Adam Scovell’s Mothlight is one of the most intense reading experiences I’ve had in a long time. I’ve reviewed the novel for Splice, with a focus on the fascinations of its form:
It has been said that moths are drawn to burning candles because they confuse flames with the light of the moon. Moths, after all, use moonlight to navigate a path through darkness, but light from elsewhere reliably drags them off-course. The result is a split in perceptions. From the moth’s perspective, the path remains direct although the destination is unreachable: the creature believes itself to be flying straight on towards its goal, even as it fails to close the remaining distance. From the perspective of an observer, however, the moth has been snared into a spiral with no way to break free; it flutters around the flame in a way that makes a misleading light the centre of an experience, surveying the object of its desire continually from a distance. In his début novel, Mothlight, Adam Scovell has written a book that shadows the movements of the captive moth. Scovell’s narrator takes aim at a very particular objective, albeit one that is hazily conceived, only to end up whirling around in circles, unable to seize his prize, fixating on an ideal in a frenzied pursuit that robs him of his sanity.
I also had the pleasure of speaking to Scovell about the process of writing Mothlight:
What about the prose style, and the way it contributes to the tone in conjunction with imagery and the narratorial perspective? There’s clearly a bit of W.G. Sebald in there, maybe some Teju Cole, but were there other models for Thomas’ voice? Where did it come from?
I think the majority of the voice techniques come from European fiction of the post-war period. Sebald was and always will be the biggest influence on my writing, but the main voice that dictated the OCD recursions in Mothlight was Thomas Bernhard. I don’t think I’d have the bottle to write fiction the way I do without having read him, and he’s probably the closest a writer has come to recreating my own “head voice”. In particular, the way Bernhard uses repetition to lock you into the tics and worries of his narrators is really quite astounding, and you can definitely see what Sebald took from his writing as well. Teju Cole was another influence, generally. I love how he is building on the use of the photographs within prose, as well as his mental and physical meanderings. I loved Open City, and reading one of his essays on Sebald from Known and Strange Things whilst in Strasbourg created one of the most uncanny reading moments of my life, though I won’t say why.
Infinite Patience 