Like much of McNamee’s work, his new novel is set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The bureau of the title is a ‘bureau de change’, where the shopkeepers and business owners who trade either side of the Irish border can exchange currency. This is only the surface layer of what goes on there, however. The bureau’s main business is in laundering the profits made from the less salubrious smuggling enterprises that form part of the natural ecosystem of the borderland, anything from cigarettes and alcohol to unlicensed diesel to human beings. The men who run the border trade are in permanent danger of death both from each other and from more serious criminals higher up the chain. The women involved with these men – whether wives or lovers – are on a hiding to nothing.
‘My writing has always been concerned with real events and making novels around them,’ McNamee says. ‘In this book, for the first time, they aren’t just public events but events specific to me and my family.’ Brendan McNamee is a solicitor. He opened the bureau after being struck off for embezzling funds. The clients he serves now are not the kind of people you would want to cross and it is not just Brendan who will be in the firing line if he oversteps his mark. On the other side of the counter is Paddy Farrell, who dreams of living ‘a sophisticated life’ in Florida or in Dublin, but who is unable to escape the pull of the border and the shadow life he lives there. Lorraine, a young woman whose intense and morbid spirituality seems at odds with her passionate physical desire for Paddy, longs for a time when the hostilities and underlying trauma of the border years will be behind them – except they never will be.
The events McNamee is writing about happened long before most newspapers began to be digitised and so to properly align fact with fiction you would have to consult the archives of the regional papers, as McNamee quotes them, or know your sources first hand, as McNamee does. If you’re as into this kind of literary mapping as I am, you can at least give yourself a virtual tour of the novel’s locations, glimpse the tracery of minor roads that are the back-ways across the border, see the hills and the forest laybys where deals were transacted, the churchyards, streets and houses where these people lived and died. The distance between Newry and Dundalk is about twenty miles via the main border crossing; in terms of what those miles once represented they span two different worlds.
The border is a liminal space, an uncanny valley between the two.
But The Bureau is not a history book, it is a novel; it’s interesting to wonder about the armature of facts on which this novel is based, but it’s by no means essential. Any book must stand or fall on its own internal merits, on its value as text, and it is as text that The Bureau shines brightest, that it lives in the mind. The Bureau is a poem in prose. From start to finish it holds the reader in a state of tension, of uneasy apprehension of what they know from the opening pages will be the final deadly outcome. Yet there is rapture, too – the inspiration and satisfaction one draws from being in the presence of a great work of art.
They drove away from the hospital, rain driven across the rear window as Owen looked back through the rain-tossed branches of the boundary trees, the hospital locked down for the night, Brendan not sleeping, the father in him awake and abroad in the corridors and hidden spaces, abroad in the vagrant dark. Picking his way through memory the way you’d pick your way through the streets and avenues of a burned-out city.
The vagrant dark. The streets and avenues of a burned-out city. The power and beauty of McNamee’s image-making so in tune with his subject matter. His grasp of darkness and of weather, both internal and external.
You want to place other people in the room. Shadowy figures. This was the era of shadows. This was the time when people disappeared without warning. This was the time of unexplained shootings, of clandestine alliances, zones of subterfuge, zones of dread. This was the border. There were set-ups, double-crosses, betrayal. Subterfuge was the currency, the game seen far into the future, the deep tradecraft.
It is often tempting to think of history as having moved on, but it is never that simple. Echoes remain, ripples spread, and in any case, history is not linear but cyclical. When someone asks what writing is for me I speak about my fear of time passing, my obsession with nailing memory into place and this would seem to be McNamee’s mission, too. To not forget. To say: this is how it was, this is what we went through. This is what we remember.
The novel that kept resurfacing in my mind while I was reading The Bureau was Death and Nightingales, by Eugene McCabe. Because both seem equally perfect, equally poised between rapture and terror, equally haunted. McCabe’s novel is set a hundred years before The Bureau and acts almost as a foreshadowing. The sense of place, so much an active element of both novels, is another point of union between them.
Reading a novel like The Bureau reminds me of what I am doing, or at least attempting. Writing as good as this is hard to find, but when you do, you feel grateful, you feel replenished. This is what’s possible, this is what it’s about. You know you’ll never be as good but you’re determined to try.
Speaking about the art and craft of historical fiction
in 2017, Hilary Mantel said she became a novelist because she had believed that
it was too late for her to become a historian. When her first, monumental work
about the French Revolution failed to find a publisher, she turned her
attention instead to stories with a tighter focus, a more restricted circle of
characters. But her reason for writing – and her way of thinking about history
– remained unaltered. ‘The historian and the biographer follow a trail of
evidence, usually a paper trail,’ Mantel explains. ‘The novelist does that too,
and then performs another act: puts the past back into process, into action,
frees the people from the archive and lets them run about, ignorant of their
fates, with all their mistakes unmade.’
The same words might be said – might especially be said – of the novelist who chooses to base their work around the story of a crime that really happened. True crime is simply history as viewed through a particular lens, and as Mantel herself vividly argues, the historical record can only ever be partial. The reader looks to the novelist more as a companion than as a teacher, someone willing to accompany them on their journey into the past. Someone who will put the questions they themselves might ask.
There is some marvellous true
crime writing out there: books that reconstruct trials, that pick apart police investigations,
that interrogate the psychology of criminals and investigate their background. There
are books that help us come to know the victims and to honour their memories. Some
of these books are factual reconstructions, some are investigative journalism.
Others are novels. In writing A Granite Silence I knew from the beginning that
I wanted to use my skills as a novelist to take the reader back in time, to lead
them to the street where the crime took place, to allow them to know the people
who lived there as if they were their neighbours. I wanted to be free to glance
off to one side, to let my imagination wander, to think about people whose
lives are missing from the historical record.
True crime novelists, like
historians, are passionate about the question of what really happened. I find
constant inspiration in the work of those writers who have felt drawn to certain
stories, who have followed them into the crannies behind the headlines. Writers
who find their own way of telling the truth. Here are thirteen of them.
Harriet by Elizabeth Jenkins (1934). Elizabeth Jenkins was a novelist, an historian and a
biographer. She also wrote two important works of true crime fiction, which
deserve to be better known. Harriet is an imaginative reconstruction of the
so-called Penge Murder of 1877 in which four people conspired to cause the
death of a vulnerable woman, Harriet Richardson, and her young child Tommy.
Harriet, who had learning difficulties, had been left a large sum of money by
an aunt – money Louis Staunton, a friend of the family, was keen to get his
hands on. What happened to Harriet was horrific; it was also as complicated,
unlikely and bizarre as the plot of any opera. Jenkins, who was born in 1905, remembered
people still talking about the case fifty years after it happened. She tells Harriet’s
desperate and enthralling story with precision, insight and empathy.
A Pin to See the Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse (1934). When Edith Thompson and Freddie Bywaters were
jointly accused of murdering Edith’s husband Percy in 1922, the case caught the
public imagination to such an extent that it dominated the newspaper headlines
for many weeks. A hundred years later and more, it is still exciting debate. In
her fictional recreation of the ‘Ilford Murder’, Fryn Tennyson Jesse’s
protagonist is Julia Starling, a young woman from a lower middle class
background who marries deadly dull Herbert and finds herself falling for Leo, a
young airman. With Leo often away on duty, Julia pours all of her
dissatisfaction and longing into her letters. She begins to entertain fantasies
of killing Herbert, and when the fantasy becomes a reality her letters turn
into a weapon to be used against her. Fryn Tennyson Jesse – a great-niece of
the poet – had a lifelong interest in true crime. Her 1924 book Murder and its
Motives is still in print, and she wrote introductions to six of the Notable
British Trials series, including the notorious trial of Timothy Evans and John
Christie in 1957. She was a remarkable writer, whose journalism took her into
war reporting and whose novelistic imagination surely made her identify with
Edith Thompson, a woman whose ‘trial by media’ saw her executed on no other
evidence than the fantasies of murder she had written down.
