Some of my books of the year. I didn’t end up writing about Doctor Glas. Missing are Adrian Duncan and Alan Hollinghurst.
2025 wasn’t really a banner year for reading, though I’m scratching my head rather trying to work out why. In terms of ‘reading projects’ it was dominated by a re-read of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time – the second or possibly third time I’ve read it in its entirety. I read it a book a month, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that approach. The books have a large cast of characters, and Powell is happy to let individuals disappear for long stretches of time before bringing them back, and then without much in the way of ‘Previously on…’ contextualisation: the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins just kind of assumes you’ll remember who they were, in the way that a parent might tell you a story about old friends of theirs, who knew you when you were little, but you can’t now quite place, and you nod along, listening to the story, with at best only a vague idea of who these people actually are. It’s one of the fascinating ways that the novels show how time and memory operate.
So for anyone thinking of reading these wonderful books I’d be more likely to suggest splitting them into four rough trilogies, treating Nick’s school and university days, young adulthood, war experience and older life. (That’s how they’re often sold these days, but I was reading a series of old paperbacks inherited from my great aunt Betty, who moved somewhat in some of the worlds that Powell’s characters inhabit.) But then how must it have been to have read these as a first reader, with two or three years between each volume!
(NB What follows builds on some of what I said on BlueSky in my 2025 reading thread. I’m starting my 2026 thread here.)
A Dance… is really a wonderful set of books, and like nothing else, though obviously you can draw parallels with Proust and Waugh, for different reasons. The surest elements of Powell’s achievement are the overarching narrative structure of the whole cycle, in terms of how characters appear, disappear and reappear (Powell keeps on introducing important new characters even in the final novels, which is one way that the cycle operates very differently to how individual novels work), and the constituent parts and ordering of the individual novels, which themselves are built around certain kinds of set pieces, most often parties – though these are useful more for introducing and interjecting characters than staging dramatic pinnacles: most of the crucial happenings of the novels take place off-stage.
The oddest thing about it, though, is the granular narrative approach. Nick Jenkins is not an unreliable narrator, so much as a highly erratic and oblique one, in his attempts to make sense of what he experiences, observes, relates. He takes narrative reticence to absurd extremes, completely passing over major incidents in his own life. The character is himself a novelist, but reading this book does make you wonder what kind of a novelist he must have been, to be so unready to make good on the potential of his own experiences! If all novels were like this, novels would no longer exist. And yet we are the richer for it.
There were four new(ish) contemporary novels that really impressed me, three by writers familiar to me, one from an unknown name.
I read Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Eveningson a holiday early in the year. He’s one of those writers I love and admire, but somehow don’t rush to read. Of his six previous novels I’d only read TheSwimming Pool Library (which piqued and wowed me) and The Line of Beauty (which seduced me utterly) but I hadn’t read anything since the latter was published, two decades ago, even though I already had The Stranger’s Child, The Sparsholt Affair AND The Spell sitting waiting on my shelves!
To start with I found this new novel ‘merely’ beautifully done. Hollinghurst is an undeniably exquisite prose stylist. Subtlety is all – you might call him glaringly subtle. Everything is obliquely presented, though oblique is too harsh a word. Melody is minimal, the harmonics predominate, details from the background are brought forward.
The novel covers nearly a whole rememberable life (school to old age) but – rather like Powell, in fact – skips the main events, at first as if no real reason, though it’s made to make sense in the end. And this makes a kind of sense – again, as with Powell – in that in our own lives the tragedies and triumphs are only ever directly experienced once, but take up much more time in the ways we anticipate and dwell upon them.
The novel’s set-up promises something like The Swimming Pool Library and The Line of Beauty, with a dominating family – two rich left-wing philanthropists, and their awful son, who turns into a major Brexit Tory – that will overshadow our lower-middle class protagonist (half Burmese, and gay) through his whole life. I kept expecting the showdown with Giles – the battle, the betrayal – but it never comes. Instead the scenes meander through Dave Win’s school and uni life, acting life, and family life (Dave’s mother grows into an unlikely lesbian hero), with no apparent purpose.
But the purpose is beautifully, brilliantly, utterly movingly there, when you reach it. Hollinghurst seeds a clue in a description of a fictitious play’s coup de theatre that Dave ‘won’t spoil’. His own coup de theatre arrives almost as a stumble, a muffled clunk, but that then echoes far and wide. And thinking about the novel’s lack of set pieces, and the way that the awful Giles is ‘underused’ as a dramatic foil to Dave, consider the late short scene at the Aldeburgh Festival, which is billed as bringing all the novel’s themes together (England, Oxford, art, Brexit). Instead, it is quashed, overridden when Giles is called away and leaves by helicopter, the noise of which drowns out the music we are supposed to be concentrating on. It’s a great anti-set piece, and a ‘destroyed’ set piece that makes its point far better – and surprisingly, and wittily – than the normal ‘deployed’ set piece we were promised, mixing characters, plot and thematics, ever could have done.
The sense of time and generations moving on and reaching back to echo their own beginnings is exquisite. One late scene brought tears to my eyes. I don’t think it’s too much to claim that he does in miniature in a single novel – using harmonics, allusion and elision – what Proust does in his seven.
The weird narrative process of the novel – almost forgetful of its ‘job’ to show a life as mapped through and made up of dramatic choices and set piece moments – makes splendid sense in retrospect, both practically (in its sly metafiction) and thematically.
As an example of the latter, consider the long scene with poor old theatrical queer Derry, which as I read it felt pointless, adding little to my understanding of Dave’s life. Then think about that scene – that character – again when you’ve finished the book, and think about where Dave’s partner Richard is left, and do some maths.
As a stark point of contrast to this great novel, I followed it with The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, which is everything that the Hollinghurst is not. Plots are built out of set pieces. Characters act out their thematic necessities, rather than show themselves as human. It pales by comparison. A flatpack novel.
NB When I posted about Hollinghurst on BlueSky there was an interesting set of replies about his other novels, and which people considered his best, and worst, with no outright leaders or losers. What’s clear is all of his novels found their ideal readers in someone, and also that for someone you might think of as a very ‘traditional’ novelist, he is never shy of playing some intriguing narrative tricks.
In three weeks I do the Great North Run, my first half-marathon. I’ve been following a training schedule, more or less. I’ve bought some new running socks and some hydration tablets and slurpy gels, and I’ve organised my meals around my long training runs. But I’ve also been working on my running playlist.
And working on my playlist, and thinking about what kind of music might help me in my conquest or survival or endurance of a 13.1-mile route from Newcastle city centre across the Tyne and out to the coast at South Shields, has got me thinking about the music I love, and how it affects me.
The idea of building a bespoke playlist came from my son, Thurston, who used one for his two Cardiff Half Marathons. He planned it very carefully. I remember him saying he mistimed his run the first time and had to skip a song so that he could cross the finish line to the right song – Saint Etienne’s Like a Motorway: can’t say I’m not proud!
I’ve been running for exercise for a decade or more, and I started doing Park Run seven years ago, and for most of that time I was happy to run to LCD Soundsystem’s 45:33. I wasn’t particularly interested in my time, I just enjoyed keeping fit, and enjoyed the social aspect of Park Run, often running with my one or more kids when they were at home. That long track was perfect: it started slowly, built up gradually, had some propulsive, encouraging moments, and then wound down at the end, when my natural adrenalin could carry me over the finish line. If I could finish before the slowing and meandering trumpets are rudely interrupted by the scratchy robot voice at 28:28 then I was doing fine.
But 45:33 won’t work on for a longer run, because its internal narrative arc ends too soon. I needed to build a longer version of the same dynamic, so I started a new playlist and started chucking tracks into it. I naturally gravitated towards that band and similar ones: what you might call indie electronica. For me, this largely resolves itself to five long-time favourite acts: New Order, Saint Etienne, Underworld, Hot Chip and LCD, if you take them in chronological order – or chronological order in terms of my listening history.
Looking at that list makes me smile, especially the idea of using music as a support for keeping fit. Whereas LCD Soundsystem recorded 45:33 specifically for this purpose (it was commissioned by Nike), I doubt it was much of a consideration for New Order when they were making The Perfect Kiss or True Faith. Nor would I have imagined, when I was first listening to those tracks, that I’d be using them in this way. At that age I was not interested whatsoever in any form of keep-fit. (I kept fit through walking, daily and on holidays. I swam a bit.)
Thought: What is the connection between dancing/clubbing/raving as an unintended form of exercise, in youth, and running, in middle age? How many people transition, without really considering it, from one to the other?
(I was never really a clubber or a raver, to be clear.)
These five acts suit my purpose, because although they’re all dance-y, they’re not massively high-energy four-to-the-floor dance acts. My goal is to get round the course, and a big risk is setting off too fast, at 5k pace, and burning out early. So I wanted longish, loosely-paced pieces, without too much in the way of internal dynamics – crescendos and climaxes – that will accompany me on the journey, without necessarily pushing me too far.
That and I know this music inside out. The huge importance to my listening life of New Order’s Substance (owned on cassette tape, then CD) can’t be overstated in terms of my affinity for those five- to eight-minute-long tracks, their laidback dancefloor vibes. I could run to them forever.
So I put a whole bunch of songs on the playlist, and ran to it on shuffle, noting tracks to delete, and tracks that might fit at different stages of the run. Songs to warm me up. Songs to ease me into a regular pace. Songs to push me on and encourage me. Songs to celebrate the home straight. Sometimes you want someone whispering positive vibes in your ear (my wife has Jo Wiley doing that for her on her Couch to 5k app). Sometimes you want something a bit harder, to give you the occasional push. (The almost metal keyboard riffs in The Perfect Kiss.) Mostly you just want the boat master hitting their big old drum to a more or less regular beat.
