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.

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.

Men Sell Not Such In Any Town

Backwards up the mossy glen

Turn’d and troop’d the goblin men,

With their shrill repeated cry,

‘Come buy, come buy.’

When they reach’d where Laura was

They stood stock still upon the moss,

Leering at each other,

Brother with queer brother;

Signalling each other,

Brother with sly brother.

 

The wicked merchants of Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’ bewitch people with their magical fruit: ‘Apples and quinces, Lemons and oranges, Plump unpeck’d cherries, Melons and raspberries, Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches, Swart-headed mulberries’. The fruit tastes so good it’s addictive; users come back for more only to find that the goblins have vanished. The unfortunate customer ‘Sought them by night and day, Found them no more, but dwindled and grew grey, Then fell with the first snow.’

 

My edition of Rossetti’s selected poems says that there is no allegorical content to ‘Goblin Market’ – Rossetti just wanted to write a narrative verse. JK Rowling uses the poem as an epigraph in her novel The Ink Black Heart, which is about the dark side of virtual worlds. The Victorian phrasing clashes with Rowling’s modern crime thriller, but you can read the resonances all the same. Social media addicts spend more and more time on constant broadcast, chasing that dopamine high, the taste of magical fruit. The sites themselves are full of fanatics, grifters, conmen and bad actors – signalling each other, brother with sly brother.

 

Nick Cohen makes the case against Twitter here. It encourages groupthink and high emotion at the expense of depth and complexity. And it’s particularly bad for writers. ‘For today’s writers,’ Nick says, ‘social media is now the prime distraction and the foremost enemy of promise.’

 

I must disagree with Nick on this occasion. While acknowledging the dark side of social media, I think overall that Big Tech is the greatest gift that global markets have left to an ungrateful nation. 

 

The narrative against Big Tech comes from boomers. They don’t understand it, they don’t like it but they’ve got to engage because the publisher tells them to. It’s the ‘do it to say you’ve done it’ imperative from which the disillusionment comes. It’s hard to take a step back and realise how much the bitterness dominates thinking about technology. One of the best novels I read this year was Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House, in which an inventor works out how to actually externalise the human consciousness – put it into an interface that contains actual human memories. The Candy House is thoughtful, compulsive, dazzling and could never have been written by a British author (and if it had would just have been rejigged as an obvious satire). 

 

No disrespect to old people. I mean, I’m old. But maybe you have to be a Gen Xer to understand. 

 

It’s the little things really. Imagine waiting for a bus without having an iPhone to check your emails. Imagine the crimes that would have gone unpunished without street footage captured on smartphone cameras. The suicides that would have happened without a stranger reaching out. People I’ve known kept indoors, or living in social deserts, whose loneliness has been alleviated by Facebook and Twitter. Could you imagine the lockdowns in, say, 1992? Could we have survived the pandemic without social media, as annoying as it was?

 

Oh, the dopamine has long since burned out. When I first got onto Twitter in the 2010s you could log on at any given time and see a post that would make you reconsider your beliefs, or laugh out loud in the street. Now, as Nick says, it’s full of careerist bores with blue ticks. I thought that Musk’s takeover at least meant the bores would clear off. We get a lot more adverts for Saudi megacities, Tom Hanks and gold exchanges. But the bores are still there. They just have Mastodon strings in their profile names.

 

One of Nick’s problems with Twitter is that it devalues longform content:

The bitter truth is that the ungrateful swine don’t click. A study of 200 US news publishers from 2016 found that Twitter generated ‘1.5 percent of traffic for typical news organizations’. At the same time a joint study by Columbia University and the French National Institute concluded that your tweet may go viral but your content may not be read.

 

So how do we get people to actually read the content – stuff that matters? One idea that Nick and others have taken up is to do substacks, with much of the content subscriber only. But then, who’s going to read all these substacks? I read Jesse Singal‘s and Leyla Sanai‘s. I’d encourage you to get paid subscriptions, to theirs and to Nick’s, if you can afford it. But who is going to pay the rest of these subscriptions? The coffee house of the Republic of Letters never used to charge admission. And longform content isn’t necessarily good content. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Unherd essay mill.

