I recently read this fine review of Jonathan Gibbs’s new novel The Large Door (which I have not yet read, though I admire his first novel, Randall, a great deal) and this passage in particular set me thinking:
“There are readers for whom this sort of thing is pretentious, an invitation to toss a novel aside. There are readers for whom it’s a snooze — been there, done that, so much pastiche of Pirandello’s Six Characters (1921) — and there are those for whom it’s not quite a deal-breaker so much as an irritant, a blot on an otherwise worthwhile book. In the case of The Large Door, however, I think it’s something else, very much worth dwelling on. It’s not just a feature of the novel’s design, I think, but also an integral component of its moral and political purposes. “
The passage seemed important to me not so much as a comment on The Large Door itself – as I say, I haven’t read it yet – but as an insight into ambition: who are we writing for and who do we hope to reach? In a word, what type of book are we intending?
Of course the answers to these questions will be different for every writer. Nor is it a simple question of subject matter. I believe one could take the outline subject of any book – even down to its key sequences and significant plot points – and recast it in any guise one might wish. I often use the example of how I might prefer A Game of Thrones as rewritten by Hilary Mantel, but it can work the other way, too – imagine Nick Hornby having a go at Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser. Not an experiment I would personally be in favour of, but even as I write I am having fun imagining how many readers might prefer the Hornby version to the original.
What I am talking about here is not subject, but intention. Why do we write, and for whom? When Jonathan Gibbs was writing The Large Door, I am guessing he knew from the outset – all hopes and matters of idealism aside – that the manner of its execution would, to paraphrase the reviewer, be an irritant, maybe even a goad to some readers. Whilst this knowledge might be a sadness for Gibbs or an annoyance, we know already from the fact of The Large Door’s existence that it is not a deterrent. The act of writing the book – the necessity of writing the book – is justification enough. If readers will come, let them come – let them come in droves. But readers are not the novel’s only raison d’etre.
Many writers insist that when they are writing they write for themselves, they don’t think about the reader. A noble sentiment, even a necessary one, but is it true? Even Emily Dickinson wanted to be read. Do we not all, when we are writing, have in mind if not our ideal reader then our ideal writer, the writer who drives us forward, the writer whose audience we would like to share, the writer – if we dare admit it – we would most like to impress?
It is useful to acknowledge the truth of this, because it opens a window on to the summit of our ambition. Ambition is often seen as a dirty word, but for me it is a powerful word as well as an honest one, an abstraction that is physically revealed in the very act of writing.
How far do we want to climb? I’m not talking about a universal standard, a clearly measurable distance. It is a matter of the kind of terrain we wish to traverse.
My mentors have always been other writers . Not necessarily writers I have ever met or spoken to in person, but whose words on the page provide not a template but an ideal and – most importantly of all – a challenge.
Name our mentors – those personal to us – and we learn a substantial amount about who we are as writers and where we want to go. There’s an experiment I am in favour of. The results are invariably fascinating and – best of all – never quite what we expected when we started out.
The Dollmaker is published today. Of all my books to date, this has been the most hard fought, the longest in the making, the most intimate and personal. The novel’s principal characters, Andrew and Bramber, have been in my heart and in my mind for more than a decade. Finally, they are ready to tell their story. I hope all those readers who encounter them will love them as much as I do.
Thankfully, the process of bringing The Dollmaker to publication has not been anywhere near as stressful as writing it in the first place, and I want to thank the whole incredible team at riverrun for their support and enthusiasm in making the book a reality . As a physical object, it is a thing of real beauty., the artwork and book design perfectly in tune with the story itself. The vision and expertise involved in achieving that should not be understated. Andrew and Bramber could honestly not have been in safer hands.
I’d like to remind you that The Dollmaker is also available as an audiobook. Hearing my work come to life through the voices of others has always been a particular pleasure for me, the closest I have come to experiencing a book as a first-time reader might experience it. In this wonderful unabridged rendition by Luke Thomspon and Beth Eyre, it’s as if The Dollmaker truly takes on its own identity, apart from its author, a freedom every book needs and deserves. The extract below comes from the very start of the novel, which is coincidentally the passage I have chosen to present in my readings.
