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Sharke’s Choice #1: The Rain Heron by Robbie Arnott

July 8, 2021 /

More on the actual Clarke Award shortlist in due course, but in the meantime I wanted to highlight some of the submissions that didn’t make it, books I’ve been interested in reading but haven’t got to yet. Now seems like the perfect time to take a closer look at them, with the aim of putting together an alternate-world Clarke of the kind the Shadow Clarke jury experimented with back in 2017. Together with the novels from the submissions list I’ve already read, I should end up with an interesting pool to choose from. I’m going to start with Robbie Arnott’s novel The Rain Heron, which has recently been shortlisted for Australia’s Miles Franklin Award. I like the Miles Franklin, which tends to be more experimental than the Booker. This year’s shortlist also features one of my favourite novels from 2020, Madeleine Watts’s The Inland Sea, and the longlist featured The Animals in that Country by Laura Jean McKay, one of the six shortlisted novels for this year’s Clarke Award.

The country that forms the setting for The Rain Heron is unnamed, though its landscape of mountains and temperate rainforests has much in common with Arnott’s home state of Tasmania. We learn that there has been a military takeover, an act of violence referred to only as ‘the coup’. The cities are subject to strict martial law, while outlying rural communities are forced to endure the periodic armed raids and plundering of resources that such an arbitrary seizure of power would inevitably entail. The story centres around two women – Ren, who has taken refuge in the mountains in the wake of some undescribed personal trauma, and Zoe, who has joined the army in an almost random act of self-sabotage and now finds herself made an instrument of its unelected masters.

Climate change is biting deep, setting neighbour against neighbour as towns are abandoned and wildfires rage. In their struggle to maintain their hold on society, those who perpetrated the coup find themselves drawn to an old legend, that of the rain heron, a mythical bird that is said to have the power to control the weather. Desperate to secure the bird, their eye falls on Zoe, who knows and understands the mountain country where the heron is said to roost. But Zoe has past trauma of her own to contend with, a hollowness at her heart that seems destined to lead her in a dangerous direction. Does she believe in the heron herself? She barely knows.

The Rain Heron is a masterclass in landscape writing, but it is equally interesting and provocative in its structure. The novel opens with Part 0, an apparently self-contained short story about a desperately unlucky farmer as she battles to keep her land fertile and productive in a hostile climate. Arnott then takes a bold narrative risk in introducing us to Ren, who we assume must be central to the action but who vanishes violently from our sight at the end of Part 1. The narrative then passes to Zoe, a character who Arnott has set us up to mistrust and dislike. How Arnott brings the various threads together and makes sense of what has gone before is an elegant sleight of hand. As a reader, I reacted strongly against Zoe, but the tightly packed, propulsive nature of Arnott’s storytelling kept me hooked. The novel’s ultimate resolution is both moving and apposite. No one gets off lightly and there are no solutions offered, but still there is light. By the end, my feelings about Zoe were entirely changed. I love that this happened. I love that Arnott was prepared to risk readers rejecting his story in the pursuit of what he actually wanted to say. The results are assured, heartfelt, genuinely special.

If they did consider this book, I can only imagine the Clarke jury’s decision not to include it on the shortlist would have centred around the question of whether it is, in fact, SF. I remember there was a lot of this kind of wrangling in critical discussions of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad in 2017. Railroad ultimately went on to win the Clarke, as well as the Pulitzer and the National Book Award in the US, though I’m sure the members of those juries were less concerned about whether their choice deserved to be categorised as science fiction or fantasy.

As with Railroad, The Rain Heron is, on the face of it, pure fantasy. Both the rain heron itself and the giant squid that are crucial to the economy of the port town Zoe comes from are mythological in essence, creatures with magical properties that do not, so far as we know, exist in nature. But again, as with Railroad, the fantastical elements of Arnott’s narrative are not so much plot devices as powerful metaphors. The rain heron itself is a symbol of power, and the lust for power – who has a right to it, who ultimately wields it. And what happens with the squid is a hymn of protest against the commercial exploitation of indigenous cultures and resources, against the displacement of animals and people in the path of the ecological vandalism being perpetrated against this planet:

I was mad at her, all of the time. The country was falling to pieces – at least, our part of the country was. My school had been closed for six months. People were breaking into shops, robbing pensioners. I was so furious, but my fury had no direction, and she wasn’t doing anything about it. She wasn’t doing anything at all. I had no father, no brothers or sisters, no other family. And my mother just kept on keeping to herself. Closing the curtains, drinking cheap wine.

