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Layers of meaning

March 11, 2012 /

Whether we like it or not, the net is rewiring our reading habits. As Benjamin said, the novel, as it exists, cannot contain the threat from the form that is greater than it: information. If it is to be relevant at all, the novel must break into new hybrids and leave the 19th-century segregation of fact, fiction, memoir and essay behind. The novel must let the world in and speak through the many forms that the world already speaks through. (Ewan Morrison in The Guardian)

I’ve been thinking about this article all week. Summarised in the quote above, Morrison’s argument – and it’s not just his, it’s been going on for ages – states that the ‘traditional’ linear narrative work of fiction is doomed in the internet age, that our ‘hopping from screen to screen’, as Morrison puts it, has changed not only the way we read but also the kind of fiction we are interested in reading.

I’m kind of with him. The great philosophical novels of nineteenth century Russia formed the bedrock of my literary education. They shaped my thinking and to some extent my personality. I’ll never regret a moment spent reading them. But now as a reader and as a writer I am finding that I prefer fiction that has some interface with the world – whichever world that may be – beyond the pages of the book. In the last five years or so I’ve noticed a distinct shift in the kind of novels I like to read, which has reflected itself in the kind of fiction I’m trying to write, and back again and vice versa. It’s rare these days for me to pick up a novel that is ‘just’ a story and feel wholly satisfied by it. I used to believe it was bad form, a gross discourtesy, to abandon a novel once I’d started to read it; more recently I’ve found myself reluctant to plough on with a book once it becomes clear to me that I’m not going to gain much by it. This is something I rather regret, but is nonetheless true. Novels I’ve abandoned have often been competently written and engaging on the story level at least – but they’ve been lacking in what I’d call creative nutrition.

I like a text that is self-aware. I like a book that talks back.

Where I differ from Morrison though is that I don’t wholly attribute these changes in my preferences to the arrival in my life of the internet. If you read the whole of Morrison’s article (which I strongly recommend because it’s excellent) you’ll see that many of the works he cites as examples of the ‘fracturing’ of the traditional linear novel date from before the modern computer age truly began and certainly before the internet became ubiquitous. Milan Kundera published The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in 1979. Douglas Coupland’s Generation X came out in 1991. We might also mention D. M. Thomas’s 1981 novel The White Hotel, and the ‘document in the form of a novel’ it so shamelessly ripped off, Anatoli Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar, first published in 1966.  Further examples of ‘factual fiction’ are Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1980), Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), Hugo’s Les Miserables (1862) and Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851). None of these guys had iPads or worried about whether their readers were suffering from screen-hopping-related ADD or not. They just wanted to try new things, to push fiction as far as it would go and see what happened.

And it’s not just the writers. Kids take to gaming and social networking more or less instantly but when it comes to reading they are more likely to begin their adventures in fiction with Harry Potter than with William Burroughs. Fiction takes time, and literary taste takes time to develop. In spite of any changes the internet might have made to the way we spend our leisure hours, the majority of book readers still prefer traditional linear narratives because that is what they are used to and therefore feel most comfortable with. You only have to look at this year’s Orange Prize longlist to see how the traditional novel still dominates the literary establishment. Of the twenty writers selected, only two (Ali Smith and A. L. Kennedy) show a consistent interest in literary form – how as opposed to what – and Helen Oyeyemi, whose novel Mr Fox presents one of 2011’s most gorgeously daring experiments in structure, is yet again conspicuous by her absence. (I note with dismay that the chair of this year’s Orange is Joanna Trollope….)

Those who seek out newer forms of fiction are likely to do so not because their brains have somehow been altered by too much screen time but because they are actively interested in how the traditional medium of literature reacts and changes when faced with the encroachment into its territory of new media. They enjoy the internet as theory as well as practice. The readers and writers who gain most inspiration and enjoyment from new forms of writing are not necessarily the most media savvy; they are more likely to be the most intellectually curious – in other words, precisely those same people who would have been galvanized by Moby-Dick a century ago.