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966). This is the one novel that inevitably crops up on
every true crime reading list. There’s a reason for that, which is that it
really is as good as everyone says, a book that anyone with an interest in true
crime would have to read. Capote’s novel is often credited with being the first
of its kind, which isn’t strictly true. What is true is that in Capote’s hands,
this account of a Midwestern farming family and their murder at the hands of
two disaffected young criminals attains the dimensions of classical tragedy.
Capote has been accused of displaying too much sympathy for the murderers and insufficient
attention to their victims, but I suspect that at least some of those who have
said this have not read the book. What we get from Capote is restraint,
empathy, a measured objectivity and just brilliant writing.
The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer (1979). It’s not difficult to trace the lineage from
Capote’s In Cold Blood to Mailer’s magnum opus, which in its turn was the
direct inspiration for Gordon Burn’s book about Peter Sutcliffe, Somebody’s
Husband, Somebody’s Son. Mailer’s novel tells the story of Gary Gilmore, a
convicted armed robber who went on to commit two murders and who was the first
person to be executed in the US following a moratorium on the death penalty
that had lasted almost a decade. Like Capote, Mailer went directly to the
source, interviewing friends, family and associates of Gilmore as well as
police and legal counsel. His coverage of the trial and the debate around the
death penalty – Gilmore refused to appeal his sentence – could have been a book
in itself. I was only ten when Gilmore was executed but I have vivid memories
of the headline news – indeed this was almost certainly my first and horrified
realization of the fact that executions could still happen outside of the
history books.
Mary Swann by Carol Shields (1987). An innovative, densely textured novel that makes use
of both poetry and playscript, Mary Swann is the story of a ‘lost’ Canadian
poet who grew up poor in rural Canada and whose death at the age of forty
remains a mystery. The novel examines the effect of the poet’s life and death
on various individuals in her orbit, including her would-be biographer and a
shy provincial librarian. Shields wrote Mary Swann as a homage to the Vancouver
poet Pat Lowther, who was brutally murdered by her husband Roy in 1975. Pat
Lowther was prodigiously talented – her first poem was published in a local
newspaper when she was ten. Roy was a failed poet, and bitterly jealous of his
wife’s growing success. According to his daughter from a previous marriage, he
was also violent and extremely troubled. With its literary theme, innovative
form and embedded sense of mystery, Mary Swann was one of the novels that first
awakened my interest in writing based around true events.
Libra by Don DeLillo (1988). There is a forensic quality to all of DeLillo’s
writing, a pared-back brilliance that makes it a natural fit for true crime
subjects, and here in Libra we get his take on one of the biggest. The
assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1963 has probably spawned more
words on paper than any other murder (with the possible exception of Jesus of
Nazareth) but DeLillo’s deep dive into the mind and chequered history of Lee
Harvey Oswald is remarkable for very deliberately blending historical fact with
imagined scenarios. DeLillo shows how the assassination could have happened –
whilst maintaining his own stated belief that the truth behind Kennedy’s murder
is most likely lost to history. Unsurprisingly, Libra generated plenty of controversy
in the US. A review in the Washington Post accused DeLillo of being a bad
citizen. ‘If novelists are bad citizens,’ DeLillo countered, ‘we’re doing our
job.’ He gets my vote every time.
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (1996). The Grace of the title is Grace Marks, a servant in
the house of Canadian farmer and landowner Thomas Kinnear. In July 1843,
Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery, with whom he was having an
affair, were shot and bludgeoned to death by James McDermott, another servant
of the house and Grace’s lover. McDermott and Marks fled to the US, where they
were soon apprehended. Both were convicted, though Marks was spared the death
penalty. Before he was hanged, McDermott made a statement blaming Grace for the
crimes, insisting that she was the ‘evil genius’ behind the plan, and that she
had feigned madness in order to escape the gallows. Atwood’s novel takes place
after the murders. Grace has been committed to an asylum and is something of a
cause celebre. A doctor, Simon Jordan, is determined to win Grace’s confidence
and to discover the truth: was Grace involved in the murders, or not? In the
novel, as in life, the question remains unresolved.
Red Riding quartet by David Peace (1999 – 2002). Peace’s first four published novels take place
against the background of the Yorkshire Ripper murders, with the investigating
police force revealed as corrupt, inefficient, and riven by internal feuds. Some
characters keep returning from book to book; others are killed off, their
deaths a warning to anyone trying to discover who was responsible. Peace’s
language is bold, stark, uncompromising, as is his portrait of the social and
political landscape that formed the backdrop to his own adolescence. It’s
difficult to overstate the impact these books had on me when I first read them,
most of all for their subverting of crime genre stereotypes. Peace does not
offer any of the comforts of traditional crime fiction. What he offers is
brilliant writing and an honesty about the nature of violence and the impact of
poverty that few writers have matched.
Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel by Gordon Burn(2008). Though Gordon Burn’s career was cut
tragically short – he died of cancer in 2009 at the age of sixty-one – the
books he left behind have been powerfully influential. To write his 1984 book
on the Yorkshire Ripper, Burn spent most of two years living in Sutcliffe’s
home town, getting to know his friends and family in order to gain an authentic
insight into his background. Burn’s later book about Fred and Rosemary West,
Happy Like Murderers, saw him immersing himself in trial transcripts, police
interviews and many other other first-hand accounts. Researching this horrific material
had a severe impact on Burn’s mental health, and he said he would never write
another true crime book. His final novel, Born Yesterday is the closest he came
to revisiting the territory, a kaleidoscopic portrait of a single year – 2007 –
and the news events that defined it, most notably the abduction and
disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Burn said that he hoped the novel might give
future readers a sense of how the raw material of news gets refashioned as
history. It is a remarkable achievement. I have read this book several times
now and am still hypnotized by it.
The Kills by Richard House (2013). In the vastness and complexity of its structure –
four standalone novels that combine to create a single overarching narrative –
The Kills bears comparison with David Peace’s Red Riding quartet. There are
plenty of murders in The Kills, but the true crime being examined is the
political chicanery, economic exploitation and environmental vandalism
perpetrated by US-government-backed big business in the aftermath of the Iraq
war. The ‘War on Terror’ kickstarted by 9/11 is revealed as a free-for-all in
which the only working currencies are money and violence. As well as being a
masterpiece of formal invention, The Kills is a thrilling, disquieting,
thought-provoking piece of fiction that reveals bitter truths about our own
time.
Dead Girls by Selva Almada translated by Annie
McDermott (2020). Roberto
Bolano’s 2004 novel 2666 was one of the first to openly address the crime of
femicide in Latin America. Since Bolano we have seen pioneering work in true
crime writing by Laura Restrepo, Fernanda Melchor, Mariana Enriquez and
Cristina Rivera Garza among others. In Dead Girls, Selva Almada concentrates
her attention on three young Argentinian women who were murdered for their
gender in the 1980s, exploring their backgrounds and circumstances as well as
the political backdrop against which their killings took place. Almada is one
of a brilliant new generation of South American writers whose approach,
blending journalistic with fictional techniques, has brought new energy and
viewpoints into contemporary true crime writing.
The Treatment by Michael Nath (2020). Here is a novel that shows what is possible when
fact and fiction come together in the mind of a writer whose imagination is as
fertile as his talent with words. Nath bases The Treatment around the Stephen
Lawrence Inquiry and the decades-long struggle to unmask institutionalized
racism within the Metropolitan Police. A journalist, Carl Hyatt, has been fired
from the broadsheet he worked for after his investigation into a corrupt
property developer risks getting them sued. He’s been forced to take a job with
the Chronicle, a free-ads paper. But in spite of promising his wife that he’ll
stay away from the story, Carl’s obsession with uncovering the truth is about
to lead him and those he cares about into mortal danger. The Treatment is a
postmodern take on the Elizabethan revenge drama, delivered in a bravura mix of
poetry, street slang and Multicultural London English. Nath exercises superb
command of his material in a novel that demands a second reading to fully
appreciate its inventiveness.
