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Month: October 2016

The elephant in the room

As part of his recent book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, novelist Amitav Ghosh recently expressed his concern that climate change as a subject matter is not being adequately covered or even taken seriously by ‘serious’ novelists:

In a substantially altered world, when sea-level rise has swallowed the Sundarbans and made cities such as Kolkata, New York and Bangkok uninhabitable, when readers and museum-goers turn to the art and literature of our time, will they not look, first and most urgently, for traces and portents of the altered world of their inheritance? And when they fail to find them, what can they do other than to conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognising the realities of their plight? Quite possibly, then, this era, which so congratulates itself on its self-awareness, will come to be known as the time of the Great Derangement.

He goes on to assert that the bulk of the literature that enjoys critical ascendancy today is indeed a literature of concealment, the skill of its writers directed towards foregrounding quotidian ultra-realism at the expense of more extraordinary and therefore less realistic narrative events, that the art of the modern novel is all about filler material:

It is thus that the novel takes its modern form, through “the relocation of the unheard-of toward the background … while the everyday moves into the foreground”. As Moretti puts it, “fillers are an attempt at rationalising the novelistic universe: turning it into a world of few surprises, fewer adventures, and no miracles at all”.

It’s a fascinating theory, and would be all the more fascinating, perhaps, if it had a greater basis in reality. The science fiction reader and writer will rightly take issue with Ghosh, reeling off an ever-expanding list of novels from the past decade and much further back than that in which climate change is the fulcrum, the driver, the core subject matter. That Ghosh has specifically chosen to exclude science fiction from the debate is both weird and frustrating. ‘When I try to think of writers whose imaginative work has communicated a more specific sense of the accelerating changes in our environment, I find myself at a loss’, Ghosh writes. He can think of only a handful of novelists – Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan and TC Boyle chief among them – that have engaged with the subject directly. Moreover:

It could even be said that fiction that deals with climate change is almost by definition not of the kind that is taken seriously: the mere mention of the subject is often enough to relegate a novel or a short story to the genre of science fiction. It is as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel.

Ghosh seems very preoccupied with the concept of ‘seriousness’, as well he might be. But is Johanna Sinisalo’s The Blood of Angels truly a less ‘serious’ novel than Rachel Cusk’s Transit? Is J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World less worthy of literary analysis than Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils? As a proposition, this is clearly ridiculous, and leads one to wonder exactly what Ghosh – himself a previous winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award – is trying to say here. That literary fiction of a certain stripe does not see fit to concern itself much with current affairs, perhaps? He goes on to present another mildly diverting theory: that ‘serious’ writers are themselves imaginatively imprisoned by the assumptions and material trappings of our toxic, carbon-emitting global economy, that they have driven themselves (literally) into a place of such complicity that overt criticism or even discussion has become impossible. While it may be true that anyone living within a society and not actively campaigning against the injustices it supports is complicit with it to an extent, as Ghosh himself concedes, most contemporary writers across a wide variety of backgrounds and literary interests point precisely to climate change (alongside racism, social inequality and the obduracy of the political class) as the subject that most preoccupies them on a daily and often hourly basis.

No. What concerns Ghosh most seems grounded within this concept of seriousness, the perceived suitability of climate change as a subject for serious fiction. It’s fine for writers to talk about climate change in interview or other forms of non-fiction, Ghosh maintains, but write a novel about it and you’ll be given the side-eye by the broadsheet critics or – worse still – no eye at all:

To introduce such happenings into a novel is in fact to court eviction from the mansion in which serious fiction has long been in residence; it is to risk banishment to the humbler dwellings that surround the manor house – those generic out-houses that were once known by names such as the gothic, the romance or the melodrama, and have now come to be called fantasy, horror and science fiction.

Ghosh’s essay is, as one would expect, thoughtful, concerned and well meaning. But once one begins to deconstruct it, one cannot help wondering why he didn’t go one step further and ask himself what this mansion of his actually stands for, and whether the reverence he affords it might not be part of the problem? If the ‘serious’ fiction he so desperately wants climate change to be ‘acceptable’ to as a subject matter has not always been conservative, reflective of societal norms rather than challenging to them? Whether it is hailed as serious by establishment elites precisely because it is happy to be non-confrontational, shunted off down the side-streets of political relevance, to write about the past rather than the future?

