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I wouldn’t be afraid of a swing away from fantasy in the culture at large. I’d rather work in tension with the real anyway. If a deep paradigm shift like that caught on and became the working assumption of the next couple of generations, yes, imaginative space might shrink and it might become important to defend “the practice of the fantastic” (if there ever was such a thing). But until then any crusade based on the assumption that organised fantastika is an abuse victim is absurd at best, at worst the bad faith of an industry astroturf, derived from attitudes that were last applicable (if they ever were applicable) in the 1960s & 70s. It wouldn’t be–it isn’t–much more than commercial protectionism. The door of that wardrobe’s been banging in the wind for fifty or sixty years. Let’s not do squeals of horror and tantrums of entitlement if it swings shut. Whoever wanted a perfectly receptive climate for what they write?

the hole

Asahi and her husband Muneaki are in their late twenties. The marriage, already quietened into routine, is disrupted suddenly when they’re forced to move out of the city. Both have work there, but Asa’s is low-paid and impermanent, ‘not the kind of job that’s worth holding on to’. Muneaki’s salary, though, is vital; if they want to keep it, he must accept a transfer. Luckily, his parents live no distance from the new workplace and own an empty house right next door to the family home. While a rental agreement has to be made for tax purposes, rent will never actually be paid. Muneaki will have a more convenient commute to his new office and Asa can take on the role of a proper housewife, someone who, as her best friend at work says enviously, is ‘living the dream’. She’ll be ‘free to look after the house’. She can bake. She can ‘do a little gardening’. What could be more perfect? There are issues, of course…

Read the rest of my review of Hiroko Oyamada’s weird & engrossing novella “The Hole” in this month’s Literary Review.

the voice in the wall

“I hate concepts. Having a concept isn’t having something to write: having something to write about is having something to write. Never favour plot. Story is fine, but plot is like chemical farming. Closure is wrong. It is toxic. Work into a genre if you like, but from as far outside it as possible. Read as much about Hollywood formalism as you can bear, so you know what not to do. Break the structures–don’t just look for new and sly twists on them. Never do clever tricks with reader expectation. Instead be honest, open and direct in your intention not to deliver the things the reader expects. You won’t always be successful in that, because it’s harder than it looks. After all, you used to be a reader too. Oh, and that’s the last thing. You aren’t a reader any more. You’re a writer, so don’t try to get reader kicks from the act of writing. Never tell yourself a story. That romantic relationship is over for you. From now on the satisfactions will be elsewhere.”

–from Wish I Was Here, Serpents Tail, 2023

entitlement

Long ago when I was more easily bullied, the industry retitled In Viriconium for US paperback without my permission. Although the publisher kindly offered me a list of the usual fantasy phrases we might choose from together, I didn’t feel I could help betray the first book I was in any way proud of writing.

Climbers was originally called The Rock Garden, a title that referred metaphorically to the bijou satisfactions and limitations of UK outcrop climbing, and literally to the setting of a pivotal scene in the novel. It brought those elements together and acted to frame and present what is admittedly a complex text. The industry thought it might confuse readers because it was the name of a music venue in Covent Garden. I reverted to the working or placeholder title, which was anyway appealingly blunt.

There were no problems with The Course of the Heart. Not the first time an irony of mine has been welcomed into the bosom of fantasy.

Light wanted to be called Empty Space, but the industry thought that was too depressive, ie not bombastic enough. It also risked suggesting to the reader that nothing much might happen, in a book that began as it meant to go on, with a misogynist mathematician & a heavily armed spaceship suffering from BPD. As a title, Light, like Climbers, had the advantage of being direct, but it also conveniently suggested its opposite; and later I was able to use Empty Space after all, for the third volume of the trilogy. So that was a win. I still think of the whole work as Empty Space –a satisfying set of references taking in absurdism, physics and dramatic theory.

The placeholder title for my novel in progress is Anabasis. I was planning to call the finished object The Future, but that’s taken. Titles aren’t copyrightable, but you want to avoid a collision if you can, unless you’re using a monumentally cliche phrase or saying, as in Signs of Life or Travel Arrangements. One of the problems if you go for the banal (or even something from physics) is that your book disappears into the babel of start-up names which is Late Google, less a search engine than a directory of businesses near you. Another is that the algorithm generally doesn’t get sarcasm. So now I try to use distinctive, multi-word phrases like You Should Come With Me Now or Things That Never Happen.

the unconscious never lies

Reassessing one of your early female characters–who, you believed at the time, was based on performances associated with two or three well-known UK actresses of the late 1960s/70s–you discover that her signature characteristics were so clearly based on a suite of your own. This is embarrassing enough. But further: she existed in the narrative solely as a description, a summing-up presented less as an act of memory than a brief, difficult, pseudo-objective act of psychological retrieval and dismissal by her own son.

mysteries of the new

March, and I’m already re-reading a book I read in February.