In the end, the background to the coup, the identity of the people in power, the exact timeline of events – all those elements that form the ingredients of the more traditional kind of post-apocalyptic novel – are unimportant in The Rain Heron because Arnott has chosen to tell his story through character. His incorporation of magical elements results not in a diminution of the science fictional sensibility of his narrative but in a kind of hyper-realism, a vision of our immediate future that is all the more hard-hitting because of the risks it takes.

We could spend a lot of time fussing over whether Arnott’s book is ‘properly’ science fiction, but I don’t think it matters. What cannot be argued with is that as a novel of climate change and the savage realignments of power that are bound to accompany it, The Rain Heron is as hard-hitting as other novels three times its length. As a work of literature it is beautifully achieved; as a portrait of a possible near future it is serious and passionately questioning. I can only hope the Clarke jury gave it due consideration.

Weird Wednesdays #17 (with apologies for it being Thursday): Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann

May 13, 2021 /

The first known appearance of the joker-vagrant Till Eulenspiegel in German literature comes with the publication of an anonymous chapbook in 1510, though his origins in folklore and oral storytelling most likely date back still further. Since then, his incarnations have been multitudinous and varied, including operas, comics, novels and films. To get some idea of the importance of Till Eulenspiegel to German culture, a British audience might find it useful to think of the centrality of Robin Hood to our own myth-making and storytelling, most especially in the protean, elusive nature of such a character, neither wholly hero nor villain, always on the move, forever reinventing himself as befits the time and place.

Daniel Kehlmann’s most recent novel Tyll, translated from the German by Ross Benjamin and shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, sets the action at the time of the Thirty Years’ War. Tyll Ulenspiegel is born the son of a miller, Claus, who finds himself a miller more by disagreeable luck than critical judgement. Claus Ulenspiegel’s true passion is for ideas – ideas that, with witchfinders roaming the land and a religious war on the horizon, turn out to be dangerous not only for him but for the entire village. Tyll, who from a young age shows a perspicacity and insularity that sets him apart from other children, is quickly forced to rely on his own resources. Brute twists and turns of fate, combined with Tyll’s mercurial and essentially unknowable nature, make for a picaresque narrative of unexpected happenings and unusual daring.

As is usual and ever-delightful with Daniel Kehlmann, the story does not proceed in a straightforward fashion. Instead, we are offered a series of discrete snapshots, shuffled like a deck of cards, dropping us in and out of Tyll’s life and times at irregular, non-linear intervals, so that even as we reach the end there are still gaps that can only be filled by our own imagination. As in a painting by Bruegel, certain figures dart forward to capture our attention, before sloping off into the background, making space for someone else. And the story is as much about the troubled social and political landscape in which it takes place as its eponymous hero. The Thirty Years’ War left many thousands dead, and was responsible for the deaths of millions more through the poverty, displacement, disease and starvation that it inflicted. One of the most powerful effects of the COVID pandemic, for me, has been the way in which it has revealed our residual closeness to events that previously seemed quite distant. Hilary Mantel has been brilliant at evoking the strong political parallels between our own time and the time of the Tudors. In Kehlmann’s hands, history is similarly pliable, similarly present.

Most of all, it is Kehlmann’s deft and original approach to the fantastic that illuminates this novel, that lends it the timeless allure and magical slipperiness of its jester protagonist. The land our little troupe travel through is alive with spirits and goblins, witches and will o’ the wisps, with hunches and premonitions, with gods and monsters that are as much the creatures of a nation’s troubled psyche as of her boundless forests, things only half-seen that still cannot be unseen because we know they are there. Kehlmann’s evocation of a magical landscape is nothing more and nothing less than the conjuring of a time in which magic and religion, alchemy and science mixed freely among the crowds, sowing their own brands of dissent and chaos, of healing and treachery among the people of a world – as continues to be proven – not so very different from our own.

