list of projects

Project Trap: Project Trap was never completed. Project Soul Gem was a project to collect “evidence-free innuendo”. Soul Gem was wound down in 1945 upon the birth of the resource (see notes). Several similar projects wound down naturally with the resource itself. Eat Cake, a hardened version of Soul Gem 2: the Eat Cake abstract promised abjection, violence, denial. Eat Cake was unlisted. Various other projects: Project 92 (see appended material). Mex Lite, Max Eight & Lite Core were clean product generated during varied initiatives and test runs. “Initiative B” ran successfully until 1978, when it was replaced under the Dark Stork programme. Project Veil Grain was an unsuccessful add-on to the Main Stem series. Vague Heart: Project Vague Heart remains partially operational but is identified under recent initiatives as “2020”. Resource appears to have retained motility & limited function.

Project 121 is the shadow of something much larger.

originally published January 2014

3 steps to heaven

From the absorbing and enjoyable Cyclogeography, by John Day, of a London cab driver who retired to become the dispatcher at a bike-courier operation–

“But after a few years on the road [Frank] realised that he preferred his mental map of the city to the real thing, and so he retreated to the office to live in it at one remove, traversing London vicariously in his imagination.”

In this narrative, Frank spends his wild years stealing cars and mopeds and racing around the city, learning “the knowledge” by accident as a way of avoiding arrest. Then he makes a socially acceptable, civilian use of what he’s learned, by becoming a cab driver. Finally, in later life, he places himself at the heart of the embodied space, as a kind of human map. He has become not the city but an expression of the city, not a user of the knowledge so much as the knowledge itself. The austere beauty of this developmental arc is that it can exist only to the extent that you have followed it: you can’t achieve state three without having first been through states one and two. This was very much the point of the relationship between the narrator and his mentor Sankey in Climbers; or the relationship between the middle class students of metaphysics and Yaxley the magician in The Course of the Heart.

published as “wild epistemologies” in 2018

an escape

It looks like a Bruegel but features only burning bridges & it’s empty of people except here & there in the distance, doing panic repairs to a fence. There used to be a pub in the bottom left hand corner but its windows are boarded up & muddy now as if from decades of passing traffic; & the sign, when you finally decipher it, says: Never Where You Thought It Was. It’s coming on dark & you’re going to wake up in the morning to find the gate’s open again & that damn goat is on the hill. It’s all yours, the goat, the pub, the sound of hammers. The picture frame is yours. The man leaning in through the frame says he always knew the bridges were down, he could smell the smoke before he arrived. “Ten mile back,” he says he could smell the smoke: “Ten mile back,” & you ask him how did he get here then if the bridges were down, because you have a real interest in that.

Meanwhile, Quentin Lewis goes to the heart of You Should Come With Me Now –that is, the actual subject matter of its stories–with the kind of clear, thoughtful, non-parochial assessment you hope to get from inside the genre but so rarely do.

premium mundane

Wherever she went after that someone could always be seen exercising their small dog in the middle distance. Later she discovered Ossie’s Toyota abandoned in a lay-by off Pale Meadows Lane.

It was no longer recognisable as a taxi. There was an air of senselessness about it. One tire had deflated. Dried mud a thin grey colour painted the bodywork as if someone had spun the front wheels trying to drive it up through the coppice behind the layby. Even the windows were spattered. The old man’s Castrol jacket, colours wrenched in the curiously distributed interior light, hung over the back of the driving seat; on the rear ledge he had abandoned a yellow site helmet and a hi-viz tabard showcasing the logo of some local builder; old fashioned porno on thickly glossy paper. “You want to be careful down Pale Meadows at night,” she remembered him warning her. Perhaps he had ignored his own advice.

Originating as a small limestone quarry tucked into the side of the hill, the lay-by was used less for parking than as a turning place: puddles of dirty water lay across a surface deeply grooved and broken up by mid-weight commercial transport. Clumps of fern grew out of the cracks and niches in the quarry wall. The meadows themselves had been spruced up into sports fields a generation ago. It didn’t appear that they had ever been pale. Believing she heard voices, she looked up and down the lane. The air was dark and rain-stained–it was easy to feel as if someone was coming when no one was. She banged loudly on the roof of the Toyota, in case Wee Ossie was sleeping inside. Nothing happened except that she imagined him curled up with the appalling economy of a small mammal in some corner she couldn’t see. In the end, she walked briskly away across the playing fields and found her way home through the Low Town.

— from The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again

an oblique move towards making something new out of things I already have

So the Map Boy builds a horse-drawn caravan by scaling-up the plans for a model. He travels round Britain in the caravan for a decade, with his dog, doing agricultural work. When the dog dies he buries it in the wood, & makes for it out of Horsham stone a monument like a low curved wall, where it rests for twelve months before badgers & foxes dig it up & eat it.