I wanted something gentle to start me off, and settled on the 20-minute ‘Thing in a Book’ remix of Underworld’s Dark and Long. No one’s going to overstretch themselves to that. The beginning of the Great North Run, with 60,000 people taking part, is likely to be slow and confused in any case. I originally followed this with Hot Chip’s Colours, from their The Warning LP, which is pretty gentle, but then slotted in before it Pete Heller’s remix of Saint Etienne’s Let’s Kiss and Make Up. Belle and Sebastian’s Electronic Renaissance goes well after this – such a lovely song, and I always feel guilty that it’s the song of theirs I listen to most. I wish they’d given themselves a wider palette for their songwriting after their first couple of albums. But also: how I listen to music has changed dramatically since I first started listening to them.
(And also again: How our relationship to certain acts is linked to their progress as‘album bands’, and how those albums mark points in their existences, and ours, is something I’d like to write more on. An album, for the band, is a resumé of and a commentary on their progress over the past year or years, but it becomes, for the listener, an unfolding emotional blueprint of the years that follow. We’re always out of step with each other. Acts presumably feel the need to develop from record to record, and we want that, but we want them to develop along with us, and that is a tall order. It’s weird but I find not uncommon for me to part ways with an act and then find us reconverting. It happened with Underworld, and with Saint Etienne. I haven’t yet parted ways with LCD Soundsystem. I have, kind of, with Hot Chip, but I hold out hope. I can’t see a coming-back-together with New Order.)
But it wasn’t just those five bands. I wanted other stuff in there. Some are indie-dance-pop classics: Annie’s Chewing Gum, Sleigh Bells’ Rill Rill, CSS’s Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death From Above – there’s nothing to get a tired middle-aged man running faster than hearing Lovefoxxx sing “You are so talented, I’m in love”. Some are propulsive oddities: Sprawl II by Arcade Fire, Give/Take by Porridge Radio, Verstärker by Blumfeld, and, in a move that might well surprise its creator, the gorgeous, rackety I Can Take All This by James Yorkston – not least for the delicious homophone title line as sung in the chorus, which you can hear just as easily as “I can tickle this from you” and “I can take all this from you”.
I’m still wavering over My Bloody Valentine’s Soon. It seems to work, but if I don’t feel it on the day, I can always skip it.
The clearest and perhaps most unexpected takeaway from these ‘audition’ runs was that the best band of all of these to run to is: Hot Chip. Now I love Hot Chip (but, as I say, there are albums of theirs that have passed me by entirely), but I’ve never been devoted to them, in the way I have been to Saint Etienne, New Order, Belle and Sebastian. But boy, they make great running music:
The basic beats are good: propulsive, looping, with interesting structures and ways of layering the songs so they don’t seem to be verse-chorus-verse-chorus-chorus, even when they actually are.
Fun sounds – most dance music for clubbing is boring, because the bass and drums are providing everything that you’re there for. And there’s a lightshow, of sorts, probably. But when you’re running, it’s nice to have some quirky, engaging, enchanting sounds on top of those beats.
Lyrics that range from the daft (“Hot Chip will break your legs”) to the apposite ( “Work that inside, outside, work that more”, but also “I’m in no fit state, I’m in no fit shape”) to the downright affecting (“Acting hard’s been tough”).
It would be easy to make a whole playlist of LCD songs, or Underworld, but they’d be too serious. I need some cheering up, and cheering along, as I’m pounding those hard middle miles.
Which brings me to my second realisation about these bands, partly independently of their inadvertent creators as running soundtracks: their position on what I’d call the silliness-seriousness spectrum, or: the subtle pervasiveness of irony throughout all ‘adult-oriented’ (in the broadest sense) pop music.
Item: pop music is silly. It’s for kids. It’s not serious, like classical music, or folk balladry, or jazz. (Rock is silly, too, in an analogous but slightly different way.)
Item: we know it’s silly, and they (the bands and artists) know it’s silly. But we all pretend to take it (and make it) seriously. But not entirely. The inherent silliness is acknowledged in the form of irony that is expressed, variously, through: lyrics, vocal performance, melody, texture of instrumentation, production more broadly.
So when I say that Underworld are at the far ‘serious’ end of the spectrum, I don’t deny the silliness of Karl Hyde’s lyrics, but his vocal performance layers that silliness with a self-aware lack of seriousness that allows us to take them/it seriously.
The same with James Murphy’s singing in LCD. The knowledge that it’s inherently silly for a grown man to be standing on stage pretending to be a rock star is absolutely ingrained throughout all their/his music. Its acknowledgement of its own silliness is what allows us to take it seriously.
New Order is a far stranger case. (I’m working leftwards, from the serious end of the spectrum to the ‘silly’ – or probably I should say ‘unserious’ – end.) Bernard Sumner’s lyrics are avowedly silly. Or no, they’re not silly: by and large they’re crap. But, apart from the very rare exception (“I think you are a pig, you should be in a zoo”), they are not consciously, self-awarely crap. He says in interviews that the lyrics are barely thought about, they’re the last thing to be added to the song, but there’s nothing in his performance to suggest that. They’re just something songs have to have, so he’ll do them. Whereas the off-handedness of James Murphy’s delivery allows us to see how seriously he does take his lyrics. Bernard is blank-faced, by comparison. He’s pop singer as clown, hiding behind the entirely conventional make-up of the role.
Hot Chip are an intelligent band, and Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard are expert vocal performers (rather than singers, as such) who deliver their lyrics with true, honest and honourable irony. Irony, let’s be clear, doesn’t mean meaning the opposite of what it says, but rather always able to be read in two different ways. They’re serious AND they’re not serious. They refract their seriousness through the profoundly unserious form of pop music. The proof of their sincerity is that no one could possible be sincere about such things, in such a mode. (Whereas Bernard Sumner, you might say, is NEITHER serious NOR not serious in his lyrics and singing.)
This irony is something I’d like to write more on as well. It occurred to me on my practice run today to reflect on the lyrics to CSS’s Let’s Make Love. When Lovefoxxx sings “You are so talented, I’m in love”, is she singing to me, personally? Well clearly, yes, and equally clearly, no. Am I allowed to think she means me, as her words come through my earphones while I stump down the eighth mile of my half-marathon? Yes! Am I allowed to think she means me as I stand in the crowd and imagine she’s making eye contact with me during the performance. Also yes! Am I allowed to think she means it at any point outside of the context of the song? No, of course not. Irony – the invitation to/the necessity of reading a text in different, even opposing ways – is central to pop music because it allows us to carry that music into the rest of our life in a safe way. It’s meaningful, and it’s meaningless. It’s disposal art that in the important cases stays with us, disposably, for decades. At any and every moment, both it and we recognise that it could be discarded without loss, but at every moment, we don’t. We hold its disposability close. (Why is that? Why do you think!)
Then we come to Saint Etienne, beloved Saint Etienne. They’re not silly, of course they’re not. What they are is profoundly serious about the silliest thing in the world: pop music. I’m not sure I can write about Saint Etienne just now. With their final album coming later this year, maybe there’ll be a chance then.
Below is my playlist (in a working state). Any suggestions, gratefully received.
Next week I plan to write in more detail about one song on the list (not yet mentioned) that I think is the Greatest Running Song ever.
Also, I’m raising money for NHS Together on my Great North Run. Please donate here.
I promised I was going to share my favourite semi-colon in All Literature. This accolade used to belong to F. Scott Fitzgerald, for a beautifully ironical semi-colon in his story (or perhaps novella) May Day, which I’ll share again now.
Here is the whole paragraph, which comes in the fourth part of the story, when we have already met, first of all, Gordon Sterrett, a Yale alumnus and World War I veteran down on his luck, and his ex-girlfriend, Edith Bradin, who as we can see quite fancies getting back together with him.
Edith, less fatuously, would have been content to cure Gordon Sterrett. There was a quality of weakness in Gordon that she wanted to take care of; there was a helplessness in him that she wanted to protect. And she wanted someone she had known a long while, someone who had loved her a long while. She was a little tired; she wanted to get married. Out of a pile of letters, half a dozen pictures and as many memories, and this weariness, she had decided that next time she saw Gordon their relations were going to be changed. She would say something that would change them. There was this evening. This was her evening. All evenings were her evenings.
For the avoidance of doubt, it’s second semi-colon in the paragraph that is the near-unsurpassable one. The first one is perfectly good. It does what semi-colons should primarily be used for: to take two sentences that aren’t quite logically connected (like you do with a colon, like I’m doing in this sentences) and bring them closer together. To bring them into relation with one another.
There was a quality of weakness in Gordon that she wanted to take care of; there was a helplessness in him that she wanted to protect.
The second thought is not a logical consequence of the first; rather, it’s partly an expansion of it that is also partly a reworking of it. Edith is rethinking her thought about Gordon, revising and refining it. I like to think of semi-colons as being Janus-faced, pointing the reader backwards as well as forwards. They backpedal the bike, encourage you to rewind, or skip backwards, and look at this new sentence in the light of or alongside the earlier one.
But the second semi-colon… oh! the second semi-colon.
It is the third sentence in a row that is built of different parallel elements. The first is the one quoted above. The second is a continuation of that one:
And she wanted someone she had known a long while, someone who had loved her a long while.
Here the second part is again an expansion and a revision of the first part. You couldn’t replace that comma with a semi-colon, though: that would be grammatically incorrect. You could write it “And she wanted someone she had known a long while; she wanted someone who had loved her a long while”, but that would be syntactically repetitive. It really wouldn’t work. You want the idea that her mind is beginning to slide, to slip gears (which is the effect you get with the comma splice, the opposite punctuating process, as I explain here) and lose focus. Then you get it:
She was a little tired; she wanted to get married.