In his refusal to provide answers or pass judgments, Kehlmann proves himself as tricksy and light-fingered as his shadowy hero. Tyll is a distillation of wonderland, a casket of ambiguous treasures. Beware his Midas touch – it may leave you with asses’ ears.

O Brave New World: Skyward Inn by Aliya Whiteley

March 18, 2021 /

The Skyward Inn was not always so called, but it is nonetheless flourishing. Under the management of Jemima and Isley it has become the hub of a small rural community, the place where people drink and socialise at the end of a working day, the place where meetings are conducted, business disputes are settled, community issues resolved. The locally brewed beverage it has become renowned for seems to have a particular way of drawing people together and if some of the villagers were suspicious of newcomer Isley when he first arrived, he is now accepted as part of the scene.

The lives of Jem and Isley are not as settled as they might appear on the surface, however. Jem is locked in an unspoken conflict with her brother Dominic over the rightful custody of her son, Fosse, born as the result of a brief liaison when Jem was still a teenager. As the villagers argue amongst themselves over whether an immigrant family should be allowed to take over the running of an abandoned farm, Dom feels increasingly concerned about balancing brute economics with the values of family, community and land that have sustained the locals through multiple generations. As the newest member of the community, Isley strives to be accepted even while struggling with the feelings of displacement and alienation that inevitably come with trying to make one’s way in a new environment. And for Isley, everything is new. An alien from a distant planet, he is literally not of this world.

The world of Whiteley’s novel is both futuristic and retrograde. A wormhole in space – known colloquially as ‘the kissing gate’ – has allowed the development of insterstellar travel and more specifically the exploration of a superficially Earthlike planet rich with resources, barely understood but almost certainly lucrative. Rather than risking invasion and possible destruction, the peaceful Qitans have opened their world to the human colonisers, who rapidly establish a trading outpost and dispatch teams of prospectors. A small number of Qitans – like Isley – have travelled in the opposite direction and settled on Earth.

In this possible future, Britain has fragmented. The larger part has joined the Consolidation, a federation of nations and peoples united in their desire for progress and alien trade. The West Country, already split off from the rest of the UK as the result of climate change, has followed an isolationist route. In the Protectorate, the population follow stubbornly in the footsteps of their forefathers. Travel to and from the Consolidation is severely restricted, new technology is spurned, and the region scrapes its living from selling the crafts, raw materials and organic produce for which it is still famous.

Is this Whiteley’s Brexit novel? Certainly it would be difficult for any British reader to read the first half of Skyward Inn especially and not remember comments made by Tory MP Andrea Leadsom in the wake of the 2016 referendum about how Britain was going to sustain itself on profits from home-made jam and Aberdeen Angus, or something. Seen through the clarifying lens of science fiction, the determination of the Protectorate to keep itself separate, Jem and Dom’s parents’ retreat to a gated community on a UKIP version of Lundy Island, the stubborn determination to ‘muddle through’ – these things appear wrongheaded rather than redoubtable, a wilful rejection of progressive attitudes and sustainable modes of living in favour of nostalgia and with inevitable shortages of medicines and essential services as a result. Working people are barely muddling through, if at all, and without an influx of new arrivals, communities are atrophying. Farm buildings are standing empty, fertile land is lying fallow with no one to farm it. Rather than bucolic utopia, the Protectorate is a lonely place, depleted and depressed. There is a feeling, above all, of things running down.

Yet Whiteley’s novel is too subtle, too multifaceted to fall into polemic. Skyward Inn highlights issues faced by England’s rural communities anyway, even without Brexit or alien incursion. Jem’s son Fosse has been born and raised in the Protectorate and understands both its uniqueness and its vulnerability. He is dismissive of attempts to recreate the region’s unique character in artificial simulations – he recognises these at a gut level for the rose-tinted idealisations they are – yet unlike older members of the community, he recognises the necessity of change, of building bridges with other communities and individuals, and it is from his perspective that we get to experience the strangeness and the beauty of an alien world.    