Ghosh talks about a ‘feedback loop’, a chicken-and-egg situation in which climate change is not deemed serious as a subject matter ergo few serious novelists write about it ergo it is not deemed serious etc etc etc  What he does not acknowledge is that in writing this essay, he is himself contributing to a feedback loop that dismisses science fiction literature as inherently generic, not-serious, and therefore unworthy of consideration within the context of this discussion. That by concentrating his attentions upon an area of literature that is at least partially susceptible to propping up outmoded and often damaging value systems, he is himself playing into the hands of the ‘men at the mansion’ who must, after all, find it pretty convenient to see works of literature that seek actively to question our current code of values and their impact upon our planet dismissed as a bunch of hacks writing about aliens.

The solution, for serious writers, is to stop hammering on the mansion door and have a look at what’s going on beyond the electronic barrier fence.

The serious fiction about climate change Ghosh is seeking is in plentiful supply, growing in breadth and complexity all the time. If only Ghosh could shift the goalposts of his ‘seriousness’, he would see that immediately.

(If anyone wants me, I’ll be in the out-house writing ghost stories.)

A second blitz

At the end of the eighties, I spent a couple of months working as a room attendant at the Rougement Hotel on Queen Street, Exeter. I was living in a shared house on Old Tiverton Road at the time, and one of my friends from that house share was doing the same kind of work at the Royal Clarence. My friend was slightly better paid (because it was the Clarence, natch) but I stuck it out at the Rougement because I started and finished earlier, which meant I had a significant part of the day left over for reading and writing. I remember my friend having a right laugh at the way I always insisted on walking to and from work dressed in my chambermaid’s uniform, little white apron and all. She always changed in and out of her normal clothes at the hotel. I insisted I didn’t want to run the risk of having my stuff nicked while I was on site. Those were the days…

That was a difficult summer for me in many ways, with the hotel work – unforgiving and badly paid as it was – providing a weird oasis of humour and stability. The swapped anecdotes, the sometimes outlandish behaviour of some of the guests, the even more outlandish behaviour of some of the other people who worked there – these were things we had in common, my friend and I, and coming back off shift there was always some new and outrageous happening to talk about, which helped take my mind off other stuff that was going on.

Whenever I travel into Exeter these days, I come out of the station directly opposite the hotel that used to be the Rougement, and I usually make a point of walking past the Clarence too, at some point during the day, just to say hello, to reaffirm that tie. I was in Exeter on Thursday, having lunch with another friend, someone I’ve known for twenty years and who shared a large part of my time living and working in the city through the 1990s and early 2000s. We’d arranged to meet at midday, so I spent the hour before that doing some shopping and just walking around, having a look at things. Immediately prior to meeting my friend, I passed through the High Street branch of Waterstone’s and out into Cathedral Yard.  I walked past the Clarence, consciously thinking how gorgeous she was looking, glanced in at the window of Caines brasserie, remembering a jazz gig I went to there once, remembering a day last December when I peeped in through that same window at more or less the same time of day. Cathedral Green is a place of such stillness, even when it’s packed. There is an atmosphere there that is only to be found in truly old, continuously inhabited places, usually in cities, a sense of continuity and of all points in time being simultaneously present in a single moment.

In the early hours of Friday morning, the Royal Clarence hotel caught fire. More than twenty-four hours later, she is still blazing, with the fire now having spread to other historic buildings in the near vicinity. The landscape of the city, which seemed only relatively recently to be fully recovered not just from the depredations of the Blitz but from the equally horrendous planning decisions foisted upon it through the fifties and sixties, is now irreparably changed. I feel devastated and heartsick. Exeter did not deserve this. We can only hope that the rebuilding that takes place in the aftermath shows appropriate respect for the city’s heritage and for what has been lost.

Thinking of all those directly affected today, and of the emergency services currently working to contain the damage.

#weird2016: Lanark by Alasdair Gray

lanark-gray“What’s worth saying, three decades on, is that Lanark , in common with all great books, is still, and always will be, an act of resistance. It is part of the system of whispers and sedition and direct communion, one voice to another, we call literature. Its bravery in finding voice, in encouraging the enormous power of public, national, artistic, sexual and political imagination, is not something to take for granted.”

