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Month: October 2019

Season of the Witch

October 31, 2019 /

Whilst the non-fulfilment of Boris Johnson’s ‘do or die’ pledge is being held up as one of those celebratory, gather-around-the-campfire moments we can all find some solace in, it has begun to feel increasingly to me like an evasion. I don’t want to say a pointless postponement because I’m hoping – along with millions of others – that this will not be the case, although what exactly I am hoping for becomes increasingly unclear. I’m a staunch Remainer who has come to distrust the word, not only because of the way it has been turned into a slur by the hardline Right, but also because of the way it sorts me into a camp, pitting me against others rather than allowing me to talk with and try to understand them.

I feel contempt and anger for the lies spread about by the ultra-Leavers, not just the lies about Remainers and how we’re all about corporate capitalism but the still more damaging lies about immigration, about what a trade deal with Trump’s US, for example, might actually look like, what it would inevitably do to the social and environmental fabric of the country those behind the Leave campaign believes they are being so vigorous in defending. Not that we’d be offered such a trade deal, except on terms so mortifying I’d hope even the ur-Slytherin Dominic Cummings wouldn’t dare to advocate for it, but still. The Remain campaign though – as throughout the referendum itself – seems to have become increasingly self-righteous, increasingly divisive, increasingly intolerant, with this week’s meltdown in the People’s Vote ranks being only the most recent example.

We have a breathing-space extension to the Hallowe’en Extension, great. But with a scant six weeks between December 12 and January 31 and with Christmas and Hogmanay slap in the middle, where exactly is the upcoming general election going to land us?

In an era where the very idea of the nation state is going to become increasingly irrelevant, we need Corbyn’s policies, need them badly – but with the deep seam of intolerance, secrecy, gaslighting and reverse-bigotry splitting the heart of Corbyn’s Labour, I can’t imagine the circumstances under which he’d be able to deliver on his manifesto or even be capable of holding a government together. What we need is not ideology but caution, tolerance, above all far-sightedness. My own electoral dilemma is easily solved, because I live in Scotland. I’ll be voting SNP no matter what, for their policies on education, health and social care and for their solidly progressive green agenda as much as for their stance on Scottish independence. But when I begin to get the sense that the only power we have up here is to shore up the metaphorical Hadrian’s Wall we have built for ourselves through our SNP mandate, that is not a good feeling. What might be coming for us from down south? Johnson’s contempt for – or indifference towards, depending on how you interpret it – Scotland is self evident, but then Corbyn sees us only as a bolt-on, another bloc vote to be corralled and subdued. (Some chance.)

I have no answers, only more questions. Not a comfortable feeling but perhaps that’s as it should be. On the up side, it is Hallowe’en, the last bright blaze of autumnal fire before the frosts of winter (although we’ve already begun with the frosts up here, thanks). So let’s gather around that camp fire and tell some ghost stories.

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I read this article about the resurgence of witchcraft in literature just before the Worldcon and found a lot to think about. Witches do seem to be having a moment right now, which is a good thing, not least because witches are far more interesting in terms of story than vampires or zombies. Dare I say they bring us hope, a sense of something vital and necessary and important to our society. I agree wholeheartedly with Cosslett, that the witch is well worth celebrating and exploring both as a symbol of women’s power and resistance to tyranny as well as a deeply rooted aspect of fairy tale and mythology. The witch is currently in the ascendant, and goddess knows we need her. But on this day of all days, we would do well to remember the reality of what the word ‘witch’ can mean, not only for the women of centuries past but still – sometimes, some places – today. The word witch has not only been a slur, it has been an accusation, a means of control, a name for hatred, a prelude to imprisonment, torture and government-sanctioned murder. Some of our witches are still fighting to be remembered, to be seen in the eyes of the society that condemned and killed them.

And we should also remember not all of them were women.

Let’s light a Hallowe’en candle for the witch still living in fear as well as for those celebrating the timely revival of all the downtrodden voices they represent. In her superb poetry collection WITCH – my standout discovery from Cosslett’s piece in the Guardian – Rebecca Tamas has done just that. This cycle of poems draws inspiration from all aspects of witchcraft – the traumatic, the incandescent, the morally ambiguous, the self-renewing – to present a blisteringly brutal revelation of what the word means. I’ve been reading a lot of poetry in 2019 (bonus recommendation: Fiona Benson’s luminescent Vertigo and Ghost, which is also quite witchy) and WITCH looks like being one of my favourite books of the year.

With the witch renaissance in full flower, there’s no shortage of crafty book recommendations for All Hallows Eve. Firstly, I’d like to focus attention once again on Sarah Maria Griffin’s Other Words for Smoke, which in terms of modern representation of witches is as powerful as anyone could hope for. The language is gorgeous and the story is compelling, the world evoked both terrifying and beautiful. I loved this book, which deserves to become as famous as Alan Garner’s The Owl Service (which is equally to be recommended and definitely witchy).