I will be taking part in author events to celebrate the launch of The Dollmaker through the month of May, both here in Scotland and in the West Country, where much of the book is set. Details to follow.
I’d already logged off by midnight last night, when the Women’s Prize longlist was announced, but I caught up with it first thing this morning with mixed reactions. I was actually very surprised to find that I’d succeeded in guessing four out of the sixteen titles – but the flavour of the longlist as a whole felt so different from my own wishlist that my overall feeling has been somewhat muted.
There are some books on the longlist that I did not get on with at all – My Sister, the Serial Killer, for example, failed for me entirely as a crime novel and felt gauche and deeply retrograde as a novel of relationships. ‘I could help Tade bleach his whites, if he would let me’ is the quote that best sums up the book’s many, many issues for me, and if I had to choose one word to describe it, it would be overhyped.
There are two books I don’t feel tempted to read because we seem to be drowning in Greek myths retellings at the moment – did the judges really have to pick The Silence of the Girls and Circe? This is just a personal bugbear and conversely I am always excited by novels that take mythology more as a starting point, resetting archetypical stories in a modern context – Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie is a prizewinning example, see also Laurence Norfolk’s masterpiece In the Shape of a Boar. Neither the Barker nor the Miller feels essential to me.
It is interesting to note that there is no dystopian fiction on this list – could this enthusiasm have run its course, at least for the moment? – and the most openly speculative novel in contention is not, as many seemed to predict, Daisy Johnson’s Everything Under but Melissa Broder’s The Pisces. I have enjoyed the vigorous debate sparked by this book, but haven’t read The Pisces yet and don’t feel in any particular hurry to do so.
This longlist does feel diverse and surprising and – its most laudable quality – it does include something for everyone. I would defy any reader not to find at least one book here that they can get wholeheartedly behind! Personally, I’m pleased and satisfied to see Milkman in contention. It could be argued that as the winner of last year’s Booker Prize, Milkman is not exactly crying out for extra publicity. However, it is an important, innovative and truly great novel – perhaps the only truly great novel on this list – and a Women’s Prize longlist that did not include it in its year of eligibility would be a nonsense. I’m delighted to see Ghost Wall, not only because it’s a superbly achieved book but also because it’s high time Sarah Moss received this kind of recognition – I hope she goes straight to the shortlist stage. I’m glad to see Sophie van Llewyn, too – her novel Bottled Goods was also longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and both the setting and the sensibility make it an instant ‘yes’ for me. Similarly, I was reading a review of Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive just a day or two ago and felt immediately that I wanted to read it, that this book’s autofictional approach would put it right up my street.
I loved what Akwaeke Emezi said in interview about inserting pages from their journal directly into the narrative of Freshwater: “There are a couple of things about writing it this way: first, the things that people think are fictionalised are not fictionalised. Second, I wanted to make clear it was autobiography, otherwise it would be considered to be very fantastical. I wanted readers to be sure that it was not magical realism or speculative fiction. It’s what has actually happened! I’m using fiction as a filter for it”. Yes, please! Diana Evans’s Ordinary People might almost be an alternative commentary on Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, its core quartet of characters moved twenty years into their futures and with a whole new set of problems. The plot summary makes it sound like yet another London mid-life-marriage-in-crisis novel, but the way it is written – free-flowing language, tumbling streams of cultural references, time shifts and jump cuts – makes it feel radical and new and very contemporary.
So that’s my kind-of preferred shortlist. I have absolutely no idea which book will go on to win. But that’s an exciting conundrum to have, and one that big prizes in literature should throw up more often.
With the longlist for the Women’s Prize announced on Monday, I thought I’d give a quick mention to some of the books I would like to see make the cut. I’m feeling excited about the Women’s Prize at the moment, mainly because both the longlist and the shortlist were so strong in 2018. I’d love to see some similarly eclectic and most of all surprising choices coming through this year.
