I have frequently been surprised, these past couple of weeks, by the way in which even seasoned literary commentators still slip into the habit of referring to Alan Garner as a children’s writer. I am sure I’ve said this somewhere before, but I continue to think of my first encounter with Garner’s work – The Owl Service, which I first read when I was around twelve – as among my most significant primary encounters with adult themes in literature. I found the book utterly compelling – but if you had asked me then what it was about I would have found it hard to answer. There was simply a feeling I had, a palpable sense of having touched something mysterious, timeless and possibly dangerous. I experienced the same feeling, albeit with a greater understanding of what was going on, both in me and in the book, when I belatedly caught up with Red Shift, some years ago.
As regards the Booker commentators, what on Earth is wrong with saying that Alan Garner is a writer who often centres young protagonists?
Which is exactly what he does in his 2021 novel, Treacle Walker, recently shortlisted for the Booker Prize, a fact that has made me feel more personally excited about the award than I have done since Anna Burns won it for Milkman back in 2018. The Booker has become generally much more innovative, inclusive and interesting in recent years, and I follow the annual discussion surrounding it with great enjoyment. Garner’s shortlisting though speaks to me personally. It counts, for me personally,. This is simply a feeling I have.
Treacle Walker tells the story of a boy, Joseph Coppock. Joe has recently been ill, and seems to spend a lot of time alone. Are his parents at work? Who looks after the house? We are never told. We live, for the duration of this short novel, entirely inside the world and mind of Joe as he encounters a mysterious rag-and-bone man, Treacle Walker, and falls into a daunting adventure that will alter his universe.
Treacle Walker speaks to Joe in riddles, an affectation he clearly finds simultaneously annoying and compelling. He is eager to learn the secrets the old man wants to impart to him, at the same time impatient, as any boy might be, to set his own stamp on the world, to interpret its signs and wonders in his own language. Most of the dialogue in Treacle Walker is conducted in the dialect of Garner’s native Cheshire, and one senses keenly Garner’s desire not to confuse or obfuscate but to set down, to save this unique language from annihilation in the twenty-first-century rush to refute the past. There is also a fierce feeling of privacy being accorded, the boy and the man who were always meant to come together sharing knowledge neither could fully fathom, until now.
It is notable that in the moments of highest tension and drama, the two cease with their mutual ragging and speak in terse, plain English. In these exchanges, it is almost as if the two are of a similar age and level of understanding.
As with all of Garner’s work, the action takes place against a vividly described, living landscape. One might almost say that Garner’s writing becomes the landscape, revealing it in all its aspects: peace, seclusion, discomfort, joy, alienation and terror:
But night was in the room, a sheet of darkness, flapping from wall to wall. It changed shape, swirling, flowing. It dropped to the ground and ruckled over the floor bricks; then up to the joints and beams of the ceiling; hung, fell, humped. It shrieked, reared against the chimney opening, but did not enter. It surged through the house by cracks and gaps in the timbers, out under the eaves. There was a whispering, silence, and on the floor the snow melted to tears.
This passage speaks to me particularly, both in its heady choice of words and in the symbols they carry. There have already been suggested many possible and plausible explanations of Treacle Walker’s meaning. For me, it is a book about the rising tide of chaos that accompanies change, the corresponding forces of growth and new imaginings that bring about progress. People have spoken of this novel as Garner’s last hurrah, a gathering together of his familiar themes, a farewell coda. It may be all of these things. Yet it is equally a work of bold experiment and dynamism, a book that makes use of ancient fable to speak to us in our own time with uncanny acuity.
Treacle Walker is tired, and Joe is ready and waiting to claim his future. As the two change places, or become one another, they mirror the unquiet yet seamless passing of one season to another.
As I have mentioned here before, one of my biggest downtime pleasures is watching Booktube videos. Sharing in the expression of love and knowledgeable enthusiasm for books is a joy in itself, and I have particularly come to enjoy the way the cyclical recurrence of certain tags and list videos have come to take the form of a literary calendar, mapping out the bookish year with reactions to book prize longlists, anticipated releases and what progress – if any – has been made in the meeting of reading goals.
Let me say from the outset that my own reading goals have been shot to shit. There is a genuine reason for this – the house move – but I still feel disappointed that my Cloak and Dagger reading challenge, so carefully curated, is now so far off schedule that there is little hope of my catching up, especially as I have taken on a couple of extra non-fiction side-projects in the meantime.
Rather than despair over this – because come on – and because I like the challenge so much I have decided to defer it to 2023, when I will begin the whole thing again from scratch. So far as this year is concerned, I intend to read whatever the hell takes my fancy. Given that I have so much research reading to do on top of my other commitments, I know I will have to keep my expectations in check. But it does lift my heart to think that we are only halfway through the year, and that there are more books yet to be read that I don’t yet know about.
In anticipation of that, I thought I would post my own responses to the mid-year book freakout tag, because I have been freaking out, just a bit, and because it’s an interesting way of taking the literary temperature of my year to date.