In her previous works, Whiteley has been resourceful and imaginative in portraying the social, geographical and political dynamics of communities, both on a wider scale and in close-focus observation of individual and family relationships within them. Skyward Inn returns to this subject area with even greater power and precision, exploring the future-possible while remaining critically attentive – like all the best science fiction – of the here and now. Her descriptive writing is as clear-eyed and boldly evocative as ever, not just in summoning the West Country landscapes she knows so well but in the creation of alien sights and concepts that bring to the final third of this exceptional novel that edge of surrealism and the uncanny that mark Whiteley as one of the most original and provocative voices in contemporary science fiction.

The concept of the hive-mind, or ‘monoculture’, as Whiteley puts it, is not new in SF. We can point to the slave-minds familiar from The Matrix and from the Borg in Star Trek as illustration of the more destructive attributes of shared consciousness, but the benificent ‘children’ of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End and the intimate culture based around shared speech patterns as detailed in China Mieville’s Embassytown provide more progressive templates. Indeed, science fiction’s obsession with this particular trope in both its positive and negative permutations would seem to indicate that the subjects it embodies – individuality versus collectivism, loss of privacy and its impact on societies as well as individuals – have been of continuing and increasing interest to us as readers and as writers, through the dawn of mass media and into the digital age. If Whiteley’s novel has a core theme, it is communication – not only how we interact with one another at street level but how the collective imagination might be broadened to accommodate the perspective and worldview of those who think differently. The way she will happily use a small group of people as a kind of literary petri dish in which to work through the implications of an idea shows a creative approach to science fiction that put me immediately in mind of Ursula Le Guin.

 Most of all, it is Whiteley’s ability to mingle the marvellous with the quotidian that makes her work special. Like Peter’s sojourn on the alien planet in Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, Jem’s leap into the unknown in Skyward Inn is believable to us at least in part because the world she leaves behind is so intensely familiar. No matter how far we travel in Whiteley’s company, we never lose faith that the incredible sights she shows us are on some level real, and that they matter intensely.   

Girls Against God

November 12, 2020 /

Late last month I happened to be reading an interview/conversation between the American writer Alexandra Kleeman (author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine) and the Norwegian writer and musician Jenny Hval, whose second novel Girls Against God has just been published. Both writers share an interest in transgression, in breaking down genre boundaries and in the idea of literary experimentation. It’s a fascinating piece, and one I found resonated with me a lot, most especially their discussion of how the radical-experimental space in writing has tended to be colonised by men. Helen de Witt in particular has written brilliantly about this, as of course has Rachel Cusk.

My own interest in fragmented narratives, in narratives that push beyond ‘story’ to examine not only the urge to record but also our relationship as both readers and writers with words on a page and especially in our current reality the value of words as resistance, protest, the proposition of counter-realities has become all-consuming of late. This obsession with narrative structures, with the purpose and meaning of the written word has resulted in notable and repeated upheavals in my work-in-progress as well as a renewed focus on and fascination with writers whom I perceive as sharing these ideals – writers whose engagement with language itself is relentless and searching.

The challenge of being a woman in such spaces is a matter of particular fascination and sometimes vexation. With this in mind, I have decided I would like to spend some of this winter exploring works by women writers that I see as radical and/or transgressive. Two years ago I read a series of such works one after the other: Ann Quin’s Berg, Eley Williams’s Attrib, Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, Break.up by Joanna Walsh, Milkman by Anna Burns, All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews, Caroline’s Bikini by Kirsty Gunn, Exposure by Olivia Sudjic and Hell by Kathryn Davis. The effect of encountering these works so closely together, as a concentrated block of ideas, was profoundly energising and remains a touchstone experience, not just in and of itself but for the inspiration it provided, the example set: this is what is possible.

Trying to process this experience, to persuade it to bear fruit – that is the tricky bit. It is also the most exciting part of the work I am attempting to do. I thought it might be useful and interesting to share my thoughts on some of works I am finding most relevant, engaging and challenging at the moment, to discover them on the page, to set down my impressions as they are being gathered. In honour of the interview that inspired it, I am going to call this project Girls Against God, though we may well find as many girls who are pro god as anti. I am not going to set myself a strict timetable for posting, nor even a specific day, though I am hoping to put up something new for you to read roughly once a week.

I plan to start next week sometime with Girls Against God itself. In the meantime, let me commend to you Jenny Hval’s stunning album The Practice of Love, which seems to tie into everything she says in the interview with energy and grace.

