Chris delivered The Adjacent to Simon Spanton of Gollancz at the end of last week and I’m really missing it! For the past two years I’ve had the privilege of living with this novel, unfolding in the background of everything I do. When you’re close to someone and you love their work, you can’t help but take that work into yourself, acclimatise yourself to it so that it comes to feel like a natural part of your working environment. Now it feels like a favourite music I’ve had playing on repeat has been switched off.

But the book is magnificent. Last week was my first opportunity to read it from beginning to end, chronologically and in order. It’s an extraordinary work, perhaps Chris’s most wide ranging and powerful to date. And as Blackadder might have said, that’s up against some pretty stiff competition. The cumulative impact of the text as it reveals itself is immense. This book will, I feel, surprise and astound anyone who comes into contact with it.

So last week was a pretty big deal.

Hopefully this one will be also as work on my own novel continues and intensifies. I’m now, let’s see, almost 46,000 words into the second draft, well into Part Two and feeling good about it. Writing this book has been rather like trying to get comfortable in bed – not easy when your mind is in constant overdrive and the slightest sound can wake you but when you finally manage it you know it feels right. I now feel I know this book. Even if never entirely in control, I feel comfortable with what I’m doing. Perhaps this is why, after almost a year working on it, the book finally has a title.

The novel is called What Happened to Maree.

I read Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home and felt disappointed. The premise appealed to me so much, but in the event what I found was a slight book, rather akin – in effect if not in subject matter – to last year’s Booker winner, Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. At a sentence level, Swimming Home was finely worked and well above average. But in spite of everything Tom McCarthy says in his intro I found both the subject matter and its treatment bafflingly conventional, and the sketchy characterisation uncomfortably incapable of supporting the weight of significance placed upon it. Which was all a bit of a shame. The last chapter was the best.

I am now reading Roberto Bolano’s The Third Reich, and loving every word of it. That man is my idol. I so need to watch and learn….