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Girls Against God #4: Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez and You Will Never Be Forgotten by Mary South

December 11, 2020 /

Reading these two story collections back-to-back presented an eerily similar aesthetic experience to my encounter with Geen and Ferrante last week, only in reverse. Both collections deal with social change, buried secrets and personal crisis. Both employ elements of the fantastic to secure their effects. Yet the manner of approach, the mode of attack could not be more different, with the internal temperature of these stories, above all, providing a fascinating contrast.

Enriquez’s stories (translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell) take place against the shifting, unstable backdrop of dictatorships past. In ‘The Intoxicated Years’ we follow a group of teenagers as they confront issues of identity, addiction and sexuality in the years following the fall of the Peron regime. The political repercussions and personal reckonings that preoccupy their parents are to their children a matter of intense dullness, of ‘yeah, whatevs’; set against the agonies of teenage angst, the adult world even in its moment of greatest precariousness feels tedious, played out, irrelevant. Only as they grow older do they begin to understand how no one can live surrounded by such a society and emerge unscathed.

Other stories come populated more literally with ghosts from the past and monsters of the present, and Enriquez’s manner of merging the bitterest social commentary with elements of horror – see ‘Under the Black Water’ for a Lovecraft-tinged death cult (this story carries strongly resounding echoes of Clive Barker’s ‘The Forbidden’ aka Candyman) and ‘The Neighbour’s Courtyard for a hideously unsettling variation on the zombie story – is brilliantly handled. The stories’ boldness in confronting issues of violence against women is, for me, the strongest, most vital aspect of this collection. Women here struggle not only against weak, bullying husbands and cowardly fathers, they have the whole machinery of systemic machismo to deal with as well:

How many times had a cop like this one denied to her face and against all evidence that he had murdered a poor teenager? Because that was what cops did in the southern slums, much more than protect people: they killed teenagers, sometimes out of cruelty, other times because the kids refused to ‘work’ for them – to steal for them or sell the drugs the police seized. Or for betraying them. The reasons for killing poor kids were many and despicable.

My personal favourites among these stories are those in which the horror is less overt, where the line between the uncanny and the everyday is most cunningly hidden. ‘An Invocation of the Big-Eared Runt’ follows a tour guide as he entertains tourists with tales of the city’s most notorious murderers and serial killers, among whom the eponymous big-eared runt is most notorious of all, most especially because of the studied delight he seemed to take in the crimes he committed. As Pablo becomes ever more obsessed with the runt, the more the strain of his home life seems to tell on him. The story’s final lines are chilling, all the more so because they are inconclusive. The collection’s tour-de-force is ‘Spiderweb’, in which a young woman tied to a peevish and controlling husband goes on a day trip with him and her extravagantly charismatic and forthright cousin Natalia. Juan-Martin’s nagging and complaining is a constant irritation, and when their car breaks down on the return journey a reckoning seems at hand.

The landscape, atmosphere and tension of ‘Spiderweb’ are reminiscent of stories by Roberto Bolano in which the threat of violence, ever-present, hovers just out of sight. As soldiers of the regime torment a waitress at the neighbouring dining table, Juan-Martin’s unwavering sanctimoniousness threatens to push the threat over the edge towards calamity. Natalia though has her own ideas on how to deal with Martin. Once again, this story is all the more effective through leaving the reader to draw their own conclusion.

After the heat, dust and sweltering tension of Enriquez, I found the atmosphere of Mary South’s stories chilly at first; studied, beautifully turned and just a little too careful. I have seen other critics reference the SF TV series Black Mirror in their assessment of this debut collection, but the more I read of You Will Never Be Forgotten, the more this description seemed too pat, too obvious, and not wholly accurate. It is only really the first story, ‘Keith Prime’, that recalls Black Mirror, not to mention Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, and in spite of being (as are all the stories) beautifully written, it is the one I find least interesting, precisely because its minimalist, soft-sci-fi tropes have been rehearsed before. South makes overt use of science fiction again in ‘To Save the Universe, We Must Also Save Ourselves’, in which the messy real-life dramas of actor Faith Massey are set against the unswerving heroism of her screen incarnation, Dinara Gorun, captain of the spacecraft Audacity.