BEST BOOK YOU’VE READ SO FAR IN 2022 would have to be Optic Nerve, by Maria Gainza. This book was exactly what I needed to read at the particular moment I read it, and I will be following Gainza’s literary journey from here on in.
BEST SEQUEL YOU’VE READ SO FAR IN 2022. I’ll have to cheat a little with this one, as I don’t think the author would necessarily want to see this book described as a sequel, but if we can include in that category books with characters we first met in an earlier novel then it’s definitely Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel. Those who read and adored The Glass Hotel, as I did, will enjoy hunting down those Easter eggs. But there’s no need for you to have read Mandel’s previous novel to enjoy this one, which is searching, original, moving and gorgeously achieved. I loved it from the first page.
NEW RELEASE YOU HAVEN’T READ YET, BUT WANT TO. Oh my goodness, there are so many – some languishing here on my desk. For the sake of keeping this short, I shall confine myself to two. John Darnielle’s Devil House is a must for me, firstly because I have loved his previous two books and secondly because I am excited to see what he’s done with a fake-true-crime narrative. And then I have been hearing very good things about Hernan Diaz’s Trust. I have read the preview and found it irresistible, and the metafictional ‘found document’ format is very much my bag.
MOST ANTICIPATED RELEASE FOR THE SECOND HALF OF THE YEAR. Once again, I shall confine myself to two. The first is Babysitter, by Joyce Carol Oates. I’m a huge Oates fan in any case, and here she is with an imaginative retelling of a true crime story. Cannot miss it. And secondly there’s The Furrows, from Namwali Serpell. Her Clarke-winning debut The Old Drift is a book I still think about a lot, both for its astounding writing and its treatment of time. The Furrows sounds every bit as intriguing.
BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT. I have been lucky this year in that the books I have actively sought out have been sustaining and each in their own way worthwhile. My experience with review assignments has been more mixed. Shall I just say that I think I am burned out on what I shall loosely term the ‘soft dystopia’? It is fascinating, how many books in this genre are debuts. There are conclusions to be drawn there, no doubt.
BIGGEST SURPRISE. The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie. I very much enjoyed Sarah Phelps’s BBC adaptation and what with Laura Thompson’s lovely biography Agatha Christie: An English Mystery acting as my sanity blanket through the book-packing process, I thought I would try out the novel, a late work by Christie and one I had never even heard of before seeing the TV series. I was surprised and delighted by how solidly crafted it is, how modern it feels. In terms of her sentence-level achievement, Christie often gets a bad press, one I found myself feeling – as I have on previous occasions – is undeserved.
FAVOURITE NEW AUTHOR – DEBUT OR NEW TO YOU. Once again, that would have to be Maria Gainza.
BOOK THAT MADE YOU CRY. To Paradise, by Hanya Yanagihara. Given the discomfiting and unstable nature of the year to date, it already seems like ages since I read this, but I thought it was magnificent – a powerful and fearless examination of the problems we face as a society and as individuals, written by an author one-hundred percent in control of her material. I would definitely read it again. Ysnagihara has quickly become the kind of author that makes you insatiably curious about where she will go next.
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BOOK YOU’VE BOUGHT SO FAR THIS YEAR would also count as the most expensive! I am not going to name it, because it is the key primary source text for my novel-in-progress, but I will say that it dates from the 1950s, and is signed and dated by the author. Its beauty is tied up in its provenance, and the way it brings the events it described so vividly to life.
WHAT BOOKS DO YOU NEED TO READ BY THE END OF THE YEAR? Many, many books. For reasons similar to those that prompted my Golding binge last year, I will be re-immersing myself in J.G. Ballard’s three key disaster novels. Off at only a slight tangent, I am lucky enough to have in my possession an ARC of Martin MacInnes’s new novel In Ascension, which I absolutely intend to get to before the year is out. One of my most anticipated reads of last year was Speak, Silence, Carole Angier’s investigative biography of W. G. Sebald. I actually began reading this the week before we moved out of our previous house and was instantly smitten. I had the book with me all the time we were in temporary accommodation, but was too tired and preoccupied to give it the full attention it so obviously deserves. I expect to be back in Sebald’s world before the end of summer.
When earlier in the week I read Johanna Thomas-Corr’s excellent review in the Guardian of Maria Gainza’s new novel Portrait of an Unknown Lady, I was reminded that I never had caught up with Gainza’s first novel Optic Nerve, published in its original Spanish in 2014 and then latterly in an English translation by Thomas Bunstead in 2019. I remember reading reviews of it, noting it down in my ever-expanding ‘of interest’ file. I even remember, quite clearly, holding a copy of the book in my hand. I was in a big Waterstones somewhere – either Chris or I, I cannot recall now which of us it was, had been asked to come in and sign some books. I remember trying to decide between Optic Nerve and Laura Cuming’s elegantly articulated memoir On Chapel Sands, both books, coincidentally, with a central focus on art.