This is not a longlist prediction. If I’m honest, I would be amazed if even one or two of these particular titles made it through. I’m deliberately going for outliers: books I think deserve more attention, books that feel resonant and exciting to me right now, books that do interesting things with language and form. I have by no means read all of these books! In some cases I’ve just sampled them, or read the author’s previous book, or have the book on my to-read list because I think it’s one I’ll respond to.
In terms of the number of books read so far, I’m doing well this year – but already I’m feeling overwhelmed by the number of books I feel I need to read but haven’t got to yet. So just to make things even more complicated, here are some more!
1. VIRTUOSO by Yelena Moskovich. 2. MILKMAN by Anna Burns 3. STUBBORN ARCHIVIST by Yara Rodrigues Fowler 4. CRUDO by Olivia Laing 5. PONTI by Sharlene Teo 6. FRESHWATER by Akwaeke Emezi 7. THE WESTERN WIND by Samantha Harvey 8. KUDOS by Rachel Cusk 9. WOMEN TALKING by Miriam Toews 10. MISSING by Alison Moore 11. ALL RIVERS RUN FREE by Natasha Carthew 12. NORMAL PEOPLE by Sally Rooney 13. MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE by Siri Hustvedt 14. MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION by Ottessa Moshfegh 15. GHOST WALL by Sarah Moss 16. SEA MONSTERS by Chloe Aridjis
I would also have chosen PROBLEMS by Jade Sharma, but I don’t think it’s eligible because it’s published in Ireland. Kind of like Normal People but more out there.
I look at this list of books and feel a thrill of excitement. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a longlist this dynamic and this bold? There is some incredible work being done and that – especially now – is an inspiration.
I hope to be back here next week with a reaction to the actual longlist, whilst reserving the right to pass over it in silence if I am really disappointed!
This past week has been rather unusual. I’ve been on the road doing some advance publicity for The Dollmaker, talking to booksellers in London and across the West Country – where the novel is largely set – and having a delightful breakfast meeting with book bloggers and magazine editors at the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green. The strangeness of finding myself in the company of a whole bunch of people who had read the novel was a sensation outdone only by its pleasure. Andrew and Bramber have been a special part of my life for more than a decade. To realise that they have also become special to other people is the most valuable reward a writer could ask for. This is the end point of the process and one that only ever becomes more mysterious and surprising.
I have always loved travelling by train. One of the chief joys this week of what might otherwise have been a long and tiring series of journeys has been the opportunity to read three very different novels, one after another and with the effects lingering throughout this cut-off little section of time in the same way a particular weather or aroma might unexpectedly attach itself to a particular place. First came Peter Hoeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, a novel I was aware of and intrigued by on publication, yet somehow never got round to reading. I started it the week before last, when our island was still covered in snow, and completed it during the train ride from Glasgow to London that comprised the first leg of my journey.
The prevalence of frost, the steely Clyde, the progression through the still-snow-streaked hills of Cumbria brought me close to this novel in ways I could never have anticipated, and what I felt most of all through the first half of Smilla’s narrative in particular was an increased appreciation of the landscape in which I now live and work, a joy in what I have started to think of as the Northern aesthetic. And yet – and I still feel the pain of this – Smilla turned out to be very much a novel of two halves for me.
The novel’s Part One concerns the discovery of a body – the body of a young boy – and the increasing conviction on the part of the eponymous Miss Smilla that his death is no accident. It is set in Copenhagen, in winter, and I have rarely met with such an exquisite evocation of place, such a deep dive into the strange alchemy of idiosyncracies and generalities that make personal recollection so resonant and compelling. The attention to technical detail, both in matters of meteorology and what might be termed common bureaucracy – that kind of in-depth focus on what might wrongly be construed as irrelevances – made this extended section of writing a joy for me. I felt mesmerised by the beauty of it, by the author’s willingness to take that kind of poetic risk. This part of the novel is also characterised by an intricate social commentary examining the colonial relationship between Denmark and Greenland. The daughter of an Inuit mother and a mostly absent Danish father, Smilla feels irreconcilably caught between two cultures. The tension this induces informs the narrative in powerful and surprising ways.
