Spread the Word: Case Closed

I was delighted to be commended in Spread the Word’s crime writing competition, run in partnership with the C&W Literary Agency. The full announcement is here with details about the contest and the selected authors. I was particularly interested in the winner Liz Cornell’s legal murder mystery, which sounds brilliantly written and I hope I can read a published copy of it one day soon. 

It has been a while since I did one of these updates. Over at Shiny New Books there are reviews of books that have interested me over the last couple of years:

– Skylark, Alice O’Keefe‘s novel about the spycops scandal;

– RV Raman’s country house murder mystery, A Will to Kill;

– My Monticello, by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson;

– Kalina Pickhart’s novel of the Maidan, I Will Die in a Foreign Land;

– The recent epic of family and capitalism, Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor;

– Priya Guns’s gig economy barnstormer, Your Driver is Waiting;

– Southern gothic mystery The Kingdoms of Savannah, by George Dawes Green;

– Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.

Update: The Bookseller reports on the prize.

Junkyard Wilderness

Until I read this book, I thought the Ozarks were just in Missouri. This was because my only knowledge of the region came from the TV show ‘Ozark’. Wiki tells me that the mountain region also covers north Arkansas, and it is there that Eli Cranor‘s novel takes place. 

The small town of Taggard can trace its decline to the loss of the nuclear power plant, which closed after ‘the reactor scare back in 1999. The sirens had wailed, sending the entire town into the surrounding Ozark Mountains. Turns out, there wasn’t a problem with the reactor, just a faulty alarm system.’ After the plant closed, ‘Taggard became a ghost town with barely ten thousand residents’ and things got worse from there:

A chicken plant popped up in the aftermath, a sprawling compound similar to Nuclear One but filthier. What jobs the plant had to offer went to men and women who didn’t mind getting their hands dirty, immigrants who’d work for pennies and didn’t ask questions. Wasn’t long before racially charged factions like the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Steel, and the White Arkansas Resistance, or W.A.R. for short, started forming across the Ozarks… Times had most definitely changed in Taggard, but the cooling tower still stood ancient and imposing out on the edge of Lake Dardanelle, a totem of days gone past.

In this febrile moonscape Jeremiah must raise his granddaughter Jo, left in his care after her father Jake was sentenced to life for murder. Eighteen years later, he has managed it – Jo is a grown woman with college acceptance letters and even a good shot at being crowned Homecoming Queen at the graduation ceremony on the football field. The story begins at this event, and Jeremiah, who rarely leaves the junkyard he operates for a living, is considerably nervous at the graduation, full of townspeople he feels are judging him. His fear and resentment are palpable. Jo doesn’t make Homecoming Queen – the title goes to the daughter of some local bigwig – but Jo doesn’t care: she leaves the event with her football hero boyfriend. Shortly afterwards, she is kidnapped – and then begins the real story of Ozark Dogs: it’s not so much about a postindustrial community as the mountains, rivers and lakes themselves. 

In James Dickey’s Deliverance, four men from the Georgia suburbs take a two-day canoe trip into the river wilderness. Things go awry when they are jumped by two locals with shotguns. The city men are lost in the wilderness, and tested by this unfamiliar terrain. In Ozark Dogs, the characters are mostly local people who know the landscape well – but it’s still a long terrible night for everyone concerned. Jo is brave and smart enough to escape the neo-Nazis who kidnapped her, but the Ozark river is a far greater challenge. The novel is a long night running wildly through dark forests. 

Ozark Dogs is a Western novel. The characters are distinctive, brilliantly written but, well, kind of Western. There is a hardass Mare of Easttown style woman sheriff. A hooker with a heart. Generic cartel bad guys. Moody fatalism and the weight of the past. Family feuds that go on for generations.

Bunn Ledford is an old-school Klansman who also cooks meth. His face is half ruined from an explosion in his makeshift lab. While Bunn is ‘leading revivals way up in the hills, preaching the gospel of white supremacy to a meth-mouthed congregation’ his son Evail, the real villain of the story, has yet more sinister ideas on how to grow the Ledford business and help his family dominate the region. Jeremiah himself is a Vietnam war veteran and a recovering alcoholic, haunted by guilt and grief. 