It’s completely correct as a construction, but it’s operating on a different principle. Whereas the first example showed someone refining and revising a thought, here you have a quite marvellous and quietly hilarious non-sequitur, an almost flailing attempt by Edith to account for her lack of focus. As well as a rewind or skip backwards button for the sentence, the semi-colon can also function as a fulcrum, the balance of a set of weighing scales, that asks the reader to hold the two parts of the sentence in balance and measure them against each other. The thought She was a little tired has the same weight for Edith, the same significance, as the thought She wanted to get married. Which is delightfully daft. As if marriage might be the cure for tiredness.
Semi-colon as rewind or skip back button.
Semi-colon as fulcrum for a set of weighing scales.
But semi-colons, like all punctuation marks, are also rhythmic devices, that indicate to the reader the pace and regularity with which they should read the prose in question. What students don’t understand about the semi-colon is that it doesn’t have rules you need to follow (there are rules, kinda, but like all punctuation rules they are more broadly conventions, and can be bent and broken by those who know them well), but that it does demand an aesthetic: it’s not enough to use it right, you’ve got to use it well.
Take any two sentences in this post that are separated by a full stop, replace that full stop with a semi-colon, and decapitalise the first letter of that comes after it, and hey presto! You’ve got a grammatically correct sentence. But it almost certainly adds nothing to the reading experience.
And indeed it’s notable that the rest of this self-same paragraph of Fitzgerald continues to vary its sentence length and syntactic strategies. After nearly losing control of her thought process (almost falling into a daze, you might say), Edith gathers herself and marshals her forces:
Out of a pile of letters, half a dozen pictures and as many memories, and this weariness, she had decided that next time she saw Gordon their relations were going to be changed.
She is now back in charge of her thinking. The final four sentences are short, assertive, almost martial in their chest-beating affirmation of self. She would say something that would change them. There was this evening. This was her evening. All evenings were her evenings. Edith is manifesting. Edith, it has to be said, is hyperbolising.
For many years I held up Fitzgerald’s semi-colon as the greatest in All Literature, but a couple of years ago I found one I loved even more, that was more purely, gorgeously exemplary of what semi-colons can do, of what they suggest about the possibilities of prose.
This comes from Nicholson Baker’s splendid Room Temperature, his short second novel of 1990 that takes 116 pages to narrate twenty-odd seconds’ worth of train of thought of new dad Mike as, sat in an armchair, he gives his and his wife’s Patty’s baby, nicknamed The Bug, her bottle of milk.
As with many of Baker’s books, the narrative is constructed almost entirely out of digressionary thoughts, about… well about all manner of things. But if you buy the contemporary nostrum that love equals attention, then Baker and his protagonist are chock full of love. So many overlooked aspects of the world are worthy of his attention, but all of these thought process lead back to his family. It’s a thoroughly heartwarming domestic message, that is only and all the more palatable for the weird avenues it takes to get there.
The semi-colon comes towards the end of the ninth chapter or section (of fifteen), which picks up a previous digression in which Mike was remembering how he loves listening to his wife Patty write in her notebook, which she does at night, recording the latest “Bug events”, Mike listening and trying to decode from the sound of her pen on the page the words she’s writing. (This digression was pack in ‘chapter’ three, to give you an idea of the convolutedness of the novel’s narrative operation.)
Anyway, chapter nine is eleven pages long (covering ten and two half pages), and in it Baker deploys no fewer than ten semi-colons. The stupendous one is the last of these, but I’ll take you through the others first. It’s important.
I knew her spelling was uncertain, of course—but I thought her “imagination” and “seperate” and “ellephant” were bits of colorful camouflage that her brain cleverly hid behind, so that her intelligence would inspire affection rather than jealousy; and when Mrs. Nesmith, my third-grade teacher, once sneeringly circled “exqused” on a note my mother had hastily written for me, I felt a greater pointedness of dislike toward that rouged and girdled witch than when she ridiculed my Beatle haircut or told Jim Heydemann and me that we would go blind reading Jules Verne.
Mike is thinking about his mother, and the way she had tried to civilise and educate him, and how at times he’d been mean to her about her spelling. The semi-colon here, it must be said, is unconventional, in that it defies the simple guidance that it should connect two complete sentences, and because the second half of this one begins with “and”, it would perhaps be more correct to use a second em-dash to close the parenthesis. But certainly the semi-colon helps the reader in following the sense of the sentence. (These, unlike Fitzgerald, will mostly be long sentences. Long sentences are part of the digressive strategy of Room Temperature, so appropriate punctuation – here meaning helpful – as well as precision-engineered phrasing, is essential.
But my mother’s informal punctuation in the op-ed letter came as a complete surprise; and the fact that my immediate instinctive response to it was to point out the misplaced commas so harshly that she wept (the only time, as far as I remember, that I ever hurt her feelings—for she understood and was even amused by my teenage request that whenever the two of us walked down the street together, she would please walk at least three yards ahead of me, so that people wouldn’t know we were related; and she even played along in her compliance, whistling, walking with a theatrical solitariness, checking her pocketbook, pausing abruptly to glance at a window display), as if these faulty commas called into question our standing as a family—the fact that I had been instinctively so cruel, made me double up with misery when, after I was married, I came across some sentences in Boswell that were punctuated just as hers had been.
This continuation of Mike’s previous thought about his snotty childhood treatment of his mother comes on the next page (there’s at least one more digression seperating them) and takes the form of a 163-word sentence in which a semi-colon is used twice, and again to pause before an “and” conjunction that ‘properly’ should be marked off with a comma. This is very much the way that semi-colons used to be used in the 19th Century, when people regularly wrote many-hundred-words-long sentences, and many-thousand-words-long paragraphs, the reader needed help to get through the thicket, like a rock-climber uses ‘protection’ as they ascend the rock face, that, if they should fall, will catch their rope and halt their descent before they hit the ground. A semi-colon, in a long sentence, can do the same thing, can give you a point of safety to retreat to, to regroup and set forth again.
You can skim the long sentence that contains the next two examples if you like. But this you should know: it’s in the part of the chapter in which Mike digresses into his love of the comma as punctuation mark, his obsession with punctuation in general, and his daydream of writing the definitive history of the comma. It’s wilfully opaque and arcane, as Mike (now) satirises his pipe dream (then).
I saw myself looking up old printers’ manuals, or snagging a fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks to study the failed attempts by Byzantine lexicographers to impose various systems of high, middle, and low marks on lines of manuscript that indicated values of pause I’d have to get some Greek going, too); I’d check into Carolingian breath marks and the disappearance of the virgule, and maybe I’d tour colometry, seeing what I could make of conventions of scribal payment and their incentive to reduce the numbers of pages by the removal of interword spaces, and the muting effect of whole phrase-spacing in turn on the need for graphical punctuation; and then I’d glance at the growth of sophisticated conventions of abbreviation and their suppression of the full potential of a simultaneously comprehensible system of disjunction that relied on the same symbols.
I’ll point out now that the supremacy of the final semi-colon depends, for its effect, on these… not merely digressions, but longeurs, or research rabbit holes – rabbit holes in fact that are so dense with data that they collapse on themselves and become black holes. The more you’re aware of the form and content of what comes before it, the more solidly this glorious semi-colon will knock you right out of the park. We’re not there yet. Press on. (Note: Paleography is the study of ancient writing systems.)
But of course I had a family; I had a Bug to take care of; instead of reading journals of paleography, I lay awake listening to my wife write in felt-tip pen in her journal; any sort of furious antiquarianism was impossible in this lulling domestic setting.
This, it’s important to say, is the first time Mike has mentioned the Bug and his wife in this chapter since its first line: “Even so, when Patty’s handwriting paused for a moment that evening soon after the Bug was born…” (though he’s cradling her as she feeds all the time he’s thinking these ludicrously labyrinthine thoughts). We’re nine pages into the eleven-page chapter.
In this sentence (these sentences?), to reiterate, the semi-colons aren’t doing the clever rewinding or balancing act of Fitzgerald’s sentences. Instead, they are acting like staging posts, like pumped-up commas that call for a bigger inhale before you read onwards. Though here the sentences shorten: he’s winding in his thinking from those serpentine excursions: he’s focusing on the matter in hand. And in fact he could have used colons in place of his semi-colons, as I did in that last sentence.
We’re nearly there now. This penultimate example in the chapter comes from another self-ironising section in which Mike imagines that he has written his world-beating history of the comma, and goes to conferences where people stare at him, amazed and appalled. I’ll give you the whole of what Mike imagines people saying about him:
“See that guy there with the terrible posture? He’s the world’s authority on the comma. He’s studied the negative spaces in prose for twenty-eight years! He sees the comma as the embodiment of civilization, as the true ‘volute’ in ‘evolution’; he’s tried to focus all of humane letters into that tiny curlicue. Can you believe it? Fruitcake!”
It’s also worth noting here that this ignores another rule or guideline I give students: that it makes no sense to use semi-colons in dialogue. Try to read that last quote aloud and articulate the presence of the semi-colon: it’s impossible! Using one in dialogue is meaningless. Though of course Baker gets away with it, because it’s not true dialogue, but as much part of Mike’s train of thought as any other part of the chapter, or book.
What immediately follows is long sentence and then a short sentence, which includes the masterful example. (Note: the horn professor at the start is a music teacher we met back in chapter eight, who marks up younger Mike’s music scores with commas to indicate where he should breathe while playing his horn.)