Assessing The Evidence

October 15, 2020 /

One of the harsher effects of lockdown for writers has been the narrowing of opportunities to come out of our studies and meet with people – with each other, and also with readers. We’ve all done our best with Skype and Zoom, and the ingenuity and enthusiasm of booksellers and events organisers in making the most of the tools at their disposal has been incalculable. We all know by now though that online meetings are not the same, and even as we enjoy catching glimpses of one another across the internet, there’s nothing like coming together in person to celebrate the announcement of a prize shortlist, the launch of a new novel or simply to compare notes on what we’ve all been reading lately.

This privation has been especially difficult for authors who have had books scheduled to be published in 2020. Even under normal circumstances, there’s a significant gap between completing work on a novel and sending it out into the world. Having to wait an extra six months or even a year before their work sees the light of day has been deeply discouraging. For those writers whose novels have been released this year, there is the sadness of not being able to participate in book festivals, conventions, and all the other events that would normally mark a novel’s rite of passage. As we re-enter a heightened state of lockdown, even the opportunity of celebrating quietly at home with friends has been pushed into an indefinite future. Which makes it all the more necessary for us to gather the resources we do have: to read, to celebrate and talk about the books we love.

Christopher Priest’s new novel THE EVIDENCE is published today. This is Chris’s sixteenth novel to date, which is achievement enough in itself. It is also a fantastically inventive, original and unexpected novel, a true delight to read. The Evidence brings us into the company of Todd Fremde, a crime writer who has been invited to give a lecture at a university some two days’ travel from his home island – for yes, this is a Dream Archipelago novel like no other. On arrival in the icy outpost of Dearth City, Todd finds himself with more than dreary weather to contend with as he is drawn rapidly into a situation that seems increasingly to resemble the plot of one of his own police procedurals.

As Todd struggles to make sense of what is going on around him, he begins to examine the activity of crime writing itself: why are we addicted to it, and what does it actually have to say about the nature of crime? The Evidence is a funny, thought-provoking, thoroughly entertaining book, a crime novel that undermines itself at every turn whilst retaining and honouring all the elements of mystery that make detective stories so satisfying.

I love this book, and I know you will, too. In fact I would go so far as to say it’s a novel that’s perfectly timed to bring some much needed joy and humour to our reading lives. If you’ve never read Priest before, The Evidence might be exactly the right place to start.

Ruby – cover reveal!

February 27, 2020 /

Truly delighted to reveal Julia Lloyd’s exquisite cover design for Ruby, published by Titan Books on the 8th of September.

Ruby is the brand new title of the brand new edition of Stardust, previously published in 2013 by PS Publishing. The all-new Ruby has been revised and expanded to include a new story that will reveal new insights and information about the book’s mysterious title character.

Ruby Castle is a film actor, famous for her roles in horror cinema, made infamous for murdering her lover in a jealous rage. The stories in this book illuminate her life and times from different angles, forming a multifaceted portrait of an extraordinary woman.

It has been a joy to return to this manuscript, to spend time with Ruby again, to bring to the text a new incisiveness and clarity. Writing the extra story was the icing on the cake! In the years since Ruby first stepped into the spotlight, I feel I’ve come to understand her better, and I hope I’ve been able to reflect this in the revised text.

Julia’s cover art captures the drama and tragedy of Ruby’s story to an uncanny degree. I’m thrilled with it, and looking forward to introducing Ruby to a wider audience later in the year!

Night Boat to Tangier

January 26, 2020 /

I begin each reading year curious about which will be the first truly great book I stumble across and how long I’ll have to wait before that happens and this year I’m lucky: less than a month of 2020 has elapsed and I’ve already encountered Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier, his third novel, longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize and as I’m turning the last page I’m wondering to myself how the judges could have had the hearts or minds to dismiss it from the running. It was a good longlist, I get that, a strong set of interesting books. Half of it had to be dispensed with, one way or another, but even so.