We return briefly to civilisation when Evail sends his henchman, Dime, to find a woman called Lacey Brewer. He discovers Lacey in a cheap motel, ‘face deep in the lower fold of a fat man’ – the same man whose daughter took the Homecoming title from Jo, earlier in the evening. Dime tosses out the fat man and hits Lacey in the back of the head. But Lacey is about to turn the tables. ‘Dime looked as if he were going to spit again, but instead swallowed. ‘You know why I’m here?” he asks… shortly before Lacey tricks him, stealing his car and gun. 

There are other subtleties in this book, too. When Jeremiah remembers the family of Vietnamese civilians he massacred in the war, he thinks ‘The girl was still beneath his feet’ – always, wherever he goes, beneath his feet.

In this broad-brush Mexican standoff of a book there is also marvellous detail like points of mica glowing in the mud. It is also a powerful novel of the wilderness, and the old lie that blood is thicker than water.

The Artefact

In Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers there is a spaceship buried in the woods of a small New England town. The ship has been under the earth for hundreds of years, its occupants long dead. Yet as townsfolk get curious and start digging up the alien artefact, its radiation seeps out and wreaks dramatic changes on people around. Not even HG Wells, one of the diggers reflects, predicted an invasion of ghosts.

For Frank Landau in Nina Allan‘s Conquest the ghosts have been here for a long time. Frank hangs out on UFO forums. Frank believes that he is being watched by people he calls ‘the n-men’. Frank’s paranoid. He prefers the postal service to email, because to his mind it is

Like sending an email in slow motion, the slow spray of data through the fabric of space, a burgeoning of spores like the vortex of midges that swarmed the copse at twilight or after rain.

Frank’s thoughts are structured like this, measured and beautiful, but often his anxiety takes over, pressuring his words, so the prose deteriorates into panicky run-on sentences:

For Frank the anxiety of knowing he was under surveillance was less than the anxiety of being spied on in secret. You could even say there was something energising in knowing for sure, a sense of forward momentum even of power yet he knew he should be careful not so much of them as of himself the ceaseless careless spooling of his unguarded thoughts. 

Frank’s problem is diagnosed as generalised anxiety disorder. He’s been in and out of locked psychiatric wards since the age of fourteen. Despite this great psychological drag, Frank has a lot going for him. He can code, well enough to earn a freelance living. He still lives with his mum because he is afraid of change, but there’s a lot of love there and he is an active participant in his family. He has a girlfriend, Rachel, who can get past his craziness because she loves him. Frank doesn’t have the monomania of the typical conspiracy theorist. His brother Michael describes going to a UFO conference and being struck by ‘the way the speakers seemed to take it for granted that everyone in the audience thought the same way they did, that they all knew the truth and anyone who didn’t agree with them was either an idiot sheep or part of the conspiracy.’ Frank is never like this – he doesn’t force his ideas on others, they are not at the forefront of his conversation, they are more like a quiet hum in the background. Michael also says: ‘I could never get my head round it, the way he could be perfectly normal, sitting there having a pint and laughing about some show he’d seen on TV and yet all the time he’d be having these thoughts, these beliefs that stood completely outside the way most people see the world.’