But no, I thought, my horn professor’s commas, my mother’s commas, Patty’s notebook commas were the only episodes in the history of punctuation that I would ever know enough about to speak with authority: except, of course, for the Bug herself, whose shape-big head, tapering extremities— when I first saw it glowing indistinctly on the ultrasound screen, and when I later hugged her real bent self to me, had introduced a quiet, golden, shade-pulled moment of retrospective suspension in my life that elevated the whole undistinguished serial succes-sion of years that preceded it into something that made sense, something with the unity and introductory springiness of the first clause in a complex sentence. The breathing Bug was civilizing me; she was my comma.
Well then. This section brings back in so many thematic concerns we’ve encountered over the previous chapters, culminating in this chapter nine which has entirely abandoned Patty and the Bug to give us three pages of Mike remembering his shitty childhood treatment of his kind, loving mother, and then a six-page cavalcade of his dreams of scholarly grandeur, albeit ironically presented.
If, as John Gardner says in The Art of Fiction, “a novel is like a symphony in that its closing movement echoes and resounds with all that has gone before […] Toward the close of a novel, the writer brings back — directly or in the form of his characters recollections — images, characters, events, and intellectual motifs encountered earlier”, then this is like the end of a movement in a chamber symphony, and does just that.
But look at what that final line achieves. The ‘movement’, if that’s what this has been, has brought into opposition the idea of the comma as a civilising force, whether deployed to help Mike successfully play his horn piece, or in organising writers’ thoughts, and the clear fact that Mike himself needs civilising – rude to his mother, monstrous in his egotism, failing even to remember the tiny child held in his arms. And there it is:
The breathing Bug was civilising me; she was my comma.
The semi-colon does more that hit rewind or ‘skip backwards’; it doesn’t just bring the two halves of the sentence into closer proximity: it as good as aligns them completely. It lays one over the other. It harmonises them. It does what Gardner can do more than hint at in his symphony analogy: it achieves polyphony in prose. This greatest semi-colon in All Literature actually orchestrates a chord.
My novel of the year (published in hardback in 2023, in paperback in 2024) was The Wren, The Wren, by Anne Enright. I read it on holiday, and it is just hit all my personal novel-reading buttons as squarely and precisely as if it had been genetically engineered. I’m in awe at this book, and in love with its author and her abilities, and I can’t say what I love about this novel without setting out an entire theory of The Novel.
There are sentences immaculate in themselves, and sentences that speak back to sentences 200pp earlier, and different kinds of sentences that invite you to lay them side by side and ask yourself questions. A couple of immaculate sentences, just as evidence:
“He had hated The Heron more than any of the women whose bed he had left.”
“Connie from Connecticut had so much money she did not need to spend it.”
But also:
“She was staring at the stupid courgette flower, which was pushing out a yellow courgette like an infinitely slow, vegetable turd.”
And look at this paragraph, which is at once entirely wonderful, but also ‘merely’ a pastiche of influencer blogging.
“On the wall, Venus’s nipple is pale, and neat as those annoying buttons that are too little to keep your shirt closed. All the painted women in the Uffizi are whiter than any human flesh. Many of them look like Cate Blanchett, if Cate Blanchett could not act. This is especially the case in the early rooms. Here, groups of pale, serene people gaze off in different directions doing very bad acting indeed. Oh, I am being born from the waves. Oh, I am getting pregnant talking to an angel. Oh, I am dying in agony. Oh, I am sexually attractive. Further in, and historically later, the acting improves, then it goes madly over the top, Slaughter! Mayhem! What a nice party, let us all laugh!”
But what makes the novel great is not just that it contains great writing, but that it deploys it. Some of the writing, for instance, is not great – some of it grates – but it’s there precisely to set off the great writing. Crucially, Enright allows characters’ voices to improve, to blossom and flower. She also sets different kinds of writing in relation to each other. That blog post is followed by one of the novel’s interpolated, fictional poems (written ‘by’ its awful Hughes/Heaney-style ‘great man-poet’) and it asks you – seriously – to measure the kinds of writing against each other. Great ‘great man’ poetry set alongside great travel blogging.
I love the book because sometimes I can see what it’s doing, as in the sentence that calls back to another sentences 200pp earlier, or speaks unknowingly to what another character says, or – somewhat miraculously – shows a character forgetting something that we know they know.
But if that’s all it was, then it would be merely a complex machine, a highly intricate set of checks and balances, a perfectly weighted mobile that we set in exquisite motion with the careless breath of our reading.
But thank god it’s more than that. I mean, I assume that for Enright it IS entirely meant and constructed, and understood, but for me as reader there is as much that is smeared, botched, as there is that clarifies. And I assume she intends that smearing.
My two favourite books that were actually published in 2024 were Spent Light by Lara Pawson and Home is Where We Start by Susanna Crossman – both of whom I know, online and in person, to some extent.
Spent Light: If Pawson’s previous book, This is the Place to Be, was an exploded memoir, of sorts, then Spent Lightis a more immediate contemplation of lived experience (though apparently it’s more fictional than I had appreciated when I read it) in the way that it tries to weigh the hell of global politics against the domestic life of objects and human care. It reminded me of Deborah Levy’s ‘living autobiographies’, but it’s less shaped, more scatted – and yet it has an undeniable flow, a movement across the surface of life, and Pawson’s thought, that carries you with it and allows you to see connections.
Spent Light plays with obscenity in wonderful ways. I haven’t enjoyed reading about shit and piss and the bare blank fact of having a body, with differently, diffidently named parts, so much in ages. The obscenity, of course, is there in the very next passage, in a description or a memory of the way our fellow humans can treat other human bodies: slavery, political and sexual violence. That is obscenity. Taking a shit while out on a run and your dog happily gobbling up your turd is not.
The book is basically an attempt to work out how to go on living in the knowledge of, and often implicated in, inhuman atrocities. The answer seems to be to be open: to knowledge of your own body, to human connections (to strangers and friends) and to thinking about the objects that live with us.
In the book Pawson paraphrases from memory a line about slavery: “The Black is essentially a human refashioned into a thing and forced to endure the fate of an object or a tool” – which is a powerful, awful thought. But it is key to the book, in a way… It’s about what happens when we treat people as objects (there are some horrific examples) and also what happens when we treat objects – well, not as people, but as worthy of our consideration. It’s about escaping the deep dark wood by paying attention to the individually beautiful trees.
Home is Where We Start is a tremendous – and tremendously subtle – book. A memoir of growing up in an English post-hippie ‘community’ (not a commune!), which, though well-intentioned, left her damaged in ways she has clearly spent a lifetime trying to understand. Maybe ‘damaged’ is the wrong word – though there was definite trauma. Perhaps ‘ill-adapted to conventional ways of living’ would be better. Though clearly she has adapted. The book is suffused with reasonableness and compassion and the practiced compassion of what seems a grounded and growth-full family life – the way she presents her past experiences through the filter of her acquired professional and emotional knowledge is wonderfully done.
What is impressive about the book is all the things it isn’t: it isn’t salacious; it isn’t spiteful or vengeful; it isn’t glibly humorous; it isn’t solipsistic or intent on making us experience what she experienced; it isn’t dogmatic or argumentative. Names are changed, and characters blended, but more than this the experience of the dozen years she spent in this huge strange house seems in her telling to loom and shimmer like a dream always a breath from nightmare. Laser precision would be a lie. Details must be off-hand, soft-edged, ephemeral.
Crossman, with her clinical art therapy training, and her wide reading across disciplines – both of which she brings most judiciously to bear on her account of the community’s ways and means – is the best possible guide to this heartbreaking paradox: a good-bad place, that gives as it takes away. The book makes me understand why people are drawn to such places, such ideas, such ideals – and makes me glad I wasn’t subjected to it. (It seems the author and I were born in the same month of the same year, and my parents surely shared their broad political sympathies with hers.)
I’ve had the Picador edition of Samuel Beckett’s ‘trilogy’ (Molly, Malone Dies, The Unnameable) on my shelves for years, most likely since I was a teenager, if the hedgehog bookplate is anything to go by. I had a sense that I’d never actually finished it, broadly familiar though I was with the contents – the pages filled side to side and top to bottom with prose unbroken by paragraphs or even, often, full stops; the near-total lack of plot; the decrepit, increasingly incorporeal protagonists and their relentless compulsive logorrhoea. The opening of Molloy was familiar, but I was taken aback by the comprehensive switcheroo it pulls halfway through. Malone Dies had pencil underlinings and marginal notes all the way through. I remember starting The Unnameable only to abandon it, but I’m confused as to how I managed to read all of the middle book without finishing, or at least fully processing, the first one.
Here then some thoughts:
It’s hard work
Yes it’s a hard read, and deliberately so, you have to assume. The lack of plot to follow, and of characterisation to engage with; the absurd concentration, when you do have a character in a broadly realist situation, on mundane physical activity, and no less mundane mental activity; and above all the refusal of the author to break up the blocks of prose, that end up at once a two-dimensional screen and a grinding linear string. The reader’s process through the text is a strange mix of the laborious and the too-easy. Half the time it’s trudging through mud, half the time it’s skating on ice – or else it’s descending a scree: take care you don’t go too fast.
One thing I teach Creative Writing students is that one of their jobs, as a writer, is to control the pace at which the reader moves through their book. It’s up to you to make sure they slow down when you need to them to, and to let them zip along when they can. With Beckett, it’s more a case of trying to keep your attention fixed where it needs to be. Picking up the book of an evening, after putting it down the previous night, I often had to go back a page or two to get any kind of sense of what was ‘happening’. And then I found it near impossible to read more than three or four pages because I simply kept falling asleep. It’s a book that needs concentration, that works better the more of it you’re able to read in one sitting. (No chapters to demarcate and signpost.) You need to fall into the rhythm of Beckett’s prose, which is perhaps too close to the biorhythms of sleep for safety.