In the end I chose the Cuming, promising myself I would acquire the Gainza at a later date. But I never did. That morning, its details blurry, feels far away, on the other side of an unspeakable divide, with those books two of the sparsely connecting threads between then and now. Reading Thomas-Corr’s admiring retrospective words about Optic Nerve, I experienced a sudden and intense hunger for it, for that book precisely, no other would do. Not even wanting to wait the time it would take to arrive in physical form, I downloaded it in e-format and started to read it more or less immediately.
Novels by nearest and dearest aside, Maria Gainza’s Optic Nerve – or so it feels to me in this moment – is the most beautiful book I have ever read. ‘It was clear that Gainza, like British authors Rachel Cusk and Claire-Louise Bennett, was opening up new possibilities for the novel as a place of freedom,’ Thomas-Corr writes in her review, ‘where you could blend fiction, memoir, art history and anecdote. She immediately felt like a thrilling discovery.’ I agree with this totally. I agree also with her additional claim that Gainza’s fiction actually ‘has more in common with Roberto Bolaño’s, with its themes of art and infamy, craft and theft.’ There is, as Thomas-Corr maintains, a Bolano-esque depth of field to her ‘stories within stories, each with its own melancholy mood and unsolvable mystery.’
And there is something more, something still greater, a quality of emotional admission, of inclusivity and of risk-taking, of personal involvement – of vulnerability even – that reminds me of the stories and writing of Mariana Enriquez, a passion that dares to reveal, to expose the self in a way that others have not, and that includes myself.
I can say only that I am thinking on this, wondering and struggling with how to address it. I am getting to know the paintings Gainza writes about in Optic Nerve, studying them in detail, reliving the moments of their discovery through the filter of Gainza’s tapestried language, of a knowledge profoundly felt and acutely described.
I am saving Maria Gainza’s new book for the moment, as something to look forward to. To cherish and to rejoice in. We need voices like these, above all, voices that remind us of all that life and art can be and what it is for.
A book such as Julian’s was far more palatable. It always surprised him, how people lapped it up, extremity, how eager they were to consume what lay far outside the compass of their own experience, their relish for it if anything increased by the absence of the very thing, he, Louis, was abjured for removing – the screen of fiction. People believed that Julian didn’t need to make things up because the extremity of his experiences was such that it released him from that obligation.
Working on my current manuscript, I have been thinking a great deal about the weight we attach to ‘true’ narratives, and how objective truth might be said to differ from experiential truth.
If I say: ‘This happened to me’, is that enough to prove that it really did?
Since 2016, our experience of the world has become fragmentary and unstable, no longer measured in years, but in seasons, weeks and days. As a writer I feel I have become less capable and less desirous of constructing grand illusions. I have instead become obsessed with small details, with exploring the imaginative potential in day-by-day, sometimes minute-by-minute experience, with tracking the potential answers to the question: what really happened? My growing interest in true-crime narratives is both a response to and a driver of this. And precisely because much of the drama of such narratives lies in the mundane.
‘I don’t really believe in character,’ says Rachel Cusk in a recent podcast conversation with Sheila Heti, ‘I believe in moments of truth.’ In the second instalment of her Outline trilogy, Cusk demonstrates how the quotidian, when fully inhabited, can spiral outwards into a poetic hyperrealism, into the fire of language. How daily reality is never banal, but rather the greyish-brown outer crust of the entire luminosity of existence. The dinner party that forms the climax of the novel is, in its own subversive way, as revelatory and as disturbing as the family get-together that forms the subject of Thomas Vinterberg’s seminal 1998 movie Festen. Reading this book, in which ostensibly dull things happen in such a way as to make them seem life-defining, is to see reality, elusive as the leopard, changing its spots before our eyes.
Cusk’s writing truly is superlative. She has not only raised the bar for British literary fiction, she has opened up a new arena for the discussion and contemplation of what fiction is, and how it works.
*
Meanwhile and elsewhere, this marvellous essay by Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky articulates brilliantly the shock, terror and heartbreak of these anxious days.
I
feel I’ve been lucky with Hanya Yanagihara, in that I happen to have read her
in the right order. When I first started to hear about her debut novel The
People in the Trees, it was a book few people seemed to have come across, let
alone read. I went into it with no preconceptions – and came away mesmerised. I
would still count that novel – a hard-hitting, tightly-wrought, highly
individual and sometimes contentious piece of speculative eco-fiction – as a
steel-bright masterpiece, the kind of confident, original writing not often
encountered in a debut and that leaves you both eager and impatient to see
where the author will go next.
Where
Yanagihara went next, of course, was A Little Life, that steaming juggernaut of
a novel that for bizarre reasons of its own became that year’s literary
sensation and is still one of the most divisive books of the decade. I
rollocked through A Little Life; I found the story unputdownable, even though I
never entirely saw the point of it, how it made sense as a follow-up to The
People in the Trees. And I worried about Yanagihara as a writer. When a book is
that successful, it can have a detrimental effect on a career, bending it so
badly out of shape, leaving so little privacy or room for future experiment,
that it is sometimes impossible for the writer to fully recover.