Babysitter by Joyce Carol Oates (2023). Oates has frequently takes inspiration for her work
from true crimes, and the background to Babysitter is a series of unsolved
child murders that took place in Detroit in the mid-1970s. The novel follows
Hannah, the wife of a rich but rather dull businessman. She begins an affair
with a total stranger, who refuses to reveal anything about his background or
even his real name. He is powerful, controlling and violently unpredictable –
but for Hannah that is part of the attraction. Oates’s narrative is
multi-stranded, with Hannah only gradually becoming alive to what is going on in
her own neighbourhood. Babysitter is brilliantly imagined and richly characterised,
with a genuine sense of menace. Keeping the external events at one remove –
glimpsed from the corner of the eye – gives the reader a queasy and increasing
awareness of the danger Hannah is in.
I’m reading Helen Garner’s diary at the moment, or
rather her diaries, the three volumes recently released in the UK as a compendium,
beginning soon after the publication of her first novel Monkey Grip in 1978 and
carrying us through to the late 1990s. I’m currently in the middle of the
eighties, just after the publication of perhaps her best-known work The
Children’s Bach, which more or less coincides with the end of her second
marriage. People talk about the clarity of her gaze, her merciless
self-scrutiny and while all of that is true, what strikes me again and again is
the calibre of her ambition, her genuine terror that she might not live up to her
own high standards. She compares herself constantly with other writers and
finds herself wanting, a necessary discipline that does not in the least
diminish her ever-present joy in the practice of reading.
Even in the midst of life – and hers is an immensely social life, a tangled mass of friendships and rivalries and love affairs and motherhood – writing is central. She never seeks to downplay its importance and how I love her for that. I don’t believe in keeping writing stashed at the back of the cupboard, something that is done in spite of. Writing is because.
Garner has arranged her diaries as a series of vignettes. Only the years are given as a guide to where we are in her life. Individual entries are undated. They are like film stills, a pile of postcards, or photographs. You turn them over, one at a time. The year gradually accrues not through numbers but through narrative glimpses. Jump cuts. Sudden revelations. A life to lose yourself in. As I read I keep thinking about how Garner is now in her eighties and so I worry about her. I don’t want to lose her from this world, to lose this voice, this edgy, bracing, self-critical, fearlessly life-loving presence.
I know in advance that this volume will end with only one of Garner’s book-length works of narrative non-fiction out in the world: The First Stone, which was published in 1995. Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) and This House of Grief (2014) will still be ahead of her. But even from where I am now in the 1980s, the qualities that make her a great writer of true crime – the acuity of observation, the rapacious curiosity, a quality of objectivity and a relentless capacity for asking questions, not only of others but especially of self – are nailed into place.
A surety of line, the apparently effortless ability to make ordinary language carry a meaning and a beauty that rises above itself. Garner, for all her fears to the contrary, is a great writer, period.
The first book of Garner’s I read was This House of Grief, which follows the trial of Robert Farquharson, accused in 2005 of killing his three sons by deliberately driving the car in which they were travelling into a reservoir. Less than a year earlier, Farquharson’s wife Cindy had left him, and Farquharson had become increasingly depressed and resentful as a result. The series of trials that led to Farquharson’s conviction took seven years to unfold, and Garner was present in the courtroom for every hearing. This House of Grief has, perhaps inevitably, been compared with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. But it’s a very different book. Capote’s genius is in excising himself from the text entirely – except in the matter of the quality of his writing. Garner is there. She reveals not only the story but her process in telling it. She speaks and sometimes argues with others who are present, reporting their interactions in intimate detail. Like Capote, she finds herself becoming drawn into the circle of relatives and family friends who have been directly affected by the case. But where Capote rode out the emotional impact of such personal involvement in private, Garner’s difficulties and doubts are made plain in the text, becoming an inalienable part of the story she is telling. She asks the questions we ourselves might want to ask, often remaining openly uncertain about the answers she is given.
There is a perfection to Capote’s work that is somehow unassailable; Garner’s has an immediacy that arises from its openness to scrutiny, through its expressions of doubt, not only about casting judgement but, on occasion, about the whole enterprise.
As with her frank and self-searching account of a sexual harassment case in The First Stone, some critics found fault with Garner for not paying sufficient attention to the gender-specific aspects of the Farquharson case, most especially the nature and repetitive frequency of male violence. But one of the qualities I value most in Garner is that she has never been interested in filtering her observations or her writing through an ideological lens. She is interested in people and how they respond to the situations they find themselves in. Most of all she is interested in discovering the truth of what really happened.
This House of Grief had a
powerful impact on me, not just in the shocking, harrowing story it was telling
but in the way it was written. True crime literature has come in for censure –
and I mean always, not just right now – for being exploitative, prurient,
manipulative and even immoral. I would maintain that this is not a problem of
content but of style. If you reach for cliches you will find your narrative
lacking in nuance, in objectivity, in accurate reasoning. In any kind of
storytelling but most of all when you are dealing in facts – especially painful
facts, especially disputed facts – the chief responsibility of the
writer is to strive for language that adequately conveys the nature of what is
being described.
Exploitative true crime is not
so much immoral as badly written. The work of a writer like Helen Garner is the
antidote, the antithesis. In revealing to us the conflicted, contradictory and
hard-to-discover facts and abiding contradictions of this terrible case she
reveals to us ourselves, the extent of our prejudices, the divided nature of
the society we live in.
On the day I started writing this, I read an interview in the Guardian with the writer Hallie Rubenhold. Rubenhold rightly gained attention for her 2019 book The Five, in which she re-examines the lives and circumstances of the ‘canonical five’ victims of Jack the Ripper. In shifting the attention away from the women’s killer, she created a compelling new model for true crime literature as well as providing insight into a society that – sometimes subtly, often not at all subtly – insisted that murdered women were to some extent responsible for their own violent deaths. A hundred years later, the same set of attitudes became a determining factor in the botched police investigation of the Yorkshire Ripper murders. If anything proves the need for the shift in thinking Rubenhold is advocating it is surely this. And yet – proving her own point – she ended up becoming the target of online abuse by ‘Ripperologists’, that peculiar subset of true crime enthusiasts who concern themselves with the unsolved (and now unsolvable) mystery of Jack the Ripper.
Certain extreme fringes of the
fraternity were incensed, it seems, by all kinds of things: that Rubenhold was
not sufficiently immersed in the ‘science’ of Ripperology for her opinion to
have any currency; that she ‘hated sex workers’ because she insisted on
undertaking a more nuanced (and factually accurate) examination of the victims’
backgrounds; that she dared to suggest that it didn’t matter all that much,
actually, who the Ripper was.
They’re a funny bunch, Ripperologists. I’m not going to castigate them for their weird enthusiasm – or only those who go in for online harassment – because to an extent at least I get it. In every writer of true crime there is at least a little of the obsessive, a little of the Ripperologist. What I don’t get is: why Jack? Seriously, guys, we are never going to know. Move on. Rubenhold herself has moved on. Her new book, Story of a Murder, focuses on a crime that took place decades later but that commanded equal column inches at the time. Dr Crippen was often reported in the press as a ‘mild-mannered murderer’; through focusing once again on his victim(s), Rubenhold is intent on showing us that he was no such thing. That indeed there is no such thing.
Rubenhold has some fascinating things to say in her interview about true crime generally. ‘I’m not interested in straight true crime,’ she insists. ‘I’m interested in the darkness in human nature as seen through historical events. And I’m fascinated by how granular you can get in terms of historical understanding; I’m looking at material that a murder throws up – all the witness statements, all the trial papers, all the unspoken human experience.’
I find all this deeply relatable. In writing A Granite Silence, the stuff I kept coming back to was the quotidian detail and circumstance of ordinary lives. The first witnesses called in the trial of Jeannie Donald were working people – a lamplighter, a gas worker, a baker – who happened to be up and about on the street in question before anyone else. I kept coming back to these people – the slaters, the rag-and-bone men and especially the lamplighters. Their trade does not even exist now yet in 1934 it was still part of the normal street scene. Such details – like the items of furniture in a room I describe in the first pages of the novel – are luminous to me because they give us an insight into history as it is lived. To quote Rubenhold again, ‘that’s where the story is – it’s about people’s experience.’