I won’t say what book it is, or who wrote it, because that isn’t going to be the point of this entry. It would be a distraction. I’ll only say that reading it has had as distinct an effect on me as Wilde’s nonfiction read in adolescence; Genette’s Narrative Discourse encountered in a leaky one-up one-down cottage in the shadow of Black Hill in the late 1970s; or a late but electrifying engagement with The Anxiety of Influence in my early forties. That is, it has made me both think and dance about in elation, & that’s an astonishing, barely understandable gift to someone who’s seventy eight years old and has enjoyed rather more gifts like that in life than his life has warranted.

That’s not the point of the entry either.

I could list all the things I’ve been doing since Christmas last that rehabilitate the me I used to be. But the one that counts in this context is that I’ve returned to journalling, an activity the last three years or so left me no room for. This means renewing the dialogue with all the books I read rather than just thinking of ways to assess specific items selected by and on behalf of other people. It’s a relief that writing can, once again, at some point in every single day, switch suddenly and unprompted away from the production of fiction (or public commentary upon it) and into private commentary on absolutely anything. I feel a lot less constrained than I’ve been–as if the private arena with its very small stage and vast number of steeply raked & completely empty seats, is exactly where I need to be. I feel loosened up by engaging other people’s work rather than my own; even more by the freedom not to have to say something about it in public. I feel able to learn.

Ironically, the first gift of this rediscovery of personal space arrived last year, with the publicly-delivered Visions of Johanna, an essay you can read, if you want, in You Spin Me Round. I won’t stop reviewing, obviously, or posting here. But it’s nice to remember that public opinions are at least partly formed and refined in private, and that the first thing a human self learns is to make and defend its own boundaries…

dreamwork

Pilot, atomic physicist/cosmologist, jockey (national hunt), folk singer, writer: I was always determined to have the job of my dreams & avoid all the real ones. If you’d asked me between five & twenty years old what my dream job was, it would have been one of the five above. Four of them required talents I turned out not to possess, & didn’t survive contact with the reality principle. By the time I was twenty, writing was the only option left. Luckily I had come pre-loaded with all the necessary talents & tendencies for that. I stared out the window a lot, read furiously, wouldn’t take life advice or direction, & could manage temporal shifts in a complex Victorian sentence by classic parsing. I had written my first adventure novel, a 20 page hymn to Mickey Spillane & the Golden Amazon, at thirteen.

some news

Wish I Was Here arrives in paperback from Serpents Tail on the 7th of March. A cute little version of the hardback package. Order now from your favoured outlets.

Haunt Game is a music and spoken word piece by pivotal contemporary composer Matt Rogers and writer M John Harrison, based on Harrison’s anti-memoir Wish I Was Here, now on CD. High-resolution audio, 24bit/48kHz, lossless FLAC. Includes PDF booklet. For details, samples, video, etc, go to Pyrofon, here.

More music stuff: my contribution to PVA’s collection, You Spin Me Round, is an essay on a lasting relationship with Bob Dylan & his Johanna. I love them both, I construct them both for my own purposes. Since 1966, they focussed me in ways I can’t explain, though I know how to explain them exactly. You Spin Me Round, out this month and pre-orderable here.

Deeply immersed in the new novel. Seven thousand words in the last thirty days, breakneck pace for me, as anyone who knows me will know. Working title ANABASIS but I daresay it won’t actually be called that. It’s not exactly the novel I would have submitted to New Worlds in 1967 if I’d had the skills to write it, but it’s certainly that type of novel.

The real news is that there’ll be some news soon that quite a few people have been hoping to hear for quite a few years; I say no more because I am still a tease.

twelve eight twenty two

The windscreen of a parked car just out of view across the road reflects the late afternoon sun, directing it at an oblique angle into our front room and projecting the shadow of a window box of pelargoniums on to the net curtain inside. The silhouettes of the pelargoniums appear sharply delineated and surrounded by a strong but diffuse white light; but in places the original clusters of flowers can be made out through their own shadows, as if a dull red bleed is part of the projection. Such a theatrical effect from such a simple set of circumstances.

The Lodgers

‘“As a bored and nervous young girl,” Holly Pester’s unnamed and disorganised narrator says, without stopping to find out if she should open up to strangers like us, “I often imagined myself climbing inside a small case or container, like a piano stool or matchbox, a washing machine drum or bread bin, and living in there.” She’s tired. She’s been travelling all day. She’s moving into a new flat, which resembles a triangular sandwich package, sublet from “a paranoid boy” she’s never seen. The details of the arrangement have a wry, playful quality, but there’s an underlying nervousness; the room doesn’t feel real to her. A glass smells of dirty hair, a window affords nothing “except the stillness of a town at night”, the “origin point of boredom” in her life…’ Holly Pester’s debut novel of a nightmarish precarity, played for the blackest of laughs, fizzes with the life it reflects. Read the rest of my review at The Guardian.