Frank’s key text is a novel called The Tower, written by an ex serviceman named John C Sylvester in the 1950s. It is an SF novel in which the Earth has concluded a war with a distant civilisation called ‘Gliese’ – concluded successfully, though at great human cost. A New York architect named Archimbaud Aspen wants to build a gigantic tower to mark Earth’s victory over the aliens. It is called the Conquest Tower and Aspen sees it as ‘a city within the city, an exclusive gated community that would function as a magnet for trade and an advertisement for its creator’s planet-sized ambition.’ Aspen’s big talking point is that he wants to build the tower from stone imported from the ruins of the defeated Gliese. This stone, unfortunately, is not ordinary stone. The artisans who build Conquest Tower ‘spoke of the malleability of the stone, or the stone ‘knowing what it was doing’, of the affinity they felt for it even’. Aspen himself is a paragon of self-confidence. His fluent vision drives the project to success. Yet once the tower is actually built and he is living in it, Aspen starts having bad dreams – and in these dreams it is New York in ruins, a burning wartime hellscape, and alien soldiers are chasing him. Aspen’s faithful PA Sidney Kruger notices a change in him: ‘an increasing propensity for small mistakes.’ Aspen is afraid to leave the building because this makes him feel like ‘whole aspects of himself were coming adrift, releasing themselves from their moorings and unspooling inside his brain.’ The problem – understated but obvious – is that the stone itself is alive. 

After twenty years of a settled life, Frank takes a trip abroad for the first time, to Paris to meet fellow enthusiasts from the UFO forum. Nine months later, he hasn’t come back, or made contact in any way. Sick with worry, Rachel hires a private detective, Robin Clay. Robin begins to unravel the mystery of Frank’s disappearance. The more conventional parts of the novel are about Robin’s investigation in the present, and her interrogation of the past. She is uncovering something huge, and so are we. Reading Conquest is to be in thrall to a evolving mystery, colossal and gorgeous. It is the kind of novel that defies analysis. In the face of Allan’s spectacular horizons the critical part of your brain just short-circuits, leaving you to enjoy the book on a deeper level. 

Disappointments? Longueurs? Sure. Allan includes lengthy essays from Frank’s friends on the UFO forum, which are beautifully written but also annoying because they make explicit the themes already so well developed in the story sequences. The precocious legend of Frank Landau gets irritating after a while – he is compared to a medieval saint near the end of the book, and by this point you agree with Robin’s advice to Rachel: ‘You have already given twenty years of your life to him. You need to think about yourself, about your future.’ Among their commonalities, the characters have a fondness for Bach, talk about him endlessly, comparing different recordings, the language of music is key, but again we already understand this, just from Frank’s early lines: ‘Words were slippery… So unlike code, or music, which had to be rendered perfectly or it wouldn’t run.’ Allan’s prose is so brilliant and well thought out you can understand the connection with music altogether, and I wonder if she actually based some of her sentences on the Goldberg Variations, as Thomas Harris was said to.

Whatever Allan was doing, it has worked. It’s rare that you read a book that makes you feel you’re a different person after finishing it.

The Writer’s Wife

My story of this name appears in the ‘Abandon Hope’ issue of Vamp Cat, a wonderful zine that takes its name from one of Terry Pratchett’s best subplots, in Witches Abroad: ‘Vampires have risen from the dead, the grave and the crypt, but have never managed it from the cat.’

I’m proud of this story, but admit the idea of the trapped muse has been done before – most famously by Neil Gaiman in his Sandman episode ‘Calliope’. The Wiki fan page for that tale notes ‘Though the story of ‘Calliope’ was not criticized for unoriginality at the time of its release, its concept has apparently become a very popular one since; a list of overused story ideas at Strange Horizons included ‘Creative person meets a muse (either one of the nine classical Muses or a more individual muse) and interacts with them, usually by keeping them captive.’

Anyway, I hope you enjoy my take on this old myth.

There are also several reviews for Shiny New Books, from the spring and summer:

Civilisations – Laurent Binet

Greenwich Park – Katherine Faulkner

The Absolute Book – Elizabeth Knox

A History of What Comes Next – Sylvain Neuvel

My favourite of these was The Hard Crowd, a collection of essays by Rachel Kushner, whose novels I discovered a couple of years ago. The Mars Room is probably her best book, but her whole back catalogue is worth reading – and the essay collection the best thing I read this year.