One of the things I love most about SF is that by its very nature it has already called the traditional novel into doubt. By presenting the reader with the unexpected – with fact that might be fiction and vice versa – it has already confounded reader expectations, added an extra layer of significance to the experience of reading it. It’s no surprise then to discover that some of the greatest literary innovators – Dick, Strugatskys, Lem, Ballard, Gibson, Priest, (M. John) Harrison, (Steve) Erickson, Coupland, Tidhar – are to be found at the borderlands of slipstream and SF.

I’m guessing that some readers will have discounted Ewan Morrison’s article as simply one more unwelcome pronouncement that ‘the novel is dead’. I found what was said here not only interesting and relevant but inspirational. We can debate the reasons for change and enjoy doing so, but what is important is the change itself, the pushing forward. Like I say, I’ve been thinking about this all week.

Guessing the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2012

March 3, 2012 /

On Monday of this week, the good people at Torque Control launched their by now traditional annual contest to guess the shortlist of the Arthur C. Clarke Award by selecting from the list of all eligible submissions. This year there are sixty novels in contention, and here is my shortlist of six:

Dead Water Simon Ings

The End Specialist Drew Magary

The Islanders Christopher Priest

The Testament of Jessie Lamb Jane Rogers

Osama Lavie Tidhar

The Godless Boys Naomi Wood

 

Awards tend to generate controversy. Last year saw both the biggest Booker debàcle since the inception of the prize, and the total meltdown of the British Fantasy Awards. One spectacle may have taken place on a smaller stage than the other, but in both cases the bloodletting was furious. Part of the problem seemed to be a confusion over what literary awards should be for. Last year’s Booker judges seemed to believe that novels should exist primarily for the purposes of middlebrow entertainment, while certain elements within the British Fantasy Society seemed happy to see the BFS awards reduced to a popularity contest. While the idea that anyone on the BFS committee was complicit in any actual wrongdoing was preposterous and the scapegoating of individual nominees was unfortunate and unfair, the changes to the awards system brought about by the BFS palace revolution were desirable and necessary and we will hopefully see the BFAs regaining some measure of value and credibility as a result. With the Booker I’m not so sure. The judges this year will probably be a tad more hardcore, but my guess is that the change will be short lived. The literary mainstream in this country, terrified of being charged with elitism, tends to pander to the middle ground. More and more regularly we see Booker shortlists crammed with works that fail to challenge the reader on any level. These are books that conform. It is a literature of obedience, the kind of books you can read in your lunch hour or at the airport then forget about immediately afterwards. It’s literary television.

The Clarke Award is different. There is always a genuine excitement around this time of year, not only over who is going to win, but about which books have been submitted, and what that says about the shifts and developments in speculative fiction generally. SF is not just a broad church, it is an evangelical one. Readers of speculative fiction by their very definition seek to have their assumptions challenged, and for the kind of SF writer in the running for the Clarke Award, their life’s main purpose is to use each new book to push at the boundaries of what literature can do and what words can say. As with any literary genre including the mainstream there is a conservative wing of SF, writers who seem content to give the reader more of what made them happy the last time, but they are increasingly unlikely to be in the running for the Clarke.

The Clarke has been attracting more and more attention of late. It now has its own page at the Guardian website, and several of the major literary festivals have recently included SF strands in their programmes. As more young writers step across from the mainstream, less worried about being tarred with the geek brush than Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson, happy to mix genres and break boundaries in much the same way as young composers have been eager to incorporate elements of jazz, hiphop and world music into their classical compositions, so SF finds itself becoming less typecast and ever more adventurous.

What is the Clarke Award for? As the one award that sets out specifically to reward innovation and the pushing of the literary envelope, I believe it’s the most radical award out there and therefore the most worthy of notice. Mainstream pundits who still believe that heartland SF is great when it comes to ideas but conservative and usually incompetent when it comes to literary expression and the refined use of language clearly have not read Ian McDonald or Simon Ings. Those advocates of nineteenth century realism who insist that SF has nothing to say about character or the human condition have obviously had no contact with the work of M. John Harrison or Ian R. MacLeod. Cynical postmodernists who claim that SF has no interest in literary form should have a read of Christopher Priest’s The Islanders or Steve Erickson’s The Sea Came in at Midnight.

