I was watching Eric Karl Anderson aka Lonesome Reader’s most recent Booktube video this morning, in which he goes through his top ten novel lists from the past five years, before picking out an overall top ten, a sort of master key to his reading experiences over what has been, I’m sure everyone will agree, an unsettling and in many ways game-changing period in our history.
I always enjoy Eric’s videos – he’s a discerning, highly intelligent and curious reader with a taste in books that frequently overlaps with my own. He is also a Joyce Carol Oates fan (if you’ve not seen his Zoom interviews with JCO from last year I would urge you to seek them out) which is one more good reason to follow him so far as I’m concerned. I’ve been making lists and notes of all the books I’ve read for going on ten years now, so I thought it might be interesting, and valuable, to see what my own top ten choices from the past five years would be.
Like many of the personal reference documents on my hard drive, my ‘books read’ files often end up being tens of thousands of words long, as I make notes not just on the books I have read in any given year, but also the books I want to read, that have caught my attention, links to interviews with writers and other critical articles, stuff that might turn out to be useful and that I don’t want to become lost in the ever-expanding labyrinth of emails, bookmarks and reminders that form the hinterland of our online lives. These documents therefore are a kind of reading journal, disorganised and full of loose ends, but always fascinating to look back on. As a record of my passions and compulsions, the way my literary interests have shifted and changed, sometimes looping back in a circle to where I left off, they are irreplaceable.
As I went through the lists, I noted down all the books I instinctively felt should make the final cut. The process was strange, and even painful as I found myself scrolling past books I loved at the time and still rate highly yet weren’t mind-altering enough to make it through. What I found most interesting is the way books tended to come in tranches, as I stumbled upon a seam or subset of reading that turned out to be particularly meaningful or useful. (NB: These are books I read during the past five years, not necessarily books that were published during the past five years. Neither did I include re-reads, or ‘pure’ non-fiction. )
This first list numbered thirty-eight titles. My intention had been to trim them down to the final ten before posting, but I have decided to leave them in place, listing them in the order I read them, rather than alphabetically, as this seems more in keeping with what this selection is about. Now I’ve cleared all the year-end lists away, this is what I am left with, the books I have to choose from. What do they say to me and about me, and more to the point, how am I going to whittle them down to only ten?
H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald
Dust to Dust by John Cornwell
The Border of Paradise by Esme Weijun Wang
Infinite Ground by Martin MacInnes
The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson
A Separation by Katie Kitamura
H(A)PPY by Nicola Barker
This House of Grief by Helen Garner
Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor
The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante
Death of a Murderer by Rupert Thomson
Joe Cinque’s Consolation by Helen Garner
When I Hit You by Meena Kandasamy
Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill
Universal Harvester by John Darnielle
Missing by Alison Moore
Falling Man by Don DeLillo
The Second Plane by Martin Amis
Attrib by Eley Williams
Berg by Ann Quin
First Love by Gwendoline Riley
The Cemetery in Barnes by Gabriel Josipovici
Munich Airport by Greg Baxter
As If by Blake Morrison
The Sing of the Shore by Lucy Wood
The Porpoise by Mark Haddon
Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
The Divers’ Game by Jesse Ball
Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel
Nudibranch by Irenosen Okojie
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli
Katherine Carlyle by Rupert Thomson
The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell
Born Yesterday by Gordon Burn
The First Stone by Helen Garner
The Inland Sea by Madeleine Watts
Strange Hotel by Eimear McBride
*
After staring at this list for a long time, I have reached my decision. As for my criteria, I decided in the end to go with the single, simple question: if you could only save ten of these books from a fire, which would they be? An old chestnut yes, but as a question it has a way of cutting right to the chase. Even then, I changed my mind a couple of times, swapping one title out for another at the last minute, and must have spent at least twenty minutes havering over my final choice, simply because I wanted to keep my options open.
But here, in the order I first read them, are my ten favourite books of the past five years (2016-2020):
Infinite Ground by Martin MacInnes
A Separation by Katie Kitamura
Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor
Attrib by Eley Williams
Berg by Ann Quin
Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli
Katherine Carlyle by Rupert Thomson
The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell
The First Stone by Helen Garner
I’m sure that on a different day, my choices might be different again. What I know for certain though is that these ten books have been a force for change in my thinking and in my writing, and will continue to exert their influence as we move forward from here.
The first known appearance of the joker-vagrant Till Eulenspiegel in German literature comes with the publication of an anonymous chapbook in 1510, though his origins in folklore and oral storytelling most likely date back still further. Since then, his incarnations have been multitudinous and varied, including operas, comics, novels and films. To get some idea of the importance of Till Eulenspiegel to German culture, a British audience might find it useful to think of the centrality of Robin Hood to our own myth-making and storytelling, most especially in the protean, elusive nature of such a character, neither wholly hero nor villain, always on the move, forever reinventing himself as befits the time and place.
Daniel Kehlmann’s most recent novel Tyll, translated from the German by Ross Benjamin and shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, sets the action at the time of the Thirty Years’ War. Tyll Ulenspiegel is born the son of a miller, Claus, who finds himself a miller more by disagreeable luck than critical judgement. Claus Ulenspiegel’s true passion is for ideas – ideas that, with witchfinders roaming the land and a religious war on the horizon, turn out to be dangerous not only for him but for the entire village. Tyll, who from a young age shows a perspicacity and insularity that sets him apart from other children, is quickly forced to rely on his own resources. Brute twists and turns of fate, combined with Tyll’s mercurial and essentially unknowable nature, make for a picaresque narrative of unexpected happenings and unusual daring.
As is usual and ever-delightful with Daniel Kehlmann, the story does not proceed in a straightforward fashion. Instead, we are offered a series of discrete snapshots, shuffled like a deck of cards, dropping us in and out of Tyll’s life and times at irregular, non-linear intervals, so that even as we reach the end there are still gaps that can only be filled by our own imagination. As in a painting by Bruegel, certain figures dart forward to capture our attention, before sloping off into the background, making space for someone else. And the story is as much about the troubled social and political landscape in which it takes place as its eponymous hero. The Thirty Years’ War left many thousands dead, and was responsible for the deaths of millions more through the poverty, displacement, disease and starvation that it inflicted. One of the most powerful effects of the COVID pandemic, for me, has been the way in which it has revealed our residual closeness to events that previously seemed quite distant. Hilary Mantel has been brilliant at evoking the strong political parallels between our own time and the time of the Tudors. In Kehlmann’s hands, history is similarly pliable, similarly present.
Most of all, it is Kehlmann’s deft and original approach to the fantastic that illuminates this novel, that lends it the timeless allure and magical slipperiness of its jester protagonist. The land our little troupe travel through is alive with spirits and goblins, witches and will o’ the wisps, with hunches and premonitions, with gods and monsters that are as much the creatures of a nation’s troubled psyche as of her boundless forests, things only half-seen that still cannot be unseen because we know they are there. Kehlmann’s evocation of a magical landscape is nothing more and nothing less than the conjuring of a time in which magic and religion, alchemy and science mixed freely among the crowds, sowing their own brands of dissent and chaos, of healing and treachery among the people of a world – as continues to be proven – not so very different from our own.
In his refusal to provide answers or pass judgments, Kehlmann proves himself as tricksy and light-fingered as his shadowy hero. Tyll is a distillation of wonderland, a casket of ambiguous treasures. Beware his Midas touch – it may leave you with asses’ ears.
Yesterday I had the great pleasure of taking part on an online symposium on the work of William Golding, organised by Arabella Currie and Bradley Osborne, under the aegis of the University of Exeter (nice to be back there, if only via Zoom!) This turned out to be one of the most inspiring and energising events I have yet taken part in, with engaging contributions from everyone involved and some excellent discussion. The artwork and storyboarding shown to us by Adam Gutch, who is developing an animated movie of The Inheritors, left us all feeling more than a little eager to see that project come to fruition. And the paper on the science fictional sensibility of Golding’s sea trilogy from poet and scholar William Stephenson was another highlight in a day that was all highlights. I had not realised Exeter boasts such a rich treasure trove of original Golding material, and the wonderful presentation from head of heritage collections Christine Faunch made me determined to visit the archive personally in the future.