Fans of the movie Galaxy Quest will find themselves chuckling happily along, and the story leaves no doubt it is doing its own thing by placing Faith’s battle with entrenched sexism – the most indestructible monster she has faced both onscreen and off – front and centre. Far stronger though are those stories in which South turns away from convention and pushes hardest against the boundary between the disdainfully ironic and the overtly uncomfortable. ‘Frequently Asked Questions About Your Craniotomy’ starts out reading like a conventional ‘list’ story but gradually strays into territory that is both horrific and heart-shattering. ‘Architecture for Monsters’ follows a journalist-fan of the groundbreaking architect Helen Dannenforth as she works to uncover the inconvenient truths at the heart of a genius’s life and art. ‘The Promised Hostel’ is, in common parlance, something of a mind-fuck, also a great story, while the title piece ‘You Will Never Be Forgotten’, in which a content moderator at ‘the world’s most popular search engine’ seeks to confront her rapist, is equally bold and ambiguous.

If South’s collection seems to lack the visceral, palpable urgency of Enriquez’s, this could well be down to the fact that I read the two books so close together. The elegance of South’s writing, the smooth turns from the domestic-banal to the queasily unnerving, her unswerving examination of aspects of the way we all live now makes You Will Never Be Forgotten well worth seeking out, and leaves the reader in eager anticipation of what South will write next. As for Mariana Enriquez, I understand her next novel is shortly to appear in English translation and I cannot wait. In the meantime, I would urge you to take an hour’s break to watch this conversation between Enriquez and M. John Harrison at this year’s (unavoidably Zoom-based) Buenos Aires Literary Festival. The insights into their writing lives, literary process and aesthetic outlook are many, varied and scintillating. Well worth your time.

Girls Against God #3: The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante and What You Could Have Won by Rachel Genn

December 4, 2020 /

The whole future – I thought – will be that way. Life lives together with the damp odour of the land of the dead, attention with inattention, passionate leaps of the heart along with abrupt losses of meaning. But it won’t be worse than the past. (The Days of Abandonment, Elena Ferrante)

Encountering these two books back-to-back provided an extraordinary reading experience. Both are superb. Each tackles a broadly similar subject matter but from a wildly different angle. For two novels covering tangentially allied themes, they could hardly have been more different. For anyone doubting the radical potential of works that focus intimately on human relationships, Ferrante and Genn tear down the curtain, revealing the stormy truth of the adage, ‘the personal is political’. What talent and drive.

In What You Could Have Won, we follow the unequal, tormented relationship between Henry, a psychiatrist engaged in research into addictive behaviours, and Astrid, a newly minted superstar who (the author has affirmed) is loosely based on the (phenomenally talented and tragically deceased) singer and songwriter Amy Winehouse. The narrative switches point of view along a disjointed timeline as we observe Henry’s jealous machinations against various colleagues, his depersonalised fascination with Astrid and his use of her – putting it bluntly – as a kind of lab rat.

Astrid is dazzled by Henry because he appears to be so solidly in control. We follow her terrifying ordeal at the Burning Man concert and subsequent escape (with Henry) to a Greek island, we observe her treatment at the hands of ‘hypno Ray’, a cultish rehab guru with some strange ideas about personal boundaries. As Henry and Astrid’s timelines interweave, our involvement – our acquiescence? – deepens. Reading What You Could Have Won is like watching Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf: you feel you’re eavesdropping on private trauma, something you were not supposed to see, and yet you have to see the drama through to its conclusion.

The experience of reading Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment (translated by Ann Goldstein) is hardly less bruising. Olga is a writer living in Turin with her two children Illaria and Gianni and her husband Mario. After supper one evening, Mario announces that their fifteen-year marriage is over, that the relationship has ceased to have meaning for him. Olga is first bewildered and then increasingly devastated, at a loss as to what has precipitated Mario’s act of abandonment. Mario does that cowardly thing men do – insists ‘it’s not you, it’s me,’ before finally admitting he’s been having an affair. Not just any old affair, either, but the continuation of a relationship that began five years earlier. Olga feels she has, in effect, been living in an alternate reality.

As her grip on her new reality loosens and threatens to collapse, the pressure of trying to carry on as normal becomes increasingly onerous. Her behaviour, once restrained and conservative, becomes more and more untrammelled. Her children, caught in the crossfire between their warring parents, are forced towards a self-reliance that is inappropriate for their young age. For Olga, whose friends seem to have deserted her for the calmer, more glowingly temperate shores of Mario-and-Carla (seriously, I cannot imagine a better book about the realities of divorce), the future feels impenetrable – until a crisis intervenes.