The Two Musicians

I really must say a few words about Kirstin Innes’s fabulous second novel, Scabby Queen, which I have just got round to reading. It’s about an idealistic Scottish singer who has one big hit – a protest song about the poll tax called ‘Rise Up’ – then spends the rest of her life in activism and low key experimental music. Her first big tour is of Highland towns – ‘Thirty dates, none of them in cities. That’s what makes it revolutionary’ – Oban, Ullapool, Fort William, the kind of towns no London Brexit columnist would be seen dead in.

Clio Campbell is considered D list as a celebrity, but she makes a strong impression on everyone she meets, and her story is told through the perspectives of the people who knew her best – her parents, people who grew up with her, the men she married, the artists she inspired, the activists who shared her squat in Brixton in the 1990s. Innes has a gift for mimicry and epistolary detail, and I particularly liked the op-ed clippings from the right wing newspapers and the music press about her. The very names – ‘John Biddie’ – ‘Pete Moss’ – are a delight. 

Martin Amis writes in his Inside Story that ‘There used to be a sub-genre of long, plotless, digressive, and essayistic novels (fairly) indulgently known as ‘baggy monsters’… For self-interested reasons I like to think this sub-genre retains a viable pulse; but broadly speaking the baggy monster is dead.’ Surely Scabby Queen is a classic baggy monster novel, long and digressive but certainly not plotless: Innes manages to keep an array of characters, cities and timelines going without once losing our attention. It’s a fractured tale, and a great novel about uncertainty, and fractured lives.

Clio’s childhood in industrial Ayrshire is torn between her lazy, irresponsible father Malcolm and her respectable mother Eileen. Her contemporaries follow the rules, keep their heads down and train for jobs that, in the event, vaporise when the industrial base is destroyed in the 1980s. But Innes doesn’t romanticise the road Clio has taken, either. At a squat reunion in 2009, Clio’s old friend Sammi reappraises her activist peers of two decades back: ‘She saw them now, frayed, middle-aged and flustered, people who’d never held down a job, raised a kid, had managed to coast through to their forties and even their fifties on outrage and vim, untroubled by any real responsibility.’ Scabby Queen is not an advertisement for dropping out. 

Her own inspiration is Robert Burns, and I wonder if the whole story is set around this Burns poem, that we hear towards the end of the novel: ‘There was a lass and she was fair,/At kirk or market to be seen;/When a’ our fairest maids were met,/The fairest maid was bonnie Jean. And ay she wrought her Mammie’s wark,/And ay she sang sae merrilie;/The blythest bird upon the bush/Had ne’er a lighter heart than she.’

But the next verse takes a dark turn: ‘hawks will rob the tender joys/That bless the little lintwhite’s nest/And frost will blight the fairest flowers,/And love will break the soundest rest.’ Burns warns that the world breaks people who dare to rise above a certain level of mediocrity, and that’s more or less what happens to Clio. Her world is full of decent people but also hawks, circling the skies, waiting to strike. After her death, her story is rewritten, just as Burns is mainly read in golf clubs and Rotary dinners these days. Innes establishes the erasure of working class women’s stories with more deft and clarity than any contemporary academic discourse. 

Just before an Iraq war demo in 2003, Clio meets her father for the first time in many years. Malcolm is also a musician but not a songwriter: ‘If I’ve learned anything, it’s that people really only want to hear songs they’ve known before…. hear those songs that mean things to them… Och, what’s that word – nostalgia.’

Clio is subdued during this argument. She just says ‘It’s important. Make a big public stand.’ Malcolm, in full wind, goes on to say this:

You can’t stop these bastards from doing what they want to do and hang the ordinary people. It never changes, lass, believe your old father here. You know that. You’re hardly a wee girl now, are you? All the likes of you and me can hope to do is cheer them up with a couple of tunes. That’s why we were put on this earth. That’s our purpose, you and me. You’ve got a God-given gift in that throat of yours, lass – you use that rather than your feet. Sing a song for people and at least you give them some hope.