My own part in the proceedings came soon after lunch. You might remember how my interest in Golding was reignited by the Backlisted podcast’s discussion of The Inheritors last year, in particular the contributions from Una McCormack on Golding’s place in the history of British science fiction. It was a real joy to be able to carry on those discussions with Una in person during our joint presentation, ‘Beyond Gaia: Golding and Science Fiction’. Una gave a fascinating talk on how Golding kicks away the genre scaffolding and dives deep into the heart of speculative ideas, and I followed this up with my own short paper on what some have claimed to be Golding’s most enigmatic novel, Darkness Visible, the full text of which is below.
I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to everyone involved in making our event such a success – organisers, speakers and audience – and here’s hoping we can someday meet again in person for more discussion and fruitful sharing of ideas.
*
Alien Country: William Golding’s
Darkness Visible and the anatomy of the strange
In his review of Darkness Visible for the London Review of Books in 1979, the Oxford scholar and critic John Bayley summoned the spirit of Borges to describe Golding’s fiction:
“Borges has written that the writer is like a member of a primitive tribe who suddenly starts making unfamiliar noises and waving his arms about in strange new rituals. The others gather round to look. Often they get bored and wander off, but sometimes they become hypnotised, remain spellbound until the rite comes to an end, adopt it as a part of tribal behaviour.
A simple analogy, but it does fit some novelists and tale-tellers, preoccupied in the midst of us with their homespun magic. They are not modish, not part of any literary establishment. Nor is there anything of the showman about them: Dickens was a magician in another sense, the sense that goes with the melodrama and music hall, and tribal magicians are not creators as Dickens and Hardy were. Their appeal has something communal, as the Borges image suggests, and the shareability of a cult. America lacks this type of magician – the shamans there are grander, more worldly, more pretentious – and the German-style version of Hesse or Grass is too instinctively metaphysical, not homespun enough. Richard Hughes was one of Britain’s most effective local magicians; John Fowles has become one; William Golding has had the status a long time.”
We might choose to quibble with Borges’s use of the term ‘primitive tribe’; we might equally dispute Bayley’s summary dismissal of American and German novelists as purveyors of magic. What makes Bayley’s review of Darkness Visible interesting to me – aside from the fascination of reading a piece of criticism contemporaneous with the novel itself – is how closely it coincides with my own view of Golding as one of what I have come to think of as the maverick strain in British fiction: novelists who, though seldom regarded as such, reveal a secret stratum of the fantastic amidst a literary geology more commonly described in terms of its obsession with novels of social mores, its tendency towards mimesis.
When
American critics talk about the genealogy of science fiction they present us
with a lineage that begins with the pulp magazines of the 1920s, that pays
homage to the holy trinity of Campbell, Asimov and Heinlein. Fantastic
literature written earlier – or that does not accord with a set of fuzzy and
increasingly spurious set of definitions – is too often dismissed as ‘proto-SF’
or ‘not really SF at all’. Long before I had ever heard the name of Hugo
Gernsback, or had any inkling that science fiction was supposed to adhere to
any specific set of arbitrary man-made criteria, I was beginning to discover
for myself a more home-grown, or to echo John Bayley homespun genealogy of the
fantastic that appeared to have grown up organically, not from any
pre-determined magic spell but from the independent-minded, endlessly curious
and – yes – maverick spirits of the writers themselves.
I
didn’t know Beowulf then but I did know Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights and The
Woman in White. I knew H. G. Wells and his Time Machine, Aldous Huxley and his
Brave New World, John Wyndham and his Kraken. As I grew older and read more
widely I was delighted to discover echoes and resonances of these elder gods in
the work of George Orwell, Iris Murdoch, Rumer Godden, Mervyn Peake and JG
Ballard, John Fowles, Doris Lessing and Christopher Priest. These writers, it
seemed to me, offered me a view of my native landscape and cultural background
that seemed to accord more closely with my imaginative experience than either
American science fiction writers – mostly aliens! – or the British mainstream
literary canon.
An
early and immediately beloved discovery in this hierarchy of misfits was
William Golding. I would not like to guess at the number of times I read Lord
of the Flies between the ages of twelve and twenty – I can only say that the
story horrified, bewitched and inspired me in equal measure. I quickly went on
to read Pincher Martin, equally wondrous and, to use a Golding word, weird. I
have not counted Golding’s uses of the word weird in Darkness Visible; perhaps
I should have done, given that no other word seems as apt to describe it.
Darkness
Visible is thought of by many as the most enigmatic of Golding’s novels, which
is interesting, given that it is unarguably the most modern. Published in 1979,
Golding actually began writing it in 1955. In its first, tentative incarnation
it was actually a science fiction story entitled Here Be Monsters, set in the
future amidst a landscape of accelerating nuclear proliferation. It is famously
the one work of his he consistently refused to discuss. It tells the story of Matty,
an orphan child who stumbles from a burning bomb site at the height of the
London Blitz, Sophy Stanhope and her twin sister Toni, prodigiously intelligent
yet morally adrift, and Sebastian Pedigree, a paedophile teacher who is both
disparaged and sheltered by the institution that employs him. The action centres
upon the town of Greenfield, a suburb of London situated on the fault-line of
post-war austerity and modernising, multicultural Britain.
Matty’s origins and parentage are never discovered – his constantly misplaced surname is used to symbolise the mystery of his fiery origins. As he grows towards adulthood, the facial scarring he incurred as a result of the bombing is a constant visual reminder of his apartness. Yet Golding leaves no doubt that Matty’s essential separateness from his fellows runs much deeper than physical appearance.
Matty’s
vision of the world is as a mysterious other, a realm in which good and evil
fight for supremacy, symbolised for him in the perfect shining roundness of the
spherical glass paperweight in the window of Goodchild’s Rare Books. When he
becomes unwittingly drawn into the simmering conflict between Sebastian
Pedigree and the school’s headmaster, the fallout is tragic, impacting itself
not only on Matty’s immediate future but ultimately on the fate of every
character in the novel.
By contrast, the Stanhope twins Toni and Sophy view the world through a lens of cynicism shading to nihilism, the fruits of parental neglect combined with an innate surfeit of self-awareness. Toni runs away from home at the age of sixteen, quickly becoming involved with a terrorist group perpetrating outrages in Europe and the Middle East. Sophy’s spiritual rebellion appears more subtle, yet its end results are scarcely less disastrous. In literary terms, Matty and the twins are opposing devices; the scarred outcast Matty touched by the divine, the preternatural physical beauty of the Stanhope twins standing in pointed contrast to their moral vacuity.
For me though, Golding resists such simplistic analysis, and Darkness Visible is infinitely more complex, more ambiguous. Matty is morally good, but he is not a freethinker. He ‘does not get the code’ and so his goodness is rather like that of Frankenstein’s Monster: an innate innocence that is also rigid, shaped by and subject to the rules and rhetoric of organised religion and with a similarly unexamined outcome. Sophy Stanhope is a symbol not of evil but of existential disenchantment. She struggles within the bonds of existence as it is, strains towards something greater, a larger meaning to everything. She seeks in a way that Matty cannot – because she comes from a place of larger understanding, of participation in the world.
As a writer who veers instinctively towards the multi-stranded narrative, I find Darkness Visible to be a miracle of construction, its strands linked together not just through the reappearance of familiar characters but through the interacting perspectives of those characters. Hence we are told that Matty first encounters Sophy and Toni Stanhope as ‘two enchanting little girls’ gazing into the window of Goodchild’s Rare Books, or that Sebastian Pedigree’s return to Greenfield after his first spell in jail coincides with their mother Muriel Stanhope’s leaving.