There was a part of me that wondered if we would hear from her again, and so when I learned, sometime last year, that her third novel was imminent I felt both delighted – she was back after all! – and intrigued. What were we going to get this time, and how were the Fanyagiharas going to react to it? I knew going in that the book was speculative, which excited me; I knew also that To Paradise was bound to be one of the literary ‘big beasts’ of 2022, which excited me in spite of myself. As another 800-pager, would it be worth my reading time, and how could it possibly live up to the hype that was already erupting?
The
answer is yes, and yes. Just hours after finishing To Paradise, I find myself
in mourning for it, a book that gave me for the first time in a long time that
kind of reading experience one remembers from childhood: the sense of living
inside a world, of being on a journey with characters who will continue to
journey with you for the rest of your life. More than that, though, one could
argue that To Paradise is not so much book of the year as book of this year, that it belongs precisely and
inimitably to now, that it is an important piece of political fiction that will
remain as a guiding landmark in the literary landscape.
I
loved this book, which thrilled me and made me feel vindicated and left me
fearful for our future. It also helped me to understand where A Little Life
fits into the scheme of things, Yanagihara-wise, how her literary project
appears to be unfolding. In terms of her craft, where Yanagihara excels most is
in her storytelling, a fluidly compelling, deceptively easy style that keeps
her thousands of readers turning pages even when the narrative brings up
difficult subject matter and draws ambiguous conclusions. Such was the mass
appeal of A Little Life; To Paradise is equally readable but I would say
meatier and more challenging, even as it demonstrates how Yanagihara’s works are
not just great stories, they are about story.
*
There
are plenty of synopses of To Paradise available online, so I will refrain from rehashing
the plot here, except to say that the novel is divided into three ‘Books’, the
first set in 1893, the second in 1993, and the third Book, which occupies half
the novel’s page count, is a split narrative, alternating between the book’s
end-point in 2093 and decreasing intervals from fifty years before that. Much
has been made of Yanagihara’s use of names in To Paradise, with some readers
enjoying the repeated appearances of the same set of names throughout the three
parts of the book, with others finding the device confusing, pointless,
pretentious or all three.
Names
have always held immense significance for me in my own fiction, and as a writer
who has previously made use of devices not dissimilar to Yanagihara’s, I find
her latticework of repeating names affecting, powerful and structurally
significant, an anchoring weight that helps to give the sprawling, multiple
timelines shape and direction, and offers the reader a guiding light on their
way through the story.
As
a fuller and more detailed explanation of what Yanagihara is doing, I find a
musical analogy works best: think of To Paradise as a symphony, and the
repeating names and situations as musical subjects and leitmotifs, and her purpose
becomes instantly clear. The first movement, 1893, is an exercise in classic sonata
form, a propulsive allegro, strongly melodic and in a minor key. With its
clearly articulated conflicts, reversals and sense of jeopardy it appeals instantly
to our emotions. In this section we meet our three dominant melodic subjects, ‘David
Bingham’, ‘Charles Griffith’, and ‘Edward Bishop’, alongside their secondary
subjects and recurring leitmotifs, ‘Peter’, ‘Eden’, ‘Adams’, ‘Nathaniel’ and
others. We learn how David is an outsider, prone to mental illness and a sense
of alienation, how he is guided towards an anchoring stability in the form of
Charles, how his own passionate desires propel him towards uncertainty and possible
disaster in the form of Edward. As a background continuo we have a pandemic,
and the theme of the house, of Washington Square, an enveloping, grounding
presence that is also a cage.
The central movement’s twin elegies are stories of farewell, the first a ballet in which David vacillates between safe, rich Charles and his penniless but beautiful servant, the second is a lament, a letter written by the ghost of David’s troubled father. The extended final movement has alternating first and second subjects that gradually become interleaved in a mighty fugue. In this complex finale, we encounter leitmotifs familiar from the previous movements. As in a symphony, this accumulation of themes, our sense of recognition as we re-encounter them works to intensify our experience, reminding us of what has gone before and why it matters to us, which themes and persons are of greatest significance to the composer. The effect is magnificent, unified, cathartic.
Reading
To Paradise bears comparison with listening to Wagner, in that anything
approaching true understanding can only be encompassed by making the whole journey,
by seeing the thing through to its end, and that is part of its joy. Before
starting out, I had seen Book One described as Jamesian – its title, Washington
Square, is a pretty major clue – and so while I found Yanagihara’s storytelling
as addictive as ever, I could not avoid a feeling of disappointment either. Although
I could see where readers were coming from in their comparisons with Henry James
and Edith Wharton, the prose felt too smooth, too directed, too easily
consumable, more James-pastiche than true Master, too much like a fairy tale. As
with A Little Life, I was struggling to see the point. It is not until some
hundreds of pages later, and the feather-light recapitulation in Book Three,
that it becomes obvious that this atmosphere of fairy tale is no accident, that
this has been Yanagihara’s secret intention all along.
