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Jesus Christ Kinski by Benjamin Myers

October 26, 2025 /

Rock stars, like lunatic actors intent on dominating or destroying every person who crossed their path – including entire film crews in remote jungle locations – were now highly unfashionable relics in an era that placed great value on virtue.

Or, viewed another way, for the first time in a century, children in the Western world had become more boring than their parents.

And did I find myself setting the book aside to take a look at the film? Of course I did. And I was rewarded with something so indisputably out there it is close to hypnotic. And Myers is right in his contention: the closest thing to this kind of outburst we have seen this summer (at a music festival – of course) sees its perpetrators immediately barred from multiple stages, the act itself reduced to a partially deflated political football, batted about the media arena, the meaning behind the words predictably ignored, the mere act of expressing them deemed so scandalous as to be beyond discussion.

The film of Kinski is itself a work of art, the background footage – the cops (grim-faced, arms folded), the promotional flyers, the audience shuffling into the auditorium in their winter coats – is almost equally engrossing, overlaid with a soundtrack of looping, minor-key piano that sounds like a Soviet film soundtrack from the same era. The fashions, the hairstyles, the strange concatenation of an almost forgotten brand of radicalism with terrible dress sense – the queasy unsettlement of being returned with such jarring immediacy to the 1970s.

Myers’s new novel is an essential counterpoint to Ian Penman’s sort-of-autofiction Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors, a still more personal excavation of a particular milieu, a total immersion in both zeit und geist from a writer just that bit further down the road, certain enough of himself not to fall victim to the (almost irresistible, when you’re not only a writer but a British writer, raised in a culture where artists – until officially deemed ‘successful’ and with the trappings to prove it – are regarded with suspicion and hostility as shirkers, routinely condemned for – that ultimate British taboo – ‘getting above themselves’) temptations of self-deprecation in the personal passages.

Thinking about all this one’s mind turns inevitably to what might have happened if Kinski and Fassbinder had been thrown into the lions’ den of working together.

It is clear from the first – the nudges and winks, the catcalls from the further reaches of the auditorium – that the audience are there for a spectacle, for a happening, to see what goes down when things kick off and to expedite that process if necessary. ‘But you have never done any work,’ some would-be agitator yells from the outer darkness. (See what I mean?) A Christian protestor implores those watching to look elsewhere for Christ. And what am I thinking? How come I didn’t stumble upon this brilliant madness sooner? is what I’m thinking, already in danger of being dragged back inside my recurring obsession with the postwar German writers known as Die Gruppe (from whom I have always turned aside from fear of not having a defensible angle because I’m not German, because what I’m running on mainly is instinct, second-hand knowledge, an empathy I can’t explain and therefore can’t claim, although maybe, thinking about it now, the biggest part of my problem is that I’m just too careful) and wondering whether I might dare try digging deeper into Herzog (whose blazing presence I still remember from my time as a bookseller, browsing the Film department, spending hundreds of pounds on glossy monographs before disappearing, far too soon, back into the streetscene) or whether I would do better to set my sights a little lower because how does one say anything meaningful about a genius? (See the lure of self-deprecation, above.)

Myers’s comparing of Kinski with Hitler is a tad predictable, but so what? When Kinski loses it, there’s no way you can’t think of Hitler, it’s almost obligatory, the same as when in pre-2001 movies you catch a glimpse of the New York skyline with the World Trade Center still intact you can’t not think of 9/11. Kinski would most likely not have been thinking of Hitler when he goes crazy but we are. Which is itself worth mentioning, worth putting out there, and surely most of what writing should be is putting it out there. What’s weirdest of all is that Kinski – his lean and hungry look, his rancorous proselytizing, his messiah complex, his raging against the machine – really is much closer to the real Christ than the sanitized, doctrine-burdened icon we’re accustomed to contemplating. Kinski is scratched and dirty and sick, he‘s the Isenheim altarpiece. Jesus wandered in the desert too long and almost lost his mind and this is the result. Truest words: what Myers says near the end about Kinski being lonely. One should judge a man mainly from his depravities. Virtues can be faked. Depravities are real.