I would add though that I think we need to be honest about our attraction to these kinds of stories. There’s a section of the commentariat that insists the current ‘obsession’ with true crime is a new thing, a toxic byproduct of capitalism, or celebrity culture, or (most popularly and inevitably) the internet. But that simply isn’t true. Going back to Jack the Ripper (if we must) the police file of bogus witness statements, prurient and salacious rumour-mongering, false sightings and – yes – dozens of people claiming to be the Ripper is as thick as any amount of similar correspondence they might receive today. Ditto the Yorkshire Ripper enquiry, two full decades before widespread internet use. And the public fascination with high-profile murder cases goes back well before either.
There are many theories
as to why that might be. I tend towards the belief that there is something
mythic about these stories, something we recognise as being common to all of
us. We draw together instinctively behind the headlines in sorrow for the
victim, fear of the killer and fascination with the mystery. We feel horror at
the violence and a sense of helplessness at the suffering of those left behind.
We feel something else, too, something harder to describe. Not excitement so
much as déjà vu. These crimes lay bare our fears, our vulnerabilities. We want
to read about them because they are part of the definition of who we are.
I know all this, because I feel it, too. It is why I am drawn to write about such things.
In her truly excellent book Savage Appetites, Rachel Monroe suggests that there are in fact four distinct categories of true crime junkie: those who identify with the victim, those who seek for justice, those who cast themselves in the role of detective and those – a very small group – who see themselves in the killer. Monroe gives potent examples from each category. I find her arguments convincing and compelling and for the record, as both reader and writer I would put myself firmly in the detective camp. I would also say about myself as a writer that I recognise and respond to the powerful energy of the mystery template in fiction and especially in non-fiction, that relentlessly nagging question: what really happened?
Personally, I don’t find anything wrong in this. How a reader – or a writer – relates and responds to true crime stories is a personal matter, the business of their own conscience. For me, that business depends on providing suitably persuasive answers to the question of why I am interested in a particular story, what I can bring to my account of it that might justify and make sense of that interest in literary terms. There have been moments – quite a few of them – in the last twelve months when I have doubted my ability and my desire to work in this field again. But then I have asked myself: what if I am good at it? What if I cannot, now, imagine doing anything else?
In her interview for the Guardian, Hallie Rubenhold reveals that her mother died while she was working on Story of a Murder. ‘It really made me reflect on being a historian, and documenting lives,’ she says. ‘Because there’s a start date and an end date. Life has a finite beginning and a finite end. This is your time. And that’s it.’
Her words for me are powerfully resonant, a true reflection of my own motivations in deciding to focus my attention on this kind of story.
FIVE ESSENTIAL WORKS OF TRUE CRIME WRITTEN BY WOMEN
The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm
(1990)
‘[The journalist] is a kind of confidence man, preying
on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying
them without remorse.’ So opens Janet Malcolm’s interrogation of the ethics of
journalism, and true crime journalism in particular. The journalist, Joe
McGinniss, befriended and gained the confidence of the murderer, Jeffrey
MacDonald, in order to write his bestselling 1983 book Fatal Vision. MacDonald quickly
came to see McGinniss as his ‘man on the outside’ and possibly a route to being
exonerated. Needless to say he was very, very wrong. Malcolm’s book is itself a
kind of true crime narrative, brilliantly written and with a deeply personal
understanding of what is at stake.
The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson (2007)
Nelson’s
aunt Jane was murdered in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1969, while she was still a
student. No one was convicted of the crime. The tragedy had always been there
in Nelson’s background, but it wasn’t until 2005 that she addressed it in
writing. Jane: A Murder is a hybrid work that includes poetry, prose and
reportage to tell Jane’s story and to recover her identity from that of ‘murder
victim’. The Red Parts is the continuation of that story some thirty-six years
later, when a new suspect is identified and finally brought to trial. Nelson is
a writer of powerful originality and both these books offer radical new
perspectives on true crime as the subject of literature.
The Murders at White House Farm by Carol Ann Lee
(2015)
Carol Ann Lee is a historian and biographer who has
written on a number of true crime subjects, including Myra Hindley and Ruth Ellis.
The Murders at White House Farm is her exhaustive investigation of the 1985 Jeremy
Bamber case, in which the then twenty-four-year-old Bamber was ultimately charged
with the murders by shooting of five close relatives including his six-year-old
twin nephews. Bamber continues to protest his innocence, now as then blaming his
sister Sheila Caffell for the killings. This is one of those cases that now
appears to be unsolvable. The only person still alive who knows the truth is
Bamber himself – the ultimate unreliable narrator. Lee’s account, like all her
work, is quiet, methodical, beautifully written and open to all arguments. Her
careful reconstruction of the character, background, personal problems and
appalling media portrayal of Sheila Caffell makes this book doubly worthwhile.
I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara (2018)
As well as being the most problematic, serial killers
are for me the least interesting subjects of true crime literature – these men
are violent, small-minded, narcissistic misogynists, end of. For this reason I
read very few serial-killer-related narratives, especially US ones. Michelle
McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is the exception, a book that proves that any
subject can be a worthy subject if the writer is sincerely motivated and equal
to the task. McNamara made it her life’s work to discover the identity of the Golden
State Killer, a notorious rapist and murderer who committed his horrific crimes
throughout California during the seventies and eighties. McNamara died in 2016
with her book still unfinished and the killer still uncaught. The manuscript
was brought to completion by McNamara’s husband, together with an investigative
journalist and a true crime writer. The resulting book became an instant
bestseller and recharged the continuing cold case with some much needed
publicity. The murderer – a retired cop – was finally brought to justice just
two months after the book’s publication.
Liliana’s Invincible Summer by Cristina Rivera Garza
(2023)
Rivera
Garza’s sister Liliana was murdered in Mexico in 1990. She was just twenty
years old. Though the killer’s identity was widely known, he was never arrested.
Some thirty years later, Rivera Garza attempts to gain access to the files that
were kept on the case. Unwilling to expose themselves to scrutiny or criticism,
the police prove to be an active impediment in her search for justice. Rivera
Garza’s formally inventive and searching memoir examines the official response
to the crime of femicide in Mexico amidst the systemic problems of entrenched
machismo and a failure to understand or even recognise the increasing phenomenon
of intimate partner violence. It is also a joyful, defiant celebration of
Liliana herself, a young woman who, one feels instinctively, would be the first
to admire the book that bears her name.
It is now just a little over two weeks before the publication of my new novel A Granite Silence. In the run-up to that, I would like to talk a little more about the background to this work – what inspired it, what it means for me as a writer. The question I have been asked a lot about this book already is: what is it? Is it historical fiction, is it true crime, are there any speculative elements involved? The simple answer is yes, yes and yes, but there’s nothing simple about this book, nor what led me to write it. A Granite Silence feels like a significant milestone for me as a writer. At the same time, it is a novel I have been gearing myself up to write for many years. Here’s an essay I wrote about that journey.
*
READING PEACE, WRITING GRANITE
‘As they left the Highbury pitch that afternoon, as
the sporting men of Fulham shook their hands, slapped their backs and wished
United luck, the very best of luck, Bobby had his head bowed, he did not speak,
a few folk even said he looked distraught, though they could not think, not
fathom why, why would he look distraught? United were in the final of the Cup,
the FA bloody Cup, doesn’t get much better than that now, does it, Bobby lad?
Come on, Bobby, smile, why don’t you smile? You scored a goal, you’re in the
Final!’
My mother remembered Munich; she was fourteen when it
happened. I first learned about the crash from when she happened to mention it
to me, years ago. I have forgotten exactly what she said, but I know she talked
about the Busby Babes, about the tragedy of what happened to Manchester United.
The odd England game aside, my mother is not a football person, never has been.
But she remembered Munich.
On the afternoon of February 6th 1958, the plane carrying the team home from their European Cup fixture against Red Star Belgrade crashed at the end of the runway at Munich airport. Of the forty-four passengers on board British European Airways Flight 609, only twenty-one survived. Of the twenty-three who died, eight were Man United players. The team’s manager Matt Busby was so badly injured he took months to recover.