What I have enjoyed most about my time with these two novels is the fascinating clash of registers. What You Could Have Won contains some of the most intelligent, close-grained writing I have encountered all year. For a novel that takes personal trauma as its central subject matter, the tone (almost in a Rachel-Cusk-like way) tends towards the abstract, even abstruse. You have to reach to engage, to dig for the emotion – but once you connect with it, the strength of feeling and power of description is both soul-shaking and mind-grabbing. The switch to first person in the final chapter – and what this means for Astrid – is a genuinely cathartic moment, and the fact that this is achieved through literary device makes it all the more satisfying. Genn’s construction work is careful, knowing and ingenious yet it is fuelled by passion – both for her story and for the written word – and I would expect to see What You Could Have Won strongly in contention for next year’s Goldsmiths.

The Days of Abandonment is so upfront in its treatment of raw emotion – so confronting in its portrayal of mental pain – it can be harrowing to read. And yet this concise, searing account of personal dissolution and restitution is about as far from a conventional ‘relationship drama’ as you might wish it to be. As Olga spirals out of control, Ferrante employs what might be called a storm of language, torrential word-power to evoke her distorted perceptions, for as it turns out, Ferrante’s novel is as much about addiction and altered states as Genn’s. There are passages of hallucinatory rage that spiral off into the abstract, an analysis of consciousness and affect that approaches the philosophical. As with Genn, Ferrante’s endgame is one of transfiguration and catharsis. Olga’s new understanding of love is more astringent, based in self-reliance. The toxic enchantment is broken, the creative life replenished with a newly-found trenchancy.

Girls Against God #2: Boy Parts by Eliza Clark

November 25, 2020 /

I read this and I thought: this book should win prizes. This book should be at the very least longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. But I bet they’re not brave enough.

Irina Sturges is a photographer. She studied at Central St Martins and then went on to do a postgraduate course at the Royal College of Art. She found her time as a student in London confronting, confusing, exhilarating and ultimately destabilizing. She has an eating disorder, a coke habit and a very guilty conscience. She has been passionately in love yet determined to sabotage her own happiness. She finds it almost impossible to relate to people other than by exploiting them. Back home in Newcastle, she is doing fairly OK professionally through online sales and her edgy, transgressive imagery has brought her a massive Instagram following. When she gets a call from a gallery in Hackney interested in putting on a retrospective, Irina goes into a tailspin, belief in her work vying with the ever-present, ever corrosive urge to self-destruction. As she sorts through her back catalogue of images, we gain insights into her process, as well as glimpses of the terrible act that brought her to this point of imminent crisis.

What’s to say about this excoriating, impassioned, incisive debut other than go read it? Is it possible for me to say I liked Irina? Put it this way, if I’d lived in a student house with her I would have been the tedious bore making cups of tea, scrubbing the KFC stains off the carpet, putting out the bins and banging on about how she should be eating proper meals. Her work though I get, her intelligence I respect, her ambition I admire. While there will be some who read Boy Parts and understandably feel repelled by Irina’s abrasiveness and misanthropy, for me the most horrific part of what can often be an uncomfortable narrative to read is what happens to Irina at the gallery and afterwards: her experience of marginalisation and eye-watering prejudice, her own uncertainty over the crime that might be a delusion, a fundamental break with reality brought on by mental and emotional collapse.

What actually happened? There are clues but they are inconclusive. Like all the most satisfying novels, Boy Parts leaves us free to make up our own minds. Whatever else this novel is, or might be, it’s a brilliant dissection of objectification and how women making art, especially women from disadvantaged backgrounds, are perceived. Clark’s loose, colloquial style is both a perfect evocation of a particular zeitgeist and a cannily contrived screen for some excellent examination of artistic process and superbly evoked weirdness.

Boy Parts is bold and dark and strikingly ambitious – just like Irina. It is also very, very funny. I loved it a lot. I’m already looking forward to whatever Clark dreams up next. In the meantime, you can find out more about the background and inspirations for Boy Parts in this author interview.

A Voyage to Arcturus: a celebration

November 21, 2020 /

On Thursday November 19th I had the pleasure of taking part in a panel presentation and discussion to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of David Lindsay’s novel A Voyage to Arcturus. The event was organised by Dimitra Fimi under the aegis of the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic and my fellow panellists were the Lindsay and Tolkien scholar Douglas A. Anderson and Professor Robert Davis of the University of Glasgow, who specialises in religious and cultural studies and has a longstanding interest in speculative fiction.

The event was well attended and hugely enjoyable, and ended with the feeling that the discussion could have gone on much longer. I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to everyone involved in making it such a success. Several people have asked me if I could make the text of my personal presentation available through my blog, and so here it is (an appropriate subtitle might be: me making trouble as usual). Thanks once again to Dimitra and the Centre for Fantasy, and here’s hoping our next meeting will be in person.

A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS: A CELEBRATION?