Clio wants art to be more than that. She wants change, not hope. Who is right in this argument? Should art move the world and change it? Clio’s friends don’t know where the talent and passion ends and the actual person begins. She’s a mystery, and in Scabby Queen there are big plot twists but also the nagging sense that you are not being told the whole story, that there is important stuff we’re not privy to. For how can anyone really know anyone else?

Decant

This story has now been published in the literary journal of the Abergavenny Small Press.

Liberals in Lockdown

It’s not made the papers, but there’s been a lot of noise and merriment about the anti lockdown protests happening this weekend. Social media echoed with images of mad old men holding enormous placards and Piers Corbyn being dragged away in handcuffs. The derision is understandable – the London Hyde Park demo drew only dozens, rather than hundreds, of people, which makes it more successful at least than the ‘mass gathering’ planned for Leeds Hyde Park, which attracted no protestors at all. The LS6ers don’t much like conspirazoids. And on a Saturday, they don’t get up before noon.

There have been small periodic protests since beginning of lockdown and they have come to represent the silly and toxic opposition to lockdown – Spiked Online, the increasingly deranged comment pages of the Daily Telegraph, Nigel Farage patrolling Dover beaches looking for immigrants, the idiots who tear down 5G poles, the President telling us to drink bleach and the rowdy yokels of certain American states. The worst people in politics gather in opposition to lockdown.

And yet, part of me’s with the yodellers in pickup trucks.

We’re used to the slow-witted David Icke and his pathetic followers shouting and grifting on the internet – they’ve been doing it for years. These weekend proved they are in the minority. But what of the stalwart supporters of the corona lockdown?

It’s a truism to say that the pandemic has brought out the best in us. Chaos tells you who people are. Hundreds of thousands signed up to the NHS volunteering scheme. Colonel Moore raised millions padding around his garden. Neighbours help each other out with food and medication deliveries. And every Thursday sundown rings with applause and pots and pans.

But there has also been a darkness to this time, and not all of it has come from the conspirazoids.

Toronto philosopher Regina Rini wrote on the ethics of disease control at the beginning of the pandemic when cases were first beginning to appear in her country.

What is so ethically troubling about epidemic disease is that it pushes us toward the objective attitude. We cease thinking about victims as persons, but instead as vectors of disease or ambling contaminated surfaces. Thinking of people as systems to be brought under orderly control helps us tamp down our own fear, even as it erases their humanity. When this disconnected attitude joins itself to underlying social prejudice – against Jews in medieval Europe or gay men with HIV in the 1980s – our response goes beyond the merely crass to the harmful and threatening. In all but the most extreme cases, the disease itself ends up being less dangerous to human wellbeing than the panicked, bigoted attitude.

In her piece Rini accepted the need for social distancing. Brute virology doesn’t care about our feelings. But she also urged ‘moral caution’ – we need still to look at people as people, not just ‘vectors of disease’.

The weekend before Boris declared lockdown, people were outraged at the numbers of city dwellers hanging out in parks and rushing out for a last pint on Friday evening. Walking through East London on March 19, NS editor George Eaton complained that he had ‘seen pubs and restaurants still half full – ‘nudging’ doesn’t appear to be working.’

But it takes time for awareness of threat to filter down. Once it did, we got the message – loud and clear.

In mid April, poet Salena Godden wrote:

I saw Goody Proctor
and John Proctor
walking side-by-side
holding hands
two-abreast
with devils breath

I saw Goody Proctor
clapping for the NHS
she were too very close
to her neighbour
and both
without bra or manners

Godden’s satire of public lockdown attitudes was close but didn’t cover half of it. Under the local kindness and volunteering was a drive of enthusiastic conformism that couldn’t stop hunting heresies. Neighbours shopped neighbours for jogging too much, shopped carers for visited loved ones, shopped people for sitting in their back gardens. Northampton police chief Nick Adderly told the BBC that ‘We are getting calls from people who say ‘I think my neighbour is going out on a second run – I want you to come and arrest them’.’ I’ve heard of forces having to set up new COVID-19 reporting mechanisms to divert the surges of reports that overwhelmed 101 and 999 dispatch centres. That’s a hyperbolic comparison – Britain in lockdown is not Soviet Russia! – but I couldn’t help being reminded of Robert Conquest’s line from The Great Terror: ‘Nevertheless, just as Nazism provided an institutionalised outlet for the sadist, Stalinist totalitarianism on the whole automatically encouraged the mean and malicious. The carriers of personal and office feuds, the poison-pen letter writers, who are a minor nuisance in any society, flourished and increased.’