Golding’s
breaking of the fourth wall is a subtle thing, a slipping glimpse of
postmodernism rather than a full immersion, yet it is a beautiful thing
nonetheless and contributes significantly to the novel’s weirdness.
Darkness
Visible takes place in the real world and has a sharp realworld awareness of
contemporary politics and changes in society. Though the novel does contain
turns of phrase and outdated usages that come across as dated and paternalistic
in a modern context, Golding’s desire not only to reflect but to understand a
rapidly changing world is powerfully apparent. The disenchantment and
disillusion felt by the novel’s younger characters – with time on their hands
and aching for purpose – seems both echo and indictment of the realworld
violence perpetrated by European fringe organisations of the time, such as the
Red Brigade in Italy, the Baader Meinhof gang in Germany, and the IRA in
Belfast and on the British mainland. Sophy is an astonishingly vivid character,
and Golding’s portrait of an exceptional woman is still something out of the
ordinary. Similarly, his portrayal of Pedigree – ‘the sort of man whom a
policeman feels in his bones should be moved on’ – is as shockingly direct as
Nabokov’s depiction of Humbert Humbert in his masterpiece Lolita.
Yet
Golding’s central literary purpose seems a million miles from social commentary.
There is a mythic, interior quality to his narrative that renders it timeless. Sophy’s
‘desire to be weird’, her ‘hunger and thirst after weirdness’ is both an
invigorating necessity and a deadly curse. Both Sophy’s narrative and Matty’s come
suffused with the ‘homespun magic’ of which John Bailey speaks in his 1979
review. Even Frankley’s ironmongers – ‘a fine old establishment’ – has a feel
of Steven Millhauser about it, or the porcelain showroom in Richard Adams’s ghost
story The Girl in the Swing. Its infinite spaces, its cavernous lofts, its
cobwebby rooms stacked with useless treasures seem suffused with the ability to
become or to conceal a whole world, a snow-globe cosomorama of a life long
past. Eventually, symbolically, we see the Frankley outbuildings being
demolished in the novel’s Part 3.
The trajectory of the narrative – the overall story arc – is finally an affirmation of the novel’s weird nature, the fulfilment of its own prophecy. Edwin Bell, retired teacher and former colleague of Sebastian Pedigree at Foundlings School, believes Matty to be some sort of prophet, a Delphic oracle for our troubled times. Sim Goodchild, the proprietor of the bookstore whose business is failing, believes no such thing. For Goodchild, modern life is all hard logic. And yet we cannot help remembering Matty’s encounter with an official who tried to help him during his earlier ill-fated sojourn in Australia, a man who treated Matty as an equal, whilst at the same time warning him that his sacred message – his prescient foreboding of a planet in crisis – would forever be doomed to fall upon deaf ears.
The secretary takes Matty’s gestures seriously, yet stands apart from them. When he asks Matty if he has the second sight, if he ‘sees’, Matty replies: ‘I feel!’ an impassioned declaration that works equally as a vindication of the novel as a whole.
We could choose to speculate on why it is that two of the 1983 group of Best of Young British Novelists – frequently singled out by critics and commentators as the golden generation – happen to have brought out novels about artificial humans less than two years apart. Most likely it’s just one of those things: coincidence, a communal grappling with new ideas that are, as it were, simply around. Less to be debated is the fact that, in science fictional terms at least, the idea at the heart of the most recent novels by both Ian McEwan (Machines Like Me, 2019) and Kazuo Ishiguro (Klara and the Sun, 2021) is not new at all. Those who share an interest in such things mostly agree that the ‘threat’ from AI has much less to do with robot uprisings than with coporate data harvesting and the gradual shift within the workplace from human to artificial labour, with the seismic changes and potential inequalities this would and will bring. The idea of human beings coming under existential threat from actual AI replicants? Not going to happen. That both Ishiguro and McEwan have spent hundreds of hours and hundreds of pages heading down this particular ‘what if?’ rabbit hole brings us face to face yet again with the weird propensity of mainstream literary writers for reinventing the science fictional wheel.
A good part of the reason for this is that writers like McEwan and Ishiguro probably don’t read much SF. Most mainstream consumption of science fiction is through TV and cinema, which tends to lag behind the curve of science fiction literature by several decades. There is also the fact that McEwan especially has a habit of straining for topicality through battening on to shouty headlines and received opinion. Machines Like Me seems more interested in denouncing Brexit than in exploring AI; it is a weird novel, mostly irrelevant as science fiction and with a curiously old fashioned feel. Reading Klara and the Sun is a similarly confounding experience, though for different reasons. Ishiguro never chases after ‘relevance’ the way McEwan does, and in many ways this new novel feels uncannily similar to the seven that precede it. From the beginning of his career, Ishiguro has been singularly preoccupied with themes of appearance and reality, and so in Klara and the Sun we enter the land that is Ishiguro-world: a calm, apparently stable version of reality in which interactions proceed with courtesy and a certain caution. The surface reality of Ishiguro-world is unruffled, almost stagnant, yet beneath this surface we intuit hints and then increasingly larger glimpses of a scarier truth.
Ishiguro also has a penchant for not so much unreliable as partially informed narrators, people who are very much embedded in Ishiguro-world but who never fully understand it. In Klara and the Sun, our guide is Klara herself, an Artificial Friend who possesses the computational abilities of an advanced AI, whilst exhibiting a view of the world that is curiously child-like, unformed. AFs are in some respects similar to the Kentukis in Samanta Schweblin’s (much more interesting) novel Little Eyes: a consumer fad, the kind of expensive consumable you purchase for your kids, who then quickly become bored with it. In other respects, Ishiguro’s AFs are more complex and more sinister. We first meet Klara as she stands with her fellow AF Rosa in a shop window, hoping to attract the attention of potential customers. She is eventually purchased as a companion for a teenage girl, Josie, who lives with her mother outside of the city and who is suffering from an unnamed illness.
Klara has been specifically designed to serve and protect the child that chooses her. She never questions the world she inhabits, nor her role within it. As a solar-powered machine, she has a reverence for the sun, which for her is imbued with an almost god-like power. Throughout the entirety of the novel, we see only what Klara sees, go where she goes, though as her understanding and experience increases, so does ours. Through Klara’s immaculate recall, we get to overhear conversations between the adults in her orbit – Josie’s mother Chrissie and Josie’s father Paul, Chrissie’s friend Helen and her former lover Vance, the ‘artist’ Capaldi. Through these conversations, we come to learn that this is a deeply divided society, one in which genetically engineered or ‘lifted’ humans are offered every advantage in terms of education and prospects, with unlifted humans consigned to mass unemployment and more or less barred from higher education.
The ifs and buts around these issues remain unexamined. We come to understand that lifting carries some sort of extreme medical risk. Chrissie has already lost one child to the process – Josie’s older sister, Sal – though this has not dissuaded her from opting for the same treatment for Josie, and the mainstream acceptance of the dangers of lifting means that – presumably – death is now seen by society at large as preferable to not being lifted. There are tiny glimpses of hardship – a minor character called Beggar Man, a drab part of the city with a lot of barbed wire and boarded-up shopfronts, Chrissie permanently tired out from long hours at her job – though the characters we spend the most time with all live in spacious accommodation far from such deprivation and we never learn what Chrissie’s job actually entails. There is a depressingly facile passage about racially segregated outsider, i.e unlifted communities, though again we never get to meet any of these people other than Josie’s father. Paul is an engineer, and supposedly a man of uncommon intelligence, though that doesn’t prevent him from getting sucked into a preposterous scheme to cure Josie’s illness, a plan that should be patently absurd to anyone but Klara.