At the time of the Munich Air
Disaster, David Peace’s father, Basil Dunford Peace was in London studying to
be a teacher. He attended the match United played and won against Arsenal at
Highbury the week before. He judged it the greatest game he’d ever seen. Though
Basil Peace was always a Huddersfield Town supporter, it was the Babes he
talked about. When his father died in 2022, David Peace set aside the book he had
been working on and began to write Munichs, a novel of the crash and of
its immediate aftermath, a novel about football but also – equally, tellingly –
about grief.
British society after the war was slow to change. Deferential and still massively class-bound, it was a society in which the traditional hierarchies of family, church and community were strongly upheld. In Munichs, the second world war is still tangibly close. The older men – the football managers, the sports journalists – have fought in the war. Some of them have fought in two. Bobby Charlton and his friend Duncan Edwards are still doing National Service. All the young players are encouraged to learn a trade – bricklayer, builder, plumber, sparks – in case football doesn’t work out. The idea of taking their game into Europe is still very new, and they feel nervous about venturing ‘behind the Iron Curtain’. More than one of the boys who ended up on that flight would have preferred to stay at home.
Peace evokes a world in which
it is still not unusual for only one house on the street to have a telephone,
where families sit anxiously around the radio, waiting for news. Where women – especially
working class women – are really only expected to be wives and mothers. Where
young lads who’ve just been in an air crash are expected to be out on the pitch
winning matches just a fortnight later.
When you look at photos of Matt
Busby’s team, what hits you in the gut is just how young they were. Several of
those who died were barely in their twenties. Those who survived received no trauma
counselling. They were not encouraged to talk, even by their families, about
what had happened to them. And once they were home there were the match-day
chants, shouts that they ‘should have died at Munich’, accusations that they
burn-outs, selfish for standing in the way of fresher talent. Jackie
Blanchflower and John Berry, who survived the crash but who were too badly
injured to continue in the game, were quickly asked to vacate their subsidised
flats in order to make way for the players who would replace them.
There are intimations in Munichs
of the increasingly commercial route football would follow. Even before the
crash, Manchester United were sneered at for being ‘Hollywood United’, a team
more interested in big names, big money and foreign travel than the home game. Matt
Busby was criticized for taking the team into Europe in the first place.
In some ways, what happened at
Munich represents a dividing line between the 1950s and the 1960s. The more
open, socially permissive era that followed the disaster promised greater
freedom and openness but less security and fewer certainties. Less emphasis on
moral values, more on getting ahead. It is a harsher time, a more ruthless time,
and not just in football. Is it fanciful to suggest that Munich is where
Thatcherism begins? Worth remembering that Thatcher was selected as the
Conservative candidate for Finchley in April 1958, just two months after
Munich, that she was elected to parliament less than eighteen months after that?
There has to be something in
this, at least for a writer. And for a writer the story of Munich is not all
about Man United. Eight journalists as well as eight footballers were killed in
the crash – a horrible symmetry – men who had known each other for longer than
most of the players had been alive. In the world of sport they were famous. The
funeral of Henry Rose, the most-read football columnist the Daily Express ever
had, was bigger even than Duncan Edwards’s or Tommy Taylor’s. When these men
died, whole lifetimes of knowledge and memory went with them, gaps that could
never be filled and that marked the end of an era in British sports writing.
There is also the broader
question of what caused the crash. The inquiry into the accident went on for
years, undermined by disagreements and conflicts of interest between British
European Airways and the German airport authorities. The pilot, James Thain, was
a former RAF officer and an experienced flyer. Thain, who had just turned
thirty-eight at the time of the crash, was subjected to an ongoing barrage of
vitriol hurled at him by the press and by a public who were desperate for
someone to blame. BEA sacked him two Christmases later, anxious to cover their
backs; the German authorities were determined from the outset that Thain was at
fault. It took him ten years to clear his name. He died of a heart attack not
long afterwards, aged just fifty-four.
I could spend a lot of time reading and thinking about
this bitter aftermath. A large part of my passion for true crime literature is in
my hunger for knowledge, an obsession with the question of what really happened.
Munichs though is not so much an investigation as an exhumation, an
evocation of a time as viewed through the lens of a single event. The novel captures
the language and texture of a grief that is both national and personal,
personal not just for the fans and families of Manchester United but for Peace
himself. A means of replaying his father’s memories, reimagining the effect of
those headlines, that heartbreak, the abysmal sense of shock. Of bringing his
father back to life, even. A way to continue with a conversation that had been
cut short.
Peace’s present tense
narrative rolls in a slow wave between crash survivors and the victims’
families, shellshocked staff on the ground at Old Trafford, newspaper
reporters, doctors, older players coaxed back to the game by a desperate
management, teenage reserves hurriedly brought on side. Hostile supporters of rival
teams, keyboard warriors before their time. Taxi drivers, grieving brothers,
even a monk. And of course the Dead, who haunt Peace’s account from its opening
pages. Everyone has their own version of what happened at Munich. Some have
more than one, hence Munichs plural, though that is not the only meaning
of the novel’s title.
Peace never feels the need to
use elevated language. As a potter constructs a miracle from humble red clay,
so Peace achieves poetry through paying attention to the sound and rhythm of ordinary
words. The language heard on the street or down the pub. Of tabloid headlines,
the cliches of condolence, the gulf that exists between what is spoken and what
is felt. You hear this novel as you read it: the voices of the regions, the
heft and weight of sentences, the way words work harder and divulge more secrets
when they are put together in a particular way.
Munichs is as much a piece of music as it is a novel, a
battery of half-rhymes and assonance achieved through Peace’s habitual,
repeated process of reading aloud. A symphony of sorrowful songs, a hymn to all
of the Dead, including his dad.
*
I kept reading around David Peace before I actually
read him. I remember seeing him on the 2003 Granta list and feeling drawn to
what he was saying about how fact works in fiction. About how his first books
had been inspired by the years-long, error-strewn hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper.
I have always been interested in true crime for its detailed evocations of
particular memories, of particular times and places. I remember also the
feelings of guilt and uncertainty I used to have around reading it. True crime
was sensationalist and exploitative, the stuff of tabloid newspapers. It was OK
to read Crime and Punishment and talk about how it was really a crime
novel but reading about real murders was somehow taboo. At least if you were
serious, at least if you had taste.
Then I read an interview with Peace that upended my thinking and ultimately changed my direction as a writer. Speaking in 2010, Peace described the crime genre as ‘the perfect tool to understand why crimes take place, and thus tell us about the society we live in and the country we live in and who we are.’ I had heard similar arguments before, but Peace went further, saying that he was ‘drawn to when writers take on history, take on real crimes. There’s just so much that happens in real life that we don’t understand, that we can’t even fathom. I don’t really see the point of making up crimes.’
I remember feeling electrified when I read that. Peace was writing densely textured works that embodied the vision and freedom to experiment that fiction offers, but that were tied to experiential reality in a way that made them even more powerful. I felt energized and inspired. I was beginning to think in a new way about what I wanted to write. At the same time I felt deeply uncertain about whether I was truly capable of this kind of writing. Whether I could bring anything new to the table. Whether I could do justice to my subject matter.
Neither could I help noticing
that the field of work I was becoming interested in was dominated by men. Macho,
in-your-face men like Norman Mailer and Peace’s own literary idol James Ellroy.
James Ellroy is about as far from British self-deprecation as you’re going to
get. But he has the goods to back up his words and in the end that’s all I care
about, the quality of the writing. If Ellroy feels OK comparing himself with
Beethoven then good on him, because he’s not far wrong. I wish I had his nerve.
I have since come to realise that my uncertainty had less to do with not being Norman Mailer than with not being ready. I didn’t feel I had the technical ability and I was probably right. I took the slow way round, feeling my way towards stories that made sense for me to tell, pushing the envelope of my abilities with each new thing I tried. When I finally came to write A Granite Silence it still felt like a risk, the most difficult and challenging project I had yet attempted. But I had come to a point where I sensed I might be capable of solving the problems the book presented, and where the writing itself – the words on the page – stood a chance of reaching a standard I felt I could live with.
I had arrived at the moment where the risk felt not just possible, but necessary.