Like Conquest says – the enthusiastic citizen rule enforcers are a part of any society at any time. It’s a part of human nature to follow The Rules and judge others by how well they can follow the Rules, in what strength of fidelity and detail. What has annoyed me is the atmosphere of enthusiastic conformity among the commentariat. It was not just the strength of their support for national emergency legislation – what David Allen Green called The Clamour – but a refusal to admit or even entertain potential adverse consequences of policy – and in a national emergency that’s any policy. A bemused Marie le Conte remarked that ‘I’ve been feeling so out of step with most of Twitter recently; it should be possible to talk about how tough the lockdown is’.

Not on Gov.UK Twitter, it wasn’t. Liberal Remainers who were up in arms, and rightly so, when Boris suspended Parliament last year, said nothing when it shut itself down for COVID-19. Unprecedented authoritarian legislation? Dead silence from the progressives. The questions of inequality, class and privilege that run through Britain under lockdown like the lettering in a stick of rock did not interest them either. Nothing on the people trapped in substandard housing or abusive relationships, the asylum seekers dispossessed because their informal networks have been shut down. Nothing on the surge in mental illness or the thousands of non-COVID deaths at home. Where there was criticism of the government, it was that emergency measures were not passed soon enough, or did not go far enough. Follow gov.uk guidelines, and listen to the experts (not that gov.UK Twitter’s own lack of expertise in infectious diseases did not prevent it lecturing us at length).

Of course what liberals say on social media is a minor issue and probably doesn’t affect anything but it represents, I think, an embarrassing failure of intellect. It will become more embarrassing for them as other countries begin to open borders and public spaces (dumping on every country that eases restrictions reveals the insecurity of our own intelligentsia’s position on this issue.) Chaos tells you who people are. Most people are wary of the COVID-19 conspiracy theorists – no one wants to be associated with them. But I am also looking around at my fellow liberals. And I’m afraid to say I am a little wary of them, too.

(Image: LeedsLive)

The Almanac

I wrote this story, I think, just after the EU referendum. I know people who spent the whole day in bed that Friday. I couldn’t imagine reacting like that, I didn’t feel this big sense of despair and loss, I knew the EU wasn’t all good – its horrendous treatment of non European migrants was, and is, one of the great world scandals of present times. So initially I thought Brexit might be an opportunity as much as a disaster.

Over the next three years my heart hardened. It got too culture war. People got sick of being denounced as ‘the elite’ just because we voted the wrong way in the summer of 2016. The narrative of cosmopolitan Remainers versus working class Leavers took hold and stayed there. We were transactional, materialist, unserious, unworthy of being part of the new community of values, place and belonging. I don’t exaggerate – even the very intellectual and respected Leavers framed the debate in these terms. This is Matthew Goodwin, writing in January:

Our leaving is the result of a collective decision, taken by a majority of its people, about the destiny of their national community — or what most consider to be their home. And this decision, contrary to the liberal view of citizens as autonomous individuals who are mainly driven by self-interest, was never rooted in transactional considerations about money.

Nor was it focused on individuals. Rather, it was anchored in a collective and sincere concern about the wider group, about the nation, and in profound questions about identity, culture and tradition. Who are we? What kind of nation are we? What holds us together? Where do we want to go, together, in the future?

Remainers never grasped the potency of these questions — or how to answer them in terms that the majority would recognise. At times, they presented a vision of Britain that was fundamentally at odds with how most people see it — a random collection of individuals who have little in common aside from the pursuit of economic growth and ‘openness’.