The Map Boy haunts the wood. He shifts easily between its layers of time. He knows where everything is, he knows what you can eat; there are endless ways you can make a fire. He won’t get another dog. All around him, Coulsdon is haemorrhaging its Jaguars into the surrounding tissues of Redhill, Reigate and Dorking, which flush and bruise suddenly under the strain. Oh, Reigate and Banstead in the sunshine! Woods and flint-faced garden walls! Further south, new shapes move in the woods as you drive past–earth caked in the roots of fallen trees to make the silhouettes of aurochs and wild boar in the medieval light. Later the seafront floats between the grey water and a sky deep stratospheric blue, between each side of the century, real gold, buildings biscuit and cream, suspended there in the horizontal sunlight–which also falls on the seaward side of the waves before they break on the beach, discovering in the low muddy swell by the stanchions of the pier two frozen-looking surfers in wetsuits. He is noting everything. A designer moon, a meticulous sliver in a sky hardly darker than this afternoon’s!

Or Leicestershire and Warwickshire, he’s telling us now. Mist thickening out of the Charnwood copses. Closer to, you can feel the water vapour in the air, but it’s invisible except as a guess until it polarises some BMW’s halogen light & startles briefly with little elusive blue wisps & flickers. So quick & faint you can never be sure they’re real. I was born near there, he will admit, if you press him, but I never saw anything like that before. Look, I’m trying to explain to you how the small fields used to fill up with white mist like industrial separation tanks, or how the late afternoon sun in November turned the air pinky gold–not the sky, the air itself–in moments of kitsch heartbreak from a thirty-years-yet-unwritten romance. There’s a constant, constantly-renewed sense of immanence in those landscapes. In the 1950s they had one sort of magic; now, just when you’d think all magic had evaporated, they discover another.

It’s like the Map Boy, when he talks the night away this way, is trying to educate us how to see everything as objective correlative. Everything interpretable in some strong Ballardian sense, dune fields as much as Hilton balconies. Your own hand in certain lights. & in uncertain lights a line of railway sleepers or sleeping women who (like Delvaux, or Henry Moore tube dwellers) explain something unknowable, something that remains unexplained even in the gesture of offering. Everything an earnest, he tells us, a guarantee, both of itself & something else. Immanence: the constant act of interpreting things that weren’t made. The Map Boy says, it’s like the world is a difficult painting of something. It’s the understanding of stuff not directly–not even indirectly, not even one time removed–but by the index of something that might, if you look at it in the right light, be evidence of the possibility of evidence. How do you understand a thing by its shadow when you don’t even know how shadows are thrown?

If you think you can answer that question, the Map Boy says, if you think the need to answer is implied by me asking, you are not getting this & we may have a problem. It’s so clear to him! Someone doesn’t even know how shadows are thrown, how beautiful is that? It is very beautiful indeed.

the Goldsmiths

The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again won the Goldsmiths Prize, an amazing result in a field of such strength.

I’d like to thank everyone involved–the panel, Sarah Ladipo Manyika, Will Eaves, Chris Power, and Frances Wilson their chair of judges; all the brilliant writers on the shortlist, a wide-ranging collection of talent and ambition, any one of whom I’d be delighted to encounter as a reviewer; the New Statesman whose sponsorship of the award is so vital; the Goldsmiths team, Tim Parnell, Olivia Franchini and Erica Wagner, who–in the face of lockdown limitations, and denied the party they felt we all deserved–made such a success of of the Zoom-based celebrations.

An idiosyncratic novel is always a difficult sell inside the industry, which is also generally suspicious of authors with a determined idea of how their work should be presented and to whom. That’s why prizes like the Goldsmiths are so important. This time my case has been made for me, suddenly and with considerable elegance. I’m glad, because after you’re 60, you may remain in some way determined to break the rules; but the effort of having to constantly explain or excuse yourself can be tiring.

It’s a cliche that no one writes a book, or has a life in books, on their own. The list of people I have to thank for the friendship, the emotional and professional support, the unfailing intellectual generosity that scaffolded the writing of The Sunken Land, is endless. But they know who they are, and I’m planning to thank them privately, in real life, one by one, as soon as that becomes possible again.

nothing to see here

From the start, mine had been less a clinamen than a wrecking project and as such unattractive to the audience. But I still didn’t want to see it misread as something it wasn’t and corrected marketward. I could have marketised it myself if I’d been interested. The New Weird was contested territory from the start. Everyone wanted a slice, Babel ensued … My longterm experience, from New Worlds and elsewhere, is that the best move in those circumstances is to maintain your distance, take care of your core ideas and aims, make sure you know the exact difference between what you do and anything else that’s going on, and move along quietly to the next thing.