Night Boat to Tangier is not just a book about two Irish ex-gangsters. It’s a book about freedom and imprisonment, love (of course), exhaustion, despair, mental illness, the iron grip of history and personal trauma. Magic and folklore. Landscape, landscape and landscape. Poetry – because Night Boat to Tangier is an epic poem. If the definition – or a definition – of a work of art is a conceived artifact that is at one and the same time dreadfully specific yet utterly universal then Night Boat to Tangier is a work of art. (I keep thinking about John Banville, that quote of his just after he won the Booker about it being about time a work of art took the prize. I love it when writers come out with stuff they shouldn’t.)

Night Boat to Tangier fits wholly, sublimely into the song-tradition of Irish writing. But the feeling it gives me as I finish reading is – illogically, incongruously, absolutely – the same feeling I get reading or seeing a performance of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.

Barry’s interpolation of magical elements into his text is the capstone of genius and I am coming to think that Barry must be a magician. At the very least, he reminds us with every sentence why writing matters. A book to sear the heart and thrill the mind.

Day of reckoning

December 12, 2019 /

The end of the year has yielded some marvellous reading. I’ve been saving Helen Oyeyemi’s Gingerbread until now, because the very title makes me think of Christmas (the parts of it I still enjoy, frost and music mainly, and, well, gingerbread) and because her close-knit, somehow private prose has a wintry feel, at least for me, by which I mean the scent of woodsmoke and the way Rothesay Bay looks – like the lagoon in The Land that Time Forgot – when it’s shrouded in mist.

Oyeyemi’s Gingerbread is all those things. It’s also a novel that is supported by an undercurrent of deep anger, wrapped about so tightly in coloured lights and party games you might not notice it. There’s a scene in the book where a bunch of helpless girls are being bullied by a bunch of other, momentarily more powerful girls, who make the tormented ones laugh and smile while they’re being pinched and manhandled, so the adults (and the watching cameras) will not realise what’s actually going on. The whole of Gngerbread is like this, and this is its subject matter.

I could call Oyeyemi a clever writer or a subversive writer or a writer of startling originality and while she is all of these things, what she is most is a writer who is intent on following her own interests, her own concerns, her own manner of expression, with barely a thought for the ‘literary establishment’ or what might be popular or acceptable or ‘now’. Her work is discursive, densely wound as a ball of wool and sometimes as difficult to untangle. There are moments when it’s tiring to read, to stick with it, because it’s so much its own thing, showing so little concern for what I might be thinking or feeling, but that’s what makes Oyeyemi’s writing rewarding, that’s what makes it important. I’m also guessing that’s what makes it so much less talked about and discussed and rewarded with prizes (am I mistaken in thinking that Oyeyemi has never yet been shortlisted for a major prize?) than it should be.

We have a magician in our midst. I know she won’t care about prizes, which is why I’m giving myself permission to care on her behalf. What she cares about is the writing, the doing of it, the thinking, the following of a thread of an idea (or a trail of breadcrumbs, if we really must) wherever it leads her. The placing of one word in front of another, an outpouring of imagery so rich and so personal it might communicate to some as dissonance, but that is in reality as careful and considered and skilful as the aligning and mortaring of bricks to build a fortress wall.

She is unique and she is wayward and she is to be treasured. I watched an interview with her recently on YouTube in which many of those qualities shine out strongly, most of all her insistence on being allowed the head-space to say what she actually means, rather than being pushed towards repeating the slew of steady, ready answers to familiar questions that inevitably accrue in our minds when we’ve done even a couple of author events, let alone a book tour. Again, treasure. I was interested, though afterwards not surprised, to hear her mention Jesse Ball as a favourite writer. Just a week or so ago I read his most recent novel The Divers’ Game, and though opposite to Oyeyemi in some ways – so pared down it’s like glass, or granite, with the immaculate sheen of poetry – in the quality of its writing it possesses that same waywardness, that same fierce, you might even say stubborn insistence on being what it is, that is, an almost icily accurate representation of what the writer is actually thinking, actually feeling.

Not a summary, not a pruned-back, dumbed-down approximation, but the real deal. A brutal and terrifying portrayal of dystopia and moral laziness and yet at the same time – can I even say this? – still somehow hopeful, The Divers’ Game should win every science fiction award out there in 2020. My prediction is that it won’t be shortlisted even for one.

I am thinking of these two writers especially today because they give me courage. They give me courage to believe that it is possible, as a writer, to enter the places you need to enter, to explore the realms of thought and language you feel bound to explore.