 

Meanwhile, don’t worry – all the posts on this blog will stay free, which would mean something if the blog was ever updated. 

Why Conservatives Aren’t Funny

Have you heard about the right wing comedy revival? Well, there’s big news: they have thought of a second joke.

Conservatives aren’t funny. We don’t know why. Maybe they are too smart, so their jokes go over our heads. Maybe they have all been cancelled. Conservatives were certainly funny once – literature is full of great satirists like H L Mencken and Saki. But whatever the reason, modern conservativism falls short. The political right isn’t funny, and the death of P J O’Rourke has left it unfunnier still.

In popular culture he represented something very twentieth century Republican, the world of after-dinner remarks and country-club speeches and things jotted on napkins, his books typically found in hotels and B&Bs and in the homes of people who don’t, typically, read for pleasure – between the volumes of Len Deighton and Golfing Nightmares.

But O’Rourke represented something else, as well – the last of a certain kind of Republican, the kind of Republican who was flexible on detail and secure in their beliefs, the kind of Republican that could handle losing a free election, the kind of Republican that could laugh at themselves. 

One critic – I can’t find who – described O’Rourke as ‘a prose comedian’. That is PJ, and it always struck me how careful his prose was for such a supposedly light writer. The many fantastic lines – ‘Hilary, mind your own business. Bill, keep your hands to yourself’, ‘No one has ever had a sexual fantasy about anyone dressed as a liberal’, ‘We’re against gun control. You can shoot us’ – only really make sense in the context of the articles. With PJ there was always a second joke, then a third, and then more.

I also respect PJ because he never followed his fellow conservatives down the road of ruin that led to the Trump administration. He was relaxed about immigration and, in 2016, endorsed Hillary Clinton: ‘Hillary is wrong about everything. She is to politics and statecraft what Pope Urban VIII and the Inquisition were to Galileo. She thinks the sun revolves around herself. But Trump Earth™ is flat. We’ll sail over the edge. Here be monsters.’ It’s hardly a glowing recommendation but if the establishment Republicans had the balls to do likewise, we might have been spared the whole circus. 

If much of PJ’s stuff was about life in general – cars, hunting, family, dogs, etc – that was because he had a life beyond politics, because he had lived. As a young man he threw himself into the counterculture and as a journalist he travelled to what Christopher Hitchens called ‘dangerous and difficult places’ for many years. I think all this experience gave him a sense of perspective other conservatives lack.

To revisit the old joke with which I began this piece. Modern conservatives aren’t funny. Satirists on Spiked, Andrew Doyle, Unherd – they’re not funny. They have too much invested in the culture war, too much to lose, and it shows. Their stuff is embittered and overwrought, and it fails as polemic and as humour. 

The article that most resonates with me was a piece PJ wrote about his childhood – ‘Why I’m Not Afraid of the Dark’: 

My father had died when I was nine, and my mother, a kindly but not very sensible woman, had remarried to a drunken oaf. He was a pestering, bullying sort of man whose favorite subject of derision was my fondness for books.

Young PJ confronted his fear of the darkness when his home environment became so nasty and fraught (‘my stepfather was bellowing threats and the dog was barking and the television was blaring in the background of it all — a scene I still envision whenever I hear the phrase ‘hell on earth”) that he physically had to leave the house, if only to sit for a while in a local park:

I decided darkness must symbolize something more general for me. Evil, I decided. That’s why I imagined monsters in the dark. Monsters are evil because they do evil things, which is what makes them monstrous. But I recognized that as circular reasoning. No, I had to consider what evil really was. Evil was harm and destruction. Murdering people, that was evil, or burning their houses down. These were the sorts of things evil forces might do, the kind of forces that darkness symbolized for me. Such forces might rage into a home like my own and murder one of my sisters or both of my sisters or even my mother and tear the house to pieces, breaking it into little bits and then blowing the ruins to smithereens with nitroglycerin and setting fire to what was left, and then take my stepfather and break both his arms and slice off his feet and poke his eyes out with red-hot staves, disembowel him, skin him alive. And then they’d attack the rest of the neighborhood and the police force and the school and burn and bomb and steal and break everything in that part of Ohio, from the filthy oil refineries on the east side of town all the way to the moldy, boring cottage we rented every summer at the lake. And who knew what such evil forces might do after that? I didn’t. But I sat on the swing set considering suggestions for a very long time. And I have never been afraid of the dark since.