What matters most about the Clarke is not who wins, but that it acts as a showcase for what is happening in SF now. As such, I believe it should take a pride in presenting writers who are prepared to risk themselves intellectually, stretch themselves imaginatively and hone their skills as writers to produce works of artistic originality and lasting literary power. In putting forward my own guesses at the six books that will make up this year’s Clarke Award shortlist I’ve tried to reflect these ideals. There are some interesting omissions.

The first thing you’ll probably notice is that I haven’t included China Miéville’s Embassytown on my list. Mainly this is because I was disappointed by the final third of the book. I thought the premise was intriguing, and I enjoyed the setup a great deal. I found Miéville’s working out of his ideas about truth and language to be original and on occasion genuinely beautiful. As a writer I admire Miéville’s imaginative reach and stylistic originality and I admire Embassytown because it’s a novel that was clearly intended to break new ground in SF and to a point it succeeds. However, I found the ending – a kind of ‘last battle’ that appeared to have been grafted on in an attempt to add some blood and thunder to a book that is essentially an intellectual pavane – to be rushed and unconvincing. Everything happened way too quickly and was resolved too easily. SF doesn’t demand a traditional happy ending, and I found the easy assumptions of Embassytown’s conclusion sharply at odds with the more questing, ambiguous tone of the bulk of the text. This book had the potential to be better than it finally was and I think China would have done well to recast the ending in a more ambiguous tone.

I’m an admirer of Ian R. MacLeod’s work, but I feel his decision to cast Clark Gable as the protagonist of Wake Up and Dream has his latest novel stymied somewhat. There’s some lovely writing here and the noir elements work well but you cannot escape the sense of being trapped in someone else’s joke. It’s all a bit flat on the page, and the characterisation never truly comes to life. I know this is kind of the point of it, but with regret I have to strike it from my list.

I enjoyed Nicholas Royle’s Regicide very much indeed, but the book is clearly dark fantasy and should not be included here. Helen Oyeyemi is a writer I feel deeply in sympathy with. I love her work, and Mr Fox is possibly her finest achievement to date, but once again if I had to call it anything it would be fantasy/slipstream and not SF, so I can’t elect it.

Colson Whitehead’s Zone One is elegantly written and sets out to be emotionally affecting. I started by wanting to admire this novel, but in the end I found its overly mannered, ornate style to be seriously out of keeping with its subject matter. Whichever way you look at it, you can’t get away from the fact that Zone One is just another zombie novel, a late addition to a shelf now so heavily laden it has worked itself loose from the wall and crashed into the abyss. No matter how gorgeously you dress it up, a zombie remains a zombie: a worn out horror trope that is not frightening, not interesting, and – forgive me – long dead.

As for the Stephen King, I haven’t read enough of it yet to be able to judge whether it is SFnal in any true sense of the word. From where I stand at the moment it appears to be just a portal novel – fantasy, not SF, and although I frequently cite King as being the finest storyteller alive on the planet today, I think that 11.22.63 would be the most boring choice for the Clarke ever. King hardly needs further promotion, and awarding him the prize would do nothing for SF whatsoever.

So on to my guesses. I came to Simon Ings’s Dead Water through Martin McGrath’s recommendation and I am impressed. His incisive, clear-eyed extrapolation of complex ideas, together with his dextrous use of language and imagery has a stylistic virtuosity reminiscent of Ian McDonald. The novel’s characters are shockingly alive, and with its complex, many-stranded narrative Dead Water is as well constructed and compelling as a movie by Iňárritu.

I loved Lavie Tidhar’s Osama. The concept is superb – an idea any writer would kill for. But it doesn’t stop there. Tidhar is a wonderful writer, as bold and beautiful in his use of words as he is radical and brave in his deployment of uncomfortable truths. He is an artist of intellect who is not afraid of writing from the heart, a rare and valuable combination that should be rewarded.