*
In the autumn of 2021 I travelled to Liverpool to meet
up with a friend I hadn’t seen in person since before the first lockdown. Just
being in the city put me on a high. Rain fell heavily the night before I headed
home again, and when I went to catch my train I discovered that the West Coast
Main Line was partially flooded, that all services heading north were severely
delayed. I was told to take a train to Preston and await further instructions.
“What happens when I get to Preston?” I asked. No one could tell me, because nobody knew. When I got there the scenes I encountered were predictably insane. Trains arriving and disgorging hundreds of passengers with nowhere to go. People sweeping in tides from platform to platform as rumours of trains that might get us into Scotland flared up, spread like wildfire and then guttered out. The one that finally arrived had limped all the way from Plymouth. By the time it turned up in Preston it was three hours late. I crammed myself into a luggage stand, fenced in by people’s knees and a couple of bikes. As we crossed the border at Berwick-on-Tweed an announcement crackled through the overhead speakers that all passengers were now obliged to put on their masks. The woman sitting next to me – I’d managed to grab a seat just after Newcastle – asked me if I’d managed to catch what they were saying. She’d been on the train since Birmingham. I reluctantly broke the news.
“Jesus!” she groaned. I told her if she didn’t feel like complying with Scottish law that was fine by me. We’d all been breathing each other’s air for several hours in any case. I was exhausted. I was increasingly pessimistic about making the last ferry. But what I remember most about that journey is reading David Peace’s 1980 and 1983, in a breathless six hours of immersion that were still ongoing. And how strange it was, that I was passing through the places I was reading about: those hard-nosed northern moorlands and back-to-backs, streaming past beyond the windows in a reel of silent film.
*
From the Redbeck car park back into Castleford –
Silence
in the black of the back of the van –
Dim
lights down black back roads –
Sat in
the back of the black of the van –
Yorkshire,
1972:
You’ll
wake up some morning as unhappy as you’ve ever been before.
When David Peace started work on 1974 he did so
with the youthful ambition to write the best crime novel ever written. That the
Red Riding novels have become classics proves the strength of that ambition,
though Peace now feels ambivalent about the first movement of his quartet. Perhaps
he feels that it does not stray far enough from the roots of the genre. But
whilst it is true that some of those roots are showing – Derek Raymond, Ted
Lewis – how could it be otherwise? When you first start writing you’re lucky, not
to mention talented, if anything you produce is entirely yours. Peace had written
earlier, unpublished novels before finding his true direction, grounding the
story he wanted to tell in the Yorkshire of the seventies and early eighties, a
time that coincided with the beginnings of his desire to write and that in some
sense formed it.
He brought to it also some of
the kitchen-sink sensibility of the previous generation of northern writers,
whose novels he had been introduced to through his father’s book collection:
Stan Barstow, who lived just a few streets away from Peace in his hometown of
Ossett; Alan Sillitoe, who as well as being a novelist was also a poet. And
there was something else too, something extra: the gritty, poetic rigour that
marks Peace’s own style, a confidence around his material that increases as the
sequence moves forward.
The material by itself is
challenging enough. Peace’s portrait of a corrupt and increasingly beleaguered
police force offers none of the familiarity and consolation of traditional
detective fiction, and few writers have come anywhere close to confronting the traumatic
effects of violence and poverty as Peace has done. In terms of story, the Red
Riding novels are masterpieces of ambiguity. But what makes these books truly groundbreaking
is their insistence on being more than a story, on being words on a page. Peace’s
language becomes increasingly codified, more condensed, so close to poetry in
places there is really no difference. The language of 1983 especially
gains a kind of transcendence, hammering the page like rain on windows,
staining the paper like mould.
You can feel it being written.
*
I first read TS Eliot’s The Waste Land in English
class when I was fourteen. I count myself as lucky. I would bet the farm – if I
had one – that they don’t teach Eliot now. My mother has always loved poetry.
She used to read it aloud to me throughout my early childhood, and so I had the
advantage of being familiar with how poetry works. I think even at fourteen I
knew instinctively how to read The Waste Land, which I recognized as a
country of the imagination as much as a symbolic portrait of the postwar
landscape.
I was so excited by what I read it made my heart race. I felt angry and frustrated with my classmates, who did not get it, who kept flipping back and forth between the text and the notes at the end, trying to discover the poem’s ‘meaning’ from references they had no hope of understanding. I didn’t understand the notes either – they were too esoteric, notes from a bygone era even then – but I knew enough to know that I didn’t need them. There was something happening between me and the words, and that was enough. I was discovering phrases and cadences and – more even than that – a way of looking at language that was to become the central strand of my writer’s DNA.
To Carthage then I came
Burning burning burning burning
There was something about Eliot’s
images that made my teeth chatter. Over in my German class I was coming to know
the stories of Wolfgang Borchert, who had worked with similar raw material,
even though his register of language and lexicon of references are very
different. I began to understand how one work of literature could inform
another. Storming through Red Riding forty years later I became convinced that
Peace must have experienced a similar epiphany. That mental thrill, which is also
visceral. The narrowing of the gap between the thought and the word.
As an adolescent, Peace
harboured a secret fear that his father might be the Yorkshire Ripper, that his
mother might be the Ripper’s next victim. What is any writing but the stuff you
are most interested in or obsessed by? Ideas you keep having. Stories you keep
noticing. Ambitions that won’t keep quiet or go away.
Finding a path towards your
material can be a tortuous process. I had ambitions to write a novel based
around true events for most of ten years before I found myself at work on A
Granite Silence. It happened almost without my realizing it – as I describe
in the novel itself, the story I had set out to write was very different.
Allowing aspects of that story to keep resurfacing became essential to the narrative
as it developed.
Every novel is a set of
problems waiting to be solved. Paying attention to how other writers have
solved their problems may not help you solve your own – the problems you have
will be different, or should be – but it should at least hold out the hope that
a solution is possible. David Peace’s work continues to speak to me directly. The
chord it first struck was so powerful it has never died away.
When I reviewed Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things for Strange Horizons back in – my goodness – 2015, I described it as ‘unendurably slow’ and wrapped my arguments in a slew of niggles about ‘is this good SF??’ and suchlike, questions I seemed genuinely concerned with at the time but that now seem irrelevant. I think I knew even then that at least a portion of my apparent dislike of the book was rooted in the discomfort I felt while reading it. Not because of ‘bland characterisation’ or ‘wrongheadedness’ but because that novel really got to me. The unknowable alienness of the planet Oasis was something I experienced as a terrible homesickness, the sense that we were destroying our own world while fully aware of the fact that there was nothing better out there and no way back.
I find it mysterious and barely explicable and utterly right that The Book of Strange New Things, no matter its weight or size or unlikability, has survived every book cull we enacted in the years since, and there have been a few.
I think about Faber’s novel more or less every day now. Not just because of the subtext about his wife Eva, but because it seems clearer and clearer to me that the books that stay with you, that provide fuel for the onward journey, are so often those you have to fight to understand and come to terms with. The books that confound and confront you. The books that pick away at your insecurities and that feel most difficult.
Just about a month ago I finally bought and read Undying: A Love Story, the cycle of poems Faber published in 2016 about the death of his wife, the artist Eva Youren, from cancer.
I cannot now imagine a book coming closer to me than that one.
Other books I have been reading these past weeks include:
The Iceberg by Marion Coutts
Ti Amo by Hanne Orstavik
In Love by Amy Bloom
A Scattering and Anniversary by Christopher Reid
The other day on the train on my way back from Glasgow I found myself picking up Strange Loyalties, the third book in William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw trilogy. It seemed like something I wanted to read just then and I didn’t know until I began it that it too was about grief. Jack Laidlaw is seeking the truth about what happened to his brother Scott, who has been killed in a hit-and-run, because seeking the truth – what he does for work – is the only way Jack Laidlaw can deal with his grief. It is a wonderful novel – well wrought, honestly told, so keenly alive and for me at least perhaps the best of the three.
