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Category: writing (Page 13 of 15)

Wasps and sharks

April 24, 2013 /

Blovky sandstone houses and mills made a town down in the valley. I saw the road I’d accidentally taken the night before and the battered park where the living brown river escaped its banks. The flashing lights of JCBs and council vehicles search-swiped through the black trees there now. Other strobing yellows blinked across the town too – recovery trucks collecting the dead cars, road cleaners, emergency street repairs. It looked as if the whole place was being dismantled to be taken somewhere else.

Beyond the town, the grey spread planes of Manchester.

It started to drizzle. My coat was still wet from the downpour the previous night but I’d worn it anyway. I huddled down, pushed my head deep into the hood and slid my hands up the sleeves. Nothing is ever still, said the wind’s spittley breath over me, there’s no hiding from that.

(Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts p110)

I got to the island eventually. The house was dark. I stood looking at it in the darkness, just aware of its bulk in the feeble light of a broken moon, and I thought it looked even bigger than it really was, like a stone-giant’s head, a huge moonlit skull full of shapes and memories, staring out to sea and attached to a vast powerful body buried in the rock an sand beneath, ready to shrug itself free and disinter itself on some unknowable command or cue.

The house stared out to sea, out to the night, and I went into it.

(Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory p86)

There’s a tendency I’ve sometimes noticed in inexperienced writers – and these are not always young writers – to believe that for effect a novel or story must possess the power to shock, to surprise or alarm or impart deep meaning, and that such power is necessarily achieved through the recounting of horrific acts or happenings, through the revelation of some unspeakable secret, through the use of some genius McGuffin the reader could not have guessed at at the outset. Sometimes in their rush to be original or relevant, these writers neglect the details. They neglect the art of the sentence, of the imagined landscape. They neglect the background to their story. But for the foreground events to be shocking or even believable, the background must shine.

The harnessing of imagic language, in other words. The writing itself. Not just the what, but the how.

Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory is famously shocking. The story grabs you hard and won’t let you go until it’s done with you and in many ways this novel is the perfect debut, shaking the bars of the establishment cage, giving the finger to every nicely tempered, soulfully searching coming of age novel that came before it. But reading The Wasp Factory now – now that it’s been with us for thirty years and the ending is known and every aspect of the violent unravelling that masquerades as plot has been discussed and argued over – what stands out most of all is the writing, the sheer, blistering talent, the imagic reach of a writer who clearly adores the medium in which he is working. The beauty of it, in other words. Banks’s evocation of landscape is the hidden engine that drives The Wasp Factory and you’re so intent on getting where you’re going that on first reading you might only be aware of it as a deep, inner rumbling at the heart of things. But remove it and you’re stranded. Banks’s blinding instinctual writing is the book.

Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts was an instant bestseller. Critics talked a great deal about its conceptual wizardry, about the genius and lunacy of its philosophies, about the daring of even trying to pin such madness to the printed page. They weren’t wrong. But The Raw Shark Texts isn’t just audacious and original, it’s also the lucent and limpid, the undeniably lovely creation of a dedicated wordsmith with the soul of a poet. Hall’s ‘un-space’ lies perfectly rendered, so expertly tailored we feel we can oursleves crawl in behind the bookcase and inhabit it.

(The man clearly understands cats perfectly too, which also helps.)

What I mean is, these guys aren’t just clever, or new, they can also write. That’s not luck or hype, that’s talent. You only have to read a couple of pages to understand that what drives a good writer is just that – the necessity of making good writing, of feeling it unspool itself through the fingers like spider silk, the tension and the weft of it, the passion.

The tightrope act of doing it, of getting to the other side. That’s why Hall and Banks are both Best Young Brits.

‘A gradual tailing off of talent’? No, not really.

April 17, 2013 /

In his Guardian review of the latest issue of Granta, which samples the work of the 2013 line-up of the Best of Young British Novelists, Theo Tait has this to say:

Best of Young British Novelists 4 doesn’t, as a whole, inspire about the future of the British novel. It offers some exceptional writing, but mostly solid, old-fashioned storytelling or hit-and-miss, boil-in-the-bag postmodernism. If you look at the selections from 1983 onwards, you see a gradual but unmistakable tailing off of talent as the decades progress. I’m afraid that this list continues that trend.

Tait has already told us earlier in his article that he is familiar with ‘at most half of them in any detail.’ The fact that he then goes on to name and approve ten out of the twenty writers seems to suggest an odd thing: that he’s said ‘yeah, OK’ to those writers whose work he already knows fairly well and thus feels he can judge – and then disregarded the rest simply because they’re just names to him, glimpsed perhaps in the reviews section of a broadsheet or two and now set before him to judge on the basis of the one short story or novel extract they’ve produced for Granta BOYBN 4.

This is something we all do. There are instances where awards shortlists or ‘best ofs’ turn out to be so inadequate or misjudged that a degree of outrage seems not just inevitable but necessary. But in the main this is not the case. Rather what you get when much-anticipated shortlists are finally published is a vague feeling of disappointment, which when examined more closely turns out to be nothing more interesting or worthy than the sense that ‘yes, but I would have liked this list better if writer A, B or C had been on it instead of E, F and G.’ There’s been a fair amount of talk already about the omissions from the new Granta list. Theo Tait himself names Jon McGregor as his notable exclusion and whilst there is much to admire in the work of Zadie Smith and Adam Thirlwell, the practice of naming writers twice as BOYBNs makes no sense to me and never has done – Zadie Smith seems in no imminent danger of being forgotten or underexposed, and surely all the judges are doing by re-selecting her is denying a place to another writer who would derive far greater benefit from being included, the amazing Jon McGregor just for example? It’s a shame, I think, that they did this. But does the list as a whole demonstrate, as Tait laments, a gradual tailing off of talent from one decade’s choice to the next? I don’t think so.

Much of the thrust of Tait’s argument arises from the myth of the 1983 list, which is now more or less enshrined in the English literary consciousness as ‘exceptional’. But how exceptional was it really? And have we seen, as Tait seems to be suggesting, a diminution in the rigour and articulacy of the prevailing literary discourse that decides such rankings? I think I’m going to argue the opposite.