Especially in The Unnameable there were long passages that I found incredibly tedious, whereas other bits I found funny or moving, but I could never be sure what distinguished these from each other: whether it was the prose, or me.
Monotony without repetition
Unlike most books, there’s no pressure in the Trilogy on the reader to retain pertinent information. One feature of the purgatory his narrators find themselves in is that they keep forgetting what’s happened to them, so are doomed (or blessed) to repeat themselves. The books, then, are monotonous, certainly, but they don’t repeat themselves in simple terms, in the way that Beckett’s later short prose sometimes does, recombining their few basic constructions in all possible orders. Phrases repeat, but not insistently; rather as a kind of entropic exhaustion.
After all, if you just wrote “I have no voice and must speak” or “I want to go silent” or “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” over and over again, then the eye would skim it, take it in, and resolve it. And in part the novel is just these things, repeatedly and effortfully paraphrased, but not just that.
With a few surprising exceptions, the narrative we read is the result of Beckett’s protagonists’ attempts to come up with something new, to pass the time – or rather to fulfil the need to keep the narrative conveyor belt fed – desperate attempts at novelty that operate, all the same, within a very constrained framework, a limited palette, a uniform porridge-y grey.
The prose is like a melody played on the piano with one hand: not one finger; it is played more or less legato, rather than staccato, with no rest between notes. It gives the impression of ranging, though slowly, over the whole of the keyboard, while never moving, note to note, more than a couple of intervals. At once tireless and exhausted.
One of the pleasures of Molloy is that feature of the prose, or of Molloy’s mental disposition by which it/he abrogates of the idea that a declarative proposition advances the argument of the narrative. Molloy revokes every statement he makes, unpicks every stitch he makes – and yet somehow we are not left back where we were at the start, once he has repudiated every statement or suggestion. There is a ghost, an echo of the progress made, and unmade, a delicate form of counter-melody, rather than a zero-sum logical negation. It is this rhythm, like the work of endless, tideless waves on the particulate beach that can grip you and carry you forward along the lines of prose that never, nevertheless, take you anywhere.
I’m reminded of the rocking chair at the start of Murphy, and in Rockaby, and perhaps the rocking chair is the quintessential Beckett object: propulsive stasis, movement that gets you nowhere.
Beckett not Beckett
As I say, there are surprises. On occasion that is localised: a reference to the 69 sexual position! In Beckett? (Yes, but jesus the sex in these books is awful; you can’t imagine what the women in his life would have thought on reading them. Yes, there’s humour of a sort to the descriptions of fraught, joyless old-bones bumping and grinding, but there’s more repulsion that comedy, more gagging than laughter.)
But there are more wholesale changes, too. There is the double shift towards the end of Malone Dies. First of all the change of narrative pacing when the characters mount in a horse-drawn and career off downhill, one of them singing a song. Short sentences, fresh air, momentum. Something of Pynchon in the song. And then the eruption of gleefully cold-blooded slaughter, two axe murders – “Lemuel released Macmann, went up behind Maurice who was sitting on a stone filling his pipe and killed him with the hatchet” – like something out of Donald Barthelme.
Pynchon and Barthelme, either of whom could have learned these particular narrative gestures from Beckett, though they must have thanked their lucky stars he didn’t follow through on this new tendency. It’s like they made whole careers out of what were for Beckett narrative cul-de-sacs.
But before all this I had been gobsmacked, frankly, by the change that comes halfway through Molloy, when we leave the book’s protagonist languishing in a ditch on the edge of a plain that might or might not contain the town where his mother lives, and abruptly switch to a new first-person narrator, Moran, a private detective of sorts instructed to track Molloy down.
Grating, bumptious Moran is not entirely unique as a Beckett character (shades of Godot‘s Pozzo) but he’s different to the kind of character Beckett usually explores through his prose narratives. The usual Beckett protagonist is a kind of desperate, degraded, etiolated yet still innocent everyman. What Moran has, at least at first, that Molloy doesn’t is a powerful sense of self. He is delineated extremely clearly, boldly outlined (boldly outlined to himself) rather than carved out of/retreating into negative space: self-asserted, rather than doubtfully constructed.
And the more delineated he is, the easier it is to respond emotionally to him. Molloy is an unpleasant character, certainly, but even in his unprovoked attack on a charcoal-burner in the woods he retains more innocence than Moran abusing his poor son – giving him an enema, for god sake. Though the wonderful trajectory of Moran’s narrative is that he gradually becomes more like Molloy, his quarry, to the extent that he ends up picking up Molloy’s ingrained habit of self-contradiction, as evidenced in the marvellous final lines:
“Then I went back to the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.”
Metaphysics
It’s interesting to compare the protagonists of the Trilogy to other characters in similar but different situations. There are in some ways like Sisyphus: condemned to a purgatory that is only kept from being hell by the fact that an end to their torment is – if only implicitly – on offer. Beckett’s forced-speakers might reach or be granted silence; might find that the conveyor belt of tongue driven by the engine of consciousness might case. The difference is that Sisyphus knows very well the reason for his punishment, and who it was that put him there. The Unnameable and his avatars know that they are being punished, but have only the vaguest apprehension of why and thanks to whom – and certainly no certainty that there is a reason, and a punisher-figure. The sentence is the only sure fact. (This seems like as good a definition of The Absurd as you could hope for; I’d need to go back to Camus to see how his take on Sisyphus deals with the godlessness of the modern universe.)
Because the unnamed protagonist/speaker/writer/consciousness can’t just compulsively narrate his unending self-reflective logorrhoea; he must, it seems, also invent. Mahood, Worm – and also Malone, Molloy, Murphy, Mercier. He may be unnameable, but he is happy to name his versions, his avatars. It’s like an ultra-sardonic rip of Joan Didion’s famous platitude, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” No, we tell ourselves stories in order to keep the repulsive ticker tape of our consciousness cranking out, or fed, or turning over.
“We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices,” says Didion. No, says Beckett. Faced with the bare brute fact of our own permanent presence in our heads, let alone what the world shows us, we just spew, and play with the spew, animate it, name it, make it walk and talk.
These avatars – Molloy, Malone, Mahood – we can surmise, are attempts at self-portraits that, when they fail, become shed skins. Skin shed, the nude self must try to write itself anew, hoping to complete the task before the game’s up. (It’s always up.) The striving for silence is constant, painful.
The sense of end-of-life desperation, of locked-in syndrome or pseudcoma, of wanting it to be over, is awful. (Relevant to an elderly relation just now.) If Godot plays well in prisons, or besieged Kosovo, great: I’d like to see you try that with this book in a care home.
And there’s perhaps a nod towards dementia in the endemic forgetfulness, self-contradiction, while maintaining some kind of sub-syntactic, sub-expressive identity. (Bits of it read like the Trump speeches you see transcribed online in their terrible, comic and pathetic incoherence.)
It’s interesting that Beckett wrote nothing in prose of this length again. As if he’d proved a point, and learned a lesson: that the extended, fruitless, self-defeating search for silence through words could not be repeated. Now he would allow himself, increasingly successfully, to approach silence.
Also he didn’t call on his back catalogue again in the same way. On the one hand it’s fun that he digs up Murphy, Watt, Mercier (Beckett Extended Universe!). On the other it’s desperately sad, that that’s all that writing might in the end be: inventing, abusing and rejecting pallid, essentially interchangeable avatars.
A. S. Byatt died on 16 November 2023 and the next day, when her death was announced, I took down The Virgin in the Garden from the shelf, where it had sat unread for I don’t know how long, and began to read it. I’d previously only read Possession by her, plus some short stories, which I’d liked well enough, but this I enjoyed far more. So much so that I went straight from The Virgin in the Garden to the second novel in ‘the Frederica Quartet’, Still Life, as I already had that to hand, but then paused for a couple of months before reading Babel Tower and then had another pause before A Whistling Woman, which I finished at the start of April 2024. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole of the quartet, and found parts of it absolutely thrilling, intellectually and on occasion emotionally. These are novels of ideas, and ambition, but are also threaded through by a writer’s love for her characters: love here meaning care and attention, or attentiveness.
These books get called ‘The Frederica Quartet’ because they follow the life and intellectual development of one central character, Frederica Potter. Frederica is 17 at the start of the first book, which is set in the year of Elizabeth II’s coronation, 1953, and she’s in her mid 30s at the end of the last book, in 1970 – in fact in historical terms she’s an exact contemporary of Byatt. The books do expand their concerns beyond Frederica, sometimes far beyond, and sometimes too far. To start with we spend as much time with her parents, the domineering Bill and emollient Winifred, and her siblings – elder sister Stephanie and younger brother Marcus – and also with Alexander, the older man with whom the teenaged Frederica is infatuated. In later books this diffuseness of focus increases, such that at times Frederica seems almost tangential. This isn’t necessarily a good thing, especially – cough – if you are in love with Frederica, as it’s possible to be in love with, for instance, As You Like It‘s Rosalind. Byatt says in an interview: “It isn’t Frederica’s book – though she’s the sort of person who would muscle in and try to take it!”
These notes draw on and develop the comments in my 2023 and 2024 Reading threads on Bluesky.
My first point, looking back on the quartet, is the oddity that the period covered by the novels is shorter – at 17 years – than the period over which they were published: 24 years. In other words the novels became more historical as the period they covered receded – and the novels in part are realist depictions of a specific period in English social and cultural history, a thrusting and exciting period that saw the rise of television and the new universities, and of the counter-culture of the 1960s.