In
Yanagihara’s 2093, the US has become a kind of simulacrum of North Korea: while
elements of community, friendship, humanity and even pleasure remain, life as
we know it has become heavily circumscribed. The idea of individual choice has
become eroded, opportunities for self-expression are negligible to nil. In such
an atmosphere of oppression, the role of the Storytellers – in a world where
books are forbidden, those who used to be writers are allowed a limited outlet
through the oral tradition – becomes doubly important, the idea of story itself
as an agent for change takes on a new intensity,
That
some commentators have complained that the ‘letters’ within the text do not
read like real letters, that the repetition of names and situations is an
artificial construct seems like a red herring to me, an ignoring of the fact that
all novels and stories are constructs, and that the idea of literary verisimilitude
is a construct also. Yanagihara is not trying to write like Henry James – to write
like James is not simply a matter of aping a style, but of feeling the weight
of opinion and tacit knowledge and the relationship to history that comes with
having lived through James’s time. For us, now, ‘writing like James’ can never
be anything more than an act of ventriloquism. What Yanagihara does in Book One
is to tell a story; Yanagihara’s
Washington Square is not a serious attempt to replicate James’s approach, but a
nod towards a form. Wika’s letter in Book Two cannot exist, because Wika is
dead, but within the house of cards that all novels are, how can that matter?
As with the Storytellers in Washington Square Park in Book Three, we should not
expect ‘facts’ from Yanagihara, so much as emotional truth.
*
What
makes To Paradise important as political fiction is that in this time of huge
uncertainties, Yanagihara is brave enough and independent-minded enough to take
on massive questions without feeling the need to provide easy or comfortable
answers. Whether within the context of an oppressive class structure, the toxic
legacy of colonialism or the dangerous malleability of scientific fact, what
Yanagihara is most concerned with is our propensity to ignore an empirical
truth in favour of jumping on a community bandwagon, our preference for
judgement as opposed to analysis, our championing of a strident black-and-white
argument over the more muted shades of grey in which reality manifests.
Book
Three of To Paradise contains some of the most pointedly urgent and questioning
analysis of our current reality that has so far appeared, a depiction of a
world teetering on the brink of multiple catastrophes, spurred on by ill luck,
bad judgement and conflicting interests. There are doubtless many more novels
still in progress that attempt to deal with the questions arising from the COVID-19
pandemic, to depict its corrosive material and intellectual effects on the
world we inhabit, but I am going to stick my neck out and say that To Paradise
will hold its ground, that it will come to be seen as an era-defining novel,
not because it is realistic in the way a nineteenth-century novel is deemed to
be realistic – it is not trying to be – but because of the risks it takes,
because the questions it dares to ask will still seem relevant.
As with all great novels, To Paradise is important because of the way in which it uses the particular to illuminate the universal, the times to reveal the timeless; in her endlessly circling reiterations, her multiplicity of time frames, Yanagihara shows how much of the terror and frustration of history is enshrined in the fact that it is all but impossible for one generation to learn from another, how in order to progress, each needs to experience for themselves how the world is, all too often with disastrous results. Seeing the timelines converge in Book Three, watching as the characters move from living a life we ourselves would recognise towards a darker state of being entirely, I felt an aching sadness, all of the time, and that feeling of living through a before-times, as we are ourselves.
2021 is a difficult year to describe. 2020 felt fraught, urgent, dangerous and tense. 2021 has felt more nebulous, more fractured, characterised by uncertainty and an increasing sense of restlessness. In terms of personal achievement, I delivered a new manuscript, a book that for me feels very much like the product of 2020, seamed and studded with all the furious contradictions that year brought but referenced obliquely rather than colliding with them head-on. It’s a novel I’m hugely proud of, and one I look forward to sharing with you in 2023.
In the months since completing that book, I have begun inching my way towards the next work, a transition that has felt more complex and troublesome even than usual. The times we are living through throw up searching questions; as a writer, it does not seem altogether surprising if those questions end up being framed around the process of writing, not just the how but the what and the why. There is never any doubt in my mind that writing – art – has value, that whatever trauma is being addressed, the practice of reflection and analysis, of creative re-imagining inherent to all art is intrinsic to the experience of being human.
Such knowledge should not prevent us from being robust in our seeking out of our own best practice. I count myself fortunate in that this period of not-knowing – familiar in its outline, yet different in its particular details every time – has always felt energising to me. I never quite know how I will come out of it, or what will result. If I can feel certain of anything, through this time as all times, it is the joy I find in the power and the talent of other writers. Discovering new works, new directions, new attitudes, visions and modes of expression – the excitement and the gratitude never lessens.
By this same time last year, the document on my hard drive entitled ‘Books 2021’ was already filling up with upcoming works of fiction and non-fiction I was eager to read. Many of them were books whose publication dates had been postponed, pushed over from 2020 into 2021 in the hope that by the time they were released, in-person events and book festivals would be happening again. This turned out not to be the case, and on the far side of 2021, I cannot help noticing that the number of books on my ‘Books 2022’ list is considerably smaller. There is a sense of uncertainty affecting all of us: what shall we be reading, what shall we be writing? There is an eerie sort of silence.