Update: O’Rourke’s friend and colleague Matt Labash has a marvellous long tribute.

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.

Everyday Gnosticism

Another day, another thinkpiece about conspiracy theories. This one is an extract from a book by John V Petrocelli, published at Lithub. Petrocelli begins with NBA player Kyrie Irving’s startling claims in a 2017 podcast:

This is not even a conspiracy theory. The Earth is flat. The Earth is flat. The Earth is flat… What I’ve been taught is that the Earth is round. But if you really think about it … There is no concrete information except for the information that they’re giving us. They’re particularly putting you in the direction of what to believe and what not to believe. The truth is right there, you just got to go searching for it.

Petrocelli seems to suggest that trying to argue Irving out of his beliefs won’t work:

If someone believes that it is more likely that thousands of scientists, worldwide, are colluding in a conspiracy to hide the true shape of the Earth, then explaining otherwise won’t get you very far. Despite the public criticism Kyrie received for his flat-Earth theory, he stood firm and remained unconvinced, saying in 2018, ‘I don’t know. I really don’t,’ and added that people should ‘do [their] own research for what [they] want to believe in’ because ‘our educational system is flawed.’ It is one thing to suggest people do their research and another thing to make claims about things one clearly knows nothing about—but something tells me Kyrie hasn’t really cared to look at genuine research evidence.

I’ve written about this stuff before. But since then, I have been reading Daemon Voices by the phenomenal Philip Pullman. Daemon Voices is a book of essays, collected over two decades, but with a striking consistency in their themes of faith, scepticism and the imagination.

Something I had not come across, until I read this collection, was Gnosticism. Pullman explains it like this:

To sum it up briefly and crudely, the Gnostic myth says that this world – the material universe we live in – was created not by a good God but by an evil Demiurge, who made it as a kind of prison for the sparks of divinity that had fallen, or been stolen, from the inconceivably distant true God who was their true source… It’s the duty of the Gnostics, the knowing ones, to try and escape from this world, out of the clutches of the Demiurge and his angelic archons, and find a way back to that original and unknown and far-off God.

As Pullman says, this idea puts believers at the very heart of its story. You are important and special, you are a spark of divinity in a fake world. Pullman saw – writing in 2002 – the shades of Gnostic myth in mainstream conspiracy – ‘at the popular end we have The X-Files and The Matrix and the Truman Show, which are all pure Gnosticism.’ Since then of course the Matrix ‘red pill’ concept has been adopted by the more malign reaches of conspiracy theorising – QAnon, anti vaxxers, incels, antisemites – but you can also see how good people like Kyrie Irving can drift toward the harmless moonbattery of flat earthers.

Pullman goes on to say this:

This notion that the world we know with our senses is a crude and imperfect copy of something much better somewhere else is one of the most striking and powerful inventions of the human mind. It’s also one of the most perverse and pernicious…. it encourages us to disbelieve the evidence of our senses, and allows us to suspect everything of being false. It leads to a state of mind that’s hostile to experience. It encourages us to see a toad lurking beneath every flower, and if we can’t see one, it’s because the toads now are extra cunning and have learned to become invisible. It’s a state of mind that leads to a hatred of the physical world.

And that is a terrible thing, because we are nowhere without ‘the physical world, this world, of food and drink and sex and music and laughter’.

I’m sure the Gnostic myth is very well known, but it was new to me, and I think it gives more insight than much science writing into susceptibility to conspiracism. For myths are more powerful than truths.

Bandages and Bullets: Natasha Pulley’s The Kingdoms

A nineteenth-century psychiatrist defines paramnesia as

‘The blurring of something imaginary and something real. Most commonly, déjà vu; the sense you’ve seen something new before. And its opposite, jamais vu, which is when something that should be familiar feels wholly alien.’