As a series of books these are less programmatically ‘historical’ or ‘historical-thematic’ than, say, the Rabbit tetralogy, or A Dance to the Music of Time. (As a side note, and based on my distant memory of reading Powell’s twelve-novel sequence, the treatment of the anarchic-religious commune in Byatt’s A Whistling Woman is rather similar to the Harmony cult in Hearing Secret Harmonies.) The treatment of early BBC Two-style television is great – all Jonathan Miller and ‘Alice in Wonderland’ – but the attempts at creating a Bowie-esque pop star fall flat. Byatt can do many things, but she can’t do rock. Occasional historical events are mentioned in passing, but Byatt is more interested in the intellectual and spiritual tenor of the times than their politics, in blunt terms.
Here are the dates of the novels:
The Virgin in the Garden: published 1978; set 1953.
Still Life: published 1985; set 1953-1956
Babel Tower: published 1996; set 1964-1967
A Whistling Woman: published 2002; set 1968-1970.
Part of the gap between the second and third novel was, Byatt has said, caused by the death of her son, killed aged 11 by a drunk driver. She also delayed writing Babel Tower to write Possession, which apparently seemed like it would be more fun to write. It was – and it was also a massive commercial success, winning her the Booker Prize in 1990. Which doubtless also delayed things.
The books are hugely ambitious. They want to give a picture of England in London and Yorkshire over this period of accelerated upheaval, but they also offer the pleasures of a family saga (how does parenting affect children? how do siblings get along? who will Frederica sleep with, and why?), and they are full to brimming of the ideas that the characters are having: about science, art, sex, psychology, religion, education, literature. The ideas are built into arguments, in conversations and letters, but also in the characters’ thoughts, thanks to Byatt’s brilliant use of omniscient narration. That said, I agree with Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s balanced LRB review of A Whispering Woman, in which she says:
“it’s possible to feel that the Potter novels occasionally suffer from an overindulgence of their author’s cognitive appetites. In a recent interview, Byatt credited Proust with having taught her that one could ‘put everything into’ a novel, but A la recherche du temps perdu may not be the safest model in this respect; and of course much depends on how ‘everything’ is reimagined and articulated. The problem is not that Babel Tower or A Whistling Woman ‘smells of the lamp’, as Henry James famously complained of Eliot’s historical scholarship in Romola, but that the proliferation of vocabularies and allusions – not to mention the sheer number of characters, many of them introduced in previous volumes – sometimes threatens to bury the narrative rather than illuminate it.”
By the way, do NOT so much as glance at any more of Yeazell’s review before reading the books if you want to avoid major spoilers!
Although Byatt said she was responding to D. H. Lawrence and George Eliot in writing the books, my original response to The Virgin in the Garden was that:
she takes the Murdochian novel – the concatenation of sex and ideas produced by daft, intelligent, passionate people in a closed environment – and i) improves the plotting and ii) gives the prose a touch of the Jamesian-Bowenesque high church style, tightening a corset that Murdoch wears slack.
It’s good to see the omniscient narrator done well, when it’s currently so out of fashion. Byatt makes it work at a domestic level – the smooth passage between different characters’ POVs in the Potters’ kitchen – but she’s also up for orchestrating major set pieces, of which there are many, with aplomb.
Here’s Byatt, in that same interview, talking of George Eliot:
“Sometimes she says, ‘He thought,’ and sometimes she almost suggests that she doesn’t quite know what somebody thought, but that it was a bit like this. She can do all those things, because she’s got a flexible instrument.”
She also does the interesting thing of starting (after the prologue) with a central character (Alexander) who is not there at the end. His emotional arc drives the plot of the first book, but is not absolutely central to the thematic concerns of the novel. And in fact the intricate plotting of a love affair or mutual seduction involving this 34-year-old male teacher and Frederica’s wilful, self-possessed 17-year-old schoolgirl (he’s not her teacher, if that makes it any less reprehensible) is very carefully negotiated – were things different then? you wonder, in anguish – and it pays off in a way I could only applaud with my hands over my eyes, as it were.
Although the plotting of the first book is tight, this loosens as the quartet goes on. In part this is to let all the ideas in, and all the characters – the long cast list is important for the novel’s realism, so that Byatt can move up and down the country and through British society without making the world of the book too compressed and coincidence-prone. Because of this some of the secondary characters become rather easy to muddle up – or easy, in fact, to give up on identifying at all. Sometimes re-encountering, say, a Monica Thone, or Geoffrey Parry or Thomas Poole late in one of the novels is a bit like seeing someone coming towards you across the room at a party, when you think, I know you, I know I know you, but who the hell are you again?
Byatt is also generous and catholic in her use of different literary modes (or ‘instruments’, to her use term). The third and fourth books include extended passages from two different novels-within-novels, and the fourth book has long epistolary sections, with Babel Tower also including legal transcripts and four very funny ‘reader reports’ that Frederica writes on books from a small publisher’s slush pile. When Frederica gets divorced we don’t just get the legal letters; we also get Frederica’s angry Burroughs-style cut-ups of those same legal letters. Her legal deposition for the divorce is seen first as her anguished scribbled notes and then in impersonal legalese.
These postmodern techniques are mostly there for a reason, and they build and echo the novels’ themes in a variety of ways. Byatt gives a spoken cameo to Anthony Burgess (no longer alive at time of publication) and mentions in her acknowledgements ‘borrowing’ an Iris Murdoch character – who, I wonder. I was less taken with the increasingly silly character names. You can roll your eyes at an ambitious academic called Gerard Wijnnobel – ha and indeed ha – but the likes of Hodder Pinsky, Elvet Gander, Kieran Quarrell and Avram Snitkin – all from A Whispering Woman – pile up with no real sense of who they actually might be, let alone why they’re called that.
Byatt also chops and changes her structural approach to the books.
The Virgin in the Garden has 44 named and numbered chapters across three sections, plus a proleptic (flash-forward) prologue to 1968.
Still Life likewise has 33 named and numbered chapters, though not split into sections, and a proleptic prologue that actually hopfrogs the entirety of the quartet’s chronology to land us in 1980!
The last two books are simpler, which is perhaps a shame. Babel Tower has 21 numbered but un-named chapters, and no sections, and a one-page prologue that is more epigraph than scene.
A Whistling Woman has 27 chapters, again unnumbered, again not in sections and this time with no prologue at all.
The sense I hope this gives is that Byatt is not programmatic about her books. They change their approach in line with her developing skills and intentions as a novelist. At times it seems like she’s improvising, as a concert pianist might improvise – or she’s like Glenn Gould or Keith Jarrett, humming along with her keyboard work.
An example here from the romance between Alexander and schoolgirl Frederica in The Virgin in the Garden, when Frederica says to him: “Just hold me a little. Without obligation.”
As for the last few years, I’m reading fewer new books, in part as my university teaching replaces book reviewing as the driver of much of my ‘strategic’ reading, and in part perhaps because of my continued and always-belated attempted to catch up with unread classics (2023: War and Peace; 2022: Moby-Dick, Ulysses, Anna Karenina; 2019-20: In Search of Lost Time; Middlemarch; 2024? I’m not sure yet…)
Anyway, here are my ‘books of the year’ – I’m keeping the title for consistency’s sake, though really this is intended as a record of my reading. In 2023, as I’ve done in some of my previous years, I kept a ‘reading thread’, which migrated halfway through the year from Twitter/X to Bluesky. (I’m keeping my X account live, really just for the purposes of promoting A Personal Anthology; I’ve deleted it from my phone, and carry on my book conversations now on Bluesky). I’m grouped the books according to i) new books, i.e. published in 2023 ii) books read by authors who died in 2023 iii) other books, with a full list at the end.
Best new books
After the Funeral by Tessa Hadley was my book of the year. She is truly a contemporary master of the short story. I delight in her rich use of language, in her ability to draw me into characters’ lives and particular perspectives (though I’m aware that, in broad sociological terms, those characters are very much like me) and in the power and deftness with which she manipulates the narrative possibilities of the short story. She’s like an osteopath, who starts off gently – you think you’re getting a massage; you feel good; you feel in good hands – but then she does something more dramatic, leaning in and applying leverage, and you feel something shift, that you didn’t know was there. ‘After the Funeral’ and ‘Funny Little Snake’ are both brilliant stories well deserving of their publication in The New Yorker. ‘Coda’ is something else: it feels more personal (though I’ve got no proof that it is), more like a piece of memoir disguised as fiction, which is not really a mode I associated with Hadley. I read or reread all her previous collections in preparation for a review of this, her fifth, for a review in the TLS, and I have to say: there would be no more pleasurable job that editing her Selected Stories – the collections all have some absolute bangers in them – though equally I’d be fascinated to see which ones she herself would pick.
Tomás Nevinson by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa. Not a top-notch Marías, but a solid one: Nevinson is a classic Marías sort-of-spook charged with tracking down and identifying a woman in a small Spanish town who might be a sleeper terrorist, from three possible targets, which naturally involves getting close to and even sleeping with them. I found some of the prose grating – flabbergastingly so for this writer (“we immediately began snogging and touching each other up” – I mean, come on!) – but the precision of the novel’s ethical architecture is absolutely characteristic.
Alone by Carlota Gurt, translated by Adrian Nathan West. A compelling and moving Catalunyan novel about the stupidity of thinking you can sort your life out by relocating to the country. Similar in theme to another book I read this year (Mattieu Simard’s The Country Will Bring Us No Peace) though I liked that one far less. I won’t say much about it as I read it without preconceptions and recommend it on the same terms. I will say it reminded me of The Detour by Gerbrand Bakker, which is another novel of solitude and the land, which again benefits from stepping into as into an unknown locality.