I was recently in the audience at an online event where Ishiguro described Klara and the Sun as the positive counterpoint to his darkly themed 2005 novel Never Let Me Go. I would go further, and say this book is Never Let Me Go, except with AIs instead of clones, eugenics instead of organ farming. There is even a wincingly uncalled-for repeat of Never Let Me Go’s central, fairy-tale premise of True Love offering a path to safety in a hostile world. Why Ishiguro considers the outcome of this new novel to be happier is a bit of a mystery, given what happens, and I’m not just talking about Klara’s ‘slow fade’. The conversations that take place between the adults in Klara and the Sun are conducted as a theatrical grotesquerie, using the kind of megaphone dialogue you might find in a particularly awful 1950s film, miles distant from what people might actually say to one another in real life. I have paused to wonder if such ineptitude might not be intentional, a kind of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt. This at least might have been interesting, though unhappily and going by past experience I think it’s more likely that writing dialogue is an aspect of his craft that Ishiguro simply does not much enjoy
I am the last person to criticise a writer for choosing a close focus approach to science fiction. I mostly find wide-screen SF unutterably dull; books in which warring factions subject each other to offensively unrealistic acts of violence in their efforts to uphold or upend ‘the system’, in which characters spend pages spouting political rhetoric at each other or acting out social archetypes in a depressingly two-dimensional way can all go straight to Netflix so far as I’m concerned. The science fiction that interests me is centred upon convincingly drawn characters in imaginable situations, provocative ideas, life as it might actually be lived, together with the kind of literary articulacy we find in books such as the aforementioned Little Eyes. What I equally expect from this close focus approach though is difficulty, not in the sense that a book should be wilfully obscure, but that it should present us with complex moral choices and genuine dilemmas, conflicted characters, a level of narrative ambiguity that challenges the intellect.
On the surface and in outline description, Klara and the Sun might appear to possess such qualities. In the reading it is a series of evasions, perplexing only in the question of why so much attention will inevitably be lavished upon a text that is so deeply flawed. Klara and the Sun is a swift, easily digestible, stylistically pleasant read, but therein lies the problem. A novel that lays claim to themes of social exclusion, state-sanctioned eugenics and enforced mass poverty should not be pleasant, it should be confronting. At the very least, it should make some attempt to examine the questions it purports to ask.
And as for the ending? It’s Toy Story 2. Tell me I’m wrong.
The
Skyward Inn was not always so called, but it is nonetheless flourishing. Under
the management of Jemima and Isley it has become the hub of a small rural
community, the place where people drink and socialise at the end of a working
day, the place where meetings are conducted, business disputes are settled,
community issues resolved. The locally brewed beverage it has become renowned
for seems to have a particular way of drawing people together and if some of the
villagers were suspicious of newcomer Isley when he first arrived, he is now
accepted as part of the scene.
The lives of Jem and Isley are not as settled as they might appear on the surface, however. Jem is locked in an unspoken conflict with her brother Dominic over the rightful custody of her son, Fosse, born as the result of a brief liaison when Jem was still a teenager. As the villagers argue amongst themselves over whether an immigrant family should be allowed to take over the running of an abandoned farm, Dom feels increasingly concerned about balancing brute economics with the values of family, community and land that have sustained the locals through multiple generations. As the newest member of the community, Isley strives to be accepted even while struggling with the feelings of displacement and alienation that inevitably come with trying to make one’s way in a new environment. And for Isley, everything is new. An alien from a distant planet, he is literally not of this world.
The
world of Whiteley’s novel is both futuristic and retrograde. A wormhole in
space – known colloquially as ‘the kissing gate’ – has allowed the development
of insterstellar travel and more specifically the exploration of a
superficially Earthlike planet rich with resources, barely understood but
almost certainly lucrative. Rather than risking invasion and possible
destruction, the peaceful Qitans have opened their world to the human
colonisers, who rapidly establish a trading outpost and dispatch teams of
prospectors. A small number of Qitans – like Isley – have travelled in the
opposite direction and settled on Earth.
In this possible future, Britain has fragmented. The larger part has joined the Consolidation, a federation of nations and peoples united in their desire for progress and alien trade. The West Country, already split off from the rest of the UK as the result of climate change, has followed an isolationist route. In the Protectorate, the population follow stubbornly in the footsteps of their forefathers. Travel to and from the Consolidation is severely restricted, new technology is spurned, and the region scrapes its living from selling the crafts, raw materials and organic produce for which it is still famous.
Is this Whiteley’s Brexit novel? Certainly it would be difficult for any British reader to read the first half of Skyward Inn especially and not remember comments made by Tory MP Andrea Leadsom in the wake of the 2016 referendum about how Britain was going to sustain itself on profits from home-made jam and Aberdeen Angus, or something. Seen through the clarifying lens of science fiction, the determination of the Protectorate to keep itself separate, Jem and Dom’s parents’ retreat to a gated community on a UKIP version of Lundy Island, the stubborn determination to ‘muddle through’ – these things appear wrongheaded rather than redoubtable, a wilful rejection of progressive attitudes and sustainable modes of living in favour of nostalgia and with inevitable shortages of medicines and essential services as a result. Working people are barely muddling through, if at all, and without an influx of new arrivals, communities are atrophying. Farm buildings are standing empty, fertile land is lying fallow with no one to farm it. Rather than bucolic utopia, the Protectorate is a lonely place, depleted and depressed. There is a feeling, above all, of things running down.
Yet Whiteley’s novel is too subtle, too multifaceted to fall into polemic. Skyward Inn highlights issues faced by England’s rural communities anyway, even without Brexit or alien incursion. Jem’s son Fosse has been born and raised in the Protectorate and understands both its uniqueness and its vulnerability. He is dismissive of attempts to recreate the region’s unique character in artificial simulations – he recognises these at a gut level for the rose-tinted idealisations they are – yet unlike older members of the community, he recognises the necessity of change, of building bridges with other communities and individuals, and it is from his perspective that we get to experience the strangeness and the beauty of an alien world.
In her previous works, Whiteley has been resourceful and imaginative in portraying the social, geographical and political dynamics of communities, both on a wider scale and in close-focus observation of individual and family relationships within them. Skyward Inn returns to this subject area with even greater power and precision, exploring the future-possible while remaining critically attentive – like all the best science fiction – of the here and now. Her descriptive writing is as clear-eyed and boldly evocative as ever, not just in summoning the West Country landscapes she knows so well but in the creation of alien sights and concepts that bring to the final third of this exceptional novel that edge of surrealism and the uncanny that mark Whiteley as one of the most original and provocative voices in contemporary science fiction.
The concept of the hive-mind, or ‘monoculture’, as Whiteley puts it, is not new in SF. We can point to the slave-minds familiar from The Matrix and from the Borg in Star Trek as illustration of the more destructive attributes of shared consciousness, but the benificent ‘children’ of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End and the intimate culture based around shared speech patterns as detailed in China Mieville’s Embassytown provide more progressive templates. Indeed, science fiction’s obsession with this particular trope in both its positive and negative permutations would seem to indicate that the subjects it embodies – individuality versus collectivism, loss of privacy and its impact on societies as well as individuals – have been of continuing and increasing interest to us as readers and as writers, through the dawn of mass media and into the digital age. If Whiteley’s novel has a core theme, it is communication – not only how we interact with one another at street level but how the collective imagination might be broadened to accommodate the perspective and worldview of those who think differently. The way she will happily use a small group of people as a kind of literary petri dish in which to work through the implications of an idea shows a creative approach to science fiction that put me immediately in mind of Ursula Le Guin.
Most of all, it is Whiteley’s ability to mingle the marvellous with the quotidian that makes her work special. Like Peter’s sojourn on the alien planet in Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, Jem’s leap into the unknown in Skyward Inn is believable to us at least in part because the world she leaves behind is so intensely familiar. No matter how far we travel in Whiteley’s company, we never lose faith that the incredible sights she shows us are on some level real, and that they matter intensely.