My relationship with A Voyage to Arcturus is a strange one. I first read the novel more than thirty years ago, sometime during the period of my mid-to-late teens, when I was hoovering up science fiction more or less indiscriminately. My memories of it from that time are indistinct – I remember a wandering, quest-like narrative rather in the manner of Jules Verne (his Journey to the Centre of the Earth was one of the first science fiction novels I ever read) only much weirder. I knew nothing about the book’s author, David Lindsay – I had no idea he was Scottish, and I hadn’t realised how much earlier Arcturus had been written than some of the other novels of the fantastic I was reading at the time.

Something of the book’s poetry and mystery must have stayed with me, however, because when I came to write my novel The Rift I knew at once and almost subconsciously that one of its key sections would carry Lindsay’s title. The Rift tells the story of two sisters, Selena and Julie, who are reunited after a separation of twenty years, during which Julie claims to have been living on an alien planet called Tristane. Of course not everyone believes Julie – even her sister is uncertain of whether her account can be trusted – and I think it was this sense of ambiguity around what had happened to Julie that made me remember Arcturus. I was attracted by the poetic synchronicity between my novel and Lindsay’s, the lack of closure around what really occurs. Did the voyage take place, or not? Was it all in the mind? Also I loved the title, just the feel of the words, the chilly elegance of them. I don’t think it’s any accident that when Julie first arrives on Tristane she finds herself in a cold place – the word ‘Arcturus’ was resonating with me even then.

What a surprise to me then when I discovered that A Voyage to Arcturus was not the book’s original title! Lindsay’s working title for his manuscript – some ten years and more in the writing – was Nightspore in Tourmance. His publishers were afraid that sounded too obscure, so encouraged him to change it. A Voyage to Arcturus was first published in 1920 – the same year Isaac Asimov was born, a fact that helps us to remember perhaps just how new science fiction still was as a genre, how original and shockingly outlandish A Voyage to Arcturus must have seemed to readers at the time.

Rereading the novel some three decades after first encountering it, I was immediately struck by how closely Arcturus chimes with the fantastic literature of the age, yet also stands apart from it. Lindsay was known to have read and admired writers like Jules Verne and Rider Haggard as well as his fellow Scots Robert Louis Stevenson and Walter Scott, and their influence is clear: A Voyage to Arcturus is an adventure narrative like no other – its protagonist, Maskull, states from the outset that he is ‘in search of adventure’ – and it’s not hard to find within the narrative echoes of novels such as Ivanhoe, Kidnapped, King Solomon’s Mines and Journey to the Centre of the Earth.  But that is where meaningful comparison ends. Although A Voyage to Arcturus might usefully be grouped with science fiction’s early essays in ‘scientific romance’ – the novels of HG Wells being the most obvious example – it is not really like them. Where Wells and Verne style their novels as genuine attempts to imagine or to extrapolate how human society might develop, what wonders and dangers humanity might encounter in exploring the cosmos, the unsolved riddle of our own Earth, even, what Lindsay attempts in A Voyage to Arcturus might be claimed as one of science fiction’s earliest voyages into innerspace.

More even than Wells, I find it interesting to compare Lindsay’s work with Alexei Tolstoy’s 1923 novel Aelita, the first full-length work of Russian science fiction and as important to Russians as Wells’s War of the Worlds is to us Brits. In Aelita, a maverick engineer who has constructed a spacecraft to take him to Mars advertises for a resourceful travelling companion to accompany him on his journey. His eventual comrade is a Bolshevik soldier who is finding it hard to readjust to civilian life in the wake of his experience fighting in the Russian civil war. The metal sphere in which they make their fantastical journey is not at all unlike the crystal torpedo used by Krag, Nightspore and Maskull in their voyage to Arcturus. But whereas Tolstoy uses his scientific romance to further illuminate and explore the harsh ideological landscape of revolutionary Russia, David Lindsay, once again, is doing something rather different.

As Alexei Tolstoy’s experiences in the Russian civil war strongly influenced the writing of Aelita, A Voyage to Arcturus bears the marks and scars of having been written against the bloody backdrop of World War One. If Arcturus could be said to have a central question it could perhaps best be summed up as what makes human existence meaningful, and how do we bear the essential nihilism of a world in which death and suffering are all around? In matters of style and formal approach, there are useful comparisons to be made between the work of David Lindsay and HP Lovecraft. But whereas Lovecraft is obsessed with the terminal nature of everything, the inescapable madness of the howling void, the vision Lindsay offers up is more transcendent than nihilistic. Death comes to all, but in feeling ourselves at one with the universe, in surrendering our selfish desires, we can gain insights into a truer, more spiritual reality, and voyage there without fear.    

