Category / British and Irish Literature

by Daniel Davis Wood

Mutual Attraction and Repulsion

New at Splice, here’s my review of Jaimie Batchan’s début novel, Siphonophore, which is narrated by a man named MacGregor who knows himself to be a character in a book written by another man referred to as “the Creator”. Although the novel begins as a fairly straightforward account of the disastrous Darién settlement of 1699,

Siphonophore [eventually] metamorphoses into something more interesting than historical fiction, if still recognisable: a metafiction of the sort in which a character tussles with an omnipotent author. The conceit, so far, is nothing new. Take it as the stuff of philosophy and you get Luigi Pirandello. Take it as material for playfulness and you get At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) and Mulligan Stew (1979). Or bear down on the stasis of the narrator’s situation — his awesome displacement combined with his stationary existence — and you get something like Antonio di Benedetto’s Zama (1956) or Gerald Murnane’s ‘The Battle of Acosta Nu’ (1985). But Batchan deftly avoids walking the same path as these forebears by introducing a new element, a new source of tension. A third of the way into Siphonophore, MacGregor learns that his Creator has been diagnosed with an illness that will slowly, agonisingly, drain the life from him. The illness is known as Prionic Fatal Insomnia, a real condition that causes sufferers to stop sleeping until, over time, fatigue compounds fatigue and finally results in cognitive failure, organ breakdown, death. So, on one level, Siphonophore straddles two distinct periods in time as well as two consciousnesses — although, rather than permitting the Creator a chance at narration, his twenty-first century worldliness is sort of imported into MacGregor’s thoughts as prior knowledge which he feels to be alien to his experience. But then, ambitiously, Siphonophore introduces a ticking time bomb that brings these two characters into conflict.

by Daniel Davis Wood

To See With New Eyes

Caleb Klaces’ Fatherhood is one of the most vibrant novels I’ve read all year. I reviewed it this week for Splice, in my final review of 2019:

Fatherhood isn’t about [the narrator’s] pursuit of [his life plans] plans in any conventional sense. It is, as above, about the ways in which the travails of raising a newborn child make a glorious, hilarious mockery of a parent’s pretensions to personal dignity. In practice, this means that Klaces surveys two parallel pathwayss and sets out to follow both of them, alternating from one to the other as the novel unfolds. The first path leads him closer to his wife, the second to his infant daughter, so Fatherhood preoccupies itself with both the comedy of post-parenthood intimacy and the profundity of watching an entirely new identity come into being.

by Daniel Davis Wood

Samizdat Goes Mainstream

In Time Lived, Without Its Flow, Denise Riley embarks on an exquisite, excoriating investigation of her own mourning in the wake of the sudden death of her son. The book was more or less self-published several years ago and passed around like samizdat from one small press aficionado to another. Now, though, it has been republished by Granta in a beautiful new hardback edition with an introduction by Max Porter, and I had the pleasure of reviewing it this week for Splice:

What is radicalism in literature, but a redrawing of the usual boundaries of the readable? Find the zone of moderation, which is to say convention, then strike off in one of two directions. Push the boundaries outwards, claim liberties beyond those taken by the average book, and churn out a thousand-page treatise on melancholy or a doorstopper that makes room for every known fact about cetaceans. Or make your space more cramped, more pinched, and draw the boundaries inward. Forgo certain allowances; let your possibilities atrophy. Write a book in chapters of exactly one hundred words each, or in sentences that all take the form of a question. Use only phrases culled from other books, or refuse to use words containing the letter e. And then, if you really want to indulge your radicalism, choose a subject whose emotional freight tilts it in one of these two directions — excessive or aloof — and force your style to take the alternative. Go maximalist, go gargantuan, with a story about office boredom. Or else go minimalist, be ascetic by an act of will, with a counter-intuitive approach to a harrowing situation like the one faced by the poet Denise Riley.

by Daniel Davis Wood

New Perspectives on an Old World

I have cherished the essays of Kathleen Jamie for the better part of five years now, so I was very gratified to be able to review her new collection, Surfacing, for Splice — and to use the occasion to look back at her earlier volumes:

Here, then, is a typical essay by Kathleen Jamie: an off-kilter line of sight is traced and extended by speculative means, and allows for an apprehension of things that otherwise escape the eye. Sometimes, as above, the escape is spatial. A locus of interest might have a position so far above human affairs, or so far beneath, or at such a distance from them, that its very place of being evades any one person’s embodied vantage point. At other times, the escape is temporal. A locus of interest, deeply embedded in the past, makes a mockery of our immersion in the urgency of the present, so that, in effect, we are blinded by the here and now and unable to pierce the surface of the times we dwell in. In each case, though, an essay by Jamie will always find a way for the author to place herself just so in relation to her surroundings, at which point — like a key with a clean cut sliding smoothly into a lock — the author’s eyes align with some aspect of the world that radically expands the horizons of her perception. [Jamie’s first collection of essays] was blurbed by Richard Mabey, while [her second] was blurbed by John Berger, and Jamie’s work often comes across as a synthesis of theirs.

 

by Daniel Davis Wood

Whiteness

This week, Splice is running a two-part essay by me on the very niche subject of white space in prose fiction, with a focus on the uses of white space in two recent “novels”. Here’s how it starts:

What are the uses of white space in prose? A paragraph break prompts a renewal of focus; it asserts, in advance, the significance of some element of a scene or sequence. A section break swallows time, disrupting chronology in ways that sometimes take a leap to another moment and sometimes pause the unfolding action, withdrawing from the flow of things. Chapter breaks combine these effects while also opening up a refuge, a place to rest, offering readers an opportunity to catch their breath and take stock of events before proceeding.

But what about a space that both shatter a tract of prose and encompass its shards? What about those spaces that break a text into fragments and then encase each one in its own carapace of silence? The text appears as a series of disjointed, discrete segments of prose, but the whiteness that runs through it is also a force for its integrity. Its lacunae devour the words that would forge clear connections between its segments — by explication, by causality — and for that reason they become, collectively, the locus of the unity of the prose, the silence from which readers might extract connective threads.

Part one looks at white space in Jeremy Cooper’s Ash Before Oak.

Part two looks at white space in Kathryn Scanlan’s Aug 9– Fog.