Bravo Ben. Bravo Klaus. Bravo, bravo, bravo.

When There Are Wolves Again by E.J. Swift

October 9, 2025 /

In her 2023 novel The Coral Bones, EJ Swift created a tapestry of interwoven timelines – past, present and future – to shed light upon the origins of the climate crisis and to point towards possible approaches to surviving the disaster. Where such a summary might offer a general outline of what the book is about, it cannot begin to convey the lyrical qualities and human sensibilities of Swift’s writing. Right from the beginning, in her early ‘Osiris’ trilogy, Swift has revealed herself as a writer whose personal commitment to the themes and issues that drive her fiction is equalled by her ability to tell powerfully affecting stories of individual lives. Her new novel, out today, is not only her best to date. It reads for me also as a culmination of the work Swift has produced so far, a jumping-off point for what she is sure to achieve in the future.

When There Are Wolves Again is a novel of dual timelines that will eventually converge. Hester is born in 1986, on the day of the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl. As a result, she has always experienced a fascination, even a connection with the place and when as a documentary film maker she finally visits the Chernobyl exclusion zone in the early 2020s, that connection is deepened. Returning to the UK, she brings with her a dog-wolf hybrid, a puppy she names Lux. The bond she forms with this wild-born creature will come to be a symbol of a wider interconnectedness between humans and nature.

Lucy is born in London thirty years later. As her parents struggle with work pressures during the COVID pandemic, Lucy spends an increasing amount of time with her grandparents, and it is from her grandmother in particular that she begins to learn about the natural world, and the environmental crisis that is largely being ignored by those in power. As Lucy grows to adulthood, the fight to protect the planet’s ecosystems becomes her primary concern, her reason for being. Together with other activists, she becomes part of a growning environmentalist movement, recognising that protest is only the first step in effecting change.

Hester’s own understanding of the land – she grows up on a farm in rural Somerset – is challenged when the community she is a part of fails to grasp the necessity of making changes to their way of working. Estranged from her traditionalist brother, she becomes determined instead to document our present moment and the conflicts it presents. Though her response to the climate crisis is very different from Lucy’s, Hester’s commitment to raising awareness is equally urgent. It seems inevitable that the paths of these two women will eventually cross.

There has been an increasing amount of discussion around the nature of eco-fiction. that the climate crisis has too frequently been used as yet another initiatior of end-times catastrophe or political dystopia. Post-apocalyptic novels though are a genre in their own right, a staple of science fiction for more than a hundred years and doubtless for even more time to come. They can also be an interesting arena for literary experiment – Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker or Paul Kingsnorth’s Alexandria are just two examples of how eco-disaster can be a disruptor in more than one sense. A new wave of eco-fiction – a recent tranche of novels that examine the climate crisis as it is currently unfolding and present if not solutions then what might be called proactive responses – sits alongside the traditional disaster novel not as a riposte but as a whole other way of thinking. These novels are different – not so much science fiction as social realism – because their aims and priorities are different. Alongside novels such as Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From, Julia Armfield’s Private Rites and Sarah Hall’s Helm, When There Are Wolves Again is in the vanguard of this movement.

I loved Swift’s novel The Coral Bones, but for me, Wolves is even better. The fact that it takes place here, in Britain, amongst landscapes and communities that are deeply familiar and deeply loved makes this poetic, passionate and incredibly thoughtful novel twice as hard-hitting. Swift’s insights are considered, plausible, and in the end affirmatory. Her writing, tied indivisibily as it is to her personal convictions, goes from strength to strength.

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

September 27, 2025 /

I haven’t actively enjoyed an Ian McEwan novel since Amsterdam, the brisk, discomfiting and wryly amusing 1998 follow-up to what for me has always seemed the high-point of his career, 1997’s Enduring Love. Probably his most famous novel – certainly his most widely-read – is Atonement (2001), the book that catapulted him from being well known in literary terms to being well known in terms of having multiple film adaptations and of being the ‘go-to’ writer in times of national crisis. I didn’t like Atonement. It – the Dunkirk section especially, with its WW2-movie-inspired dialogue – seemed like heritage literature to me. I much preferred the weird, uncomfortable stuff – Black Dogs and The Child in Time – and Enduring Love, which, it seemed to me, was successful precisely because it inhabited a world and set of concerns McEwan understood and cared about. Atonement just felt – fake.