For me, the most successful aspect of A Voyage to Arcturus is Lindsay’s landscape writing. His visions of an alien planet are incandescent, wildly strange and often inspiringly beautiful. The breadth and depth of imagination on display in his descriptions of the terrain, flora and fauna of Tormance, not to mention its people might almost persuade the reader that Lindsay is describing his own dreams.

There is a Wagnerian grandeur to Lindsay’s vision, and I wasn’t entirely surprised to discover that the composer and pianist John Ogdon had written a large-scale operatic composition based on Arcturus, bringing excerpts from the text into consort with passages from the gospels – Ogdon, like others, clearly saw Arcturus as a religious work, somewhat akin to John Bunyan’s A Pilgrim’s Progress, with Maskull in the role of Christian.  

Equally fascinating is the new musical adaptation of this impossible novel. Its Australian creator and director, Phil Moore says he was actively drawn to Arcturus because of its philosophical underpinning and because it was ‘a real drama’ as opposed to satire or comedy, in the manner of earlier science fiction musicals like The Little Shop of Horrors or Rocky Horror Picture Show. He has cleverly cast Maskull as a young, attractive, sensitive man as opposed to the pedantic, sexist and peculiarly priggish character we meet in the novel.

For this is where we must ask ourselves how successful, exactly, Lindsay is in his ambition. The cult writer and alternative thinker Colin Wilson was a famous admirer of A Voyage to Arcturus – he called it a masterpiece of the twentieth century – but devotee though he was, he found his patience increasingly tested by what he saw as the stodginess of Lindsay’s style:

The man was a towering genius whose mind is cast in the same mould as that of Dostoevsky… [But] ordinary technical ability, the literary talent that so many third-rate novelists possess in abundance, was denied to him.

As a one-time Russian scholar with a particular interest in Dostoevsky, I found this quote from Wilson enlightening – because it’s not far wrong. Lindsay’s total commitment to and pursuit of an idea – not to say an ideal – is vividly apparent throughout Arcturus. Though his approach is radically different, Lindsay seems to be fired with the same epistemological zeal as the great Russian, and his work likewise offers a vast and tantalising array of possible meanings and interpretations. Dostoevsky though could write character, and did so with passion, as anyone acquainted with Rodion Raskolnikov or Ivan Karamazov would surely attest.

As a novel of character, A Voyage to Arcturus is an embarrassing failure, in which the demands of a simplistic quest narrative are the entire determinant of character action. For me it is not so much the style of Lindsay’s writing that is a problem – Lindsay was possessed of a vivid and singular imagination – so much as its peculiar turn of priggishness and rampant sexism. Lindsay does make some startlingly modern observations about gender and sexuality, even going so far as to invent a set of nonbinary pronouns for one character as he gropes towards a broader understanding of their nature, engaging with these issues in a way that prefigures writing by Ursula Le Guin or John Varley fifty years later.

However there is nothing to explain or excuse the all-round direness of his attitude towards women. In our journey through the landscape of Tourmance we meet Joiwind the angelic helpmeet, Oceaxe the temptress, Tydomin the jealous harpy and Sullenbode, who ‘is not a woman, but a mass of pure sex. Your passion will draw her out into human shape, but only for a moment. If the change were permanent, you would have endowed her with a soul.’

Lindsay has read Nietzche and Schopenhauer and boy it shows. DH Lawrence can get away with a lot when it comes to being a patronising sexist because he’s one hell of a writer. In A Voyage to Arcturus, Lindsay’s prejudices are embarrassingly on display.

Having reread the novel, I would have to frame its relationship to my own novel as ironical. In The Rift, Selena is faced with the choice of believing her sister and cutting herself adrift from her conventional worldview, or clinging to what logic tells her must be the truth and dismissing Julie’s experiences as post-traumatic madness, and I find a renewed satisfaction in the fact that these philosophical arguments are conducted between women – men here are strictly an optional extra. As we turn the final page of Arcturus, we find ourselves faced as readers with a similar dilemma: did any of it happen? Or are we back where we started, on the north east coast of Scotland on a stormy night, wondering why we came here and where we are going?

A Voyage to Arcturus is a singular, frustrating, baffling and ultimately rewarding book – rewarding precisely because of its obscurity, its own inner conflicts and confusion, its refusal to be typecast. It is possibly unique in science fiction, and shines a revelatory light on science fiction’s early development. Once you read it, you may not like it, but you’ll never forget it. I for one will be queuing up to see the musical!    