Jane Rogers’s The Testament of Jessie Lamb is a near-near future catastrophe novel that ably employs science fictional ideas to chart a young girl’s evolving understanding of the world she lives in. I heard Jane Rogers speaking about Jessie at the Cheltenham Literature Festival while the novel was still in its infancy, where she expressed her enthusiasm for the novels of John Wyndham, whose writing she felt as a guiding inspiration behind this book. Jessie is not remotely imitative of Wyndham, but with its involving first person narration and its close examination of a thought-provoking ‘what if?’ scenario it does have something of that addictive Wyndham vibe about it. Most of all I love its prose, which is simple, direct, and quietly poetic. It’s a clear contender.

If Jane Rogers’s book contains echoes of Wyndham, Naomi Wood’s The Godless Boys explores themes of spirituality and faith that remind me of Keith Roberts’s great 1968 novel Pavane. Like Pavane, it’s set in an alternate Britain where after bitter political upheavals religious belief has become the defining characteristic of the social order. Atheism has been outlawed, and the ‘Godless Boys’ of the title are now exiled to a remote island. Wood’s novel is sensitively written, and takes a brave step in its exploration of contentious themes. This is a debut of merit and interest and Wood herself is clearly a writer of serious intent. This book would be a worthy addition to the shortlist and the Clarke judges would do well to include it.

I started reading Drew Magary’s The End Specialist and became immediately hooked. I loved the ‘found footage’ element because I always love found footage elements and because it lent the novel a trace of the metafictional. Besides that, I happen to envy writers like Magary who are able to achieve, seemingly without effort, a style that is so natural and loosely flowing, that chatty American vernacular. Perhaps it’s simply because I can’t write like that myself. It’s the opposite of what I do and I’m jealous. It goes on the list.

People are bound to wonder whether I am able to comment objectively when it comes to Christopher Priest’s The Islanders. What I would say in reply to that is that Priest’s novels had been delighting me for many years before Chris and I met, and the qualities that made me shout about them – a prose that is limpid, beautifully crafted and a delight to read, ideas that could have come from no one else and that changed the very ground rules for what speculative fiction could aspire to, all encased within a formal perfection that makes his novels increase in power with every subsequent reading – have never been more powerfully persuasive than they are in The Islanders, and that this novel deserves to be classed as a landmark in British speculative fiction. Like all Priest’s books, it subverts the very notion of science fiction even as it delights in it, and makes us re-evaluate what we are looking for when we read SF, or indeed anything else. By deconstructing the novel, Priest makes it exciting again. I love this book!

Any or all of these six novels could have – and by God, should have – graced the Booker shortlist. They shine as literature every bit as much as they succeed as SF. It is precisely works like these that the Clarke Award exists to promote. It’s quite simply fantastic to observe how much the SF community values and is galvanised by the concept of the written word. The level of informed discussion and speculation surrounding the Clarke Award is a perennial delight to me, and our huge thanks should go out to Tom Hunter, to the Clarke judges, and to Torque Control for providing us yet again with such a marvellous forum for debate. The Clarke Award discussion thread is here, and you still have a week to post your own guesses.

The Clarke Award shortlist will be released towards the end of March, and the winner will be announced as part of SciFi London on May 2nd.

Work in progress

February 26, 2012 /

I’ve just found a CD on my shelf that I’d completely forgotten I owned, a marvellous recording of the Schnittke piano quintet and Shostakovich’s String Quartet 15, performed by the Keller Quartet with Alexei Lyubimov on piano for the Schnittke.

It’s an amazing disc – that rapturous ECM sound – but I’m even more pleased about finding it than I might normally be because it ties in so perfectly with something I’m planning to write, something that’s been taking up all my spare thoughts this weekend.

My non-spare thoughts have all been fully occupied with the novel. I’m hoping to finish the first draft of the first section tomorrow, which will have me on about 54,000 words so far. I’m guessing I’m about half way through, perhaps a little more.

The book is so different now from my original conception of it. It’s constantly evolving, which feels very natural for me. I can’t imagine being the sort of writer who plans everything in advance, chapter by chapter.