I am Homeless if This is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore. Oh boy. I love love love Moore at her best and though this aggravated as much as delighted me it’s been nagging me ever since I really want to go back and read again. [NB I have gone back to it, as my first book of 2024, and am being far less aggravated than on the first read). After a brisk, unexpected and exhilarating opening the novel seems to go into stasis, a slow series of disintegrating loops. It fails to do the thing that Moore usually seems to do quite effortlessly: keep you dizzily engaged with a cavalcade of daft gags and darkly sly sharper wit and observation. The protagonist, Finn, seems to miss what Moore usually gives her central characters: a dopey friend to dopily muddle through life with. He has a brother, Max, but he’s dying, and an ex, Lily, who, well… But all of this is done in flat dialogue wrestling with the big questions. Moore usually lets the big questions bubble up from under the tawdry minutiae of life (as, brilliantly, in A Gate at the Stairs); here, they’re front and centre. More tawdry minutiae, I say! I think part of my frustration with the novel comes from a place of ‘Creative Writing pedagogy’. Wouldn’t it be better, I think, to open up Finn’s character, show him as a teacher, his banter with the students, and his entanglement with the head’s wife? Rather than making all of that backstory, dumping it into reflection. The scene with Sigrid, for instance – her attempts to flirt with Finn – would be stronger if we’d already met her in the novel, already seen their relationship (such as it is) in action. You tell students, first you establish the ‘normal’ of the protagonist’s existence, then you throw it into confusion. So, am I giving LOORIE MOORE MA-level feedback? Well, yes. To which the response (beyond: “she’s LORRIE MOORE”) is: she’s not writing that kind of ‘normal’ novel. For every bit of LM brilliance (the gravestone reading “WELL, THAT WAS WEIRD”; the line “Death had improved her French”) there’s something off, that should or could be fixed or cut: the cat basket sliding around on the car backseat; the scene where Finn’s car spins off the road.
A Thread of Violence by Mark O’Connell. A suavely written book that digs into the true crime genre but stops short of the moral reckoning it at least flirts with: that in truth it shouldn’t exist – as a published book, at least. Will surely sit on reading lists of creative non-fiction in the future.
Tremor by Teju Cole. Read quickly and carefully (in physical not mental terms: it was bought as a Christmas present and sneakily read before being wrapped up and given ‘as new’), with the full intention of going back and reading it again. Cole is a literary intelligence for our times, that I’d drop into the Venn diagram of the contested term ‘autofiction’, not for its supposed relationship to the author’s life, but for its relation to the essay form.
Wish I Was Here by M. John Harrison. In fact I haven’t finished reading this. But I dug what I read, and will go back and finish it, but feel like I wasn’t in the right headspace for it at the time. It’s a book to sit with, to scribble on, to squint, to make work on the page. It’s not a book to do anything as basic as just read.
Sports and Social by Kevin Boniface. Stories from the master of quotidian observation that somehow avoids observational whimsy (the curse of stand-up comedy). If we build a new Voyager probe any time soon this should be on it, but failing that I’d recommend putting a copy in a shoebox and burying it in your garden, for future generations to find.
Thunderclap by Laura Cumming. A slight cheat, as I finished this on the first of January 2024. But it was a Christmas present and perfectly suited the slow, thoughtful last week of the ending year. I loved Cumming’s take on Dutch art, and how its thingness is often overlooked, and I loved the way she mixed together scraps of biography of Carel Fabritius (about whom little is known) and a memoir of her father (James Cumming, about whom little is known to me). The fragments hold each other in tension very well, but it’s not fragments for fragments’ sake. Cumming delineates a space for thinking about art, and its relationship to life, and lives, and other elements, big and small: death, sight-loss, colour-blindness, the nature of explosions, dreams, more. Tension’s not the word: it’s more like a provisional cosmology, that puts thematic and informational pieces in orbit around each other. There’s no symphonic tying-together at the end, but things are allowed back in, with new things too.
I only started underlining (in pencil: it’s a beautiful book!) towards the end. Here are some lines:
“Open a door and the mind immediately seeks the window in the room”
“Painting’s magnificent availability”
Of an explosion witnessed first-hand: “a sudden nameless sound […] a strange pale rain”
There is so little known about Fabritius, with so many of his paintings lost, but really there’s so little known about any of us, the book suggests… and most of our paintings will be lost (as paintings by Cumming’s father have already been lost) but yet looking at art brings a special kind of knowledge, showing us “the intimate mind” of the artist, as of a novelist, or – as here – a writer. The love of art and of life shines through, or not shines, but diffuses, as in one of the grey Dutch skies Cummings writes about.
“But I have looked at art” she says, and she shares that looking (as does T. J. Clarke in his magnificent The Sight of Death) but she also opens up a space for looking. If “But I have looked at art” is an understatement, a compelling gesture of humility, then Cumming can also write, again towards the very end of the book, “What a glorious thing is humanity” and not have it jar, or smack of pomposity. There is much to cherish – much humanity (and what else is there in the world truly to cherish? – in Thunderclap.
I was reading Brian Dillon’s Suppose a Sentence last night, in the way that you’re supposed to, dipping into it, looking for something to snag my interest – either the writer of the sentence in question, or the sentence itself, or something Dillon might have to say – and I alighted on his section on Elizabeth Bowen, whose stories I also happen to haphazardly reading at the moment, because I’m reading Tessa Hadley’s stories, Hadley being a fan and literary descendent of sorts of Bowen… and, anyway, I read this passage:
As I write, I’m two thirds of the way through A Time in Rome, which [Bowen] published in 1960, and I think I have found, again, a writer after my own heart. How many times does it happen, dare it happen, in a life of reading? A dozen, maybe? There is a difference between the writers you can read and admire all your life, and the others, the voices for whom you feel some more intimate affinity. Could Elizabeth Bowen be turning swiftly into one of the latter, on account of her amazing sentences?
Which is marvellous, and sparked two particular thoughts, last night, and has sparked a couple more, this morning, as I sit down to write, on a Bank Holiday Sunday morning, at just gone 8am. There’s one, on the phrase “after my own heart”, that I really want to get to, so I’ll try to dispatch the other ones briefly.
Firstly, the word ‘affinity’, which is obviously an important word for Dillon: it was the name of Dillon’s next book, after all. It could just as easily have been the title of this one. What interests me about the word, however, is its aura of neutrality. When we think of the connections that get built between – as here – us as individual readers, and particular writers, we tend to look to one or the other as the active agent in the relationship. Either the writer is a genius – they seduce me, impress or overawe me – or I love the writer, I find something particular in them. But an affinity is bipartisan, and objective, as if unwilled by either. The chemical usage of the word is the most critically productive one, especially after Goethe applied it to human relationships in Elective Affinities, but in fact the original meaning was to do with relationships – in particular relationships not linked by blood, such as marriage, or god-parentship. I suppose, contra Goethe, what I like about the term is that these affinities that Dillon is talking about seem to be un- or non-elective, but weirdly, inexorably fated.
(NB I haven’t read Affinities yet, so maybe Dillon goes into all this in his book.)
The other brief thought from this morning was that, although Dillon does talk about Bowen’s fiction in his piece on her, the sentence he picks to write about is from her sort-of-travel book A Time in Rome. And this made me think of the death, last week, of Martin Amis, and how much of the online critical chat had an undercurrent of favouring the non-fiction (the journalism, and the first memoir) over the fiction (with a few exceptions, usually involving Money), and I wondered if anyone had really considered, at length, the legacy of writers that had written both fiction and non-fiction, and what it meant when one was favoured over the other. Susan Sontag wanted to be remembered as a novelist, but isn’t, and won’t be. It would surely appal Amis if he felt that it was his book reviews and interviews that we remembered him for. Geoff Dyer does talk about this a bit with reference to Lawrence in Out of Sheer Rage, but I’d like to read something broader. If a writer has a style, and that style is to an extent consistent over their fiction and non-fiction, then what are the conditions by which they become remembered, and stay read, after their death, for one rather than the other? Or, alternatively, is there a difference in terms of how a similar style applies to fiction, and non-fiction?
Now to the original point I wanted to make. Dillon’s paragraph on his relationship to Bowen is lovely, and I’m sure many readers will relate to it, as I did, but I was particularly struck by the phrase a writer after my own heart. “After my own heart” – it’s a strange and wonderful idiom, and sent me – it’s a Bank Holiday weekend – to the dictionary. ‘After’, after all, is a preposition that, like most prepositions, has a variety of different uses.
“After my own heart” could, for instance, have a sinister intent, as with hounds after a fox. The writer in pursuit of the reader’s heart. But it doesn’t mean that. It means “after the nature of; according to”, a usage going back to the Bible (“There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit”, Romans 8:1-2) – though the specific usage of “a man after his own heart” isn’t recorded until 1882, when it appears in, of all places, The Guardian, attributed to one G. Smith.
But the other meanings or uses of ‘after’ hover around the word. ‘After’, too, in the sense of “after the manner of; in imitation of”, as it’s used in art history – for example, Picasso’s The Maids of Honor (Las Meninas, after Velázquez). I remember a novel called After Breathless, by Jennifer Potter, that I read simply because it was inspired by A Bout de Souffle, my favourite film. “After my own heart” as critical interrogation.
And then the word ‘own’ in the phrase, too: after my own heart. It’s a phrase that is deeply, reverberantly embedded in the language from which it grows. It’s a phrase to conjure with. It’s an idiom, in other words.