Girls Against God #1: Girls Against God by Jenny Hval

November 19, 2020 /

Jenny Hval’s prickly second novel turns out to be the perfect place to begin my current reading project, because Girls Against God is a confronting text in every sense. At the surface level, the novel poses as an autofictional account of a young woman growing up in the stiflingly religious, provincial atmosphere of southern Norway. Raging against a society that presents a whiter-than-white face to the world whilst harbouring and nurturing attitudes of racism, intolerance and petit-bourgeois philistinism, our narrator finds a focus for her rebellion through the world of black metal music and its aggressive iconoclasm. Her passionate desire to ‘be in a band’ allies her with two other like-minded young women, Venke and Terese. Together they flirt with various styles of performance and expression, entwining their musical experimentation with the practice of modern witchcraft. They begin to think of themselves as a coven, an irritant in society’s gut, a literal ‘trash stench’.

The timeline jumps between the narrator’s schooldays and her years at college to residencies in London and New England to a moment in the near-present in which an older version of the narrator is engaged in the making of an experimental film. Girls Against God rejoices in filmic imagery and references. Derek Jarman makes an appearance, and Dusan Makavejev’s ultra-transgressive 1974 film Sweet Movie is referenced and analysed before being partially re-enacted in a scene of phantasmagorical weirdness in a school canteen. The Blair-Witch-like film Forest, whose description and analysis forms the third part of the novel, is both a metaphor for the book as a whole and a marvellous act of ventriloquism; Hval is able to translate the elusive visual language of film to the written word with remarkable acuity and power.

There is still more to be had from this book, though. Girls Against God reads almost as a polemic, a manifesto – Hval’s examination of the taboos around women’s self-expression, the persecution of ‘witches’ (and witches) and the authoritarian suppression of individual acts of rebellion and protest is the cold steel, the anger that gives this narrative its resonance. As a piece of weird fiction that places passages of memoir alongside strange slides into hallucinatory otherness and sublime terror, this book is unique, The Craft on LSD. As a record of the slow commodification of Nordic Black Metal, Girls Against God works as a fascinating piece of documentary. As a rebel yell, a scream of protest in the endless white night of Norwegian summer, it is lacerating, eloquent and exhilarating.

The novel goes still further in examining the nature and purpose of writing itself in breaking down atrophied systems and challenging norms. I especially admired Hval’s juxtaposition of the forest interludes with her startling and imaginative use of the electronic sounds (text tones, old dial-up modem sounds, skype calls) that make up the ‘cosmic internet’, a parallel natural history, a modern cosmology.

Impassioned, original and revelatory, Girls Against God is a dense, occasionally stubborn book that rewards the effort involved in reading it. Hval opens up the possibilities of fiction, fusing together music, image and thought in a web of text that is refreshing and inspirational in its integrity. One to keep.

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.

When words do not suffice

November 9, 2020 /

Like everyone else, I have spent much of the past week being exhausted by the American presidential election. I didn’t get a proper night’s sleep until Saturday, and still feel on edge because of the dishonourable and disreputable behaviour of much of the Republican party. Seemingly there are those who will continue to give lip service to what they know are lies (because they, unlike Trump himself, are not morons) because it seems politically expedient to do so. When they do, as seems inevitable, begin to peel off in droves, this will not be through any sense of personal honour or desire to uphold the democratic process, but because they fear the damage that might accrue to their own careers through sticking their colours to the burning mast of a despot in the twilight of his reign. 

This for me does not compute. For me, the worst aspects of Trump have not been his personal loathsomeness, his inane generalisations, his total inability to form any kind of political argument, his racism or his misogyny or his financial malpractice (vile though they all are) but the fact that he has been enabled as President of the United States to stand on a world stage, making statements that are known to be lies by all of those around him and yet still stand unchallenged by the bulk of the party he claims to represent (he doesn’t, as they all know, but that’s a longer argument). I despise him, I loathe his politics but his attempt to dismantle democracy and to erode the infrastructure of democracy has been, for me, an existential horror that outflanks any and all partisan considerations. And this is still going on. There are still those – again, American citizens with intelligence and decades-long political experience – who seem prepared to support him in what now amounts to a toddler’s tantrum, no thought for what is best for their fellow citizens or for the constitution whose ideals they are sworn to serve. These people are more dangerous even than Trump because they know what they’re doing. Seriously, they should go away and read their Hannah Arendt. Personally I won’t breathe easy until he is actually out of the White House.