When the doctor says this, his patient, Joe Tournier, cries out in recognition: ‘Yes!… Yes, that second one, ever since that man found me at the station!’ 

We all know that second feeling, when something ordinary becomes strange, and I wonder if it’s common to people living under authoritarian regimes, as Joe does. He comes to himself on a train just pulling into London… that’s actually ‘Londres’, because Joe is in a nineteenth century where the French won the Napoleonic Wars. In this reality, it’s 1898 and England is just one more colony of Napoleon’s republic, Joe Tournier just one more slave inside it. Even though well into middle age, he remembers nothing before the train pulled into the Gare du Roi. His wife and child are strangers he must get to know all over again, his past is a mystery. Years go by and nothing returns. 

The only physical trace Joe can find of his past life is a postcard showing a lighthouse in the Outer Hebrides and a cryptic message – COME HOME, IF YOU REMEMBER. When Joe reaches the lighthouse of Eilean Mòr (and it takes some doing) he finds that the island is a spooky place. Winters arrive in a single day. Everyone has tortoises. The lighthouse itself is like an optical illusion – from one angle it’s a proud beacon, from another a crumbled ruin. There are two stone pillars in the causeway with names carved onto them. 

For in Eilean Mòr a portal in time has opened. Joe finds himself shanghaied into the past to fight the battle of Trafalgar all over again, and win it this time. 

It sounds a bit silly – Blackadder in a time machine. But any potential absurdity of the concept is buried under the gravity of events. Joe is conscripted by the mercurial captain Missouri Kite, and life on board his ship is full of the horrors of naval wartime – floggings, drownings, sleeplessness, amputations, annihilation. After each battle, Kite’s sister Agatha (who is also the ship surgeon) goes to tend to the wounded with bandages… or pistols. When too many sailors die, children are drafted in their place. It’s so grim it almost drags. But there is a battle in Edinburgh that is well worth your king’s shilling. And Natasha Pulley seems to capture the lure of the sea. This is Joe and Fred at the ship’s helm:

Because the water was rough, it took two people to hold the wheel. It was hard work, so nobody was allowed to do it for more than an hour, but it was a wonderful hour. Fred showed him how to correct the course on the compass, and how, even once you’d moved the wheel, it took the ship twelve or fifteen seconds to start swinging in the direction you wanted. By the time their hour was up, they were soaked and laughing, and in a flying rush, Joe understood why all these people had signed up for such a wet, miserable, dangerous life.

We’re used to research-heavy historical novels (the Culture Secretary, raging against woke arts, may want to take solace in contemporary English fiction, which seems stuck in the more respectable parts of the English past) but there’s a narrative grace to The Kingdoms that makes it better than most. As we get to know the characters, the terror eases off. Missouri Kite is a monster, but a human monster that war has made. He is so a creature of the navy that he feels nervous on dry land, because the ground isn’t rolling. The time travel conceit even begins to make sense because you realise how advanced technology was at the end of the nineteenth century compared to the beginning. (Sail to steam was a big development in Conrad’s time; Kite doesn’t seem to like it either.) And there is a love story that is not the expected love story.

And Pulley makes a marvellous imaginative reach into the impact that time travel could have on human psychology and memory. The blurring of something imaginary and something real – an aspect of paramnesia, and also one of a terrific novel.

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?

Bric-A-Brac And Murder

Weldon Kees, the great Larkin of American suburbs, wrote a poem ‘Crime Club’ that is also an impossible mystery. His case is an absence of helpful clues: ‘No butler, no second maid, no blood upon the stair. No eccentric aunt, no gardener, no family friend’ and a surfeit of misleading clues: ‘The unsent fan letter to Shirley Temple/ The Hoover button on the lapel of the deceased/The note: ”To be killed this way is quite all right with me.” It’s clear that the mystery of ‘Crime Club’ will never be unravelled, not least because ‘the sleuth, Le Roux, is now incurably insane, And sits alone in a white room in a white gown, Screaming that all the world is mad’. 