We saw a remarkable film on Monday, Sean Durkin’s tensely understated Martha Marcy May Marlene. It’s been described as a thriller, but for me the very use of that word implies the presence of certain generic tropes (hooks, twists, cliffhangers). MMMM is (mercifully) free of all of these, yet still manages to be one of the most powerfully disturbing films I have seen in some while. I came out of it with my hands bunched into fists and my nerves jumping – a side effect not entirely due to the three insanely strong cups of coffee we’d managed to rack up prior to entering the cinema.

It kills me that masterful pieces like this don’t get more coverage. I’m now looking forward to seeing Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, and Pawel Pawlikowski’s new movie The Woman in the Fifth. I’ve loved Pawlikowski’s films to date. This new one looks great.

Michael Kelly has just posted the cover art for issue 3 of his speculative fiction anthology Shadows and Tall Trees. The rather wonderful cover image is by Eric Lacombe, and the ToC will include my story ‘The Elephant Girl’. I had the idea for this piece a year or so back but it remained just a sketch until fairly recently. I’m very happy to have completed it – I hate those bits that float around on your hard drive demanding attention.

It’s odd, too, because the story’s themes kind of link back to what I was saying at the start here about my lost-and-found CD. Everything seems to be about music at the moment.

 

Phantom Cities

February 18, 2012 /

Reading about William Gibson’s Collected Essays in The Guardian this morning, I was delighted to learn that Gibson was once an obsessive collector of mechanical watches. I learned also that he had written the introduction to a monograph by Canadian photographer Greg Girard entitled Phantom Shanghai, a collection of images documenting the planned destruction of the old city and its replacement with carbuncular structures in concrete and metal.

The images chart a tumbling of empire, and I’m not talking about the last faded remnants of colonialism. The deliberate destruction of the texture, imagic language and layers-deep history and culture of this richly cosmopolitan city is, to paraphrase Gibson, almost more than one can bear to contemplate.  It’s also hard to write about without spilling story ideas. Images of forgotten cities and vanished civilizations are commonplace in fantasy novels, yet our awareness of the way these same stories are being played out in the world we now inhabit and within our lifetime is often dangerously thin. Historical fiction is supposedly today’s most popular literary genre, yet it is those stories that slip past us, hidden on the back pages of a travel supplement or broadcast, in the silent hours, on the World Service, that are most agonizing and resonant because they are ours.

Gibson’s concern with old watches and exploded hotels in the French quarter of Shanghai seems to me profoundly science fictional. Only a writer who understands the past can begin to imagine the future, which (as Gibson said) is really only the present properly observed. Great writers preserve and remember as well as invent.

It seems that fate has been nudging me in the direction of things Chinese this week. As well as Girard’s photographs I also discovered the writing of Ken Liu, in the form of his novella The Man Who Ended History: a Documentary. I loved the form of this piece. I loved the way Liu was able to take past, present and future and bind them together. The background to the piece, which I am ashamed to say I had not been aware of previously, has been haunting me all week. Liu’s story wears its science fictional content lightly and is all the better for that.

Work continues well on the novel. Absolutely the most complex thing I’ve ever tried and it’s good to have to fight for it. If I’m fighting I know I’m working to the best of my ability.

Weird experience of the week? Hearing Ian Mond and Kirstyn McDermott’s spirited discussion of The Silver Wind on their monthly podcast The Writer and the Critic. As I say, a weird experience, but good weird. Thanks, guys.

Best New Horror

February 12, 2012 /

Reading becomes more complicated when you’re a writer because you gradually discover that you can no longer ‘just’ read. I don’t mean that the pleasure of reading becomes diluted because it doesn’t – if anything it intensifies, because your focus intensifies. It is simply that whatever you read, you read it with judgement aforethought. All the time you’re asking yourself: how do they do that? Or: do I want to do that? Or: why the fuck don’t they stop doing that?? It becomes increasingly rare to be so immersed in a book that your judgement becomes temporarily suspended and you find yourself reading blind, as it were, filled with the exhilaration that comes with the discovery of something new and great.