(Janice Galloway, ‘Glasgow Belongs to Us‘, The Guardian 2002)

In the Epilogue to Lanark, which can be found somewhere towards the latter quarter of this behemoth text, Gray directly references both Orwell’s 1984 and Koestler’s Darkness at Noon – ‘mostly conversations between disappointed Socialists’ – as key influences upon the novel. As Darkness at Noon, which I read at least four times between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one, was the work that most influenced me away from dogmatic socialism, and 1984, which I read for the first time probably in the very same year I first read Darkness at Noon, was one of the key works that introduced me to the vast radical intellectual potential of science fiction, Gray’s direct-to-reader irruption into his own novel raised more than a frisson of fellow feeling.

Lanark is so much more than this, though – so much more than excited underlining of key passages and thinking bloody hell, this could have been written yesterday. Interwoven with and inseparable from the blistering political commentary on our own times – and yes, Lanark truly is so prescient, so relevant to today’s political crisis it feels newly minted – are passages of such emotional and imaginative power they raise the whole from the merely important to the truly great.

I loved this book. Lanark is the kind of novel one emerges from with a renewed and evangelical appreciation of what writing is for.

*

In his engaging and candid introduction to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Lanark, the novelist William Boyd describes his first encounter with the monster – he was commissioned to review it for the TLS when it was first published – and recalls his confusion regarding the novel’s fantastical elements:

“I know now why I didn’t respond with wholehearted enthusiasm to the allegorical story of Lanark in the city of Unthank. I was positioning myself, as all writers unconsciously do – and particularly as a first novelist whose first novel had just been published — using criticism of others to evaluate and proclaim what I myself stood for. I was and am a realistic novelist and I felt strongly then that fable, allegory, surrealism, fantasy, magic realism and the rest were not my literary cup of tea.  But I think that in my 1981 review I unconsciously prefigured aspects of my recent, late reading of the book.  The structure of Lanark – the small naturalistic novel embedded in a large eclectic one – is, it seems to me now, precisely the reason for the book’s enduring success.  I realize now that, for Alasdair Gray, the last thing on earth he wanted to achieve in Lanark was to write, and be hailed for writing, ‘a minor classic of the literature of adolescence’…[That] could never have been enough: every ambition that Gray had for his long-gestating book obliged him to create something larger, more complex, more difficult, more alienating. Gray needed the overarching machinery of allegory and fable to make Lanark transcend its origins.”

A fair enough analysis, one might think, and at least experience has brought Boyd a deeper understanding of Gray’s intentions. Yet – like so many writers and critics who disdain the fantastic or at the least entertain grave suspicions about its fitness to be included within the canon of ‘great literature’ – we still see Boyd stumbling about, stubbing his toe on concepts such as ‘allegory’ and ‘fable’, reminding us in the process of much of the inept debate that attended the publication of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant just a year or two ago.

Personally, I think it’s a mistake to view Lanark in terms of it being split into two ‘realistic’ books and two ‘science fiction’ books. The point and the glory of Lanark – and of much of the greatest science fiction – is that the two are inseparable. One of the most powerful passages in the entire novel – Duncan Thaw’s descent into madness at the end of the ‘realistic’, Glasgow-set Book 4 – bleeds seamlessly into the wire and workings of the nightmarish dystopia of Glasgow’s shadow-self, the city of Unthank. Thaw is Lanark, Lanark Thaw. There is little to be gained in seeking to pigeonhole them and certainly not clarity. Towards the end of this sequence, Glasgow begins to morph very visibly into Unthank: the scant trickle of river, the towering municipal building, the ‘tomb-rotten pile’ of the necropolis:

He remembered a stone-built city of dark tenements and ornate public buildings, a city with a square street plan and electric tramcars…but below a starless sky this city was coldly blazing. Slim poles as tall as the spire cast white light upon the lanes and looping bridges of another vast motorway. On each side shone glass and concrete towers over twenty floors high with lights on top to ward off aeroplanes. Yet this was Unthank, though the old streets between towers and motor lanes had a half-erased look, and blank gables stood behind spaces cleared for car parks.

