in small-circulation magazines and so have been hard to find. There is one brand new story, written in 2019 and appearing here in print for the first time.
The Art of Space Travel will be published on September 7th by the wonderful team at Titan Books. I shall be posting a full table of contents and more details closer to the release date, but in the meantime I have the pleasure of sharing with you the quite wonderful cover art, created for the collection by Julia Lloyd. For me, it sums up the mood and direction of the collection perfectly, and I could not be more thrilled by it. I am looking forward very much to sharing the stories themselves with you later in the year.