I’ve felt that way about pretty much everything he’s written since. Saturday, which strived for political relevance yet landed face-down in its own self-importance, was a low point, as was Lessons, a book that struggled to encompass the century yet managed to say only very obvious, Guardian-reader things in an obvious way. I kept looking for the nod and the wink but found only nostalgia. Scary. Scarier than The Cement Garden, in fact.

Why then did I find myself immersed in McEwan’s latest, What We Can Know, just days after it came out? One reason was deeply personal: Chris couldn’t stand post-Atonement McEwan and my insistence on keeping up with his work became a kind of running joke between us. I wanted to keep the joke going. The second reason was tied in with my low-level disappointment around the Booker Prize longlist. I gave up on that project after Seascraper, because I was finding it too dispiriting and worse, a waste of reading time. I found the judges’ choices baffling not because they were so, so awful but because I couldn’t believe there weren’t better books out there. Better in the sense I was trying to explain in my post about David Szalay’s (excellent) novel. Better in the sense of bigger, somehow. Books that reached around the side of time rather than settling for being here, so precisely in the mid-2020s, so good-enough-but-not-great. Books you probably wouldn’t think of reading again.

McEwan has reached that stage in his career where rejecting him from the Booker longlist is most likely an automatic reaction on the part of the judges. He has the fame and he has the money but he is no longer cool. He still gets the obligatory Today programme interview, the half-hour discussion on Front Row, but he’s going to be dissed from all the major prize lists. A devil’s bargain indeed, an uncomfortable space for a writer to occupy. Reading half of the Booker longlist and finding it so wanting made me wonder: had McEwan deserved to be dissed? Was his new novel truly even less ambitious than the books that had been selected? And I did like the sound of it. From what I’d read and heard beforehand, What We Can Know had a literary subject, a literary subtext. And a speculative framework. I was intrigued to see if he’d moved on since Machines Like Me, a novel that might have worked much better without the (utterly ridiculous) child-adoption plot strand, a lapse in logic that ruined the whole book, at least for me.

Part One of What We Can Know takes place in the 2100s, a world where accidental wars and the ‘Derangement’ (nod to Amitav Ghosh) of climate disruption has seen the world’s population cut in half and the balance of political and economic power slide away from America and China and towards Africa. The US is now all but inaccessible, torn apart by feuding warlords (nod to current headlines) while Britain has become an archipelago, with many of its cities – including, of course, London – inundated and its seats of higher learning centred in Snowdonia and the Scottish Highlands. Tom Metcalfe is a lecturer in English Literature, a specialist in the period from the 1990s to the 2030s (nod to McEwan’s own generation, natch) and obsessed with a poet named Francis Blundy. Blundy is said to have been ‘the equal of Seamus Heaney’, with a colourful personal life and surrounded by a sense of abiding mystery. The single extant manuscript of what might perhaps have been his greatest work, an abstruse and technically complex love poem to his wife, Vivien, went missing soon after it was written and is now presumably lost forever. Driven to terminal despair by his students’ indifference to what feels to them like ancient history (nod to all McEwan’s friends in academe and most of mine, too) Tom lets himself become convinced that the poem is still out there. When an equally obsessive archivist, Donnie Drummond, happens upon a clue, Tom sets off in pursuit. The second part of the novel returns us to our own world of the 2020s, and offers us a record of what Tom eventually finds.

Of course this book is soaked in nostalgia – it’s a McEwan novel. What differentiates What We Can Know from, say, Lessons is that McEwan (mostly) resists the temptation to step into the arena of grand pronouncements. He keeps his centre of action small and tightly focused. Moreover, he keeps it focussed on something he personally knows and cares about. As a result, the larger, more overarching themes – climate change, post-Brexit politics, environmental collapse – become a natural and relevant part of the story and significantly more effective. There is also a welcome return of some of the darker elements that so strongly characterised pre-Atonement McEwan. The handling of these elements – and the crisis that precipitates them – is really quite powerful, as the central tragedy becomes – again – both a haunting depiction of particular personal circumstances and a matter of overarching poetic symbolism.