Here also, there is opportunity. Not knowing – feeling less sure of what I’m going to be reading leaves more space for new discoveries. It also leaves space for me to go back and read more of the books I did not manage to get to in 2021. A year of regrouping, maybe. A year of finding out what is important.
I enjoy reading challenges because they give my reading a focus. This can be especially valuable if the challenge is related in some way to a problem or question that has a bearing on my work in progress. I also enjoy reading challenges because they provide me with a framework for talking to readers. With all of this in mind, I have created my own crime reading challenge for 2022. As regular readers of this blog will know by now, I am always on the lookout for original, challenging and imaginative approaches to genre archetypes, with the mystery archetype foremost among them. For pure reading pleasure, there’s nothing to beat a mystery. There is also no stronger template for withstanding the often punitive process of literary experiment.
I have created thirty prompts, some of them leaning heavily towards my particular interests, others designed to take me into less familiar territory. Thirty seems like a good number – big enough to make the challenge interesting, not so huge that it becomes burdensome, squeezing out all other reading. The individual challenges can be completed in any order, and can be based around any aspect of crime writing: fiction, true crime, journalism, history or memoir can be considered and included for any of the prompts. I am hoping to have completed and blogged all thirty by the end of the year. Here are the prompts. Let’s see how we get on:
Published in 2022
By a debut author
Translated from the French
Translated from the German
Translated from the Italian
Translated from the Spanish
Translated from the Japanese
Set in South America
Nordic
Set in Australia
By an author based on the African continent
By an African-American author
Historical mystery
Experimental published since 2000
Experimental published before 1980
Published by an independent press
Classic noir
Neo noir
Golden Age
Nineteenth Century
Published before World War 2
By a Scottish author
Legal thriller
Financial or military
With a speculative element
Award-winning
Has been adapted for the screen
Woman detective
Based on real events
Any crime but murder
I have some ideas already for how I might fill some of the categories, books I have been wanting to read for a while and now have the perfect incentive to tackle. Others I have not yet started to think about. Mainly I am hoping to be surprised. Surprised and inspired. Here’s hoping we can all find something of the same in 2022.
A tad late for Hallowe’en, but if you’re looking for a new ghost story to read I can thoroughly recommend Alison Moore’s new novel The Retreat. Moore is an extraordinarily good writer. Each of her five novels to date has been in its own way perfect: not a dud sentence in sight and with the slowly brewing tension deliberately understated. Moore sees no need for shocks or histrionics or forced affect in her work – her deft, spare handling of language, her facility for creating weird situations, above all her intense yet utterly realistic evocation of character are more than sufficient for creating a unique body of work for which ‘unhallowed’ might turn out to be the defining adjective.
Her latest concerns an artists’ retreat, a rather uncomfortable house on a somewhat inaccessible island. Once you’re there it’s difficult to leave without making a scene, without deliberately setting yourself in opposition to your fellows, which is the last thing you want to be seen doing when you’re supposed to be forging a mutually supportive atmosphere of communal creativity. Sandra, a rather disappointed painter, finds her experience of the island falling far short of her expectations. Carol, a novelist in search of sanctuary, finds the ghosts becoming actively beneficial to her work in progress. Who gets out alive? Moore will keep you guessing until the very last page. I loved this book, which is effective and disturbing to a far more potent degree than any number of more deliberate or dramatic haunted house stories. The only problem with being a Moore fan is that the moment you’ve finished reading one of her novels you’re already looking forward to the next – and Moore, to her credit, is a writer who is prepared to give her books all the time they need to come into being.
Another November miracle comes in the form of Sarah Hall’s new novel Burntcoat. Like The Retreat, Burntcoat is sparse, economical and intense, carrying more emotional weight and resonance than you might expect to find in novels twice its length. Here we follow Edith, a sculptor who has found fame but at an immense cost, whose narrative is conducted during what we understand to be the final weeks of her foreshortened life. Edith’s background is traumatic – her mother Naomi, a writer, experiences a dramatic personality change following a brain haemorrhage when Edith is young. Yet still she drags herself back to life, relearning not only her passion to make art, but also her ability to adequately love and care for her daughter. It is Edith’s relationship with Naomi, as much as her all-consuming love affair with a refugee chef named Halit, which forms the armature of this novel, which in essence is a book about how love transforms us, and what real love means.
Burntcoat takes place against the background of a pandemic. The world is swept by a disease still more deadly than COVID, and with still more destructive implications both for individuals and for society. This is a harrowing firestorm of a book, and as a commentary on what we are currently experiencing, what it costs us to live through such a crisis, I cannot imagine many better ones coming along. As someone who has read most everything Hall has written, I would count Burntcoat as her crowning achievement to date.