But first, let’s take a more detailed look at that original line-up of BOYBNs from 1983. The ‘holy trinity’ of Barnes, Amis and McEwan are discussed and reminisced over as if their importance and literary influence is now a given, that these were the writers, the enfants terribles who revitalized the art of the English novel, who rescued British writing from its post-war parochialism and forced the Americans to sit up and take notice. But I’d argue that if Tait’s words about a gradual tailing off of talent have relevancy anywhere then it’s here with the trinity.

I reread McEwan’s early collection In Between the Sheets recently and it’s good. It also bears saddeningly little relation to the conventional establishment-pleasing works McEwan has produced in the last decade, publicly disowning much of his earlier output as ‘a youthful desire to shock’. How disappointing and how sad, to see a writer who once promised so much sell out so publicly. McEwan still can and still does write beautiful sentences – but by this stage in his career that should be a given, frankly. The truth is that McEwan hasn’t written anything even remotely challenging since Amsterdam.

Love him or loathe him, the young Martin Amis was a seething talent. Again, I reread his third novel Success a year or so back and much against my literary prejudices I found myself laughing aloud with pleasure, in public, at his verbal dexterity and malicious sarcasm. But Lionel Asbo, his most recent offering, I found so embarrassing a faux pas, so wide of the mark as both formal conceit and social comment that I had to stop reading it.

And what happened to the Julian Barnes who wrote the experimental novels Flaubert’s Parrot and The History of the World in 10 and a Half Chapters? His 2011 Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending was a pallid little book, prissy as fine needlework and with its one great startle moment entirely wasted, mislaid almost, amidst Barnes’s narrator’s worryingly irritating self-obsession.

Amis, McEwan and Barnes are only in their middle sixties, which hardly makes them Methuselahs especially these days, and yet they seem comfortable – determined, almost – to settle into the role of old men, reflecting on their glory days (could any book be more inappropriately self regarding than McEwan’s Sweet Tooth!) as radical young bucks and commiserating with an establishment they should and could still be rucking up. What they hell happened? Are they simply too successful now, too insulated by received opinion, to feel they can risk alienating their public by giving it a kick up the arse? What was McEwan thinking when he wrote that lily-livered apologia for Margaret Thatcher?

If the MAB triumvirate ever had a birthright, it has squandered it, and I find this sad, and disappointing. Of the rest of that ‘golden generation’, I personally find Pat Barker to be one of the most overrated writers currently lauded, William Boyd has settled for broadsheet approbation and the middle of the road, ditto Graham Swift and Rose Tremain. Anyone who heard A. N. Wilson on Radio 4 last week, bleating on about how Britain’s ‘unfettered’ social welfare system leads inevitably to the crimes of Mick Philpott cannot be anything but dumbfounded at the idea that Wilson’s particular literary voice bears relevance in any form today whatsoever.

I’d argue that only three of the class of ’83 have fulfilled their promise, which is a pretty poor percentage, considering the reputation the group as a whole continues to enjoy.

I can’t read Salman Rushdie – while his non-fiction is cogent and well argued, I find his fiction overwritten and mannered to the point of implosion. His recent memoir Joseph Anton also shows signs that he’s beginning to believe in his own entitlement, always a dangerous moment for a serious writer. There’s little question however that Rushdie is still that – a serious writer – and that he continues to explore and push the outer limits of his own abilities, which is the most important thing any writer can do.

Kazuo Ishiguro is often bracketed with Barnes, Amis and McEwan but I don’t think he should be. He’s a slower, more considering writer, a private thinker who’s always determinedly gone his own odd way. His books are unpredictable and strange, and each of them is different from the others. You get the sense while reading him that he’s still trying to work out what he’s about – which is a good thing, and so different from McEwan, whose whole mission now seems to be about proving to us how solid and beau-ti-ful and dependable, how securely grounded in the nineteenth century the English social novel can still be. I like Ishiguro because he takes risks. He’s a good writer – better than that he’s still an interesting one.

Christopher Priest will be just shy of seventy when his new novel The Adjacent is published later this summer, but in contrast with Amis and Barnes there’s no sign of his age in his mindset or in his fiction. Priest’s thirteen novels to date form a rising arc, a steady and discernible series of stylistic and thematic advancements from one book to the next. Priest does not harp on about how Britain is going down the tubes, nor does he endlessly reminisce about what life was like before the evil internet when Margaret Thatcher was on the throne. Rather, he examines the nature of lived reality itself, as well as the ways in which the novel as a form can still surprise, confound and elate us. His life’s work is still vigorous, still evolving, still under construction. You’ll never read a Priest novel and come away with the impression that he’s treading water, or marking time, or settling down. Priest has been notably excluded from much past commentary on the BOYBNs either because the established commentators can’t work out where he fits into the prevailing consensus or else they dismiss him, unread, as ‘that chippy bloke who writes science fiction.’ Yet I predict that a hundred years from now it’ll be Priest’s name that stands out from that group as the renegade talent, long after McEwan and Barnes and Boyd have been written into the margins.

The 1993 list produced some dead ends and some middle-of-the-roads (Nicholas Shakespeare, Esther Freud, Louis de Bernieres most of all and I’d maintain that Hanif Kureishi also is overrated) but it also produced Iain Banks, Will Self, Jeanette Winterson, Alan Hollinghurst, AL Kennedy and Lawrence Norfolk, six outstanding writers of true grit and demonstrable staying power – that’s twice the number we ended up with from 1983. And in 2003 Nicola Barker (one of the very best writers in Britain at this moment), Alan Warner, Dan Rhodes, Hari Kunzru, David Peace, David Mitchell and Andrew O’Hagan upped the strike rate still further. Just look at these writers and what they’re doing and try to argue that they’re less accomplished, exciting or relevant than the MAB trinity and I will counter that such an argument holds no water.

And so we come to this decade’s list, and far more disturbing to me even than his words about tailing off is what Tait says here:

It’s well known that British literary fiction seeks out the exotic, avoiding middle England in favour of immigrant communities, the more exciting past and urban Scotland. But the collection, I think, takes the tendency too far: less than half the pieces are set in Britain, and two of those are in apocalyptic variations thereof. Otherwise, it’s building sites in Dubai, army camps in Somalia, a sheep station in the Australian outback, the streets of Ghana.