McEwan’s treatment of speculative ideas is all the better for being relaxed – for being, in essence, a backdrop for a story that has more in common with AS Byatt’s Possession than with any one of a dozen more recent post-climate-change novels I could name. He does himself another favour by keeping Blundy’s actual poetry off the page – Byatt might have had the chops, but McEwan recognises – and indeed states – that his strengths lie with prose. Yes, he namechecks a load of his friends, but his skilful imagining of a fictional cast of literary characters to sit alongside them more than makes up for this. In the passages where Tom is talking about biography, about the final impossibility of stepping back into the past, McEwan’s referencing of Richard Holmes’s 1985 book Footsteps provides one of the novel’s most memorable and moving statements:

One evening, after walking through a heavy storm, Holmes crossed a bridge over the River Allier to enter the village of Langogne. It appeared to him a cheerful place, with its eleventh-century church and mediaeval market. But Holmes, footsore and exhausted, was gripped by a feverish idea that would not let him go, a blend of hallucination and hope: Stevenson would soon be arriving. The young man retraced his steps to the bridge and stood there a long while as darkness began to fall. He removed his hat in preparation for a formal greeting. Passers-by gave him odd looks. Bats started swooping over the river. Then he saw, fifty yards downstream, picked out against the fading gleam of the western sky, the old ruined bridge into town, the one his dear Stevenson would have crossed.

‘The waiting figure on the modern bridge is me,’ Tom adds, Being obsessed with time’s passing myself, I find these passages – which could stand in for the novel as a whole – both moving and resonant. It is no surprise that the novel’s title and epigraph are also drawn from Holmes’s work.

I enjoyed this book and I loved it, too. I would be telling Chris he had to read it. He would have complained, then given in and read it anyway. Then we’d have spent half a day arguing about it. I’m glad to keep the joke going. I also feel pretty certain that if What We Can Know had ended up on the Booker list, it’s the novel I’d be rooting for. Because in its imaginative reach, philosophical heft and skill in telling – a quality, I fear, that we have come to take for granted in McEwan and thus underappreciate – it feels much more like a Booker book than most of what is on there. Perhaps this is simply because its themes and landscapes and references are themes and landscapes and references I care about, too. But taking note of and acknowledging such shared affinities is surely what reading – and writing, also – is all about.

As the city heats up…

July 12, 2025 /

Here are two exceptional, and closely related books I’ve read recently – both about cities, both about art – and that have provided matter for reflection and inspiration as I become ever more deeply immersed in my new novel project.

In The Lonely City, Olivia Laing finds herself adrift in New York as what was supposed to be a new life with a new lover is transformed by a single phone call into a period of acute loneliness and personal change. In making her way – cautiously at first, then with increasing confidence – around a city she finds it difficult to pin down as friend or foe, Laing examines the lives of others who have found themselves alone in the Big Apple, and the visionary, sometimes tormented art that has resulted from this experience. Edward Hopper, Henry Darger, Vivian Maier, Andy Warhol and David Wojnarowicz especially become Laing’s subjects but also her companions as she interrogates the idea of loneliness: how does loneliness differ from being alone, and is loneliness, by default, an inalienable part of the creative condition?

In Flaneuse, Lauren Elkin examines the traditionally male pursuit of city-walking through the prism of the various cities she has lived in and the women who have proven by practice that observing and writing the city is not just for men. New York, Paris, Venice, London are revisited and recharted against the backdrop of a novel-in-progress and a disintegrating relationship – is the third point in this triangle actually Tokyo? – as Elkin struggles to decide which is truly ‘home’. In tracking the footsteps of Sophie Calle, Jean Rhys and Virginia Woolf, Elkin reveals the art of ‘street haunting’ as a universal pursuit, a magnetic force that, for those who love cities, has been a guiding inspiration for women even when they weren’t ‘supposed’ to be there.