This past week has been enervating and at certain moments thrilling, a week that has included along with the tension the headiest moments of relief and thanksgiving. There is such a long way to go but this is a hugely important step, for all of us, all over the world. One of the worst aspects of Trump’s ‘presidency’ has been the way his attitudes and actions have been a green light for demagogues, racists and climate deniers everywhere, producing a hothouse environment for hate, intolerance and social division not seen for a century.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are fine people, whose ambitions for their term in office – healing, inclusion, rebuilding and hope – are the only valid reasons to be in politics, basically. May they flourish and prosper.

Tricks and treats

October 30, 2020 /

As an opportunity for partying and dressing up as the Witchfinder General (I really do need that cloak) it looks like Hallowe’en is pretty much cancelled this year. All the more reason then to bake some skeleton cookies and curl up on the sofa with a favourite horror movie or a volume of ghost stories (or indeed both).

Luckily for all of us, there is some wonderful new gothic reading to be had, and as a Hallowe’en treat this year I am delighted to recommend a brand new anthology I’ve just finished reading. It’s called HAG (because of course it had to be) and is subtitled ‘forgotten folk tales retold’. As a concept it is wonderful: ten contemporary women writers offer their own take on some of the more obscure regional folk tales of the British isles. We’re all familiar with retellings of popular fairy tales such as Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast or The Little Mermaid, and there are some superbly innovative interpretations out there. But the stories in HAG are different: obscure and often remembered only in the particular part of Britain from which they originate, they offer microcosms of rural life from the time when they were first being told. The Britain that emerges from these tales is a place of dark magic, eerie transformations, fairy mischief and supernatural retribution. As with so much British weird, landscape often plays a central role in these stories, grounding the magic firmly in a reality that is stark and dangerous to navigate.

The original folk tales that inspired HAG are reprinted in full, together with an introduction from Carolyne Larrington that sets the stories in context, examining the influence of fairy tales on our national literature, then and now. It is this kind of attention to detail that helps to make HAG such a magical book and a genuinely informative one, a project that clearly means a great deal to everyone involved with it. And yet to experience the power of this anthology in its purest form, I would recommend that readers leave the original tales and the excellent introduction to one side until they have finished reading the stories themselves. Each of the ten new stories offers a brilliantly original modern interpretation of an old, old tale, its own world of magic and beauty and occasionally terror. Each one is radically different in style and form, and although it’s a cliche to say it, there really is something here for everyone.

The standout story for me is Daisy Johnson’s ‘A Retelling’, based on the old Suffolk tale ‘The Green Children of Woolpit’. I loved the blend of autofiction and fairy tale, the one segueing seamlessly into the other to create an unsettling yet ultimately transcendent effect. (Reading this story reminds me I really do need to grab myself a copy of Johnson’s new novel Sisters.) Stories by Naomi Booth, Natasha Carthew and Imogen Hermes Gowar (so painful to read but bravo that ending!) offer their own delights, and I deeply appreciated Eimear McBride’s tongue-in-cheek subversion of the entire brief. The wonderful thing about HAG though is that every reader will find their own favourite story. Needless to say, this book, which has one of the most beautiful covers I’ve come across this year, would make the perfect Hallowe’en gift.

Hallowe’en is a time of transformations, and in this light I would also like to recommend Wild Time, a short novel by the writer, artist and performer Rose Biggin in collaboration with her partner Keir Cooper. I know Rose – we have appeared in several anthologies together – and I was intrigued to see what she would do with a longer-form narrative. Rose is boldly experimental in her theatre work, and I am delighted to say her latest project is every bit as daring, not to mention fabulously entertaining.

Wild Time takes as its template what is possibly Shakespeare’s most popular and well known play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. One of the most remarkable aspects of this book is the way it honours its source material: the bawdiness, the humour, the word play, the theatrical chaos – they’re all here, all mined knowingly and inventively and to delightful effect. As in HAG, the reinterpretation of the characters and situations to fit a modern idiom is expertly handled (Titania, Queen of the Fairies, sweeping along the platform at Bank station was a particular highlight for me and a moment I will no doubt remember with affection when I eventually get the chance to visit London again). The authors’ willingness to be bold and innovative in terms of language and form adds extra verve, and their understanding of and appreciation for theatre in every sense of the word results in a work that almost demands to be adapted for the stage. Take note, Wild Time contains some pretty explicit action, shall we say, though the poetry, humour and sheer joy with which these erotic elements are handled is refreshing and beautiful (and may indeed leave some readers opting for an early night :-)) Wild Time is a lovely book, and one that will raise a sorely needed smile as these dark days encroach.

For those daring a walk in the woods this Hallowe’en, let me heartily recommend as a companion to their trip Aliya Whiteley’s The Secret Life of Fungi, an exploration of the kingdom of mushrooms and Whiteley’s first non fiction book.