It’s all the more thrilling therefore when it does happen, and it has happened for me this past week. I first heard about Livia Llewelyn‘s collection Engines of Desire when I read Lila Garrott’s review of it over at Strange Horizons. I was drawn to the book immediately, and finally got around to ordering it last Sunday. I don’t want to say too much here, because I’m intending to do a full write-up for my next month’s Starburst column and I like to keep my powder dry, but what I will offer is a heartfelt recommendation. This is extraordinary writing, horror fiction that redefines the genre and that I am finding profoundly inspirational. Anyone who can write a post-apocalypse story (‘Horses’) that is not only more uncompromising than Cormac McCarthy’s The Road but that comes close to equalling it in power, conviction and originality of voice demands to be read, and I am so very excited to be reading new work of this quality. I see from her blog that Livia Llewellyn is currently working on a novel – I earnestly hope the work is going well and that we can look forward to seeing FrankenNovel soon.

I’ve been working hard on the new book this week, and am feeling quietly excited by its progress. Weird things started happening last Monday, when I realised that the part of the novel I’d been redrafting wasn’t actually the beginning of the book. Since then I’ve started to write what will be the beginning, am now 12,000 words into that section and wondering why (as always) I didn’t understand what I was supposed to be doing with it up until now. The pieces are beginning to slot into place, that edgy, antsy feeling that keeps me awake at night trying to unpick the recalcitrant knots of one of my own ideas has ebbed away, and I can now begin to concentrate on getting the words down.

And to bring things full circle, I should draw your attention to a superb essay by Matthew Cheney over at Weird Fiction Review. I read this and – as with the Livia Llewellyn – felt immediately and keenly inspired. Can’t wait to read that Barry Lopez story! Thanks to Mike Harrison for highlighting this piece at his blog.

Oooh, Mildred

February 4, 2012 /

I started reading the new Stephen King last night. It’s early days – only another 700 pages to go – but right there on page 11 I came upon a paragraph that’s been hogging my attention for most of the day. The narrator Jake Epping is an English teacher. Here at the start of the book we find him marking student compositions:

The spelling in the honors essays was mostly correct, and the diction was clear (although my cautious college-bound don’t-take-a-chancers had an irritating tendency to fall back on the passive voice) but the writing was pallid. Boring. My honors kids were juniors – Mac Steadman, the department head, awarded the seniors to himself – but they wrote like little old men and little old ladies, all pursey-mouthed and ooo, don’t slip on that icy patch, Mildred.  In spite of his grammatical lapses and painstaking cursive, Harry Dunning had written like a hero. On one occasion, at least.

Epping then goes on to talk about ‘the difference between offensive and defensive writing,’ and now I find I can’t stop thinking about precisely those categories, about Mildred and the icy patch, about how easy it is to fall into a way of writing that takes no risks. Or that doesn’t take enough risks, anyway. The pressure on writers to ‘succeed’ is so immense now. It’s easy to lose sight of what you were wanting to write about in the first place.

We should be writing like heroes. I think it’s good to keep that in mind.

Desert Island Discs

January 29, 2012 /

Today is the 70th anniversary of that Radio 4 hardy perennial Desert Island Discs. I’ve been following the programme for at least half that time (scary) and in spite of the odd hiccup (was Michael Parkinson in the driving seat at one point or did I just dream that?) it’s still a marvellous institution, pandering one-hundred percent to my geekish love of lists as well as my fascination with other people’s musical tastes.

For breadth of intellect and musical depth it’s hard to outclass the choices of Vladimir Ashkenazy and Berthold Goldschmidt, while the prize for most misunderstood castaway must go to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who famously chose eight of her own (sublime) recordings to take with her to the mythical island. Entertaining to recall though her blunder is, I’ve always believed she made it through a simple misunderstanding of the rules.

Shameful though it is, I have to admit that I am one of those people whose previously good opinion of a castaway can be permanently cancelled out by a poor choice of music. The one person who has so far managed to conquer my prejudice in this regard was the late and very great J. G. Ballard, who appeared to flaunt his musical apathy as a virtue. I have continued to worship him anyway.