There are more and more of us out there, writing the bones.

Autobibliography by Rob Doyle: diary of a vocation

May 18, 2025 /

‘What is it we’re reading for? I mean, why do we keep reading and rereading a particular novelist? When I think about Bolano – and I think about him often – invariably I find my way to the conclusion that what I’m primarily in it for is friendship.’

‘I read The Dispossessed when I still suspected that my anarcho-punk friends might be right about everything. While the novel rammed home the ways in which capitalism mutilates us, life in the anarchist ‘utopia’ of Anarres – hard labour, dust and aggressively policed mediocrity – made me wonder if capitalism wasn’t the best of a bad lot.’

‘Although I sometimes tantalise myself with the idea of moving to London again, I don’t need Heraclitus to remind me that you can’t step into the same river twice. The London where I lived no longer exists, any more than a dream exists upon awakening – a dream in which you were happy, in which life lived up to its promise.’

‘PROBLEMATIC: A judgement generated by the demand that art avoid describing what is and express what ought to be, and that we admire only art that issues from a stainless soul and a clean rap sheet. Everything in the human being that is messy, vital and interesting; everything shadowy, unconscious, offline.’

‘London Fields failed to make the 1989 Booker Prize shortlist, cock-blocked by two feminist judges who disapproved of the depiction of women. Even if you feel they had a point, can we nonetheless agree that in its architectonic splendour, visions of megacity entropy and unrelenting lingual charisma London Fields stands damn near the summit of modern novelistic achievement?’

‘Ballard was such a superb commentator on his own fiction, one wonders whether the fiction was needed at all. Might he not have simply pretended it existed, then given us books of pure ideation?’

*

In 2019, Rob Doyle was commissioned to write a weekly books column for the Irish Times, a ‘year of rereading’ that would be a journey back through the novels that had meant the most to him. There were two rules: books chosen were to have been published no later than the year 2000 and each column would run to a maximum of 340 words. Within three months of the final column being published, the COVID lockdowns began. With previous plans put on hold, Doyle found himself reflecting on the wider implications of his fifty-two book columns. What had his choices said about him, both as reader and writer? And what did such choices mean, precisely now?

It would be wrong to call Autobibliography a diary of the pandemic, though it sort of is, just as it is also a partial memoir of Doyle’s progress to date. What it is mostly though is a declaration of allegiance to the practice of art, an impassioned defence of a particular kind of writing – ‘the kind of novel with as much essay in it as narrative, the kind you can read with a pen in your hand’ – and why such writing matters.

Doyle loves Houellebecq, Cioran, Nietzsche, Dyer, Mailer, Didion (sort of), Carrere, Bolano, Lispector, Sarraute, Markson. His choices are eclectic, but with a certain unity. The commentary on the books themselves – like Doyle’s always brilliant reviews – rise far above the practised, easy argument it is so easy to fall into when you’ve a limited word count. The passages of memoir and reflection woven between offer a commentary upon that commentary, an autobibliography, a portrait of a writer in fifty-two books.

It’s also very funny. If you enjoyed Mike Harrison’s Wish I Was Here then you will probably love this book, too. That I am in sympathy with Doyle on most of what he says here is beside the point. Thank goodness there are writers writing who write like this, writers who understand what the gig’s about, who have the courage and talent to put that knowledge to practice, who are still young.

Books of this year

December 26, 2024 /

My reading through 2024 has been dominated by the demands of the Ballard project, taking in books about JGB as well as re-reads of most of Ballard’s novels. This kind of deeply immersive, intimate engagement with the work of one writer is something I have not experienced in the same way since writing my Masters thesis on Nabokov, getting on for thirty-five years ago now, but it is one that completely fits my mindset and that has, in some sense, reset my thinking and aspirations for where I might want to go as a writer, further down the line.