Readers familiar with Whiteley’s novella The Beauty (and if not, why not?) will already have more than an inkling of her interest in mycology. The Secret Life of Fungi takes us deeper into her world, unearthing facts and folklore around fungi that will offer something new to even the most seasoned enthusiast. Beautifully written, this book is an intensely personal narrative, tracing Whiteley’s interest in fungi from childhood walks with her father through to her continuing fascination with these mysterious life forms in the present day.

As you might expect from Whiteley, there is some lovely nature writing here, evocations of landscape that will stir a personal response in every reader. Above all, one gains a sense of going on a journey – of accompanying Whiteley both on her walks and in her contemplation. This is a book that throws up more questions than answers and I love it all the more for that. For those who cherish books as physical objects, The Secret Life of Fungi is exquisitely made and conceived and like HAG, would make a beautiful Hallowe’en or even Christmas gift.

As the Scottish winter closes in on us yet again, we take comfort in the fact that we wouldn’t be visiting the mainland much at the moment in any case. Very much on the up side, there’s plenty of reading and writing going on, and I’m hoping to begin a new winter blogging project before the end of November. In the meantime, I hope you’re all doing well and staying safe, and here’s to Hallowe’en, a time of change, transformation, and gratitude for the landscape, artistic creations and people that fuel our imagination. For ourselves, we’ll be settling down tomorrow evening with the 1989 Nigel Kneale adaptation of The Woman in Black. Fondly remembered, unseen for thirty years – let’s hope it holds up!

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.

In a time of radical hope…

October 14, 2020 /

Reading James Bradley’s daunting yet powerful essay on climate catastrophe for the Sydney Review of Books yesterday, I was struck most of all by a passage near the end, which seems to speak as much to the current situation with COVID-19 as to the overarching horror of the climate crisis:

Like deep adaptation, radical hope is a psychological practice as well as a political position. It requires us to accept the past is gone, and that the political and cultural assumptions that once shaped our world no longer hold true. It demands we learn to live with uncertainty and grief, and to face up to the reality of loss. But it also demands what Lear describes as ‘imaginative excellence’, a deliberate fostering of the flexibility and courage necessary to ‘facilitate a creative and appropriate response to the world’s challenges’ that will enable us to envision new alliances and open up new possibilities, even in the face of catastrophe.

If only there were more widespread recognition that simply getting back to how we were before should not be our overriding goal, the potential for change that has already been demonstrated could be effectively harnessed. This is a matter not of logistics, but of political will.

Bradley’s essay also chimed eerily with the novel I have just finished reading. Madeleine Watts’s debut The Inland Sea is a short, powerful work that hovers on the boundary between the mimetic and the speculative, combining personal, seemingly autofictional elements with issues of climate change and the embedded aftershocks of colonialism in Australia. The narrator is a writer, looking back from some unspecified time period at the year she spent working as a telephone operative on the 111 (read 999) switchboard, connecting incoming calls with the appropriate emergency service. The calls she has to deal with are acutely distressing, often coming from people in immediate danger of their lives. Yet the narrator is told – encouraged, even – not to engage with callers beyond the basic requirements of her job. The life of the office is conveyed with grim and often hilarious accuracy. Unsurprisingly our narrator frequently questions her suitability for the job, wondering aloud how long she will be able to keep going with it.

The atmosphere of transience – the sense that the life she is living is already in flux – is compounded by the steady accretion of climate events that are taking place in the background of the narrative: devastating fires (we hear the literal cries for help coming through the switchboard) unnatural floods and violent storms. The narrator’s destructive relationship with a tutor at the university further pushes the unreliability envelope. Significantly, we learn that the narrator’s great-great-great grandfather was John Oxley, a British explorer of the early nineteenth century who spent years in an obsessive search for the ‘inland sea’ he was convinced must exist at the heart of the Australian interior. Needless to say, he never found it. Watts points towards the futility of his quest as a metaphor for the settlers’ mishandling and misunderstanding of Australia generally.

As a chronicle of our current moment, with all its uncertainty, uprootedness, personal and political floundering and disquiet, The Inland Sea forms a fascinating and persuasive argument, a beautifully imagined, hauntingly memorable work of fiction that spoke to me deeply. It’s worth noting that I came to it via this essay Watts wrote about Helen Garner and the relationship between autofiction and lived reality. I loved the essay, both in what it said about Garner (whom I tend to hero-worship, just a little) and its exploration of writing the self as an imaginative act. I segued straight from this piece of non fiction into Watts’s novel and couldn’t have been more satisfied.

It is a comfort at least, to know that important work is still going on.

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