Somewhere around halfway through, I was knocked to the ground by the following passage, in which Jack speaks with the dying mother of one of his suspects:
She had a face like a handful of bones and those pilgrim eyes of the dying. Most of the essential luggage of her life had gone on ahead and here she was waiting at a wayside station among strangers who had other business. The living are all strangers to the dying. It’s just that they’re too polite to tell us so. They are kind to our crass familiarities that mistake them for someone else. They do not tell us that we are the bores who have crashed a party for one, seeking company for our own terrified loneliness we have suddenly recognised in their eyes. The dying arrive at true politeness. Even if they scream, they only scream in so far as it is necessary. For who else can establish the rules for what is theirs alone? They cannot be unkind to us, for they leave us alive when they are not. She was kind to me.
From what I can remember of that time, I think I saw him as some kind of integral role model. Incautious, unfettered, improper, untethered. But also… getting the work done.
At this blackened, stub end of the year, it is hard to express what a comfort this book has been for me during the greyish hours between four and six when I have not been sleeping. Because of what it says. About art, about German culture, about death. About the missing link, as Penman puts it, between one era and another.
Because of what it says and because of its sentences. Because of the sense this book gives me, that if I could write something even halfway comparable then I would have succeeded in expressing something of the kind of writer I aspire to be.
Did I ever wonder: why are so many of the things I love either French or German? Did I ever think: how European is it? Or why does the UK feel so parochial and un-European? Why are we so time-stranded and small-c conservative? Such a hidebound culture at the time; plenty of newspapers and small magazines and arts programmes but all of them so Oxbridgey and middlebrow. Absent a whole education in European culture, ancient and modern. I don’t recall ever feeling particularly English or British or Anglo-Saxon or Celtic or whatever; this may partly have been the punkish, puckish spirit of the time, and partly a result of my own, wildly dispersed, non-settled, non-linear childhood, which had nothing like a home town or immediate circle or anything like a secure sense of nationality.
You don’t have to know Fassbinder to love this book. I have seen only a couple of his films: Effi Briest (which I remember as a claustrophobic vision of Bismarck-era Prussian propriety as if viewed through the lens of an unsuccessful film maker from the thirties, thinking about going over to the Nazi party), Die Ehe der Maria Braun, bits of Berlin Alexanderplatz. (Of course I want to see more now. I want to binge-watch.) You don’t need to know Fassbinder to love this book, because this is really a book about how to write biography – your own, someone else’s – and I have been thinking about that a lot recently.
For I do not exist: there exist but thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms reflecting me increases. (Vladimir Nabokov, The Eye)
The book’s epigraph, from the novella by Nabokov that only VN completists ever read, a postscript to Dostoevsky’s The Double, a precursor to VN’s own Despair, the most Dostoevskian of his novels, this from a writer who was forever insisting how he hated Dostoevsky, how cheap his sentiments, how gaudily lit his scenes. VN, estranged from Dostoevsky as from his own twin brother. A kind of self-hatred, the classic Fassbinder material, the rain across the opening credits neither the ecstatic catharsis of the rain that enshrines Solaris nor the terrifying downpour that powers Suspiria. The grey pouring-out of winter, somewhere in-between.
Watched two episodes on Netflix of the Spanish crime series Bitter Daisies, including now almost obligatory scenes of the detectives’ wall of clues and photos, linked together by differently coloured bits of wool or string. Later that night I dream that eventually I am going to have to assemble this book the exact same way. But what is the underlying mystery or transgression here, crying out to be solved?
A biography of the film-maker, an excavation of self. Writing as if it matters, which it does.
Today sees the appearance of Matt Hill’s long-awaited fifth novel. Lamb is published by the Liverpool-based independent press Dead Ink, the home of Naomi Booth’s Exit Management, Gary Budden’s London Incognita and Missouri Williams’s The Doloriad, provocative, unsettling works that challenge every aspect of the status quo. Given the nature of Hill’s literary identity – northern, speculative, discomfiting yet humane – it seems inevitable that this writer and this publisher would come together eventually.
Hill made his presence felt from the moment he arrived on the scene in 2013 with The Folded Man, which was a runner-up for the Dundee International Book Prize. Set in a disturbingly near-future Manchester and ‘starring’ the superbly dislikeable Brian, The Folded Man presents a fertile clash between gritty Gibsonian futurism and a distinctly home-grown eco-noir, an ambience that persists throughout his tangentially related 2016 follow-up Graft, which was a finalist for the Philp K. Dick Award.
The two novels that followed are equally distinctive. Climate change and the post-work environment become major themes in Zero Bomb (2019) in which grieving father Remi becomes drawn into a murky world of government surveillance and anarchist plots. The Breach (2020), published on the eve of lockdown and thus denied much of the attention it deserved, is a potent mix of evocative landscape writing and post-Brexit paranoia.
Indeed, what Hill’s books have in common is an obsession with the enforced inequalities and social divides – north and south, worker and manager, government and citizen – that have come to define our disunited kingdom in the present century. Hill is too young to have fully formed memories of Thatcher in government, but his political and literary consciousness have clearly been shaped by and within the long and continuing fallout from the 1980s.
This new novel Lamb, the latest chapter in Hill’s evolving oeuvre, is as brilliant as anything he has yet written, keeping faith with his core themes of future-shock, environmental degradation and the structural imbalances tearing at the fabric of our post-truth society. Following a family tragedy, teenager Boyd and his mother Maureen flee north from Watford to the village of Sile, an eerily closeted community where Boyd feels not just out of place but actively threatened. He knows there is something amiss here, whilst amongst certain elements of the townsfolk, the suspicion begins to surface that what is wrong in Sile is Boyd himself, or more specifically his mother Maureen.
With Lamb so newly published, it would be wrong of me to reveal much more about the exact nature of Boyd’s catastrophe, except to say that the journey he embarks on is one of radical transformation. The truth of who Boyd is – WHAT Boyd is – has far wider implications than the fate of one family, and as always with Hill, the vision presented to us within the pages of this story has more to say about our unreliable present than any possible future.
One of the most arresting aspects of Hill’s fiction is its boldness in incorporating dramatic speculative ideas into deeply human stories. From The Folded Man onwards, Hill has seemed compelled to place his characters in extreme situations, to test their resilience, and thinking about this today, the book that keeps coming to mind is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Like Shelley, Hill writes about responsibility, about cause and effect and the price of human arrogance. About technology run out of control, about the costly repercussions of moral failure.
Lamb is a unique blend of the personal and the political, the kind of work that reminds us how radical science fiction can be, how well it retains the power to shock and to surprise. A road trip like no other, Lamb will leave you thrilled, changed, unsettled, and still asking questions.
When I reread Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home a month or so ago I found it astonishing to remember that the book was published in 2012, more than a decade old already and yet still, in my head at least, so enmeshed in and essential to our literary present.
The same could be said of Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation, published the same year and which I have finally, belatedly caught up with. I remember reading the press at the time, intrigued by the outrage the book seemed to be causing, though not enough to dive in immediately. I felt instinctively on the side of the writer, who seemed to have committed no other sin than have the temerity to say what she thought.
That writers say what they think seems to cause outrage rather too often, especially if the writer is a woman.
I feel amazed, disappointed, tired as I reread the reviews of Aftermath from the week of publication. Frances Stonor Saunders and Julie Burchill damning with faint praise, their responses inadvertently, embarrassingly sexist and profoundly un-literary. Burchill finds the final chapter of Aftermath ‘baffling’; Saunders thinks it ‘bizarre’ and feels it ‘should [have been] dumped altogether’. Most of the discussion seems to revolve not around Cusk’s astringent analysis, her mastery of language and form, but – as with Julie Myerson’s The Lost Child – whether or not she ‘should’ have written the book at all.
Aftermath is one of the most powerfully interrogative, furiously honest and boldly imaginative texts I have read. The final chapter is what makes the book a masterpiece. Always, but especially now, I feel grateful, inspired, humbled to have such talent to look up to, to show me what can, with sufficient courage, be achieved.
Earlier this summer, I reread Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. This was the first time I’d revisited the book since seeing Bennett Miller’s film Capote when it was released in 2005. Capote is a favourite film of mine, one I rewatch frequently and with undiminished admiration. Of course, Philip Seymour Hoffmann is out of this world in it. But it’s not just him. From the opening frame, there’s something about the texture of this film, the evocation of sense of place most of all, that keeps me coming back to it, wishing that there were more true crime dramas that accorded their subject matter this level of attention and restraint.