On Thursday November 19th I had the pleasure of taking part in a panel presentation and discussion to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of David Lindsay’s novel A Voyage to Arcturus. The event was organised by Dimitra Fimi under the aegis of the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic and my fellow panellists were the Lindsay and Tolkien scholar Douglas A. Anderson and Professor Robert Davis of the University of Glasgow, who specialises in religious and cultural studies and has a longstanding interest in speculative fiction.
The event was well attended and hugely enjoyable, and ended with the feeling that the discussion could have gone on much longer. I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to everyone involved in making it such a success. Several people have asked me if I could make the text of my personal presentation available through my blog, and so here it is (an appropriate subtitle might be: me making trouble as usual). Thanks once again to Dimitra and the Centre for Fantasy, and here’s hoping our next meeting will be in person.
A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS: A CELEBRATION?
My
relationship with A Voyage to Arcturus
is a strange one. I first read the novel more than thirty years ago, sometime
during the period of my mid-to-late teens, when I was hoovering up science
fiction more or less indiscriminately. My memories of it from that time are
indistinct – I remember a wandering, quest-like narrative rather in the manner
of Jules Verne (his Journey to the Centre of the Earth was one of the first
science fiction novels I ever read) only much weirder. I knew nothing about the
book’s author, David Lindsay – I had no idea he was Scottish, and I hadn’t
realised how much earlier Arcturus had been written than some of the other
novels of the fantastic I was reading at the time.
Something of the book’s poetry and mystery must have stayed with me, however, because when I came to write my novel The Rift I knew at once and almost subconsciously that one of its key sections would carry Lindsay’s title. The Rift tells the story of two sisters, Selena and Julie, who are reunited after a separation of twenty years, during which Julie claims to have been living on an alien planet called Tristane. Of course not everyone believes Julie – even her sister is uncertain of whether her account can be trusted – and I think it was this sense of ambiguity around what had happened to Julie that made me remember Arcturus. I was attracted by the poetic synchronicity between my novel and Lindsay’s, the lack of closure around what really occurs. Did the voyage take place, or not? Was it all in the mind? Also I loved the title, just the feel of the words, the chilly elegance of them. I don’t think it’s any accident that when Julie first arrives on Tristane she finds herself in a cold place – the word ‘Arcturus’ was resonating with me even then.
What
a surprise to me then when I discovered that A Voyage to Arcturus was not the
book’s original title! Lindsay’s working title for his manuscript – some ten
years and more in the writing – was Nightspore in Tourmance. His publishers
were afraid that sounded too obscure, so encouraged him to change it. A Voyage
to Arcturus was first published in 1920 – the same year Isaac Asimov was born, a
fact that helps us to remember perhaps just how new science fiction still was
as a genre, how original and shockingly outlandish A Voyage to Arcturus must
have seemed to readers at the time.
Rereading
the novel some three decades after first encountering it, I was immediately struck
by how closely Arcturus chimes with the fantastic literature of the age, yet
also stands apart from it. Lindsay was known to have read and admired writers
like Jules Verne and Rider Haggard as well as his fellow Scots Robert Louis
Stevenson and Walter Scott, and their influence is clear: A Voyage to Arcturus
is an adventure narrative like no other – its protagonist, Maskull, states from
the outset that he is ‘in search of adventure’ – and it’s not hard to find
within the narrative echoes of novels such as Ivanhoe, Kidnapped, King
Solomon’s Mines and Journey to the Centre of the Earth. But that is where meaningful comparison ends.
Although A Voyage to Arcturus might usefully be grouped with science fiction’s
early essays in ‘scientific romance’ – the novels of HG Wells being the most
obvious example – it is not really like them. Where Wells and Verne style their
novels as genuine attempts to imagine or to extrapolate how human society might
develop, what wonders and dangers humanity might encounter in exploring the
cosmos, the unsolved riddle of our own Earth, even, what Lindsay attempts in A
Voyage to Arcturus might be claimed as one of science fiction’s earliest
voyages into innerspace.
More
even than Wells, I find it interesting to compare Lindsay’s work with Alexei
Tolstoy’s 1923 novel Aelita, the first full-length work of Russian science
fiction and as important to Russians as Wells’s War of the Worlds is to us
Brits. In Aelita, a maverick engineer who has constructed a spacecraft to take
him to Mars advertises for a resourceful travelling companion to accompany him
on his journey. His eventual comrade is a Bolshevik soldier who is finding it
hard to readjust to civilian life in the wake of his experience fighting in the
Russian civil war. The metal sphere in which they make their fantastical
journey is not at all unlike the crystal torpedo used by Krag, Nightspore and
Maskull in their voyage to Arcturus. But whereas Tolstoy uses his scientific
romance to further illuminate and explore the harsh ideological landscape of
revolutionary Russia, David Lindsay, once again, is doing something rather
different.
As Alexei Tolstoy’s experiences in the Russian civil war strongly influenced the writing of Aelita, A Voyage to Arcturus bears the marks and scars of having been written against the bloody backdrop of World War One. If Arcturus could be said to have a central question it could perhaps best be summed up as what makes human existence meaningful, and how do we bear the essential nihilism of a world in which death and suffering are all around? In matters of style and formal approach, there are useful comparisons to be made between the work of David Lindsay and HP Lovecraft. But whereas Lovecraft is obsessed with the terminal nature of everything, the inescapable madness of the howling void, the vision Lindsay offers up is more transcendent than nihilistic. Death comes to all, but in feeling ourselves at one with the universe, in surrendering our selfish desires, we can gain insights into a truer, more spiritual reality, and voyage there without fear.
For me, the most successful aspect of A Voyage to Arcturus is Lindsay’s landscape writing. His visions of an alien planet are incandescent, wildly strange and often inspiringly beautiful. The breadth and depth of imagination on display in his descriptions of the terrain, flora and fauna of Tormance, not to mention its people might almost persuade the reader that Lindsay is describing his own dreams.
There is a Wagnerian grandeur to Lindsay’s vision, and I wasn’t entirely surprised to discover that the composer and pianist John Ogdon had written a large-scale operatic composition based on Arcturus, bringing excerpts from the text into consort with passages from the gospels – Ogdon, like others, clearly saw Arcturus as a religious work, somewhat akin to John Bunyan’s A Pilgrim’s Progress, with Maskull in the role of Christian.
Equally fascinating is the new musical adaptation of this impossible novel. Its Australian creator and director, Phil Moore says he was actively drawn to Arcturus because of its philosophical underpinning and because it was ‘a real drama’ as opposed to satire or comedy, in the manner of earlier science fiction musicals like The Little Shop of Horrors or Rocky Horror Picture Show. He has cleverly cast Maskull as a young, attractive, sensitive man as opposed to the pedantic, sexist and peculiarly priggish character we meet in the novel.
For
this is where we must ask ourselves how successful, exactly, Lindsay is in his
ambition. The cult writer and alternative thinker Colin Wilson was a famous
admirer of A Voyage to Arcturus – he called it a masterpiece of the twentieth
century – but devotee though he was, he found his patience increasingly tested
by what he saw as the stodginess of Lindsay’s style:
The man was a towering genius whose mind is cast in the same mould as that of Dostoevsky… [But] ordinary technical ability, the literary talent that so many third-rate novelists possess in abundance, was denied to him.
As a one-time Russian scholar with a particular interest in Dostoevsky, I found this quote from Wilson enlightening – because it’s not far wrong. Lindsay’s total commitment to and pursuit of an idea – not to say an ideal – is vividly apparent throughout Arcturus. Though his approach is radically different, Lindsay seems to be fired with the same epistemological zeal as the great Russian, and his work likewise offers a vast and tantalising array of possible meanings and interpretations. Dostoevsky though could write character, and did so with passion, as anyone acquainted with Rodion Raskolnikov or Ivan Karamazov would surely attest.