That’s the level of debate we have had. The idea that anyone who voted remain – 48% of us – might have thought about the EU referendum on a political or philosophical level seems to have been beyond Goodwin. Such stereotyping and lack of allowance for human complexity inflamed the culture war. People complained about the People’s Vote movement and their gigantic demonstrations but that movement only reflected Leavers failure to win support and sell their case. But the spectacle also legitimised the tactically useful communitarian idea that we were a country divided into two very distinct tribes.

Here is the problem. Brexit was always analysed as a reaction to rather than a call for, it was sold to us as a cry of pain from an oppressed majority waiting to overthrow their neoliberal overlords. What we were going to do outside the EU, what a post Brexit Britain would look like, barely entered into it. Take away the stuff about free ports and state aid rules, and there wasn’t much there.

Take this piece from Jonathan Rutherford, one of the founders of the communitarian Blue Labour movement, writing (like Goodwin) on the verge of our offical exit from the EU. What is his vision for Britain post Brexit? ‘It will require a national economic development strategy which focuses on improving and modernising the everyday economy of child and elder care, health and wellbeing, education, utilities, and the low wage sectors of hospitality, retail, food processing and supermarkets which sustain daily life.’ This is New Labour without the style.

And who cares about this now anyway? It all seems so very long ago. Now of course we are fighting the coronavirus. A culture war doesn’t matter so much when you’re fighting to stay alive. Even Trump’s attempts to trigger the libs by labelling corona the ‘Chinese virus’ seem tired and perfunctory now.

So all of this is to say that when I wrote ‘The Almanac’ I had no idea how Brexit would turn out. It’s a story that plays on ‘Project Fear’ not as prediction but as concept: what happens when everything that could go wrong does?

It has been published by The Selkie and I should thank the appreciation and guidance of its editors.

And from now on, I swear, I will try to keep this place a Brexit free zone!

Image: Bloomberg. The stamp is from the Austrian post office. As the report says:

Austria had planned a stamp to commemorate Britain’s departure from the European Union, but when the presumed deadline – March 29, 2019 – came and went with no Brexit, the postal service found itself with 140,000 stamps bearing the wrong date.

Fast-forward 10 months, and as Britain finally heads for the exit, Austria is releasing the stamp–with the original date crossed out and Jan. 31, 2020 printed just below.

The Old Devil

My story of this name appears in Crossways.

It was inspired by Michelle McNamara’s haunting true crime classic I’ll Be Gone in the Dark – particularly its unforgettable epilogue.

The book got me thinking about the awful, sordid headline crimes in British history like the Sutcliffe murders and I imagined what if one of those evil creepy men from the 1970s had somehow slipped the dragnet and was now living in obscurity in the 21st century.

As always, see what you think…

The Old Curiosity Shop

One of my fun reads this year was D J Taylor’s The Prose Factory which is his history of writing and publishing since WW1. It’s a witty and enjoyable read, although for me the book was a bit of a letdown as it has absolutely nothing about Brutalism and 3:AM magazine, a glaring omission that I trust Taylor will rectify in future editions.

Taylor is a critic of the twentieth century old school. From his point of view, writers like David Mitchell and Zadie Smith are still ‘fashionable younger voices’. Martin Amis merits only a handful of mentions – which is interesting because his novel The Information is set around the same period of time when The Prose Factory tails out. Both novels in their way are a tribute to the twentieth century book world. Each takes you into a vast untidy cathedral of printed words.

The Information‘s Richard Tull is a one man prose factory. As well as complex modernist novels – for which he can’t find a publisher – he writes reams of copy for an obscure journal and also book reviews, on an almost daily basis. Significantly, the books Richard reviews are all lengthy biographies of twentieth-century, old school writers and critics. Richard’s life is books: ‘He had books heaped under tables, under beds. Books heaped on windowsills so they closed out the sky.’ His desk is a world in itself: ‘schemes and dreams and stonewallings, its ashtrays, coffee cups, dead felt-tip pens and empty staplers… books commissioned yet unfinished, or unbegun.’