There is a sense of utter desolation and loss, the sense of life and creative freedom slipping away under the foul iron hand of central planning, monetary imperatives, coercive control.  When talks are prepared and essays are written about the key works of social science fiction written in Britain over the past hundred years – works that have come to define our science fiction century – we are all used to hearing about Brave New World and 1984, Lord of the Flies and The Island of Dr Moreau. We are less used to hearing about Lanark. which seems to me to be a dire and almost laughable oversight. Lanark is a towering achievement in terms of its creative expression, its social comment but also its science fiction. Gray seizes the levers of science fiction with an uncanny natural ability, driving the machine forward with instinct and purpose. Gray is no science fiction tourist. He makes himself a part of the conversation not by covertly seeking admittance but by barrelling into the room and raising a storm. His science fiction feels intense and sophisticated – a polemic in the European tradition of argument-making and ideas-formation – and yet at the same time urgent, rough-hewn, so raw it is bloody.

*

Again and again, Duncan/Lanark finds himself crushed beneath the absolute incompatibility of creativity and capitalism, freedom of thought and the money-making impulse. At its heart, Lanark is a portrait of the artist as a young man – another of the key texts referenced directly by Gray in his crafty (and very funny – Lanark is funny, folks) Epilogue.  As every serious artist before him, Duncan Thaw has first to win the trust and admiration of the system before rejecting it utterly:

“This exam is endangering an important painting. It would be blasphemy to waste my talent making frivolous decorations for a non-existent liner. But I see your difficulty. You must uphold the art school, while I am upholding art. The solution is simple. Do not award me this diploma. I promise not to feel offended. The diploma is useless, except to folk who want to be teachers.”

This realisation – that like every great artist he is essentially on his own in uncharted territory – is both exhilarating and terrifying. In one of my favourite passages in Lanark, Duncan Thaw feels furious with an art school assignment – ‘Washing Day’ – for being so tame, so lacking in relevance, that he is minded not to attempt it. Then he finds himself swept along, subverting the notion of quaintness in a stark, ecstatic expression of his own vision, his own Glasgow:

His pen paused above the page then descended and sketched the tree on Sauchiehall Lane, making it larger, and leafless, and among the tenements and back greens of Riddrie. Around it three dwarfish housewives were stretching ropes between iron clothes poles, and he drew them from a memory of a home help who had looked after the house while his mother was dying. They wore headscarves, men’s boots, and big aprons covered their chests and skirts giving them a sexless, surgical look. At the top of the picture the tree’s highest branch stuck into a strip of sky among the tenement chimneys. He remembered a Blake engraving of a grey ocean with an arm sticking out of a wave, the hand clutching at the empty sky. Another Blake engraving showed a tiny pair of lovers watching a small frenzied figure set foot on a ladder so thin and high that the top rested in the sickle of a moon. A caption said, “I want! I want!” Thaw drew a moon in the sky above the treetop.

*

Lanark is a simple and in some ways familiar story: a young boy growing up in Glasgow in the years after the second world war discovers he is unlike other boys, that he loves reading and painting. To the consternation of his parents and teachers, he refuses to let his creative ambition be defined by the demands of a system geared towards making money. Thaw goes to college and there begins to find friends who are at least partially of the same mind, though his continuing difficulties in forming relationships with the opposite sex, coupled with chronic illness and an obsessive, irascible temperament, combine to plunge him into a spiral of depression and poor physical health from which he fails ultimately to escape. Thaw dies tragically, in a kind of accidental suicide, and then seems to pass into a hell that proves to be nothing more than a starker, darker portrayal of the world he has left.

Is Unthank one of Duncan’s murals, a kind of John Martin-like vista of horror revealing the corruption and wrongheadedness of the contemporary political landscape? Is Unthank a warning – a doomsday scenario – or merely an accurate depiction of the world as we currently experience it? Alasdair Gray’s Lanark has been described as the novel that kickstarted the Scottish literary renaissance – James Kelman, Alan Warner, Janice Galloway and Irvine Welsh all cite him as a life-changing influence. Scotland’s makar, Jackie Kay, insists that it was meeting and talking with Alasdair Gray as a teenager that gave her the confidence to think of herself as ‘a writer’. We should also note that it was an Englishman and a science fiction writer – Anthony Burgess – who first hailed Lanark as ‘a shattering work of fiction in the modern idiom’.

Lanark is important to Scotland, important to science fiction, important to modernism. It is novels of of such passionate ambition that reinvigorate the whole idea of literature for a new generation. Some of them – Lanark, for example – will continue to do so, for one generation after another.