Again, I can scarcely wait to see what she has planned for us next. Reading writers this good is always something of a game-changer, an electrical shock to the head, a reminder that the work of art is always worth the effort.
I had been hoping to read You Let Me In in time to include it in the series of posts on fairy literature and mythology I wrote to coincide with the publication of The Good Neighbours back in June. As often happens with my reading, the stars of time and ambition were not in alignment. However, now that I have read the novel I can see how beautifully it would have slotted into my list of favourite fairy fictions – and how oddly out of place it feels on this year’s list of Clarke Award submissions.
A year after their Aunt Cassandra goes missing, Janus and Penelope receive a curious letter, summoning them to an empty house and with instructions to read a manuscript they will find on the desk there. This manuscript is novelist Cassandra Tipp’s last will and testament – and the book you are holding. Cassandra’s life has not been easy. Previously put on trial for her husband’s murder, her role in the death of her doctor, not to mention several other close family members has also been the subject of gossip and speculation. Her late-blooming success as a romantic suspense novelist leaves us in no doubt of her way with words. But is her confession all it seems, or just another fairy tale? Janus and Penelope have a decision to make, and it looks like their involvement in their family’s strange history is far from over.
You Let Me In performs the extraordinary feat of being two novels slipped inside a single skin. On the surface, Bruce’s novel is a dark fairy tale, the story of a house in the woods besieged by the fair folk and the overflow of faery mythology into the mundane world. Beneath the shadow of the trees, however, lurks a tale of a different kind, a deeply troubling account of child abuse and family secrets, truths suppressed for so many years they have become unspeakable.
As with all the best fairy stories, Bruce leaves the matter open. Her writing is like the book itself – a wealth of lovely images and fine landscape writing that hides its thorns and snares beneath a wreath of flowers. To call this book delightful would be to do it a disservice – it’s far too weird for that. I can see why the publisher wanted to submit You Let Me In for the Clarke Award, because this is a novel that certainly deserves wider attention than it has attracted so far. But science fiction it is not, so I can equally understand why the jury did not select it for the shortlist. You Let Me In is exactly the kind of novel you might expect to do well at the Shirley Jackson Awards, and had I been on the jury, I could well have been agitating to swap out one of the other titles and place You Let Me In on that shortlist instead.
In any case, I am now eagerly awaiting Bruce’s second novel, the intriguingly titled Triflers Need Not Apply, based around the story of a nineteenth-century Norwegian-American serial killer I’d never heard of previously. Bruce has already shown herself to be a bold and original writer, and I’m sure this new book will leave readers equally haunted.
*
In other news, a reminder that my new story collection The Art of Space Travel is now out in the world! I have been immensely gratified by the response it has received so far. As an overview of my work in short fiction to date, this book is special to me and interesting, I hope, for the reader. In the introduction I talk about how my idea of the short story has continued to shift and change, also how connections between stories – the idea of stories as episodes in the lives of characters, lives that may be revisited at any time – have always formed an important focus. I deliberately chose to skew the collection more towards science fiction than towards horror – for the simple reason that I would like to keep my options open for putting together a more horror-inflected collection at some later date. So hang on in there, horror fans – you are always in my heart.
I would also like to mention Out of the Ruins, an anthology of apocalypse and dying Earth stories edited by Preston Grassman and containing a brand new story by me. ‘A Storm in Kingstown’ is truly one of my favourites among my own stories, and might yet form part of a longer cycle because I fell in love with these characters and their world. The anthology boasts stories by China Mieville, Emily St John Mandel, Lavie Tidhar, Chip Delany and Ramsey Campbell among others, so why not stick it on your Hallowe’en reading list right now?
*
While I’m here, I can’t resist sharing the marvellous and beautiful cover art for the French edition of The Dollmaker, which has been receiving some lovely reviews and notices across the channel.
The doll depicted is the work of dollmaker extraordinaire Laurence Ruet, whose work so resembles that of my own dear dollmaker Andrew Garvie that it has me catching my breath each time I see it. You can watch a stunning video of Laurence at work here. I honestly cannot think of a more fitting match between cover and contents. The Tristrams knock it out of the park yet again!
*
Chris and I spent last week on the Isle of Skye, a superb experience that I am still digesting. It really is true that every Scottish island is different, with its own character and unique landscape. Skye is vast, a kingdom in itself, with the magnificent Cuillin mountains dominating the landscape. Meanwhile, I am making tentative progress with my next novel, embedding myself in that beginning part of the process which for me might more rightly be called a series of experiments, of false starts and new directions and many words discarded as I get to know my material and come to understand what I want to do with it. I think I’m almost ready to make a proper start now. I hope so, anyway!
In the second of my posts looking at the Clarke-shortlist-that-might-have-been, I want to focus on James Bradley’s Ghost Species, a novel that takes place against a background of climate change, imagining a future we might already recognise, with some additional surprises.