The characterisation of Miss Smilla herself is a thing of wonder. Rarely have I felt so close to a character. Make of that what you will.
In the second half of the novel, Smilla smuggles herself on board a ship bound for Greenland and the eventual resolution of the mystery. There is absolutely no reason this section should not have been equally compelling – yet turning the page to begin this part of the narrative felt to me disconcertingly, almost shockingly akin to entering a completely different novel. The careful construction of a narrative edifice, the complexity, the minute observations, the fascinating web of relationships – whoosh, gone. Smilla barely seems to remember or think about her life and discoveries in the first section of the novel. What we have instead is a narrative that feels as if it is going through the motions: rather boring thriller elements, unnecessary killings, bare-bones characterisation, sketchy description that felt as if it had been bolted on at the last minute. I was literally open-mouthed with disappointment.
In the past two years or so I have become increasingly interested in new ways of writing crime fiction. What I rejoice in, more than anything, is the kind of novel that takes the detective story as its template and then makes something weighty and great from it, that nods to the tropes and enjoys them but that is driven to go that further mile in terms of literary invention: Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, Rupert Thomson’s Death of a Murderer, Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13, Katie Kitamura’s A Separation. While reading the first half of Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, I had the same feeling I had when I first read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, close on thirty years ago – that I was in the presence of a genuinely important work of European literature.
The second half blew that out of the water – almost literally. It felt desultory, by-the-numbers, filling in plot. Most of all, it felt to me as if Hoeg had refined Part One to a degree of perfection that pushed him to the boundary of his ability as a writer at that time, then for some unknown reason went on hiatus. Every writer knows what it’s like – leave a manuscript uncompleted for too long and something gets away from you. It is difficult, almost impossible, to re-enter the state that led to the creation of that particular narrative. Rather than trying to pick up where you left off, it is often better to start again from the beginning, to re-imagine the novel as the writer you have become in the time since you let it slide. Painful, but true.
I have absolutely no idea, of course, if anything of the sort happened. What I do know is that I just don’t get it. The novel’s resolution – the reason behind everything – I actually quite liked. It was sinister and frightening and unusual. But the hundred-and-fifty pages leading up to it were so much generic padding. The novel reads like a cut-and-shut. I’m still in mourning.
*
After that breathless roller-coaster ride of ecstasy and disappointment, it was actually quite weird to enter Looker, the debut novel from poet Laura Sims, a slim, present-tense, no-words-wasted novel of the perfectly-honed variety that is fashionable right now. The protagonist, a college lecturer, attempts to keep up an appearance of normality while her life collapses around her. As her personal crisis deepens, she becomes increasingly fixated on an actress who lives in the building across the street from her. The actress, it would appear, leads a charmed life. Our protagonist begins to collect pieces of it for herself – literally.
Hoeg’s aim – like Dostoevsky’s in Crime and Punishment, like Thomas Mann’s in The Magic Mountain – is to involve his reader, to draw them, through weight of words and argument, into the same philosophical and emotional labyrinth that enfolds their protagonist. In novels like Looker – think Sheila Heti, think Ottessa Moshfegh, think Gwendoline Riley – there is a distancing effect, achieved in part through the novel’s smoothly planed surfaces, in part through the author’s insistence on our stunned complicity. Like these novels’ protagonists, we do not act, we spy. We gaze, round-eyed, at the misfortune that inevitably unfolds. We are become, in fact, lookers.
I admired Sims’s novel for its perfectly modulated sentences, its mordant insights, its sharp analysis and demolition of traditional mystery tropes. It did suffer from being read straight after the Hoeg, though. You read Smilla and know in spite of everything that Hoeg was pushing himself to the limit. Looker feels studied and if not exactly arch then constructed by comparison. Too obviously aware of itself as good art. Katie Kitamura’s A Separation, though not dissimilar in some ways, takes more risks, reveals more personality, distills more real emotion and feels more mature generally. I liked Looker, but I didn’t love it.