To say what we have to say, regardless of how it might be received, what worth might be placed upon it by others. To follow what we believe to be true, and to keep on going.

Pure love for words

November 25, 2019 /

‘The poem, like most of my poems, and like the story I’d promised to expand, conflated fact and fiction, and it occurred to me – not for the first time, but with a new force – that part of what I loved about poetry was how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction didn’t obtain, how the correspondence between text and world was less important than the intensities of the poem itself, what possibilities of feeling were opened up in the present tense of reading.’

(Ben Lerner, 10:04)

In a recent episode of BBC Radio 4’s Open Book, an interview with the American writer Ben Lerner about his new semi-autobiographical novel The Topeka School could be heard back-to-back with a discussion between Olivia Sudjic and Meena Kandasamy on the nature and rise of autofiction. I read Sudjic’s Exposure earlier this year. At the time of listening to the programme I had just finished reading Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 in preparation for reading The Topeka School. As I write these words now, I turned the final page of Kandasamy’s third novel Exquisite Cadavers about half an hour ago.

Kandasamy has spoken of how Exquisite Cadavers is in part a response to the response surrounding her second novel, When I Hit You, much of which had the effect of relegating this singularly audacious, virtuoso autofictional essay on the radical power of literature to the domain of misery memoir. As part of the discussion on Open Book, Kandasamy was upfront about the repeated frustration she has experienced in being subjected to this kind of commentary:

‘When I wrote my second novel and it was very personal, people would reduce the whole thing to “oh, she just wrote about what happened to her”. Most of the emphasis was on the ‘what happened to her’ part of it, as opposed to the fact that ‘she wrote about it, and she’s creating a work of art here’. The fact that you’re a woman, the fact that this is an artistic endeavour that’s taken years to write is just erased.’

Sudjic was quick to confirm that her experience as a writer has thus far been very similar and I could have listened to their conversation for hours:

‘Autofiction when it’s written by women is often seen as this indulgent thing where they’re writing about themselves, and I find that so strange, because what they’re really doing is drawing attention to the frame. It’s a technique that sits next to metafiction really, which is drawing attention to how it’s all constructed, and I find it very frustrating that that’s what gets ignored when it’s women doing it, whereas for example with Ben Lerner, everyone’s very on board with reading those books as real, structural, artistic works, rather than constantly asking him what his mother thinks about the way she’s represented in them.’

Exquisite Cadavers is a brave and important work on so many levels. With a structure partly inspired by Derrida’s 1974 novel Glas, it presents a fictional story of a mixed-race couple living in contemporary London alongside margin notes detailing the ideas, events and research that inspired it. As the book progresses, the invented story and the autobiographical elements begin in their own strange way to coalesce, each illuminating the other in a way that reads as a genuine representation of the way fiction is actually created. It’s a brilliant achievement, and what I love most about it – as with When I Hit You – is its visceral revelation of the power literature can still wield, not in spite of its ‘literariness’, but because of it. The ‘lived experience’ is the creation of these words, these sentences, this body of work, not the facsimiles of experiences described, which may or may not be ‘true’ but who the hell cares? What we care about is what is on the page, the experience that brings reader and writer closer together.

The irony, as Sudjic points out, is the extent to which she and Lerner and Kandasamy are engaged in similar literary endeavours, as set against the peculiar distance that is drawn between them by many readers and commentators. I loved Lerner’s first two novels so much I found myself weeping in gratitude. I cannot imagine a more important writer right now than Kandasamy. I found Sudjic’s polemic in Exposure vitally enlightening and, safe in the knowledge that her second novel Asylum Road is coming down the line soon from Bloomsbury, I am about to begin reading her debut, Sympathy.

I’m saving The Topeka School for the week between Christmas and Hogmanay. Far from being played out, the novel today is more exciting than it’s been for years.

The Dollmaker: AMA

November 4, 2019 /

Just to let you know that I’ll be doing a Reddit AMA this evening, 8 pm UK time, so do feel free to drop by and ask me questions about The Dollmaker, my upcoming novel The Good Neighbours and anything else you can think of relating to books and writing. Looking forward to you joining me at eight!

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