If you haven’t caught up with Catriona Ward’s Shirley Jackson Award-winning, British Fantasy Award-winning second novel Little Eve yet, let tonight be the night. Ward has a phenomenal talent, her feel for language so steadfastly in service of her riveting plotlines as to be inseparable from them. I read this book in a single sitting and found it genuinely chilling. Knowing that Ward is currently at work on a new book makes it doubly exciting to revisit this one.

If you’re already fed up with the cold, and enjoy a generous leavening of metafiction with your horror (I know I do) then William Gay’s masterful Southern Gothic Little Sister Death is your perfect match. I cannot overstate how much I loved this book, how closely it’s stuck with me since. The first chapter is one of the most exquisite feats of suspense writing I’ve ever come across, and the novel as it progresses does not renege on this initial promise. Like Little Eve, this is a story of cults and kinship and buried truths. It is also a novel about the implications and possible dangers of rooting out those truths. It’s a book about writing, and writing horror in particular. Little Sister Death is not just for Hallowe’en, she’s with you for life.

If you’re off to a Hallowe’en party and don’t have time to read a complete novel this evening, I would recommend you get yourself into the groove with a story or two from Georgina Bruce’s collection This House of Wounds. I’ve not quite finished reading it yet, but oh my goodness, this is something special. I don’t normally go in for these kind of overly simplistic comparisons but Bruce’s writing truly does read as if Eimear McBride and Livia Llewellyn had a baby! Bruce has been gradually building her reputation in weird short fiction for some years now and this collection marks a significant staging post in her career. The stories in This House of Wounds are richly allegorical, formally innovative, thought-provoking and ambiguous. All the things I love, in other words. If this isn’t on every awards ballot next year then the witches will be rising in rebellion…

If you’re heading to the cinema in search of Hallowe’en hell-raising, forgo the seasonal shlock-fests and reboots (fun though they always are on an evening like this) and go see Joker instead. ‘S all I’m saying.

For some musical accompaniment on your nightly revels, might I be so bold as to offer you this – a playlist for The Dollmaker that I recently compiled for largehearted boy. This is more wistful, mist-ful Hallowe’en than your full John Carpenter, but there are some ghosts here, some dark and twisted tales, an elf-queen or two. I loved picking out the tracks for this and I think that taken together they do convey something of the strangeness and longing that lie at the heart of Andrew and Bramber’s search for one another. I hope you enjoy them.

For me, it’s Cabin in the Woods (again) and a dram of single malt. Happy Hallowe’en!

Ormeshadow

October 18, 2019 /

Priya Sharma’s new novella Ormeshadow has the quality of a story that has always existed.

Gideon Belman learns the legend of the orme from his father John, who tells him of a great beast, a dragon, that once flew high across the bay before coming to rest with its head in the waves. The dragon fell into a sleep that seemed vast as death, but as John is careful to remind Gideon, sleep and death are not the same…

Ormeshadow is the story of Gideon, his father, mother and uncle and the many lives that intersect with theirs as they live out harsh lives on the farm held by both the Belman brothers, a plot of land loved by one, left behind by the other but not forever, the site of promises and betrayals and – ultimately – the birth of new futures.

The story is told through a series of discrete chapters, sections of a continuing narrative that take place sometimes years apart, sometimes a few scant days. This fractured form is both mosaic and multifaceted jewel, a sequence of prose poems that beguile and engross and accumulate and shatter the senses.

The urgent themes from Sharma’s earlier work are here – family tensions, social inequality, myth and magic. In Ormeshadow, we see her acquiring still greater confidence and authority in the art of storytelling. It is impossible to read this novella and not be affected by it at a gut level. It is still less possible to read this novella and not be overcome by admiration for what Sharma as a writer has accomplished here. Ormeshadow feels ageless, perfect. Yet it is a story that speaks persuasively for our time.

A powerful fusion of language (did I mention the language?) form and mythmaking from a writer whose work is constantly evolving and breaking new ground. Superb. Read it.

Andrew’s in America!

October 15, 2019 /

The Dollmaker is published in the US today – excuse me while I gloat over the fantastic (and creepy) cover art:

Huge thanks to Judith Gurewich and the whole incredible team at Other Press for steering Andrew on his journey across the Atlantic.

The Testaments

October 9, 2019 /

I read The Handmaid’s Tale not long after it was published. I was still at university and I remember it was a much talked-about title, even then, in the way that William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice had been when the film adaptation came out, which happened to be the year I started doing my ‘A’ Levels. I tend to think of these two novels, still, as a kind of pair – both discussed important ideas, both had a profound effect on me at the time, both – again, at the time – felt safely removed from my lived reality. For my young-adult self, these novels provided a significant focus for my developing intellect, an illustration of how bad things might – could – get if complacency were allowed the ascendancy over political engagement.

I remember reading The Handmaid’s Tale and feeling a visceral, red-robed hatred of Gilead’s organising structures and founding ideology. I also remember reassuring myself that as a society we had moved past these dangers, that the arguments Atwood was rehearsing were largely theoretical.