Other than that, it has been a strange and somewhat erratic year all round. From the first half of 2024 I would have to make particular mention of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story simply for existing and being there for me to read, with Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency and Amy Key’s Arrangements in Blue being in their own way similarly consolatory. Miranda Seymour’s wonderful biography of Jean Rhys, I Used to Live Here Once, and Richard Morton Jack’s superb Nick Drake: the Life were both exactly what I needed to remind me of what I was doing and why I was doing it. Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos was an extraordinary reading experience, one that was personal to me in unexpected ways, and I was thrilled to see Erpenbeck, after several previous nominations, finally win the International Booker Prize.

Moving through into the second half of 2024, Laura Cumming’s On Chapel Sands and its follow up, Thunderclap were both equally magnificent, revealing Cumming in my eyes as one of the most accomplished writers working in Britain today. Janet Frame’s posthumously published short novel Towards Another Summer is a quiet, devastating miracle, and I could use exactly the same words of Rachel Cusk’s Parade, though the two books could not be more different. I was delighted to finally catch up with Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea, which is a very good book indeed, and also – from somewhat further back – with Barry N. Malzberg’s Galaxies, which follows Ballard’s prime example in revealing science fiction as a radical, knotty form that is capable of just about anything. Indeed, one of the side-effects of the Ballard project has been a re-engagement with the ideals of the British New Wave and the literary possibilities of a mode of literature that – no matter how it is used, abused, sidelined and devalued – remains as powerful and significant as any given writer chooses to make it.

Will 2025 be the year I finally read Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow? Regular readers of this blog will know that I enjoy setting myself reading challenges, but I’m going to hold off on doing that, just for the moment. I would like to leave the reading horizon open and uncluttered, a space to inhabit as feels useful, inspiring and necessary, a year of new discoveries.

Yuletide…

December 21, 2024 /

… and what better time to finally catch up with a classic of weird fiction that I have read a lot about but never read?

Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow is one of those books. Written in 1895, this collection of stories has inspired and influenced writers all the way from HP Lovecraft to Nic Pizzolatto (and can you believe it has already been ten years since the first showing of True Detective??)

‘The King in Yellow’ is the title of a text-within-the-text, a play that brings insanity on anyone who reads it. I find it remarkable and rather wonderful, that the ‘cursed text’ trope is a hundred years old and more. So much of the power of the weird lies in its timelessness, the enduring appeal of its ideas and imagery. In the first story, ‘The Repairer of Reputations’, Hidred Castaigne is obsessed with the forbidden play, which he has read while convalescing from a head injury sustained in a horse-riding accident. Whether his madness stems from this accident or from reading ‘The King in Yellow’ is for the reader to decide. The glorious uncanniness of the story hinges on the fact that as readers we are drawn into Hildred’s delusion – that he is heir to a vanished kingdom – that we experience both shock and horror as his plan to assassinate his cousin in pursuit of his destiny comes closer to being enacted.

That the story is also science fiction – it is set twenty years in the future – adds another level of weirdness. The ‘future’ Chambers imagines is dark and sinister. There are suicide booths on street corners, a palpable sense of unease even in the most ordinary actions and interactions. All colours seem heightened, somehow. What I loved most about this story is how modern it feels.

Only the first four stories in the volume are explicitly bound by the ‘King in Yellow’ mythos. The remaining tales have often been dismissed or excluded from newer editions for not being weird enough, but I think this is a mistake. They are weird – very. There is a time-slip romance – a young man loses his way and ends up betrothed to a falconer in mediaeval France (very reminiscent of Le Grand Meaulnes) – and a brutal war story set during the Siege of Paris, which took place just twenty-five years before The King in Yellow was written. The chaos of war is written as a kind of haunting:

The fog was peopled with phantoms. All around him in the mist they moved, drifting through the arches in lengthening lines, then vanished, while from the fog others rose up, swept past and were engulfed. He was not alone, for even at his side they crowded, touched him, swarmed before him, beside him, behind him, pressed him back, seized and bore him with them through the mist.

Even in those stories where ‘lost Carcosa’ is not explicitly named, there is a sense that the realm of the lost king is there, waiting to reassemble itself, that the world we inhabit is the delusion, a temporary structure that might be swept away at any moment:

From somewhere in the city came sounds like the distant beating of drums, and beyond, far beyond, a vague muttering, now growing, swelling, rumbling in the distance like the pounding of surf upon the rocks, now like the surf again, receding, growling, menacing. The cold had become intense, a bitter piercing cold which strained and snapped at joist and beam and turned the slush of yesterday to flint.