I think everyone in Britain must have played this game at some point, and although my choices might shift and change from week to week I’d like to celebrate the programme today by posting my current line-up. So (in no particular order) here goes:

Brahms Piano Concerto 2 Ashkenazy Wiener PO/Haitink

Dvorak Cello Concerto Du Pre Chicago SO/Barenboim

Mahler Symphony 6 Berlin PO/Karajan

Henze Undine L. Sinf/Knussen

Beethoven Violin Concerto (cadenza by Alfred Schnittke) Kremer COE/Harnoncourt

Bach Cantata: Ich habe genug Hotter Philh/Bernard

Bob Dylan Blonde on Blonde

Sandy Denny Gold Dust: The Last Concert

And (in the words of Roy Plomley) if all of the eight discs were to be washed away and I could save only one, it would have to be the Beethoven, a clever choice really because with the Schnittke cadenza it captures the genius of two heroes on the one record. And with Gidon Kremer (whose playing I could listen to until the crack of doom) that makes three.

If you’ve not heard the Schnittke cadenza, I urge you to try it – it reimagines Beethoven for the 20th century, and like all of Schnittke’s music it is inspiration straight from the jugular.

I thought choosing these discs would be fun, but in fact it was agony. I couldn’t possibly go to the island with no Shostakovich, no Scriabin, no Elgar Dream of Gerontius, no Tchaikovsky, no Bruckner, no Peter Maxwell Davies, godammit. It’s a hopeless task. I hate lists. I give up.

The book’s a tricky one – of course – and I would have to insist on taking two: Christopher Priest’s The Affirmation and Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters.

For my luxury I’d take the ever-popular endless supply of pens and paper. I considered opting for a solar-powered laptop instead, but on balance thought this would be unwise as it would almost certainly get buggered up by sand influx after a year or two. And having to write with a pen again might help return my handwriting to the edge of legibility.

While writing this I’ve been listening to Anne Sofie von Otter’s recording of Kurt Weill songs. Another irreplaceable classic, and my sudden compulsion to hear it undoubtedly something to do with the odd (very odd) piece I’ve been working on these past three days……

Alfred Schnittke by Reginald Gray

Couple of things

January 23, 2012 /

Firstly, here is the ToC for the forthcoming NewCon Press anthology Dark Currents:

  1. Introduction by Ian Whates
  2. The Fall of Lady Sealight – Adrian Tchaikovsky
  3. The Age of Entitlement – Adam Nevill
  4. Electrify Me – Tricia Sullivan
  5. Alternate Currents – Rod Rees
  6. The Barricade – Nina Allan
  7. Things that Are Here Now – Andrew Hook
  8. Loose Connections – Finn Clarke
  9. Sleepless in R’lyeh – Lavie Tidhar
  10. Damnation Seize my Soul – Jan Edwards
  11. Home – Emma Coleman
  12. A Change in the Weather – Rebecca J Payne
  13. Bells Ringing Under the Sea – Sophia McDougall
  14. In Tauris – Una McCormack
  15. Lost Sheep – Neil Williamson
  16. The Bleeding Man – Aliette de Bodard
  17. George – V.C. Linde

The anthology will be launched at this year’s EasterCon. The wonderful cover art is by Ben Baldwin, who also created the amazing illustrations for ‘The Silver Wind’ and ‘Orinoco’ in Interzone and Black Static.

This looks like being an excellent book, and I am especially pleased to be sharing space with Tricia Sullivan, who wrote the intro for my collection The Silver Wind last year. My contribution to Dark Currents, ‘The Barricade’, was inspired by the landscape and legends of Cornwall and I was wandering around on the set of it only last week.

Secondly, I found out this morning that ‘The Silver Wind’ has been shortlisted for a BSFA Award in the Short Fiction category. I feel incredibly honoured by this vote of confidence as there seemed to be even more fine stories than usual on the nominations board this year. TTA Press have posted the full shortlists and a link to the story here. Needless to say I am delighted to report that Chris’s novel The Islanders has been shortlisted in the Best Novel category.

Thirdly, reading Tomas Transtromer’s poem Six Winters in The Guardian today made me want to start writing a new story cycle directly inspired by it. Each of these six haiku-like ‘chapters’ reads like the writer’s note to himself for the opening of a novel.

On a side-track, an empty railway-carriage.
Still. Heraldic.
With the journeys in its claws.