As a novel of character, A Voyage to Arcturus is an embarrassing failure, in which the demands of a simplistic quest narrative are the entire determinant of character action. For me it is not so much the style of Lindsay’s writing that is a problem – Lindsay was possessed of a vivid and singular imagination – so much as its peculiar turn of priggishness and rampant sexism. Lindsay does make some startlingly modern observations about gender and sexuality, even going so far as to invent a set of nonbinary pronouns for one character as he gropes towards a broader understanding of their nature, engaging with these issues in a way that prefigures writing by Ursula Le Guin or John Varley fifty years later.
However there is nothing to explain or excuse the all-round direness of his attitude towards women. In our journey through the landscape of Tourmance we meet Joiwind the angelic helpmeet, Oceaxe the temptress, Tydomin the jealous harpy and Sullenbode, who ‘is not a woman, but a mass of pure sex. Your passion will draw her out into human shape, but only for a moment. If the change were permanent, you would have endowed her with a soul.’
Lindsay has read Nietzche and Schopenhauer and boy it shows. DH Lawrence can get away with a lot when it comes to being a patronising sexist because he’s one hell of a writer. In A Voyage to Arcturus, Lindsay’s prejudices are embarrassingly on display.
Having reread the novel, I would have to frame its relationship to my own novel as ironical. In The Rift, Selena is faced with the choice of believing her sister and cutting herself adrift from her conventional worldview, or clinging to what logic tells her must be the truth and dismissing Julie’s experiences as post-traumatic madness, and I find a renewed satisfaction in the fact that these philosophical arguments are conducted between women – men here are strictly an optional extra. As we turn the final page of Arcturus, we find ourselves faced as readers with a similar dilemma: did any of it happen? Or are we back where we started, on the north east coast of Scotland on a stormy night, wondering why we came here and where we are going?
A Voyage to Arcturus is a singular, frustrating, baffling and ultimately rewarding book – rewarding precisely because of its obscurity, its own inner conflicts and confusion, its refusal to be typecast. It is possibly unique in science fiction, and shines a revelatory light on science fiction’s early development. Once you read it, you may not like it, but you’ll never forget it. I for one will be queuing up to see the musical!
One of the harsher effects of lockdown for writers has been the narrowing of opportunities to come out of our studies and meet with people – with each other, and also with readers. We’ve all done our best with Skype and Zoom, and the ingenuity and enthusiasm of booksellers and events organisers in making the most of the tools at their disposal has been incalculable. We all know by now though that online meetings are not the same, and even as we enjoy catching glimpses of one another across the internet, there’s nothing like coming together in person to celebrate the announcement of a prize shortlist, the launch of a new novel or simply to compare notes on what we’ve all been reading lately.
This privation has been especially difficult for authors who have had books scheduled to be published in 2020. Even under normal circumstances, there’s a significant gap between completing work on a novel and sending it out into the world. Having to wait an extra six months or even a year before their work sees the light of day has been deeply discouraging. For those writers whose novels have been released this year, there is the sadness of not being able to participate in book festivals, conventions, and all the other events that would normally mark a novel’s rite of passage. As we re-enter a heightened state of lockdown, even the opportunity of celebrating quietly at home with friends has been pushed into an indefinite future. Which makes it all the more necessary for us to gather the resources we do have: to read, to celebrate and talk about the books we love.
Christopher Priest’s new novel THE EVIDENCE is published today. This is Chris’s sixteenth novel to date, which is achievement enough in itself. It is also a fantastically inventive, original and unexpected novel, a true delight to read. The Evidence brings us into the company of Todd Fremde, a crime writer who has been invited to give a lecture at a university some two days’ travel from his home island – for yes, this is a Dream Archipelago novel like no other. On arrival in the icy outpost of Dearth City, Todd finds himself with more than dreary weather to contend with as he is drawn rapidly into a situation that seems increasingly to resemble the plot of one of his own police procedurals.
As Todd struggles to make sense of what is going on around him, he begins to examine the activity of crime writing itself: why are we addicted to it, and what does it actually have to say about the nature of crime? The Evidence is a funny, thought-provoking, thoroughly entertaining book, a crime novel that undermines itself at every turn whilst retaining and honouring all the elements of mystery that make detective stories so satisfying.
I love this book, and I know you will, too. In fact I would go so far as to say it’s a novel that’s perfectly timed to bring some much needed joy and humour to our reading lives. If you’ve never read Priest before, The Evidence might be exactly the right place to start.
Reading James Bradley’s daunting yet powerful essay on climate catastrophe for the Sydney Review of Books yesterday, I was struck most of all by a passage near the end, which seems to speak as much to the current situation with COVID-19 as to the overarching horror of the climate crisis:
Like deep adaptation, radical hope is a psychological practice as well as a political position. It requires us to accept the past is gone, and that the political and cultural assumptions that once shaped our world no longer hold true. It demands we learn to live with uncertainty and grief, and to face up to the reality of loss. But it also demands what Lear describes as ‘imaginative excellence’, a deliberate fostering of the flexibility and courage necessary to ‘facilitate a creative and appropriate response to the world’s challenges’ that will enable us to envision new alliances and open up new possibilities, even in the face of catastrophe.
If only there were more widespread recognition that simply getting back to how we were before should not be our overriding goal, the potential for change that has already been demonstrated could be effectively harnessed. This is a matter not of logistics, but of political will.
Bradley’s essay also chimed eerily with the novel I have just finished reading. Madeleine Watts’s debut The Inland Sea is a short, powerful work that hovers on the boundary between the mimetic and the speculative, combining personal, seemingly autofictional elements with issues of climate change and the embedded aftershocks of colonialism in Australia. The narrator is a writer, looking back from some unspecified time period at the year she spent working as a telephone operative on the 111 (read 999) switchboard, connecting incoming calls with the appropriate emergency service. The calls she has to deal with are acutely distressing, often coming from people in immediate danger of their lives. Yet the narrator is told – encouraged, even – not to engage with callers beyond the basic requirements of her job. The life of the office is conveyed with grim and often hilarious accuracy. Unsurprisingly our narrator frequently questions her suitability for the job, wondering aloud how long she will be able to keep going with it.
The atmosphere of transience – the sense that the life she is living is already in flux – is compounded by the steady accretion of climate events that are taking place in the background of the narrative: devastating fires (we hear the literal cries for help coming through the switchboard) unnatural floods and violent storms. The narrator’s destructive relationship with a tutor at the university further pushes the unreliability envelope. Significantly, we learn that the narrator’s great-great-great grandfather was John Oxley, a British explorer of the early nineteenth century who spent years in an obsessive search for the ‘inland sea’ he was convinced must exist at the heart of the Australian interior. Needless to say, he never found it. Watts points towards the futility of his quest as a metaphor for the settlers’ mishandling and misunderstanding of Australia generally.
As a chronicle of our current moment, with all its uncertainty, uprootedness, personal and political floundering and disquiet, The Inland Sea forms a fascinating and persuasive argument, a beautifully imagined, hauntingly memorable work of fiction that spoke to me deeply. It’s worth noting that I came to it via this essay Watts wrote about Helen Garner and the relationship between autofiction and lived reality. I loved the essay, both in what it said about Garner (whom I tend to hero-worship, just a little) and its exploration of writing the self as an imaginative act. I segued straight from this piece of non fiction into Watts’s novel and couldn’t have been more satisfied.
It is a comfort at least, to know that important work is still going on.
Earlier this month, Chris and I spent a number of days away, exploring our neighbouring islands of Islay and Jura. The trip had originally been booked for the end of June, to coincide with the summer solstice and the longest day. The summer nights up here are very precious to me, the quality of light is extraordinary and I wanted to experience that on Jura, a place that was special to us already without having seen it for reasons of its literary legacy. It is well known that George Orwell went to Jura to find the seclusion he needed to work on his final novel, unarguably his masterpiece. I knew it would be difficult for us to gain access to the house itself but I was determined to try.