*
Passing from Looker to Eugene McCabe’s Death and Nightingales provided another jolt, this time in the opposite direction. Set in County Fermanagh in the first half of the nineteenth century. the novel tells a story of nascent sectarian violence, family secrets, betrayal and murderous revenge. It is a crime novel only in the loosest sense: by the time the action is over, a crime has been committed. Of the three novels I read this week, McCabe’s is the most traditional in form – the most staunchly realist. It is also the only one of the three you could point to and call flawless, or Dostoevskian, or both. In terms of page length it is as economical as Looker, yet in terms of the richness and passion of its language, its taut dissection of national schisms, the many unforgettable scenes at its heart it would seem to contain three times as much. One feels enriched and invigorated from reading it, certain in some sense that this is how great writing should taste and feel and be, equally certain that one can never and will never attain such mastery.
It’s strange, though, isn’t it? While I was looking up information on Eugene McCabe, I came across his appallingly unprofessional and, frankly, childish ad hominem attack on the critic Eileen Battersby in the Irish Times back in 2011. A salutary reminder that even the greatest writers are capable, on occasion, of being absolute dicks.
Having concluded his story, he opened the door to the church. Inside were ruins, on which bushes and saplings had sprouted. Through the broken windows we could see a bleak sky. A mute church bell hung above us.
We all looked up.
“See, ” our teacher said, “the bell had its tongue torn out. It can no longer ring.”
Later, by a campfire near the church, over sandwiches and tea, the teacher asked us what thoughts the bell had inspired.
As always, the wunderkind had to be different. He said that the bell had been lucky in a way, because it never had to worry about holding its tongue again.
Everyone, including Teacher Blums, laughed heartily.
“And what do you say?” the teacher asked me.”
Everyone gazed at me in silence. The fire was crackling. The flames and the silence burned my cheeks.
“That bell reminds me of my mother.”
The silence and the crackling grew louder.
*
The unnamed mother and the daughter in Nora Ikstena’s Soviet Milk are more or less the same age as me and my own mother. There are other parallels, too. As a student, I spent three months in the Soviet Union at the same time the daughter would have been in her final year at school. I lived in dormitory accommodation first in Leningrad – where the mother in Ikstena’s novel sets out to study medicine – and then in Kursk, not far from the Russian border with Ukraine. Already at that time there was a marked difference in atmosphere between Russia’s second capital and the moderately sized, provincial city in the heart of the Soviet interior. In Leningrad, people were beginning to engage openly in political discussion – there were demonstrations on the streets, excited gatherings of young people eager to discuss everything from God to McDonald’s.
In Kursk, we were still on Soviet time. The city’s skyline was still dominated by statues of Lenin and Marx and you felt they still meant business. Vast placards at every street intersection shouted Soviet slogans. The young people here had never met British students before. They were excited and beyond hospitable but you could also sense their caution – not at us, but at who might be watching them interact with us.
Most afternoons after our classes we swam in the river, like the mother and daughter and Jesse in Soviet Milk.
Ikstena’s novel is blisteringly beautiful and hauntingly sad but more, far more than that it is tenacious. It tells the story of what half of Europe lived through once they got rid of the Nazis. Reading Soviet Milk reminded me painfully of reading Christa Wolf’s Nachdenken ueber Christa T, which is a book of my heart. When I read Claire Armitstead’s review – ‘its powerful evocation of an era that seems almost unimaginable now’ – I felt sad and somehow cheated. For millions of people, on both sides of the wall and for different reasons, that era forms the spine of their being and is still very present. Would we say that the Thatcher era is almost unimaginable now? Sadly, I don’t think we would.
The mother in Soviet Milk reads Moby-Dick and 1984 – Ishmael and Winston Smith are her comrades in arms. The mother’s refusal to compromise – her inability to live inside a situation that demands compromise on pain of ruin – is tragic yet she is a great soul, a powerful intellect, a modern martyr. The daughter’s contrasting and ferocious desire to thrive – to win freedom – makes her equally so. I loved these two people. I loved the stalwart Jesse, an intersex woman living at a time that denied her very existence. I loved the constantly illuminating presence of the natural world, which sustained these women through their journey – even the cold.