Of course I was always going to be thrilled by the fact that more than a third of the writers on the new Granta list display in their work at the very least a passing interest in speculative themes. That gives us, let’s see, roughly six times as many SF writers as there were on the 1983 list and offers evidence – to me at least – of a more adventurous, experimental and yes, a more modernizing approach to what literature should and can be about. Equally thrilling to me though is the inclusiveness of this line-up – more than half of them women, more than half of them personally representative of the cultural and ethnic diversity of Britain today, Britain as the nation it is evolving into. Having writers on this list – young writers – who are willing and able to show us how rural China is dealing with the too-rapid influx of Western influences, or what it means to be Afropolitan? Surely we should feel invigorated by and intensely proud of such voices? Surely lamenting them as somehow ‘un-English’ is just, well, wrong? And what Tait’s doing attacking the choice of ‘urban Scotland’ as a choice of narrative setting for young British novelists I have no idea. As Scotland has produced much of the UK’s most muscular, radical, accomplished, relevant and downright exciting fiction in the past half century I’d deem his words as badly chosen, at the very least.

For myself, I’m particularly thrilled to see Helen Oyeyemi chosen as a BOYBN, because I think she’s one of the most talented young writers to come out of this country since Nicola Barker, and Evie Wyld, who writes so beautifully it makes me go grrrr. I’m well pleased to see Ned Beauman, too – that man writes like a demon and has, I feel, a glorious future ahead of him. I’ve long admired Sarah Hall and Steven Hall and Naomi Alderman, and I am loving Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon. I’m looking forward to discovering Ben Markovitz and David Szalay, Kamila Shamsie and Xiaolu Guo, of whom I’ve heard great things.

My own notable exclusions (apart from Jon McGregor)? Those would be China Miéville and Scarlett Thomas. They’re only just forty and they’re both standout talents. Bend the age rules just a little bit, why dontcha..?

I feel for Theo Tait. He writes well and I always enjoy reading him, most especially because he’s outspoken and often contentious. Having to come up with something pithy and concise and accurate about the new Granta list in under twenty-four hours is not something I’d envy him. But dare I say I think he spoke too hastily this time, and with the wrong emphasis. The British novel is not in danger, nor are our young writers becoming less engaged or somehow less talented. The huge interest around the BOYBNs this year – an interest that far from tailing off grows stronger decade on decade – is surely proof of the hunger for books and the fascination with stories and ideas and narrative that still shapes and drives our cultural life. The writers on that list show that our cultural life, far from being in decline, is rapidly expanding in a multitude of directions.

Winter trees, Newham

January 29, 2013 /

And The Who Shop, Barking Road, E6 – how many times a year do you find yourself walking randomly down the road, only to come face to face with a window full of Daleks?

We’re both working hard at the moment. Chris has completely recast the beginning of his new novel, I’ve been working on a substantial rewrite of What Happened to Maree. Over Christmas I began feeling increasingly dissatisfied with some aspects of the novel, and a week or so into January I made the decision to do a complete third draft. As well as all the usual benefits of redrafting, my aim is to restructure the novel, freeing up the flow of the narrative and removing some redundant material.

It was a big decision, but I’m glad I’ve made it. I’m now just over 50,000 words in, and already I’m feeling a great deal happier with things. The novel now feels less like four big chapters and more like one coherent entity. It’s an interesting process – the more familiar you become with your material the better you understand what you are trying to say. As I’ve explained to people many times, I used to hate the whole idea of intensive redrafting – now it feels like an essential part of the process, and one I cannot imagine not adhering to.

I hope to have the rewrite finished in a month or so.

I have ideas for two new stories I definitely want to write, but they will have to wait until Maree is done and dusted.

Still thinking about those recent awards shortlists, I am intrigued by how different they are. A lot of this is due I think to the fact that the BSFA list is very much a science fiction only shortlist, whereas the Kitschies shortlist is much broader and consequently it’s more exciting. It could almost be a Clarke shortlist – and a quality one at that. Like the Clarke, the Kitschies is a juried award, but its remit – ‘to reward the most progressive, intelligent and entertaining works that contain elements of the speculative or fantastic’ – is just that bit wider, thus cutting out the need for that whole ‘but is it truly SF?’ thing that in my view at least can so often be entirely beside the point.

On the whole, I’d say it’s a good thing that the four main UK genre awards (BSFAs, BFAs, Kitschies and Clarkes) are so different in character, if only for the simple reason that they tend to shine the spotlight on different works. It’s certainly going to be interesting to watch the discussion unfold around the Clarkes this year – roll on that list of nominations!

One work I’ll definitely be nominating when the BFA noms open is John Ajvide Lindqvist’s collection Let the Old Dreams Die, which I am reading at the moment. I’ve seen Let the Right One In three times, one of those occasions being the UK premiere, but this is my first encounter with on-the-page Lindqvist and I am impressed. These are odd stories, original stories, intimate and alienating at the same time, and once again they are proof that there are plenty of things you can still do with horror. I love Linqvist’s style, which is relaxed, quietly poetical, vernacular. Good stuff – makes me jealous, I would hope productively so.

Year’s Best

December 29, 2012 /

Last night we watched Hanna, Joe Wright’s film from 2011. We were keen to see it when it came out but it was one of those we missed – we’ve now caught up with it on DVD. The reviews at the time were non-committal, but whilst Hanna is undoubtedly flawed (Cate Blanchett’s part is so badly scripted you’re desperate for her to be gunned down just to put an end to her wooden dialogue) what we discovered was an odd, highly imaginative little movie with some wonderfully surreal moments, striking imagery and a great soundtrack by the Chemical Brothers. I loved seeing it, and it left me feeling aggrieved for Joe Wright that his first two features – the predictably lavish and entirely unchallenging costume dramas beloved of habitual non-cinema-goers, Pride and Prejudice and Atonement – were so rapturously received, while his next three films – The Soloist, Hanna and this year’s Anna Karenina – have met with indifference and a vague bewilderment. The variety and weirdness on display in his more recent work gives us ample indication that Wright wants to do a great deal more as a director than pump out repeat performances of the kind of heritage cinema that launched his career – and yet it would seem that some reviewers at least would feel happier with him if he stayed in the box he was originally allocated. This, as they say, makes me mad.