Jay and Kate are geneticists. When they receive an invitation to visit a secret research facility deep in the Tasmanian bush, Kate suspects they are being scammed. When they discover the identity of their host – tech billionaire Davis Hucken – her reservations deepen. The Hucken Foundation is engaged in a series of highly advanced genetic engineering projects of borderline legality, designed to offset the effects of climate change by reverting large swathes of the planet’s depleted ecosystems to their original wilderness condition. Davis reveals that their experiments have entered startling new territory: by using strands of DNA harvested from the remains of long-dead specimens, they have succeeded in resurrecting the Thylacine, the elusive Tasmanian Tiger whose last living relative died in Hobart zoo in 1936. The Foundation is already progressing its plans to revive other species – the woolly rhino, the mammoth – and reintroduce them into the wild.
But these replenished ecosystems would not be complete, Davis explains, without the presence of Earth’s original human ancestors, the Neanderthals. Will Kate and Jay, experts in their field, come on board? Davis insists their pioneering work can help save the planet. Kate instinctively distrusts him – he’s a man too used to getting everything he wants – but Jay is excited, thrilled at the prospect of unlimited resources and the chance to make history.
What follows is the story of Eve, the first Neanderthal child in forty millennia. Still processing her grief over the loss of her own pre-term baby, Kate forms an almost instantaneous bond with Eve that goes against everything the ‘experiment’ demands of her. Eve is not an experiment, she is a person , and Kate is determined that she should be treated as one, that she should receive the personal love and care that is owing to any human child. When she goes on the run with Eve, Kate knows the Foundation will not allow their liberty to extend indefinitely. But her actions have already altered the trajectory of their research, winning Eve the time she needs to grow into her identity.
Although it takes place over a more compressed time period, in the way it is structured Ghost Species is not unlike Bradley’s previous novel Clade, the narrative progressing in discrete chapters, each focusing on a different time period, each moving the action forward by a number of years. Thus we see Eve grow from an infant into a toddler, a pre-pubescent and then a teenager, at which point the narrative point of view shifts from that of Kate to Eve herself. And as Eve grows, the world around her changes, the climate crisis becoming ever more pressing and wide-ranging until the world’s order shifts irrevocably, sliding towards disaster and the end of human civilisation as we currently understand it.
To say that Ghost Species is ‘more’ than just a novel of climate change is something of a misnomer: there is no subject more important than climate change, and James Bradley is among its most passionate literary advocates. There has been a lot of discussion in recent years about how writers should best engage with our current crisis, and if there is any criticism to be levelled at science fiction writers in particular it is that their narratives of climate change have too often been set in some unspecified ‘future’, with over-familiar scenes of mass destruction and fleeing multitudes cementing the illusion of climate change as little more than a convenient set of post-apocalyptic tropes.
By contrast, Ghost Species might as well be set right now. The environmental changes Bradley pinpoints have this week been the living subject of media headlines. For those of us – and for that read all of us – who feel an increasing sense of anxiety and helplessness in the face of government and corporate inadequacy the final chapters of Ghost Species are confronting and hard to read, hard to come to terms with. But that’s exactly how they should be. Bradley is unflinching in his approach, without ever resorting to the kind overblown disaster imagery that is in danger of becoming ineffective through over-exposure. And as in Clade, what Bradley has given us is an entirely believable, quotidian story of real people, none more human than Eve.
Eve’s story is the heart of Ghost Species, an examination not only of human rights but of the many and varied ways of being human. We have seen similar discussions and arguments rehearsed through the many narratives of artificial intelligence that exist in science fiction; Kate and Jay’s arrival at the isolated research facility has strong Ex Machina vibes, and there are some clear parallels between what is happening in Ghost Species and the action of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker-longlisted novel Klara and the Sun. But Bradley’s vision is more original than Garland’s, and his competency in imagining a future already with us, his determined and responsible grasp of his subject matter vastly outflanks Ishiguro’s.
Bradley’s extrapolation of research into character – what might a Neanderthal person actually be like, how might she respond to the modern world of Homo sapiens? – is itself a beautiful and, for me at least a highly successful experiment. revealing to us those aspects of our own selves that have been lost through our rush towards progress, and much to our detriment.
Ghost Species is a quietly devastating and immensely affecting novel, wrought with sensitivity and precision, and I cannot get my head around why it does not feature on this year’s Clarke Award shortlist. In many ways, Ghost Species presents an ideal of the science fiction novel, a realistic imagining of the whole through the sum of its parts, the universal via the particular. Where other novels splash about in the comfort zone of derivative tropes, playing games in future worlds that are never going to happen, Ghost Species dives deep into now and tomorrow and next week, asking how we are going to survive and what survival might do to us.
In its humanity and in its willingness to ask difficult questions, Ghost Species has a clear affiliation with the science fiction of Anne Charnock, whose third novel Dreams Before the Start of Time won the Clarke Award in 2018, During the first lockdown in 2020, Charnock and Bradley participated in an online conversation at the Los Angeles Review of Books, focusing specifically on writing fiction in the age of climate catastrophe. It is well worth the read.
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.