My final brief thought, and again someone has probably written on this, but what exactly is the relationship between idiom and cliché? Does an idiom have to pass through the state of being a cliché before it can achieve this linguistic apotheosis? Is an idiom merely a cliché that has freed itself of the negative connotations of overuse – overuse with a single meaning – to allow itself to take on other meanings. Because that’s the problem with clichés, isn’t it? Not that they’re overfamiliar as phrases – as signifiers – but because their overuse has obliterated the meaning the phrase intends. The site of meaning has been rubbed raw.
Reading habits and outcomes change according to personal inclination, of course, but also according to external factors: life circumstances, temperament and age, the demands of a job. All of which is to say I’ve read fewer new books this year than in the past. I review less than I used to, certainly, and when I read for work (teaching Creative Writing at City, University of London) I’m more interested in the books that came out a year or two ago, and that have perhaps started to settle into continued relevance, than the whizz-bang must-read of the year.
Of the new books I have read, that have made a lasting impression, here are seven:
Ghost Signs by Stu Hennigan (Bluemoose) is an unforgettable journal of the 2020 Covid pandemic lockdown, during which the author was furloughed from his job working for Leeds City Council libraries and volunteered to deliver food parcels to vulnerable people and families. The eerie descriptions of empty motorways and fearful faces peering round front doors evoke that weird time in 2020, but the true and lasting impact of the book comes from Hennigan’s realisation that the poverty and distress he discovers in his adopted city isn’t down to the pandemic at all, but to entrenched government policies that have forced council services to the brink, and thousands of people into shamefully desperate circumstances. It’s a political book, sure, but one written out of necessity, rather than out of desire or ideology, and one that you want every politician in the country to read, and quickly, so that the responsibility for dealing with the issues it raises passes to them, rather than resting with Hennigan. (That’s the problem with writing books like this, isn’t it? That by being the person who identifies or expresses the problem, you become inextricably linked to it, a spokesperson, a talking head, with all the emotional labour that implies.)
(Ghost Signs isn’t in the photo because I’ve given away or lent both copies I’ve owned.)
I heard Hennigan read from and talk about the book at The Social in Little Portland Street, London this year, and the same goes for Wendy Erskine, who was promoting her second collection of short stories, Dance Move (Picador). Erskine is one of the most talented short story writers in Britain and Ireland today, and I’ll read pretty much anything she writes. Dance Move is at least as good as her first collection, Sweet Home, and if you made me choose I’d say it’s better. The stories are muscly, chewy. Erskine has had to wrestle with them, you can tell. They are worked. She takes ordinary characters and by introducing some element that might be plot, but isn’t quite, she forces their ordinary lives into unprecedented but gruesomely believable shapes. These stories are perfect examples of the idea that plot and dramatic incident should be at once surprising and inevitable. But the thing I love most about her stories (I wrote a blog post about it here) is how she ends them:
You are so immersed in these characters’ lives that you want to stay with them, but the deftness of the narrative interventions means that the stories aren’t wedded to plot, so can’t end with a traditional narrative climax or denouement.
(As David Collard said, in response to my original tweets, “Wendy Erskine’s stories don’t end, they simply stop” – which is so true. Perhaps it would be even better to say, they don’t finish, they simply stop.)
So how does she end them? She kind of twists up out of them, steps out of them as you might step out of a dress, leaving it rumpled on the floor. In a way that’s the true ‘dance move’: the ability to leave the dance floor, mid-song, and leave the dance still going.
Take the story ‘Golem’, definitely one of my favourites in the collection. It’s a story that does everything Erskine’s stories do. It densely inhabits its characters’ lives, and it has its comic-surreal interior moments, but most incredibly of all, it manages to end at the perfect unexpected moment. The story goes on, but the narrative of it ends. It departs, exits the room, taking us with it.
Perhaps the best way to put it is that you feel that, yes, the characters are ready to live on, and yes, you’d be ready to keep on reading the prose and the dialogue forever, but no, you wouldn’t want the stories themselves to last a single sentence longer.
My other favourite short story collection of the year is We Move by Gurnaik Johal (Serpent’s Tail), which is a thoroughly impressive debut, that again seems to show how short stories can be the perfect receptacle for characters: they give us characters, rather than plot, rather even than writing, or prose, or words. The difference between this and Dance Move is that We Move, to an extent, looks like the traditional debut-collection-as-novelist’s-calling-card. I’d love to read a novel by Johal – or for Erskine, for that matter, but equally I’d love her to just go on writing stories, because the more people like her keep writing stories, rather than novels, the stronger and more vital the contemporary short story as form will be.
My Mind to Me A Kingdom Is by Paul Stanbridge (Galley Beggar – publisher of my debut novel, though I don’t know Paul) is an exquisite piece of writing that does live or die by its sentences. (Narrator: it lives). An account of the aftermath of the author’s brother, it is indebted to WG Sebald, in terms of the way it leans on and deals out its gleanings of learning, but also in terms of how its lugubriousness slides at times into a form of humour, or perhaps of playfulness. No mean feat when you’re writing about a sibling who killed himself. A hypnotising read.
My most unexpectedly favourite book of the year was Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, by Katherine Rundell (Faber), which I wrote about for The Lonely Crowd, here. I didn’t know I needed a biography of a Sixteenth Century English Metaphysical poet in my life, but Rundell fairly grabs your lapels and insists you read him. Frankly I’d read any book that contains lines like “A hat big enough to sail a cat in” and “joy so violent it kicks the metal out of your knees, and sorrow large enough to eat you” in it.
My final new book of the year isWe Still Have the Telephone by Erica van Horn (Les Fugitives), which I received as a part of a support-the-publisher subscription. It’s a delightfully sly and spare account of the author’s relationship with her mother. “My mother and I have been writing her obituary” etc. One to file alongside Nicholas Royle’s Mother: A Memoir, and Nathalie Léger’s trilogy of Exposition, Suite for Barbara Loden and The White Dress (also from Les Fugitives) as great recent books about mother-child relationships.
A mention here too for Reverse Engineering (Scratch Books) which is a great idea: a selection of recent short stories accompanied by short craft interviews with their authors. It’s got succeed on two levels: the stories themselves have to be worth reading, and the interviews have got to add something more. It succeeds on both, with wonderful stories from some of our best contemporary story writers: Sarah Hall (at her best thebest contemporary British short story writer), Irenosen Okojie, Jon McGregor, Chris Power, Jessie Greengrass etc, and useful commentary. I look forward to reading more in the series.
(Copy not shown in photo as loaned out.)
I’ll include another section here on new books, but new books written by writer friends or colleagues: Cells by Gavin McCrea (Scribe) is a jaw-droppingly raw and honest memoir that bristles with insight, and revelation, and liquid prose. Keeping in Touch (also Scribe) is my favourite yet of Anjali Joseph’s novels, a properly grown-up rom-sometimes-com, that makes you want to get on airplanes, travel the world, travel your own country, wherever that is, talk to people, work people out, and fall in love, which is perhaps the same thing. And Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris (Duckworth) is a novel I’ve been waiting more than a decade to read, and it didn’t disappoint. It’s a moving and delicate told narrative of the siege of Sarajevo, that perhaps wasn’t best served by its publication date just as something horribly similar was happening in and to Ukraine. Finally, 99 Interruptions is the latest slim missive from Charles Boyle, who published my Covid poem Spring Journal in his CB Editions. It sits alongside his pseudonymous By the Same Author as a perfect short book – with the same proviso that it’s so damned slim that it’s easy to lose. And indeed barely a month after buying it I already can’t find it to put in the photo. No matter. I’ll find it, months or years hence, by accident, and enjoy rereading it all the more for that.
For various reasons, this was a strong year for me for successfully finishing fat chunky classics that I’d tried and failed to read in the past: the kind of book I usually can’t read unless I can organise my life around it.
Announcing a new and very exciting collaborative writing project: London Consequences 2.
London Consequences 2 is a collaborative novel being written from September to December 2022 by a collection of amazing contemporary writers (see below!). It is organised and curated by David Collard, Jonathan Gibbs and Michael Hughes, and is a creative response and homage to a little-known but very interesting book published 50 years ago called, yes, London Consequences.
London Consequences was a collaborative novel written for the 1972 Festivals of Britain and edited by Margaret Drabble and BS Johnson. Drabble and Johnson co-wrote an opening chapter, and then passed the manuscript on to a series of 18 writers (including Melvyn Bragg, Olivia Manning and Eva Figes) who each wrote one chapter before passing it on, until it returned to the editors, who co-wrote the closing chapter. The published book listed the contributing novelists, but each chapter was anonymous, giving readers the fun parlour-game challenge of trying to work out who wrote what. (There was a £100 reward for whoever could successfully do this – as yet we have no idea if this was collected!)
Original writers: Paul Ableman John Bowen Melvyn Bragg Vincent Brome Peter Buckman Alan Burns Barry Cole Eva Figes Gillian Freeman
Jane Gaskell Wilson Harris Rayner Heppenstall Olivia Manning Adrian Mitchell Julian Mitchell Andrea Newman Piers Paul Read Stefan Themerson
The original novel features a middle-class London couple, Anthony (a journalist) and his wife Judith (a mother and housewife) on a single day – Easter Sunday, 1971 – as they navigate the capital, and their relationship with each other. It was published in 1972 by the Greater London Arts Association, with a cover price of 65p.
The idea for this new project came about in a strange and serendipitous way. In April 2022 I turned 50, and Michael Hughes gave me as a present a copy of London Consequences, which I read and very much enjoyed. I tweeted that it would be a fun idea to do a contemporary version, to which David Collard, who knew the original, responded by throwing down the gauntlet. We should do it, he said.
Tiny Camels / Jonathan Gibbs 