I love Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. It was my great introduction to Russian literature and I’ve read it three times. I’d be content to see it (perhaps along with Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago) awarded the title of Best Novel of All Time. Most attempts to film Anna Karenina have concentrated on period detail, on recreating, as accurately as possible given the time restrictions, what actually appears on the page. Such attempts have met with varying success, but given the scope of the novel and the mountain of narrative material to be climbed it’s perhaps inevitable that most of them were doomed. You can enjoy them as entertainment – in much the same way you can enjoy David Lean’s approximation of Doctor Zhivago – but they don’t add a thing to the novel. How could they, when all they’re doing is trying to ape a novelistic language, rather than approaching Tolstoy’s work from a fresh angle, in terms of cinema?

Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina, filmed in a mock-up of a nineteenth century theatre, all swagged red velvet and gilt trim, is a satirization of lavishness. It plays around with the idea of being a stage play, and yet the filmic devices Wright employs – the apparent transposition of the action inside a toy theatre, the use of a model railway layout to portray Anna and Vronsky’s journey from Petersburg to Moscow – could only be achieved through the medium of cinema. As such they pass beyond gimmickry to illumination, augmenting our understanding of the novel from a twenty-first century perspective. Rather than being heritage cinema, Wright’s Anna is a modern work of art. Can it be that which upset the purists? Whatever the reason for this film’s lukewarm reception, it pisses me off. Cinema, like all art, thrives on risk, and the willingness to take risks, as Wright has done, is infinitely more praiseworthy than the lush repetition of some perfectly executed Hollywood Tolstoy-by-numbers.

Anna Karenina turned out to be one of my favourite films of 2012: a surprise and an inspiration and a delight. Other favourites include Todd Solondz’s Dark Horse, Jean-Marc Vallee’s Cafe de Flore, Miguel Gomes’s Tabu, Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers. These are all what I’d call hole-in-the-wall movies, the kind that get only a limited theatrical release and rarely crop up in awards nominations. You won’t find them on view at your local multiplex, yet they’re undersold on the arthouse circuit also. They’re those peculiar little films that no one seems to know what to do with and I love them, even when, or especially when, they’re not perfect.

(Disclaimer: I haven’t seen The Master yet, but we’re going next week. I loved Woody Allen’s To Rome, With Love, even though it’s not ‘good’ Woody Allen, apparently, but then I’ve loved everything he’s done apart from Whatever Works – and yes, that includes the London movies. Also I totally adored William Friedkin’s Killer Joe. So shoot me down.)

The year in books was dominated for me by two titles, M. John Harrison’s Empty Space, and Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn & Child. You might easily draw comparison between these two – Keith Ridgway tackles the crime novel in a manner reminiscent of the way Mike Harrison tackles the science fiction novel, an approach composed of pretty much equal parts love and resentment – but that wouldn’t be the point. Both these books are astoundingly well written, punch-to-the-gut well written in fact. Both do fascinating things with form, both offer an honest confrontation of contemporary reality. Above and beyond that, both these novels are meant, both give you the sense that the writer staked his integrity on them, not to say his sanity. Both feel like essential reading, in a way that too few contemporary novels are willing to risk. There – we’re back with risk again. A real novel, surely, should entail some.

If Empty Space and Hawthorn & Child tie for gold, my worthy runner up would have to be Sam Thompson’s Communion Town, a first outing so accomplished it raises the bar a notch higher for anyone and everyone behind Thompson in the debut queue. I really loved this book. What’s more, I was excited by it – not just because of the risks it takes with form and with genre but also because of the compelling mystery of its storytelling and the rapturous beauty of its language. Communion Town made the Booker longlist and should have gone further. Still, there’s plenty of time for Sam Thompson, who clearly means business.

The other books on my personal year’s best list weren’t written or even published this year – 2012 just happened to be the year in which I read them. Nicola Barker’s Clear was a total joy – I honestly can’t go far enough in stating my admiration for this writer and what she’s doing. Barker has often talked about how much she feels compelled to take risks, both in her subject matter and the form of her narratives, and it is a testament to her skill as a storyteller that for the reader these risks are rendered invisible by the runaway pleasure one always finds in reading her. (I mean, Barker’s Behindlings or Self’s Umbrella – which would you rather read..?) In 2013 I plan to read The Yips – already purchased – and to finally catch up with Wide Open, the novel that won Barker the Impac Award and that I’ve been meaning to get to for ages.

Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching took my breath away. A small novel, but perfectly formed. and without a doubt the best ghost story I’ve read in years. Why it was largely overlooked by the various awards judges – both mainstream and genre – is a complete mystery. Roberto Bolano’s The Third Reich was another book I came away from wishing I’d written it. And continuing in the military vein, 2012 was the year I finally got around to reading Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. I’ve heard so many people rate this book as their ‘desert island’ novel, an indispensable classic that made them look at narrative in a whole new way. I was a tad sceptical, to be honest – but wow this was a great read! The Good Soldier is buttoned up to the point of claustrophobia, understated to the point of being repressed – but still it seethes with tension and enmity and hidden meanings; unshowy yet flawlessly elegant in its use of language, it’s a genuine page-turner and I found myself joining the ranks of those who couldn’t put it down.

The book that has proved the most practical inspiration to me this year was Stephen King’s The Gunslinger. When I read it I burned with envy, simple as that. Here’s a novel that made me stop what I was doing and think again, a tautly composed, one-of-a-kind book that is a masterclass in storytelling as well as a showcase for some of King’s best writing. What King demonstrates most of all in The Gunslinger is that style and substance can and should be equal partners. Grasping this – indeed I think I shold say finding the courage to grasp this – is reshaping me as a writer, I hope for the better.

Of course there there were some low points: Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles (trying to ‘do’ SF but failing from a great height with a lingering waaaaa sound), Benjamin Wood’s The Bellwether Revivals (a too-shallow exploration of a fine idea), Ali Shaw’s The Man Who Rained (a weak recapitulation of his brilliant first novel The Girl with Glass Feet) to name but three. But when it comes to reading and writing, nothing is wasted. I find that even the books that don’t work for me teach me something, and asking myself precisely why I’m angry with a book can often be as instructive as setting down my reasons for loving a text.