I felt a particular gratitude for Peirene Press’s and translator Margita Gailitis’s decision to leave the text of Soviet Milk interlaced with different languages, sometimes in parallel text format: Latvian of course, transliterated Russian, even Old Church Slavonic. The power this brought to the novel as a whole – in terms of nuance, in terms of form – is inestimable and precious.
This morning I listened to a news item about a Saudi government app – now ubiquitous – that allows Saudi men to register their female relatives and receive text messages whenever their wife, daughter or sister boards a plane or passes through some other travel checkpoint. Yesterday I read about a 90-year-old man who is being forced by our government to return to the United States – a country where he has no remaining family or close friends – in order to complete a visa formality that will enable him to remain here in the UK with his wife and family. State oppression is not unimaginable – it is here, and everywhere. Soviet Milk may tell a story set in the second half of the twentieth century but it is a story for all of us, now.
This week saw the announcement of Hannah Sullivan as the winner of this year’s T. S. Eliot Prize for her collection Three Poems. Sullivan is 39, and much of the commentary around her win has been centred on the fact that Three Poems is her debut collection. Prior to its publication, she was a virtual unknown.
One of the delights for me in reading the T. S. Eliot Prize longlist was the realisation of how difficult it must have been to call a winner. The shortlisted collections were radically different in terms of approach, subject matter and background, yet in terms of ability, standard of achievement, originality, depth and above all seriousness of intent there seemed barely a hair’s breadth between them.
Reading work of this standard offers a profound joy, most of all in its confirmation that such work – in the midst of everything writers face in the current climate – is still being done.
This week’s unveiling of the longlist for the Republic of Consciousness Prize – a relatively new award for works published in the UK by independent presses – offered a similar surfeit of joy. Presses like Stinging Fly and Galley Beggar, Carcanet and Charco and Splice are increasingly where the risks are being taken in British publishing, where the work is being done, where the idea of experimentation and revolt is actively welcomed. It is also interesting to note that of the thirteen books listed, almost a third are works in translation.
The work goes on, and that is cause for joy.
The 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize longlist is here. You can hear an interview with Hannah Sullivan at the Guardian books podcast here. I found it inspirational, and Sullivan’s previous book The Work of Revision sounds tremendous.
When I was writing about my books of the year at the end of December I remember saying that Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s The Shape of the Ruins is ‘the best kind of autofiction – the kind that is actually about something’. Vasquez’s book is the most complex web of stories – the author’s own life history and passions woven inextricably with the lives of others and the historical events that threaten their sanity. Die, My Love occupies a smaller, tighter canvas but – like Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You, the novel it brings to mind for me most forcibly – it is equally ‘about’ something. I’m not just talking about its overt subject matter – imprisonment of the self, female anger, the violent contradictions that are implicit in becoming a mother – but the ways that Harwicz’s novel (and Kandasamy’s) are also ‘about’ language.
Die, My Love is a dense mat of language, all the more miraculous through having its vividness so boldly captured through the medium of translation. The book’s translators, Carolina Orloff and Sarah Moses, have achieved something profound and beautiful in bringing this work intact to an English-speaking audience.
The close interchange between the literal and the metaphorical, the mundane and the phantasmagorical in Die, My Love has the heart-pumping and energising effect of a cold shower. People have been comparing Harwicz’s work with Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream and I think that if you enjoyed one you will definitely enjoy the other. Their effects are different, though. For me, Fever Dream was just that: creepily languorous, a rising increment of terror (that novel’s impact only increases with time). Die, My Love is insistently immediate, spiky, jagged. If I were forced to choose, it would be my favourite of the two.
There are novels you read and are so impressed by you immediately start lusting after the writer’s next, as-yet-unwritten book. Martin MacInnes’s Infinite Ground was like that for me. So is this one. Die, My Love is the kind of novel that makes you feverishly excited about writing. It reminds you of what should be possible, if you pay proper attention to what you are doing. It is about that.