I was a child of the Cold War. The year The Handmaid’s Tale won the Clarke Award, I was in Russia meeting other young students and experiencing first hand the stirrings of a new political reality that would bring down the Berlin Wall only two years later.

Yes, it was incredible and yes, it feels like ancient history. The Handmaid’s Tale became an instant classic because it is so perfectly conceived, so exquisitely judged as writing, so powerful as story. But the definition of a classic goes further: for a book to remain in the literature it must continue to feel relevant, ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred years and more after it was written. A relatively short thirty years after Atwood wrote her breakout book, it feels more relevant, more important and certainly more terrifying than it did when it won the Clarke Award. In political terms this speaks for itself. In literary terms it is an incredible achievement, and a marker of Atwood’s status as one of the most important writers of the post-Vietnam period.

I was not able to be at the London event to commemorate the launch of her sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, but I was lucky enough to bag a ticket for the live cinema broadcast of that event, an interview with Samira Ahmed interspersed by readings from the new novel by actors including Ann Dowd, who plays Aunt Lydia in the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood has grown gracefully into her role as literary grande dame and she is wonderful in interview: incisive, insightful, sardonic, quick-witted, fearless, funny. I feel lucky to have been there, as it were, and nothing could diminish my admiration for Atwood both as a writer and as a human being. But what of The Testaments itself? It is a book that seemed desperately wanted, but did we need it? And, to put the question bluntly, is it any good?

The answer to both questions, as so often, is yes and no. There is so much commentary on The Testaments available online now that to summarise the plot again here seems superfluous to requirements. Suffice it to say that the novel comprises three alternating first-person narratives, that the architecture of the novel is structured around revealing the links between them. One of the narrators we know already – or at least we think we do. The other two we have previously glimpsed – but at some distance. The thrust of the novel’s action concerns the fate of Gilead as a political system. Where The Handmaid’s Tale was slow, interior, close-focus, its acute tension derived from the withholding of knowledge and answers, The Testaments is structured more like the later, non-book-related TV series of The Handmaid’s Tale: information is withheld, but only until the next episode. Characters are there not simply as their complicated, contradictory selves, but to represent particular facets of a problem or system. There is action and there is cruelty. There is plot exposition in the form of dialogue.

It reads well because it is Atwood and she has now reached that summit of experience where she can – in all likelihood literally – write in her sleep. But the whole enterprise feels lightweight to me, a MCU version of The Handmaid’s Tale in which cruelties are avenged and villains are vanquished. Most superhero movies bore me because they’re morally simplistic (even the ones that strain so desperately not to be). The Testaments feels the same. I came across a reader review the other day that said The Testaments felt like YA, ‘as if the sequel to Nineteen Eighty-Four turned out to be The Hunger Games’. I can’t think of a more accurate critical summation.

In answer to my original questions, I would say personally that no, we did not need this book. In terms of language, interiority, structure, conceit, complexity and resonance it lacks the power of the original. If The Testaments were by a lesser known author and did not have the might and weight of The Handmaid’s Tale to act as an anchor, it would quickly become lost among all the other similarly timely feminist dystopias currently being written and consumed. At the level of reading pleasure, it has plenty to offer. I turned its pages quickly and with enjoyment, finding the first half (the set up) a great deal more interesting than the facile-seeming denouement, but then that’s true for me of virtually all mass-market SFFH. I did not hate it – not at all. I will remember it with affection because of everything it represents about Atwood and about now. But taken purely for itself, as text, it is disposable.

Even in spite of this, there is a case to be argued that rigorous critical appraisal of The Testaments is not the point of the story, that this is not a book so much as a phenomenon. I find it interesting and moving that the generation of young women who are growing up with the TV version of The Handmaid’s Tale, many of whom will have read the novel after seeing the series, are precisely those who have flocked in such numbers to launch events for The Testaments, who have queued outside bookstores at midnight to obtain their copies first, who have felt such a passionate sense of ownership of the original novel and its characters that it is they, in some sense, who would seem to have provoked and inspired Atwood into writing a sequel, where thirty years of steady sales and campus admiration did not. In a very real sense The Testaments is their book, not mine. That the book exists is in itself a phenomenon, a testament to the power of The Handmaid’s Tale and its own justification.

Does The Testaments diminish the power of the original text? Of course it doesn’t, and nor should it. But whilst I will hope to continue visiting with The Handmaid’s Tale, The Blind Assassin, Alias Grace, my beloved Cat’s Eye, Oryx and Crake even, and those marvellous interlinked stories in The Stone Mattress, I cannot imagine wanting or needing to reread The Testaments, which if not a bad book is a weak book by comparison. Its solutions are too easy, too rapid. It feels like wish fulfilment. No doubt I’ll watch the TV adaptation, when it inevitably arrives on our screens, but I already know in advance that it will vaguely annoy me.

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