Over time and with repeated viewings of the movie it was perhaps inevitable that book and film had become inextricably enmeshed in my imagination. This was a good part of the reason I chose to revisit the novel. I have read a significant amount of true crime literature in the almost twenty years since first encountering Truman Capote’s magnum opus. How would it have fared in the onrush of time and memory?
If anything, it was better than I remembered. Not just a masterpiece of true crime literature but a masterpiece full stop. The attention to detail, the restraint, the beautifully jointed, watertight sentences. In Cold Blood is rightly called a novel, not simply because it goes beyond the reporter’s brief in imagining scenes, dialogue, alternative scenarios but because it is a novelist’s feel for structure and for narrative form that Capote brings to his material. The thing that surprised me most – the thing I’d forgotten – is how little Capote inserts himself into the text. There is just that one line near the end, in which he refers to ‘the journalist’, a person that can only be him, but who is neither named nor referred to again.
I have read criticism of In Cold Blood that suggests Capote’s obsession with the two perpetrators and his uncomfortably close relationship with Perry Smith in particular makes the book unforgivably unbalanced, that he ‘did not do right by the Clutter family’. Though one has to take account of and respect the views of those who knew the Clutters as neighbours, I would have to disagree with this assessment. Whatever his private turmoil, Capote does not in any way ‘favour’ the murderers. His summoning of an entire community and way of life, very much including the personalities and daily lives of Herb, Bonnie, Nancy and Kenyon Clutter is a act of imagining – I almost want to say resurrection – that favours nothing but the truth insofar as he was able to discover it, an inextricable tangle of opposing truths, contrary points of view, accidents of fate that are as horrifying today as they were in 1959.
More than sixty years ago and still, this story. There is nothing that can forgive or make right the evil act that ended the lives of a blameless family. But in literature as in life, the line between ‘evil acts’ and ‘evil men’ is a notoriously tricky one to navigate or to describe. That Capote attempts to do so is his job as a writer and he succeeds brilliantly. The only certain thing is that the death penalty helps no one, and solves nothing.
There is similarly much to contemplate in two more recent works of true crime, both published this year. Francisco Garcia’s We All Go into the Dark revisits the Bible John murders that took place in Glasgow in the 1960s – less than a decade after the Clutters were murdered – while Cristina Rivera Garza’s Liliana’s Invincible Summer recounts the murder of Garza’s twenty-year-old sister Liliana in Mexico City in 1990. In the case of Patricia Docker, Jemima MacDonald and Helen Puttock, no one was ever charged with their murders and the identity of Bible John remains a mystery. In the case of Liliana Rivera Garza, the identity of her murderer is all too clear – but he, similarly, has never been charged.
Francisco Garcia admits up front that he has little to add to the Bible John narrative as it is already known. His intention in writing the book is to examine the effect the crimes had on Glasgow at the time, their treatment by the media and the ultimately unsuccessful attempts of detectives to shine a light on the identity of the killer for decades afterwards. While I might have liked a little more commentary on the harshly constrained lives of Glasgow working class women in particular, Garcia’s work is honest, thorough and captivating and I like his book a lot. His unsensationalist, self-questioning approach to writing true crime should be noted and applauded. I hope his next book will push this envelope still further.
I know Cristina Rivera Garza’s work from her strange, elliptical 2012 novella The Taiga Syndrome. It would be impossible for her not to insert herself into the text of Liliana’s Invincible Summer – whole tracts of this heartbreaking narrative are inevitably her story, too – but the miracle she performs in allowing her sister not only to be properly seen for who she is but in some sense to be the narrator of this remarkable book is no less an act of literary resurrection than Capote’s. As an examination of coercive control, intimate partner violence and the only recently named and acknowledged crime of femicide, Liliana’s Invincible Summer is an essential addition to the library of true crime literature. As an elegy for a lost beloved it is equally indispensable.
Reading this excellent interview with Eliza Clark over the weekend – Clark is the author of the smartly original novel Boy Parts and has recently been named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists – I was particularly struck by what she says about what it is that attracts her to true crime narratives:
“I’m just interested in people’s lives and the histories of places… True crime, done well, feels like one of the only times you get to read nonfiction about day-to-day lives.”
This chimes so exactly with my own reasons for being interested in true crime literature, why I think it’s important. It’s good to see new voices entering this arena, even better to see the inventiveness, seriousness and respect with which they approach this difficult and sensitive material. I cannot wait to read Clark’s new novel, Penance. And while I’m waiting, I have my own research to be getting on with…
What he is, is greedy and lazy, selfish and a coward but what he also is, is clear and when he gives me a way out, I refuse to take it.
Readers and critics alike have described the unnamed narrator of Sheena Patel’s I’m A Fan as an ‘unlikable character’, one of those Moshfeghian millennial bitches we love to hate. I have problems getting to grips with this designation. To me, she’s simply real. If angry and uncomfortably honest makes you unlikable, I guess that’s just more of the shit we’re having to wade through.
As in Anna Burns’s Booker-winning novel Milkman, with which Patel’s debut shares more than a strand of literary DNA, no one is named. Characters are ascribed a function within the text: ‘the man I want to be with,’ ‘the woman I am obsessed with’, ‘his wife’, ‘my boyfriend’. This is both alienating and strangely intimate, as if we too are engaged in spying on these people, as if we too are complicit with what is going on. As, if you are a woman, you will be. Because in one way or another, you will have been there.
If I had been writing about this subject at the time when similar stuff was happening to me, the resulting text’s internal furniture would have been different: street maps instead of Google maps, telephone boxes instead of iPhones, newspaper articles instead of Insta. The sentences would have unfolded differently as a result, more formally structured and punctuated in keeping with the times. But the story would have been the same, or broadly similar. That tortuous tract of time when one’s internal weather is mainly dictated by the narcissistic, self-seeking actions of another person. The madness of knowing that, but still sacrificing one’s agency. The pointless suffering that – with a portion of luck and a fuckton of time – you eventually wrest yourself free of and pick up your life.
What cannot be wrested free of are the adjacent pitfalls, the systemic inequalities of class, race and gender Patel’s unnamed narrator catalogues and interrogates with matter-of-fact, intimate knowledge and brutal precision.
*
No, I would really like for someone to explain to me, why the hell would one come into this world a woman – and in Ukraine, yet! – with this fucking dependency programmed into your body like a delayed-action bomb, with this craziness, this need to be transformed into moist, squishy clay kneaded into the Earth’s surface…
You’re a woman. And that’s your limit./Your moon sleeps like a silver fish lure./Like spices off the edge of a knife/Dependency sprinkled into your blood.
Oh, this book.
So there it was, girlfriend – you fell in love. And how you fell in love – you exploded blindly, went flying headfirst, your witch’s laugh ringing to the heavens, lifted by the invisible absolute power of whirlwinds, and that pain didn’t stop you – although it should have – but no, you cut the juice to all your warning signs that had lit up with their red lights flashing and screaming “meltdown” – like before the accident at the atomic station – and only your poems, which switched on immediately and rushed forward in a steady, unrelenting stream, sent out unambiguous signals of danger: persistent flashes of hell, and death, and sickness.
Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is as much about language as physical intimacy. The vexed and now murderously abusive relationship between Russia and Ukraine, between the Ukrainian language and the Russian language, runs through this novel like a sword, as its true subject matter, the matter of language not so much a metaphor for sexual politics as the other way around.
Zabuzhko’s work contains some of the most thrilling, innovative writing at the sentence level that I have ever read, and I want to give particular mention here to the novel’s translator, Halyna Hryn, who has conveyed the raw force of the original with a facility and passion that keeps English-language readers as close to Zabuzhko’s furious rhythms, her sardonic humour and dextrous word choices as is possible.
The way this novel is freely punctuated with poetry. The way there is no redemption, save the hunger for freedom.
Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is most likely the most important novel I will read all year. The fact that it was written in 1996 should make us all ask ourselves questions about the gaps between the real and the imagined in our attitude to nations, peoples and individuals threatened with existential as well as physical annihilation.