As for next year’s reading resolutions, what I wish for myself more than anything is some structure, the self discipline to stop dotting around all over the place and engage in some serious and constructive ‘project’ reading. (OK, so this is just another excuse for me to make lists of things, fair cop.) As well as completing Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. I also have vague plans to read the whole of Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘gothic’ sequence – with the fifth and last novel due out in March, I can’t think of a better time to embark on that particular voyage, especially given that I could read JCO all year long and not get tired of her. I’d like to catch up with some contemporary crime novels (everyone was all over Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, for example) and I can always make time for more literature in translation – Bernardo Carvalho’s Nine Nights is already on my reading list. Then of course there’ll be the excitement of a whole new Clarke Award shortlist – I can barely wait!

But the best thing about a new year’s reading is the newness of it, not having a clue what your best discoveries will be.  And there’s always that hope, reiterated every year, that you’ll stumble upon a book that will change your whole outlook, that kind of talismanic text that fills you with a new urgency, that reminds you of what you’re supposed to be doing and equips you – if you pay attention – to do it better. That’s what I’m looking forward to in 2013.

Happy New Year!

Nothing more Christmassy than this…

December 24, 2012 /

I haven’t read Susan Cooper for years and years – about thirty of them, to be exact – but when I came upon this interview just now it made me want to curl up in an armchair with a mug of cocoa (spiked with Glenfiddich, of course) under a good strong reading lamp and hurtle through all five Dark is Rising books one after the other.

This is an inspiring, beautiful article that I would recommend anyone to read, especially if they’re up to their eyes in writing a novel. Cooper has clearly drawn heavily on her own life in her fiction. She’s used her own passions and experiences – but in the best way any writer can, that is invisibly and unselfishly, to create worlds and stories that will captivate and inspire others. She never insists that ‘this is about me’; rather she’s saying, ‘this is about you.’ This is something that as writers we should all aspire to.

I love especially the passage where Cooper describes the moment when she first knew that The Dark is Rising was not a story set on its own, but part of a series:

My head went into overdrive, and I took out a piece of paper and wrote down five titles, starting with Over Sea, and five times of the year – the Celtic festival times like Beltane and Samhain, and the solstices. And the people who were going to be in these five books. And I wrote the last page of the last book so I knew where I was going. Then I spent the next six years writing these four books.

‘My head went into overdrive’ – that’s when you know you’re on to something. And the quote taped above her desk, the words of her friend Ursula Le Guin? Never a truer word:

If you find that it is hard going and it just doesn’t flow, well, what did you expect? It is work; art is work. Nobody ever said it was easy. What they said is: life is short, art is long.

This is just to say Happy Christmas to everyone who’s been reading this blog, to all those wonderful readers, writers, friends and critics who have been so generous with their talk, ideas, support and encouragement. Thank you all, so much – it’s a huge deal and I truly appreciate it. Time now to unstopper the malt and pick out a DVD. I keep threatening Chris with the Abrams Star Trek, which I have a perverse love for, but I don’t think I’m going to get away with that one…

Cheers, everyone!

Christmas comes early

December 19, 2012 /

Really very happy indeed to announce that my story ‘Sunshine’, originally published in Black Static #29, has been selected by Rich Horton for his Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2013 Edition. The full ToC can be viewed here – with stories by Ursula Le Guin, Kelly Link, Elizabeth Bear and Genevieve Valentine, among many other wonderful writers, it truly is an honour to be included.

And a piece of news like this does go some of the way towards dulling the pains of First Draft Hell. The thing I’m working on now is difficult. At this early stage, progress is slow as I’m still very much feeling my way into the story, discarding stuff almost before I write it. But it’s exciting! I don’t think I’ve ever felt so excited about a project in my life.

I may take a break for Doctor Who and mince pies, but that’s about it…

Breaking the code

December 12, 2012 /

I’ve never much liked the term ‘non-genre SF’ because I feel it runs the danger of deepening an already false divide between science fiction and the literature of the mainstream and thus making the ghetto mentality around SF still more entrenched. More recently though I’ve come to see some sense in it, if only for the purposes of describing a difference not so much in style as of approach. Wanting to write science fiction should never be treated as a literary crime, any more than it should commit you as a writer to a particular style. But it has always been and remains true that whilst there are writers who feel wholly committed to the idea of SF as a life’s project, there are also those who are what are sometimes called ‘tourists’, writers more usually associated with the mainstream, who approach SF out of curiosity once or twice but who never revisit. Perhaps they enjoyed SF when they were younger but feel they’ve ‘grown out of it’. Perhaps they’re a bit ashamed of admitting their weird proclivity in front of their LRB friends. Whatever their reasons, there’s a sizeable chance that many of those writers who come visiting from over the mainstream fence haven’t read much science fiction since their late teens or early twenties. They almost certainly don’t have much idea of what’s going on in the field at the moment. It’s because of this, more than any other reason, that their contributions to the literature of science fiction are often seen by ‘real’ SF readers and writers as somewhat reactionary or out of date and why, somewhat ironically, they tend to be rather looked down on.

I freely acknowledge that writers who are more usually associated with the literary mainstream do not always, indeed do not often, produce the best SF, and although I often find myself fighting a corner for non-genre SF, when it comes to individual novels I often find it disappointing. But science fiction can always use a kick up the arse, the kind of literary jolting that infuses it with new ideas about literary form and new ways of seeing itself. Sometimes jolts like this come from the literary side of the fence rather than the SFnal side, and occasionally a non-genre work will come along that goes all the way out there science fictionally and raises the bar for the rest of us. I believe that Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was one such novel. I was up until 3.30am reading that book, and there aren’t many novels I’ve read since my twenties that I can say that about. Waking just a couple of hours later and still thinking about it, I remember pulling back my curtains and looking out over southeast London, thankful and relieved that my city was, at least for the moment, still there. The Road made me re-evaluate my own reality, and that’s one of the ways I knew it was not just a great novel, but great SF too.

But more often the kind of non-genre SF you find gathering the most attention in the broadsheets is not nearly so strong. Usually these books are dystopias, because that’s more or less the only SF template that the literary mainstream seems comfortable with – better the devil you know, after all, and while Ian McEwan and Margaret Atwood may not have read The Dervish House or Dhalgren or The Separation you can bet your life they will have read Brave New World, The Day of the Triffids and probably The Road as well. Non-genre SF is often very heavy on premise, and those writers who venture into it tend to introduce any science fictional concepts they do try with a kind of ‘woo look, no hands!’ underlining, wheeling out their Big Idea in such a way as to suggest that no one’s ever thought of it before, when in fact if they’d actually read any SF post-Wyndham they’d realise loads of people have done it before, probably decades ago and with a greater degree of originality and flair.