That the overt weirdness of the stories recedes, reined back in the later tales to a suggestion, a supressed memory almost, makes the collection as a whole still more memorable and mysterious.

So much is left unsaid and unexplained. As if the writing of the book was interrupted, or prevented. It is unsurprising to me, that so many writers since have fallen in love with its atmosphere and – I use the term in its truest sense – obscurity. That they have felt bound to explore the yellow kingdom for themselves.

I may well become one of them…

Some books

March 17, 2024 /

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.

I am working. I am doing OK.

Just sayin’

August 10, 2023 /

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.

Faith in the Future

May 11, 2023 /

My new novel, Conquest, is published today.

Jonathan Thornton’s insightful and generous review at Fantasy Hive offers an eloquent analysis of its structure and intentions, while Steve Andrews brings his particular knowledge and engagement to our ‘interview-review‘ at Outlaw Bookseller. As always, I hope that readers both familiar with my work and entirely new to it will enjoy discovering their own reactions and responses to a book that was a long time in the making and is to an extent a personal commentary upon the last few years.

Conquest is a novel about truth and post-truth, the familiar made strange, communal crisis and personal epiphany. But on the day that sees the book pass from my hands into the hands of readers, I would like to reflect upon the theme that perhaps most of all provided its guiding inspiration. In one section of the novel, my private investigator Robin remembers how at the age of twelve she fell ill with pneumonia and as a result was absent from school and from her normal life for more than six weeks. Feeling weakened from the disease and with no one to talk to, she listens to Radio 3 for hours on end. This is where, for the first time, she hears the Goldberg Variations, and falls in love with the music of J. S. Bach.

The same thing happened to me, more or less, and I count those six weeks spent listening to music as some of the most formative in my cultural life, a period in which I was able to experience works that might not otherwise have crossed my path until much later. Where I was able to think, in privacy and without interruption, about what music meant, not only in terms of my own emotional reaction to it but in the abstract.

Unlike Robin, this was not when I first heard the Goldberg Variations. I came to know Bach through others of his compositions: through listening endlessly to the violin concertos and playing the flute sonatas, through singing in the B minor mass, a valuable and joyous apprenticeship that meant when I finally did come to know the Goldbergs, in my middle twenties, it felt like coming home.  

One of the fringe benefits of my many years spent working in a music shop was the opportunity for listening. I was responsible for our whole stock of classical recordings, which meant I could buy in and test drive anything I wanted to. The effect was similar to being let loose in an enormous playground. One of the lessons I learned from all that listening was that recordings I initially considered my favourites could and often did cede their position to other performances, sometimes in the same day. That the point of studying different recordings is not simply to establish a hierarchy, fun though that can be, but to come to a deeper understanding of a piece of music through its various interpretations.

You would be surprised at the number of times you rub shoulders with Bach – through advertising, through film or game soundtracks, even through lift music – during the course of a single week. Without our consciously realising it, Bach reveals himself to us through an accumulation of encounters over many years, sure proof of his continuing ability to speak directly to millions of people across every conceivable divide of age or culture or background. Bach’s work deepens our relationship with the past, even as it informs our present. Through an intricate interweaving of sound and meaning that seems hardwired into all of us, Bach gives us faith in the future.

I have tried to convey something of Bach’s timeless and magical appeal in my writing of Conquest. I have not felt ready to write at length about music before now, precisely because the subject means so much to me, and also because it is difficult, for any writer, to add anything to what is already present in the music itself. In setting out to explore Robin’s world, and most especially Frank’s, I have found myself constantly in mental dialogue with those writers who have struggled with similar questions, and in so doing provided inspiration of their own. I hope I have added something to the conversation. I hope most of all that anyone reading Conquest who has for whatever reason persuaded themselves that Bach is not for them will throw aside their preconceptions and listen again.

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