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At the moment we’re in the puzzled phase of the relationship, me & the novel, whereby you can only insert half-written scenes at random into your wonky synopsis in the hope they’ll spread, coalesce & take control. That’s not going to happen immediately, or without problems; but you can’t stop trying because you already feel, somewhere in the back of your head, the whole contraption tipping & lurching towards being a real, structured thing. I love that feeling. It’s hard to make an account of these kinds of processes without banalising them. You need to avoid the reductive in fiction, but it’s even more important to avoid the reductive when describing it–especially to yourself. Go in that direction & if you’re not careful you’ll soon be reduced to using the industry algorithms to express–then to write–conveniently expressible things.

Anyway, this one is going to be short & structurally quite odd. I know, what am I like?

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Everything in this landscape has been driven mad by the light. The sea, the beach, the people, the objects. This is not surrealism or anything like that. It is an accident of the painted light & the frozen motion of the waves, clouds, bathers, ships. It is somehow a pure 1930s light, light from an imaginary stocked when people could still–just about–use words like “spiritual” & mean something. Light & wind, as waxy or chalky or degreased–raw, muted, incomplete, contemporary, infused, trembling on the edge of some disaster of immanence–as the vision allowed. Above all, it had to be the normal, subtly transposed. I’ll never get tired of trying to describe what UK art–cooped up between a failing metaphysics, modernism & two world wars–could suggest about the universe by looking at a kitchen or a row of shops. We don’t have much language for it now. Maybe they didn’t have it then either & I’m looking at something I’ve invented.