This doesn’t mean their novels are bad – there was a fragility, a quality of sincerity to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go that made me like it a lot, and although Jane Rogers’s The Testament of Jessie Lamb was not the most innovative SF in the world, it had a writerly sensibility, an approach to the material and most importantly to characterisation that made the book live in the mind and gave it weight – but when they are bad they are horrid. Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles was one of the most uncomfortable reads of this year for me and not in a good way. In terms of its SF it was dreadful – only the most cursory logic had been applied to the central conceit, while the book’s shallowly complacent, California-centric worldview had me wincing with embarrassment on almost every page. When reviewing the book for The Observer, Edward Docx put the problems of this novel down to the very fact that it was SF:

But for this reader at least, it is mildly depressing that so nimble, delicate and emotionally sophisticated a novel should find itself burdened by such sci-fi oafishness.

Docx argues that The Age of Miracles would have been a better book if it had been allowed to become the ‘beautifully observed coming-of-age story’ that it wanted to be. I couldn’t have disagreed more. As a coming-of-age novel, far from being nimble, delicate and emotionally sophisticated, the book seemed to me to be strikingly naive and limited, stuffed with cliché and with not one thing apart from its admittedly cack-handed SF premise to distinguish it from a thousand other American first novels of its type. It gives me no pleasure to say it, because I wanted to like the book, but The Age of Miracles felt very much like writing-by-numbers.

And yet this novel, acquired for $1m, was marketed by its mainstream imprint as the pinnacle of science fictional achievement. For science fiction writers the squandering of such superlatives is particularly galling, as it is impossible to escape the suspicion that many of the critics who lavished praise on the book hadn’t picked up a science fiction novel since they had to read Nineteen Eighty-Four for ‘O’ Level.

So can non-genre SF ever wholly embrace science fiction? My instinct would be to say yes, of course it can, and for much of its length the book I have just finished reading, Tobias Hill’s 2003 novel The Cryptographer, would seem to be the perfect justification of such an argument. Hill is an award-winning poet, and it’s perhaps not surprising that The Cryptographer, whilst it is set in the near future, was immediately claimed by the mainstream as the kind of novel that cannot be SF because it’s proper literature. In her review for The Guardian, A. S. Byatt was specific in describing The Cryptographer as not science fiction:

This is neither a thriller, nor a futuristic utopia or dystopia. Tobias Hill has his own elegant, clear and complex, meditative way of inventing worlds…. He has a masterly control of hinted, rather than elaborated, changes.

It’s beautifully written and well imagined, in other words, both factors that in the minds of some critics at least immediately disqualify it from being SF. Also there are no aliens. This is all predictable enough. What is perhaps equally predictable but more of a pity is that Hill’s novel has attracted relatively little notice from within the SF community. I think this is a shame, because to my mind The Cryptographer is precisely that kind of novel that is worth examining from a science fictional as well as from a literary standpoint.

The Cryptographer is told from the point of view of Anna Moore, an executive – or should we say agent? – of the British Inland Revenue. When we meet her at the start of the novel, she has just been assigned to the case of John Law, the world’s first quadrillionaire, inventor of ‘Soft Gold’, a universal computer currency that has been adopted on a worldwide scale. The Revenue has no reason to suspect John Law of any impropriety, and Anna is told that the investigation is a random check. Anna soon uncovers what appears to be a minor anomaly in his firm’s accounts; Law immediately pays what he owes and the file is closed. But Anna cannot seem to let go. She is mesmerised by her client, not so much by his wealth but by the person of John Law himself, the particular vulnerabilities of a man who would appear to have everything. She has suspected from the first that something is going on beneath the glossy surface of Law’s empire and is determined to root out the truth.

But then she is a slow thinker, Anna, suited to her work. Not brilliant, only sedulous. It is her talent to miss nothing, given time. (p150)

What she discovers is that an undercover organisation of top hackers is about to crack the code Law has created, and that if they succeed it could lead to the collapse of society as she knows it. John Law has secreted away massive reserves behind a wall of code, a bulwark of protection for himself and his family. His main concern is not for himself, however, but for what he has created – the perfectly abstract invention of Soft Gold, and his brilliant but vulnerable young son Nathan, who suffers from a severe form of congenital diabetes. The only thing Law wants to buy now is time – time to crack his own code and so discover its weakness before his enemies discover it for him and bring it down.

The last decade has seen a riot of literary speculation into the subject of financial meltdown – fiction and non-fiction, killer thrillers, stark analyses, blame games, righteous outrage and proposed solutions. What it has seen less of is any attempt to determine or describe the metaphyiscs of our current situation, to ask the philosophical question of what is money? The Cryptographer goes bravely out of its way to redress this balance. Hill’s summation of what he terms ‘The Fall’ is as devastating in its economy as it is in its failsafe grasp of the essentials:

By the time the floors are closed it is already too late. It is as if, through money, time has slipped backwards. In less than two hours, the world has been set back scores of years. The faces broadcast, later wiped out, sagging with the understanding that something has gone wrong, and so critically wrong that decades have been swept away, like ships and houses by great waves. Whole lives, if lives can be measured in money, and they can, since they are. In greed and generosity and desire. (p175)

It is with his exquisite practice of poetry – the distilling of a large idea into the compass of a few perfected words – that Hill infuses the body politic of science fiction with a new vitality. A. S. Byatt is right when she says that Hill has his own clear and complex, meditative way of inventing worlds. In Hill’s future London, there are hints that John Law may be ‘risking his life’ in deceiving the Revenue, while to read books is an eccentric pastime (‘you do still read books?’); a character’s handwriting is ‘scrawny, out of practice’, the personal letter written on paper is itself an almost extinct curiosity. It is ‘just two years since they cancelled the dollar’, and yet the scents and sensations of old, ‘touchable’ money itself, ‘the sour smell of alloy, the arcane traces of urine and cocaine on old notes’, are already the stuff of nostalgia. At a New Year’s party at Law’s vast London estate (he has purchased and relandscaped the whole of Erith), we see through Anna’s eyes how wealth can change the laws of physics if it is vast enough as, for a few hours at least, winter is transformed into spring:

It feels like the proof of something. That money can do anything, change whatever it touches. Like Midas, she thinks. The king who changed the world to gold. The gold that changed the king. She wonders if that is true of money, after all, though it is not what she has always believed. It is not what she sees in her own world, where people are not immutable but, still, stubborn-hearted, born into themselves. Ungolden. Where winter, despite everything, stays winter. (p129)

Hill’s uses of the present-impossible are deft and light – we are not projected or info-dumped inside our own possible future so much as already walking towards it under our own power. Most crucially though, the novel’s smooth narrative flow never becomes obfuscated by the demanding nature of its ideas.  The Cryptographer contains a mass of science fictional concepts and complex information, but we are guided effortlessly through those ideas in a language that is crystalline in its form, deceptive in its simplicity, and never less than beautiful. The Cryptographer is a unique and persuasive, original work of science fiction that contains not one word of science fictional jargon. Anyone who likes to read, whether they are habitual readers of SF or not, could pick up this book and be equally thrilled and disturbed by what it contains. It is a novel that requires concentration, but it is not a selfish book; for all its complexities it is still, at its heart, a novel about people. The Cryptographer shows us a future, but it shows it to us not through the eyes of an over-eager SF writer but of the people who have to live in it. It is not ‘about’ the future – it’s about us. And like all the best science fiction, it hasn’t dated. When Hill wrote The Crpytographer, the future he imagined was still twenty years away. With the passage of time it is now less than half that – and yet unlike so many other, more extravagant works of SF, Hill’s London 2021 does not feel less real the closer we approach it in realtime, but frighteningly more so. Anyone reading The Cryptographer today could be forgiven for believing that the manuscript was completed not a decade ago, but only yesterday.

But just how good is Hill’s novel really, as SF? I have to say I changed my mind on this point as the story progressed, and if you’d asked me the question fifty pages in and again at the end you’d have received two different answers. The literary excellence on display in The Cryptographer makes the book timeless, and as a mainstream novel it could be argued that it is wholly satisfying. We see a story unfold, and a conclusion of sorts is reached. The protagonist, Anna Moore, goes on a journey and is changed by it – she is not the same person at the end of the book as she was at the beginning. In a formal sense, The Cryptographer is beautifully worked. The coolness of its interior spaces – the obsidian, brushed steel and glass surfaces of the various office buildings where power is wielded then wrestled away then seized again – is mirrored in the novel’s language, an essay in restraint and control, the taut self-mastery that conceals deep emotion. But in terms of its science fiction, I came away with the regrettable feeling that The Cryptographer pulls its punches. The sense, so ominously present in the first half of the novel, that something huge and disastrous is about to be unleashed, ends in anticlimax. We are told that the collapse of Soft Gold has set the world back by as much as a hundred years, but the effects, the specifics of what this means are kept firmly off stage. We see little or nothing of what the world crash means in and for the lives of ordinary people. At one point, a character compares the collapse of Soft Gold with the disastrous hyper-inflation suffered by Weimar Germany in the 1920s. If you read a novel like Hans Fallada’s 1932 classic Kleiner Mann, Was Nun? you will come away in no doubt as to the shattering effects of this disaster, the way it broke millions of individual lives and propelled an idealistic nascent democracy into the arms of the most notorious megalomaniac of modern times. For Fallada’s protagonist, the eponymous, hard-working ‘little man’ with his new marriage and his modest dreams, everything, but everything, is at stake, and reading about what happens to him is a sobering, moving, and perhaps most importantly a deeply anger-making experience.

For the characters in The Cryptographer, the extent of their personal losses seems risible in comparison. They remove themselves to Scottish islands or to the north of Finland, where they take refuge in the kind of scrubbed-down, pleasantly remote cottages you might just as easily find in The Guardian’s travel supplement, and enjoy simple home-cooked food prepared by honest artisans who never went in for ‘the Electric’ in the first place. They give up their computers and take the radical step of using their old CD ROMS as drinks coasters (yes, really). They resign from the IR and spend time cataloguing their father’s collection of antiquarian books instead.

For all the talk of risk, there is no real risk here. The only things that Anna loses are things she was getting tired of in any case.

What I felt at the end of The Cryptographer was disappointment. I neither believed in nor cared about the ‘romance’ between Anna Moore and John Law, and I felt the immense promise of this novel had been wasted on trifles.

As someone who’s been known to argue that SF can often work better when it’s toned down a little, I found it amusing and ironic when I discovered that in the case of The Cryptographer what I actually felt in need of was more science fiction. I wanted the writer to follow through, to have the courage of his initial convictions, to take responsibility for the apocalypse he had created. As a novel like The Age of Miracles most aptly demonstrates, using SF as a sparkly stage dressing is an act of literary cowardice that is likely to rebound on you. There are those who maintain that the essential difference between SF and Fantasy is responsbility, and whilst mainstream writers do all manner of fine and subtle things with SF, what The Cryptographer finally shows us is that not to be true to science fiction’s core strength as a literature of ideas is, in the end, to do it a disservice. SF can learn a lot from the mainstream – the SF writer who reads Cormac McCarthy and doesn’t feel moved to up their game probably has their head in the sand – but mainstream writers like Hill and like Walker have just as much, if not more, to gain from reading some real science fiction.

If they want to write books that keep you up until three in the morning, that is.

Thought for the day

December 6, 2012 /

I guess the moral of the story is, give yourself free reign to write or paint or create the weirdest weird-ass shit you can possibly conceive of, and never worry about if it makes sense or is right or correct or follows the rules. Because, I guarantee that somewhere in the world, someone will read it or watch it or listen to whatever you’ve created and say, “this makes sense – this is about me“.

From an interview with Livia Llewellyn, just up at Weird Fiction Review. Includes excerpt from new ‘Obsidia’ story!