Simple twist of fate

I’ve always credited T. S. Eliot with opening my eyes to the possibilities of pure language, but really it was Bob Dylan.

I’ve always been obsessed by song lyrics, in that they have always mattered to me, as much as the music itself. Many a superb melody has been ruined for me – for good – on my becoming aware of the banal or derivative nature of the words that have been set to it. Whereas few things are as spontaneously thrilling as a poem of powerful originality and linguistic invention that happens to have musical notes of equal intelligence and loveliness attached.

When I first read T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land at age 14, it felt and sounded like music to me, and that was how I understood it, that was how I began to learn that words could exist outside of their literal meaning. Being driven from one place to another in the back of my father’s car – we did a lot of driving as a family – and hearing Bob Dylan (though I didn’t know who he was at the time, not at the beginning) on home-recorded cassette tapes had a similar effect. Though I wasn’t able to analyse it like that, I just knew his words obsessed me. Frightened me even – some of the stuff he was singing about seemed pretty dark. When I didn’t perfectly understand what he was singing about – which was most of the time back then – I made up my own interior movies to run alongside the lyrics.

I made sense of his stories by creating stories of my own.

Bob Dylan is a poet and he defines our century. I remember back when I was an undergraduate, there was a big debate raging in academe about whether the lyrics of Bob Dylan should have a place on the ‘A’ Level English syllabus. I remember feeling doubtful – could Dylan stand with Eliot, with Pound, with Plath? Should he be allowed to? How foolish was I.

Dylan is our conscience, our fire, our life-changing road trip. No one puts words together and breaks them apart quite like he does, and most likely never will again. He understands the raw stuff of words as well as he understands what words can say. Dylan also has the distinction of being the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature who has most likely touched more people, in more countries of the world, than any other recipient of that honour to date.

Good call.

Strange Horizons needs YOU!

We are now in the final week of the annual Strange Horizons fund drive. In case anyone needs reminding, Strange Horizons is run entirely from reader donations, and all its staff are employed on a volunteer basis. I happen to think that Strange Horizons – now in its sixteenth year – still rates as one of the most progressive, challenging and all-round excellent speculative fiction magazines on the scene, and I would encourage you to support it in any way you can, either by donating or just by spreading the word.

Strange Horizons is stuffed full of excellent writing, so it’s difficult to pick favourites, but among this past year’s highlights I would select:

FICTION: Applied Cenotaphics in the Long, Long Longitudes by Vajra Chandrasekera

REVIEWS: The Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist by Abigail Nussbaum, The Queen of the Night by Alexander Chee, reviewed by Catherine Rockwood, If Then and The Destructives by Matthew de Abaitua, reviewed by Andy Sawyer, The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle, reviewed by Vajra Chandrasekera

ARTICLES: SF is the Genre of the City – an interview with Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay by Eli Lee and Gautum Bhatia, A Writing Life by Johanna Sinisalo

POETRY: little stomach by Charlotte Geater

As I say, it seems unfair to pick out favourites, given that the success and longevity of Strange Horizons is rooted in the magazine as a whole, in its progressive ethos and the combined commitment of its contributors. There’s never been a better time to donate. No amount is too small!

Updates

I’ve been away for most of the past fortnight, firstly at FantasyCon in Scarborough, then for a week in Scotland, which is getting to be a habit with us. I haven’t felt this way about a landscape since visiting Tasmania (more than two years ago now, believe it or not) and I have the feeling we’ll be heading back there before too long.

Reading material for this time away consisted of Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser, which fired me up more than anything I’ve read since Roberto Bolano’s The Third Reich: a rivetingly obnoxious, hilariously frustrating book that wilfully buries its story – an obsessive, a suicide, a murder house, an incestuous affair, a pernicious musical rivalry – beneath a farrago of spite. The rapier-bright, uncompromising intelligence of the narrator, who is also a complete arsehole, gave me everything I yearn towards in fiction, reminding me in weird and wonderful ways of other touchstone works: Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Mann’s Doktor Faustus.

Superbly translated (by Jack Dawson) too. I must read more Bernhard.

Meanwhile, I’m currently reading Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, which has been on my ‘to read’ list for ages. So far? I am in love with it.

Work is steadily progressing on a new novel. The madder it gets, the happier I feel.

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