It’s in the section on The Little Magazine, where Richard is literary editor, that Amis shows his debt to and affection for the old school publishing world. He evokes a world of ‘Dusty decanters, hammock-like sofas, broad dining-tables strew with books and learned journals: here a handsome philanderer in canvas trousers bashing out an attack on Heinrich Schliemann (‘The Iliad as war reportage? The Odyssey as ordinance survey cum captain’s log? Balderdash!’); there a trembling scholar with 11,000 words on Housman’s prosody (‘and the triumphant rehabilitation of the trochee’).’ One of Richard’s many unwritten books is a biography of one of the magazine’s legends, R C Squires, a real twentieth century character who was in the Spanish Civil War and pre Nazi Berlin (‘whoring in the Kurfürstendamm and playing pingpong in Sitges, as Richard had learned, after a month of desultory research.’) Amis is so taken with The Little Magazine that he features it in a short story, ‘Straight Fiction’, set in a parallel reality, and I like the idea of Little Magazines sprouting up all over the multiverse, like the magic shops in Discworld.

Richard is a throwback, but he thinks of himself as a pioneer. In his head he interrogates ‘the standard book… not the words themselves that were prim and sprightly-polite, but their configurations, which answered to various old-time rhythms of thought. Where were the new rhythms – were there any out there yet?’ And yet writing and publishing is changing, just not in a way an old school writer might like. While Richard’s novels are out of print, his oldest friend Gwyn Barry has recently found unstoppable success with his Amelior series. Gwyn has embraced the corporate and identitarian world with these novels: while Richard bangs on about the universal, Gwyn feels that ‘the art lay in pleasing the readers.’ Richard is recruited to write a profile of his old rival, and has to follow him around on an American book tour while trying to plug his own latest novel, which he sells out of a burlap mailsack. Critics at the time felt that the American section of The Information killed the flow of the book – but I’d argue that the US section is important because it emphasises the new world of corporate publishing that emerged from the ashes of the twentieth century cathedral of words.

Gwyn is praised for the plain writing and ‘deceptive simplicity’ of his novels, whereas Richard comes to feel that he is just too ‘difficult’ to make a living as a writer: ‘if you do the arts, if you try the delirious profession, then don’t be a flake, and offer people something – tell them something they might reasonably want to hear.’ And it is true that it is harder to make a living as a ‘difficult writer’ and time has been called for the old style literary magazines. I’m thinking here of this wonderful Little Magazine esque passage from Taylor:

Chief among these was Panurge, edited by the novelist John Murray from a farmhouse seven miles outside Carlisle, which managed twenty-five issues in a combative career that extended between 1984 and 1996. Although it published a fair amount of criticism and reportage, from the very first the magazine specialised in the short story; the more obscure the author the greater the chances of him, or her, being published – ‘brilliant work by people you’ve never heard of’ as one of the early editorials put it, with further showcasing of little-known talent provided by occasional anthologies (see Move over Waxblinder! The Panurge Book of Funny Stories, 1994) and compilations. If Panurge had a weakness, whether edited by Murray or, between 1987 and 1993, by David Almond, it was that very few of these discoveries went on to make distinctive careers…. [Murray] signed off with a bumper valedictory number nearly 100,000 words in length, arguing in a final editorial that such cottage industries were no longer economically viable, calculating that he had managed to pay himself £11 a week during his time in the editorial chair and thanking his wife, whose full-time job had kept him afloat.

A lost art. But is it any longer true that modernism and difficulty have been frozen out? Richard Tull would surely have applauded Lucy Ellman’s Ducks, Newburyport, which consists of a thousand-page single sentence, sold well and was shortlisted for the Booker. Paying journals are hard to come by, but there are plenty of new indie publishers who are happy to shake a tin in your face via crowdfunder, a Little Magazine ethos in the digital age. The old curiosity shop will darken its windows but never really close.