New things

November 30, 2012 /

Well, I’ve now read the first two books in The Dark Tower series, and I am beginning to understand why Stephen King looks upon this work – which he describes as ‘one long story’ rather than seven individual novels – as his crowning achievement. It’s a classic quest narrative, yes, but it’s more than that. (It would have to be – nothing feels quite so derivative these days as a classic quest narrative. Normally they bore the pants off me.) It has irony, it has knowingness, it has postmodernism. It has a love of its own game so heartfelt it is a joy to behold. It also has some inspired writing. Take this section, from ‘The Oracle and the Mountains’, about two-thirds of the way through The Gunslinger:

The sun climbed to its zenith, seemed to hang there more briefly than it ever had during the desert crossing, and then passed on, returning them their shadows. Shelves of rock protruded from the rising land like the arms of giant easy chairs buried in the earth. The scrub grass turned yellow and sere. Finally they were faced with a deep, chimney-like crevasse in their path and they scaled a short, peeling rise of rock to get around and above it. The ancient granite had faulted on lines that were step-like, and as they had both intuited, the beginning of their climb, at least, was easy. They paused on the four-foot-wide scarp at the top and looked back over the land to the desert, which curled around the upland like a huge yellow paw. Further off it gleamed at them in a white shield that dazzled the eye, receding into dim waves of rising heat. The gunslinger felt faintly amazed at the realisation that this desert had nearly murdered him. From where they stood, in a new coolness, the desert certainly appeared momentous, but not deadly.

(The Gunslinger p148)

This is what I mean about Stephen King and sense of place! That gorgeous word ‘sere’, and then the lovely image of the desert sands ‘curled around the upland like a huge yellow paw’, giving the desert itself the character of a serval or a mountain lion, stretched watchful and tawny and deadly in the baking sun.

The Gunslinger is full of writing like this. There’s a terseness, an economy (like being sparing with water when crossing the desert) in its construction. Yet the lyricism, when it occurs, is exquisite.

This is a perfect short novel. Anyone who still labours under the impression that King isn’t interested in writing should try it. (And I’d be willing to bet those many detractors of King who haven’t actually read him wouldn’t be able to guess the author of the paragraph above, not in a million years.)

The Drawing of the Three, the novel that follows, is very different. Longer and less meditative, less austere, this is more Canterbury Tales than Rheingold, but it’s a lovely thing, with some super set pieces (the Balazar shoot-out, the whole of the final sequence with the Roland-possessed John Mort and the cops and the gun shop guy) that made me laugh out loud through sheer enjoyment of King’s skill in telling, the bravura of what can only be called his writerly choreography.

To be honest, I feel I could quite easily launch into The Waste Lands right now, and from there to the end of the sequence and not feel trammelled for a moment. There was a time when I believed that King was so different from me as a writer that I couldn’t possibly learn from him, but I’ve changed my mind on that, rather. We’re no more similar now than we were then, but King does all kinds of things so well that it’s worth paying attention, not just as a reader but very much as a writer, too. I think what I gain most from reading King is the drive and the courage to try new things, things I might not have dared to try otherwise. His evident enjoyment of the craft is contagious. His memoir/manual On Writing has inspired and helped me more than any other book on writing I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a few.  I would recommend it, without hesitation, to anyone.

My quest for the Dark Tower will have to be deferred for the moment, however, because quite suddenly there are other books I need to read. I’ve just begun researching for a new piece of work, something I’ve been skirting the idea of for a while but that now appears to be acquiring a definite shape.

This is the exciting time, when the idea is still so new it is almost infinitely malleable. I haven’t yet had time to write myself into a corner, or become daunted by the complexity of what I’m attempting. I’m doing something rather different this time, and writing (very vague, very flexible) chapter summaries in advance, which gives me a shivery feeling, like looking at a chessboard in the moments before a game begins, the pieces in position, ready for battle.

It’s a matter of form.

Thinking about form a lot – it’s a subject I’m obsessed with, anyway. I liked very much some of the thoughts expressed in the latest of Jonathan McCalmont’s excellent essays, Annoyed with the History of Science Fiction:

Terms like ‘info-dumping’ are the science fiction equivalent of the film critic’s ‘deep focus’, ‘long take’ and ‘dynamic editing’. However, while film critics are able to draw upon a rich technical lexicon, the few technical terms used by SF critics generally come bundled up with their own unexamined assumptions about how best to write science fiction. For example, the lionisation of show-don’t-tell at the expense of the info-dump assumes that the aim of science fiction is to tell a story that is immersive in that it never causes the reader to break from the story and think about what it is that they have just read. However, some authors such as Stanislaw Lem, Neal Stephenson and Kim Stanley Robinson make frequent use of info-dumps as they believe that wading through densely written expositional text is an integral part of the science fiction experience. I would even go so far as to argue that Lem’s approach to info-dumping is so effective and idiosyncratic that it not only forms an integral part of his novels’ literary affect, it also makes his work substantially more complex and interesting than anything written under the purview of show-don’t-tell.

If we simply assume that show-don’t-tell was a linear improvement on the info-dump then it follows that writers like Stephenson and Lem are nothing more than unsophisticated writers who have yet to acquire the skills necessary for Heinleinian narrative immersion. However, if we assume that science fiction is a literary tradition rich enough to create its own literary techniques and that the info-dump might be a literary technique with its own affective payload then experimental info-dumpers such as Lem and Stephenson immediately appear more important and influential.

I loved this, even if I don’t think I can entirely agree with the idea that info-dumping is unique to SF. The term is SFnal, the technique not exclusively so, and many and various are the writers who have employed it. Versions of it, anyway.

That’s not the point though, or at least not for me. The point is that we should think about form, because the games we can play with form are as exciting as the stories we can choose to tell. Form is, in its way, its own kind of story.

Thought for the day

November 29, 2012 /

Science fiction has always defined a future as a global trend successfully isolated & described: the futurologist’s future, the cultural analyst’s future. All that interests the sf writer is the wavefront, the shock of the new. Cold, man. Because the future is also the umwelt of those who are left behind & muddle on–accepting this, rejecting that, failing to acknowledge or even detect macroeconomic shifts. In fact that’s really the only actual future, the non-discourse future, the non-speculative, non-theoretical future, the future on the ground. It’s all around, now. One of the many ways science fiction might delimit itself is to write in that direction, rather than always going for the shiny stuff, the Googie of the day. Bruce Sterling meets Anita Brookner & they totally fail to understand one another at the Hotel du Lac.

(M. John Harrison, bruce sterling meets anita brookner)

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