The mystery of Inga Vesper’s The Long Long Afternoon is no less impenetrable. It is suburban California in August 1959. Joyce Haney, a married mother of two, has vanished into thin air. The only clues are a couple of beer bottles, a bloodstain and a child’s sleepsuit. Of course, Mrs Haney isn’t the most well adjusted housewife around. She takes a lot of medication – even for the time – she came from a rough background, she has a rough boyfriend in her past, and she is far too friendly to ‘the help’: brilliant young Black cleaner Ruby Wright, who gets the bus from Skid Row to do the jobs that white Californian housewives will not do. 

We’ve been here before of course – the lonely struggle of Betty Draper in Mad Men, the research of Betty Friedan into the lives of upscale homemakers (‘Sixteen out of the twenty-eight were in analysis or analytical psychotherapy. Eighteen were taking tranquillisers; several had tried suicide’) – we know this time, and how crazy it seems now, men drinking and whoring in the city while their womenfolk fiddle with the air conditioning in their perfect little houses. We know Vesper’s characters. Mick Blanke is the haunted detective. Jimmy McCarthy, Joyce’s ex, is the haunted roughneck and war veteran. Ruby Wright is the aspirational young woman from the ghetto.

And yet Vesper’s novel never has the ring of overfamiliarity. Her prose is like the poetry of Weldon Kees – it’s understated but says everything. A half-finished freeway arches over the suburbs. Sunnylakes ‘looks like something from an election poster. The tidy houses, the flags, the mailboxes glinting in the sun’. Ruby suffers in her cleaner’s uniform: on the bus south, ‘her head is burning up under her little cap, and her feet are marinating in her sneakers’; cleaning the kitchen, ‘Ruby leans against the mop, which has gone slippery in her hands.’ Mick is from Brooklyn, kicked to the west coast for screwing up a case in New York, and he never gets used to the heat: ‘the sunshine makes him woozy every time he steps outside’. Investigating the Haney garden, he notices that ‘the sun flares from the tiles marching around the pool. Not a single weed dares to rear its head through the cracks.’ If that’s what it’s like to work in the oppressive summer town of Sunnylakes, living there must be worse. ‘There is hope in the morning hours,’ Joyce says, ‘just as there is desperation in the afternoon, which stretches like gum and yet contracts into nothing’. To be killed this way is quite all right with me.

Vesper writes brilliantly about male privilege and the struggles of the time. Joyce’s husband, Frank, is no Don Draper. He can work in a high paying office job but that’s just about all he can do; when Joyce disappears, Frank visibly disintegrates; without a woman in his life, he panics, and calls in his mother, a scary Lady Bracknell figure who quickly moves into the family home. Frank is a man who has been brought up to expect everything to be done for him, and is distraught to find that’s not always on offer.

In Ruby’s life there is the Sunnylakes Women’s Improvement Committee and the Skid Row Black Man’s Advancement Committee. Ruby’s not welcome at either. My life needs advancing too, she wants to tell her boyfriend. The tenement city where Ruby lives is described just as skilfully as the Sunnylakes ideal. Many of the homes are going to be bulldozed to build the new freeway. Evictions are coming, and near the end of the book, there is a riot. ‘When she steps into Trebeck Row, it’s nearly empty. Only a few people hurry to their homes or their work. Fine 49 is shut up. In the distance, Mrs Estrada is making her way to the bus stop, her dress aflame with evening light.’ You see the riot before it happens.

The head of the Sunnylakes committee is Genevieve Crane, one of the best drawn characters in the novel. Her committee is ostensibly about home efficiency and home economics, but Mrs Crane is also subtly trying to teach the housewives to think for themselves, and make their own decisions – to show them ‘that there is more to life than men.’ She understands that Sunnylakes women have been conditioned into believing they will never be complete without a husband, and that the conditioning leads some of these women into very dark places. But her neighbour Nancy Ingram snaps back: ‘You think all a woman ought to want is freedom. But freedom is damned hard, Genevieve.’

The Long, Long Afternoon recalls the 1930s noir writers in its fusion of workable mysteries and a portrait of a society. It is also a fine way to kill a long, long afternoon. 

Decant

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