Port Ellen, Isle of Islay, September 2020
As things turned out, we did not get to see Barnhill; neither did we get to spend the summer solstice on Jura. That we were able to reschedule our trip and almost get to Barnhill seems something of a miracle, given the circumstances. Staff at the hotel where we were staying made enquiries about us taking a boat trip down the coast so we could glimpse the house from the water but on our one full day in Jura, the weather was ridiculously inclement (always a possibility when you’re in Scotland) and the boatman was having trouble making even his scheduled trip across from the mainland.
Machir Bay, Isle of Islay, September 2020
We drove instead, as far as we could – twenty-five miles along an increasingly tenuous strip of road and into a landscape I had scarcely imagined. I knew in my head that Barnhill farmhouse was isolated and inaccessible, but it wasn’t until we were in the landscape that I was able to appreciate just how much. I think I’d been imagining a bumpy track along the coast, something like the farm roads we were used to in Devon. In fact, the road turns inward, away from the coast and into the vast, moorland interior of the island. Stags leap across the road in front of the car. Mist sweeps in like bolts of gauze. The colours – those quintessentially Scottish colours of ochre and sage and grey, contoured with purple. The heather – at its finest when I travelled north just a fortnight before (another trip, another story) – was still in evidence, still everywhere. That particular purple, with that particular grey – glorious, favoured, northern.
Craighouse, Isle of Jura, September 2020
In the end we reached the point where the road seemed so precarious it would have been foolhardy for us to continue. Chris parked, or rather, brought the car to a standstill overlooking the valley. I left him listening (appropriately enough, given my work-in-progress, but more of that another time) to Science Stories on Radio 4 while I got out and walked for an hour, up to and past the signpost that indicates the end of the public road with still four miles to go until you reach Barnhill. It was raining pretty hard but I was singing at the top of my voice into the wind. I felt utterly alone, and yet utterly seen, utterly alive. It might sound like a leap too far to say I felt Orwell’s presence – yet I think anyone who travels there must feel that they do. The spirit of the book has somehow become enmeshed with the spirit of place: not the grimness of the book’s contents, but the wildness, the intellectual courage, the poetic insight that enabled its creation.
I am determined to return to Jura, sooner rather than later, so I can walk the whole distance, so I can reach the moorland ridge (I have seen it in photographs) from where you can look down and see the white, elongated block of Barnhill crouched in the valley below, the glistening sea beyond. But for now the immense privilege and joy of being in that place, of seeing and smelling and tasting the landscape that Orwell knew and loved, that acted as a spiritual counterweight to the unrelenting harshness of the work he was composing – these are the memories I want to carry out of this year, a counterweight to the increasing instability and grimness of this time in all our lives.
The Paps of Jura, Isle of Jura, September 2020
*
The book I took with me to read on this trip was Dorian Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth, subtitled ‘a biography of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four’. Lynskey’s aim in this book is to provide a biographical and cultural analysis of Orwell’s masterpiece, showing how the book came to be written, and the independent life it has gone on to lead in the absence of its author. Lynskey is at pains to stress that Nineteen Eighty-Four came as the culminating achievement of what, in a parallel universe, might have been just the first part of Orwell’s career. Orwell’s experience in the Spanish Civil War set in motion a period of intense thinking, reading and conversation that funnelled itself into the creation of what is, in effect, the summation of Orwell’s ideas on totalitarianism and political ideology. As a foundation stone of twentieth century literature, we can count ourselves lucky that Orwell lived long enough to complete it.
In the second half of his study, Lynskey examines the impact of NIneteen Eighty-Four on both literary and popular culture: through the years of austerity and McCarthyism, the later years of the Cold War, the post-Thatcher crises in unemployment and national identity, right up to the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump. Lynskey reveals how Orwell’s masterpiece – like all truly great works of literature – reinvents itself for each successive generation. Orwell drew his original inspiration primarily from his experience of Stalinist communism, Trotskyite international socialism and the acts of blind obeisance committed by both the British government and the British Labour and Communist parties in effectively eliding the atrocities committed in the name of socialism. But Nineteen Eighty-Four is too big and too brilliant to remain associated with one specific time period alone; it’s a shape-shifting, mutable text, Lynskey argues, the major proof of which resides in the fact that it has been called into service by every shade of political opinion, often at one and the same time.
I was so excited and so energised by The Ministry of Truth I couldn’t stop thinking about it, couldn’t stop talking about it. Lynskey’s work is informative, original and addictively readable, one of my books of this year for sure. What it also does – as well it should – is drive you back to the original text. I first read Nineteen Eighty-Four when I was around fifteen years of age and still at school. I read it at least twice more over the following decade – but that was thirty years ago now and although I’ve thought about and referenced the book as often as anyone else, I haven’t reread it. I finished Lynskey’s book with a hunger to put that right – and I’m so glad I did.
When I first read Nineteen Eighty-Four, it was in the context of a lot of other dystopias. The novel that is closest to Orwell’s in terms of its genesis and overall impact is Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, which I read at almost exactly the same time (it changed my life, but that’s another story). However, my young-adult self never thought to bracket those two books together: in my mind, Koestler’s book was a historical text specifically about the Soviet Union, whereas Orwell’s was a ‘true’ dystopia, set in the future (only a couple of years in my own future by the time I read it, but still) and built around concepts that seemed undeniably science fictional. It felt more natural to me to bracket Orwell’s work with other similarly science fictional novels: Zamyatin’s We, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, even Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day, which no one else seems to have read but I was obsessed with at the time.
Rereading Nineteen Eighty-Four as a mature adult reveals how I was both right and wrong: Orwell’s novel is both horrifyingly realist, and one of the most perfect exemplars of the science fictional argument we have to draw on. Save for the unavoidable absence of computers, this novel could have been written yesterday. The fact that Orwell was not in a position to imagine the kind of digital infrastructure that would come to define our world is, in the context of this book, unimportant.
As a younger reader, the parts of Nineteen Eighty-Four that impressed themselves upon me most forcefully were those that were most outwardly expressive of the dystopian mode: the telescreens, the Thought Police, Winston’s hidden diary, the imprisonment and torture. Though my memory of the text proved near-photographic in places, I was astounded to discover on rereading that aside from casual mentions of hangings, and of course the ongoing war with Eastasia/Eurasia (take your pick) there is no overt violence in Nineteen Eighty-Four until someway past the halfway mark. What you get instead is an accumulation of circumstances, a portrait of postwar Britain, with all its griminess, everyday privations and grim sense of stasis that, although seventy years in the past now, will feel immediately resonant and present in our pre-Brexit reality to anyone born in Britain in the analogue age.
There are also minor yet touching details that draw directly from Orwell’s personal circumstances: the way Winston ‘hated using his hands, and he hated bending down, which was always liable to start him coughing’, for example, a detail that reminds us instantly of how the author was suffering from TB at the time of writing, and edging closer to death.
Orwell’s attention to detail extends even to minor characters, Winston’s neighbour Parsons for example, the exemplary Party man who ends up being denounced (for absolutely nothing) by his own daughter. We have all met someone like Parsons, nodded hello to him on a Sunday morning as he washes his car. He’s the kind of man who votes UKIP, the kind who sticks a note through his neighbour’s letterbox during lockdown, warning them that he’s seen them taking an extra exercise session and feels inclined to report them for it. Orwell doesn’t demonise Parsons – he just shows him like he is, pathos included. I especially admired his characterisation of Syme, the passionate stickler who works alongside Winston at the Ministry of Truth, a man whose intelligence has been corrupted into the service of a monstrous master yet whose obsessive interest in his work still makes him interesting to talk to:
In an intellectual way, Syme was venomously orthodox. He would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of helicopter raids on enemy villages, the trials and confessions of thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of the Ministry of Love. Talking to him was largely a matter of getting him away from such subjects and entangling him, if possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on which he was authoritative and interesting.
‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words,’ Syme asserts, before discoursing on the essential redundancy of synonyms and antonyms. ‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?’ he says. ‘In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.’ What struck me most profoundly on reading the novel this time around was how its subject, more than any other, is the importance of language, not only in resisting tyranny but also in maintaining any kind of personal integrity. Anyone who cares about language and words will find Syme’s proposition for the shrinking and coarsening of language literally shiver-inducing, especially as we are already bearing witness to such a transformation across large segments of political and online discourse. One need barely ask what Orwell would have made of phrases such as ‘alternative facts’ and ‘the reality-based community’. If it weren’t so appalling it would be funny. Reading Syme’s words, I also found myself thinking of the ways in which Anglophone culture has forcibly suppressed indigenous languages, gaslighting, devaluing and at the worst extreme obliterating the identity and means of expression of entire peoples.
If I were to pass a negative comment on any aspect of Nineteen Eighty-Four, I would have to say that Orwell is not particularly imaginative in his portrayal of women. Winston’s estranged wife Katherine is referred to as ‘stupid’ and moreover ‘too stupid to detect the unorthodoxy of [Winston’s] opinions’. Wherever prole women are mentioned – and with the exception of an elderly man Winston talks to in a pub the proles described by Orwell are all women – they are invariably described as ‘enormous’, or ‘monstrous’. The idea that these women might have inner lives is never contemplated, and it is only shortly before his arrest that Winston is able to connect a prole woman’s singing with the idea of beauty..
The main female character Julia is bright and bold and courageous but again Orwell seems at pains to stress her physicality. “You’re only a rebel from the waist down,” Winston says to her – Julia is above all a sensuous being, showing no interest in the intellectual reasons behind her rebellion or the life of the mind generally. ‘She hated the Party, and said so in the crudest words, but she made no general criticism of it. Except where it touched upon her own life she had no interest in Party doctrine.’ In spite of his love for Julia, Winston remains fundamentally alone in his search for answers about the nature of the Party and its hunger for power. The idea that women might be equal partners in counter-revolution seems barely to occur to him. Considered on the terms we are offered, Julia is excellently characterised: a warm-blooded, vital creation with a life force that is pivotal within the novel as a whole. Orwell clearly has a blind spot when it comes to feminism, which is a shame. In this respect it is interesting to compare Nineteen Eighty-Four with Zamyatin’s novel We, in which the male protagonist is schooled in the concepts of revolution and intellectual independence by a woman.
Though it might seem incongruous, there are many moments of illuminating beauty throughout Nineteen Eighty-Four, moments that are not often mentioned or remembered but that form a crucial and definitive counterweight to the horror. Winston’s dreams of ‘the Golden Country’ for example, passages that in a sense represent the heart of Orwell’s vision, the necessity of ‘staying sane’ as an act of resistance. There is also much discussion to be had around the ending of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Certainly when I first read the novel all those years ago I had no doubt that Winston’s final assertion, that he loves Big Brother, was a statement of utter defeat, that every last scrap of his integrity had been torn away. This time, I’m not so certain. ‘White always wins’, Winston says, as he moves chess pieces across the board in the Chestnut Tree Cafe, and I had the sense that it was this assertion about the ultimate triumph of good over evil that held the most weight, a coded message almost, even at the last: Winston says he loves Big Brother, but does he truly?
We cannot know – or at least we can only know the answer that feels most true for us. What I do know is that Nineteen Eighty-Four is and remains a landmark work that deserves its fame and status. Not only in its prescience but in its historical acuity, not only in its polemic but in its literary assurance and raw beauty, this is an elegant, complex, mature work of fiction that rewards the reader’s attention on every level. Reading it again brought me not only intellectual satisfaction; I was equally excited to discover how well it has stood the test of time, how relevant this book still feels, precisely today. It also brought me uneasy dreams, a sense of being on the boundary between the known world and the most perilously unstable of futures. To share one’s fear with a like mind in this way is not merely a consolation, but a reason for hope.
Each time this shortlist gets announced, I find myself wondering why the Rathbones Folio Prize isn’t given more attention. Is it because the award was founded as a riposte to the Booker, or rather to the Booker’s sporadic tendency to succumb to popular pressure (and I’m sure we can all find examples) around which novels or which kind of novels should be considered? Is the Folio Prize’s unabashed pursuit of literary excellence seen as unfashionable or – and I can’t believe I’m using this word – elitist? Or is it something as banal as the prize organisers not being massively clued up on publicity? (Or not having a massive publicity budget?) Whatever it is, it’s a shame, because the Folio Prize has produced some of the most consistently interesting shortlists year on year.
The 2020 selection is better even than usual. Fiona Benson’s Vertigo and Ghost is a masterpiece. There can be no questioning that fact, no suggestion that the use of the word masterpiece is yet another instance of book world hype. Vertigo and Ghost will be being read in a hundred years’ time and hopefully long after. It’s won prizes already but it absolutely deserves this further accolade. Ben Lerner is so good it’s fashionable to hate him now. After having read the whole of the Adam Gordon trilogy virtually back-to-back towards the end of last year, I’ve been wondering whether Lerner will get the Booker nod, hoping of course that he will, preparing to feel unsurprised if he doesn’t. All the better then to see his third novel The Topeka School featuring here. (And yes of course the book can be criticised, but only at the level where you know you’re nitpicking. Lerner’s writing – his thought process – is so advanced that it doesn’t matter about the nitpicks, which I guess is what the Folio Prize is all about.)
How lovely to see Laura Cumming’s beautifully written investigative memoir On Chapel Sands recognised. Cumming’s art criticism is so consistently excellent and On Chapel Sands is a joy: understated, refined, powerful. It’s not had enough attention, in my view, and so my heart leaped when I saw it on the Folio shortlist. James Lasdun is another underappreciated writer. I read his memoir Give Me Everything You Have last year, and found it an uncomfortable book to read on many levels, yet once again the writing is so good, the approach so thoughtful and self-questioning, that it’s worth the discomfort, and shouldn’t all literature aim to be this self-exposing? I’m hoping Lasdun will find more readers as a result of this overdue recognition for a major prize.
I’ve not read Grand Union yet, but I did read two of Zadie Smith’s essay collections last year and found such joy in them. Smith is one of our most assured writers, no doubt about it, but – like Lasdun – she is also one of our most reflective and self-questioning. The piece in which Smith explores her decision to keep away from social media (because she believes it is essential that a writer retain the ‘freedom to be wrong’) should be read and at least considered by every writer. As with Lerner, Smith has to an extent reaped the anti-rewards of literary fame, which has meant a tailing-off of engaged interest in what she is actually writing. This shortlisting will hopefully encourage a generous measure of re-engagement.
Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive. What can I say, except that it was a source of sadness and frustration to me, to see this important, formally innovative, searching novel dropped from both the Booker and the Women’s Prize at longlist stage last year (the Women’s Prize decision especially had me grinding my teeth). This fact alone might place Luiselli as my favourite for winning the Folio but we shall see. I have only read part of Constellations so far but the form of the book, the quality of thought and writing, makes Sinead Gleeson’s shortlisting a no-brainer and I’ll make sure I absorb her book in full before the year is out. Similarly, the Folio shortlisting for Azadeh Moaveni’s Guest House for Young Widows has put it back on my radar. Given the often-appalling discourse around Muslim women, not to mention the appalling (and illegal) treatment of Shamima Begum (could our government please remember that Begum was a child when she left Britain??? What she must have been through since can scarcely be imagined by those who have taken the decision to leave her stateless – that’s if they even tried) I would consider Moaveni’s book essential reading for everyone, now.
The Folio Prize shortlist is diverse in every sense of the word. It is also profound, and thoughtful, and interesting. If there is one quality – literary excellence aside – that could be said to unite these eight books it is that of being ruminative, of inviting a personal response. This desire, this ability, this courage to look inward even as we look outward, to make the political personal, is an approach I would hope to see more of on every prize list and it is inspiring, and a source of solace, to see it here.