Simply sublime. And wintry. Makes me think of Tarkovsky. And want to stay up all night writing.

Some thoughts on a train

January 17, 2012 /

Returning from Falmouth, and reading Nicholas Royle’s recently published novel Regicide. Flashing along the luminous Exe estuary, and thinking about Alain Robbe-Grillet’s elusive first novel Un Regicide, which haunts Royle’s book, and seems to be pre-haunting The Affirmation. There are no copies of the English translation of Un Regicide available to order, anywhere, and I’m wondering if I can manage it in the original. Thoughts of the Robbe-Grillet lead me inevitably to Nabokov, Pale Fire, false kings, dead kings, check mate, shah mat. The whole of Regicide is like a chess game, and anyone who knows me knows how mad I am for chess in novels.

Through Wiltshire, and I move on to Peter Stamm’s envy-making, perfect, diamond-bright stories. Thinking sleepily of how damned brilliant he is. My head rests against the window, and suddenly we’re making an unscheduled stop at Reading West. Vast ambush of memory as timelines overlap. It has been twenty-six years now since I lived here, and still only yesterday. On through Reading. The gasworks rear up on my right, bringing back Regicide and that great little passage near the end about Jaz’s photos of the gasometers.

A very dear friend of mine lived out her childhood in the shadow of the Reading gasworks. She and her friends used an abandoned Hillman Minx as a hideout, and dared each other to climb the ladders running vertiginously up the sides of the huge gas tanks. I can never see a gasworks without remembering William Sansom‘s brilliant little story ‘The Vertical Ladder.’ Sansom is one of the unsung heroes of the English Uncanny. I first read ‘The Vertical Ladder’ when I was fourteen (in one of the Pan Books of Horror, of all places), not knowing a thing about it and forgetting the name of the author almost at once. The story haunted me for years but no one had heard of it or could tell me who had written it – except, finally, Chris, who in another of those weird juxtapositions of fate has been a Sansom fan for years.

Steaming in towards Paddington, the sparse trees a raddled grid against a blazing orange sunset. London envelops me. Half an hour later on Villiers Street I snatch some food and some London air before heading south.

I’ve been awake since five. I want to read more of the Stamm, but I’m too tired. When I wake up the train has reached Battle.

Home.

Onwards

January 9, 2012 /

Anyone who is or who thinks they might be a writer should read this piece by AL Kennedy in today’s Guardian. Coming upon it made me want to jump up and down and shout hallelujah. Because this – ‘putting everything into writing’, as AL puts it – is what it’s all about.

The joy and fear and work involved in writing have to be real and full to have meaning and to achieve anything.

That’s it, precisely. And the joy of reading Kennedy’s essay lies in knowing she has the talent and the tenacity to put her money where her mouth is. Her fiction – sometimes thorny, sometimes abstruse, always felt, always meant, always intelligent – reads like a battle fought and won. She’s someone who stakes her life on her work. In other words, the real deal.

Above all, the pure act of writing – the truth that it is still there for you and you for it – is a wonder. And it need have nothing to do with the details of your life. Within it, you can be away from everything and saying out new dreams, just because you can, because human beings do sing for other human beings and make unnecessary beauties. Onwards.

Perhaps it is because certain sections of the literary establishment seem actively to fear fiction that takes risks that Kennedy’s most recent novel The Blue Book didn’t even make the longlist for last year’s Booker. It makes me clench my fists and grind my teeth to see our bravest writers so ill-served. Read Michael Bywater getting stuck into this groove here.

It’s ‘lit. fic.’ that has difficulties. Only a few, like Christopher Priest and Hilary Mantel, have the narrative genius to do it straight from the shoulder. The rest drift hopelessly into pink-embossed chick-lit or yet more nervous adultery in north London. With good reason. These are prissy times.

Great article. We’re not doomed yet.

Work on the new book is going well, even if the word ‘well’ has to let itself be defined in my own peculiar fashion. About ten days before Christmas I realised that the 20,000 words of draft I’d written to open the novel was not what I wanted. At all. So I dumped the lot. Today I got back to where I was and reached the 20,000-word mark (again) and this time it feels much more like it.

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