Alam Garner

Alan Garner

Interview

‘It can feel quite mysterious’: Alan Garner on writing, folklore and experiencing time slips in the Pennines

At 90, the author reflects on his friendship with Alan Turing, quantum realities and how his grandfather inspired his latest book

Justin Jordan

Saturday 14 December 2024

Alan Garner is a few days from his 90th birthday when we meet, and his plan for the day itself is “to be very quiet”. He says, “I sound antisocial but I’m not. I’m very sensitive to people and I don’t like more than three or four people in a room at a time.” Since The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, published in 1960, he’s had a long and singular writing life, with a certain amount of gregariousness forced on him by its extraordinary late flowering over the last dozen years.

Review

The best fiction of 2023

From Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting to Zadie Smith’s The Fraud, and a companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four – this year’s fiction highlights

Justine Jordan

Sat 9 Dec 2023 07.30 GMT

T

he book I’ve recommended most this year – and had the most enthusiastic feedback about, a whopping 656 pages later – is without doubt Paul Murray’s Booker-shortlisted tragicomedy, The Bee Sting (Hamish Hamilton). This story of an Irish family’s tribulations told from four points of view combines freewheeling hilarity with savage irony, surprise reveals and generations-deep sadness; it offers the immersive pleasures that perhaps only a fat family saga can bring. It lost out on the night to Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, a harrowing portrait of a totalitarian Ireland with an urgent message for a world of rising political violence.

There was another long-awaited return to fiction from 2013’s Booker winner Eleanor Catton. In Birnam Wood (Granta), idealistic guerrilla gardeners in New Zealand run up against a ruthless billionaire. This is a propulsive thriller responding to the climate crisis, apocalyptic thinking and political ideology, and as stylishly written as you’d expect. Zadie Smith also took on a new genre with her first historical novel, The Fraud (Hamish Hamilton), which sets a gently comic portrait of 19th-century literary London, and a real-life trial which stirred up passionate emotions around class and identity, against harrowing testimony from a slave plantation. It expertly links Jamaican and British history, and offers a timely, quizzical reflection of our current age of globalisation and hypocrisy. Nigerian-American author Teju Cole’s Tremor (Faber) is deeply engaged with the horrors of colonialism, using autofiction for a subtle and up-to-the-minute study of how ideas around art, value and trauma are inflected by historical knowledge.

Sebastian Barry’s beautiful, nightmarish Old God’s Time (Faber) also digs back into the past, to show how trauma remains an open wound. A retired Irish policeman’s apparently calm life is torpedoed by historical experiences of abuse within the Catholic church: this raw and hugely moving novel is shot through with the force of familial love and mourning. There was more brilliant Irish writing about family in Claire Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor (Faber), unbearably tense yet blackly comic dispatches from the early days of motherhood, and Anne Enright’s The Wren, the Wren (Jonathan Cape). This supple portrait of mothers and daughters, exploring the hangover of the patriarchal past in the shape of the famous poet who wrote about and abandoned them, may be her best book yet.

Deborah Levy delves into the deepest patterns of family connection and self-invention in August Blue (Hamish Hamilton), the riddling, elegant tale of a globe-trotting concert pianist whose subconscious is catching up with her. Formal ambition is elsewhere on display in Benjamin Myers’s Goldsmiths winner Cuddy (Bloomsbury), a visionary epic which covers a millennium of English history and employs poetry and prose, playscript and pastiche to trace the story of St Cuthbert, the building of Durham Cathedral and the contemporary northern landscape. Justin Torres won the National Book award in the US for the dreamlike and innovative Blackouts (Granta), which chops up historical texts and uses images and absence to construct a shadow history of queer desire and erasure. And I loved Kate Briggs’s debut fiction The Long Form (Fitzcarraldo), a quietly radical reinvention of the domestic novel in which a woman and her baby spend their day reading, thinking, feeding, napping – being. It’s full to the brim with fertile ideas about time, literature, care, and how we live within the form of our days.

Other notable debuts include Jacqueline Crooks’s hypnotic journey into the dub reggae scene, Fire Rush (Cape), charting a young Black woman’s experience of music, danger and racist policing in the 1980s. Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin (4th Estate) follows young Vietnamese refugees to Thatcher’s Britain with great heart and delicacy. Chetna Maroo’s Western Lane (Picador), the slim story of a girl dedicating herself to squash after her mother’s death, blossoms in the spaces between words and the silences between characters: a masterclass in restraint. For Thy Great Pain HaveMercy on My Little Pain by Victoria MacKenzie (Bloomsbury) is another tiny marvel, tenderly illuminating the inner lives of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich.

Two first novels drew on the crime genre: Kala by Colin Walsh (Atlantic), a tale of bright-burning teenage friendship and slow-fade adult disappointment in a small Irish town, is a page-turner to rival Tana French. And No One Dies Yet by Kobby Ben Ben (Europa) places a trio of gay Americans looking for their ancestral roots in Ghana against a string of murders, for a playful and daringly executed expose of history, diaspora and the exploitation of African voices.

Short stories to look out for include Camilla Grudova’s impressively weird vignettes in The Coiled Serpent (Atlantic), Laura Jean McKay’s sharp speculations in Gunflower (Scribe), and another virtuoso collection from Tessa Hadley, whose After the Funeral (Cape) identifies moments of psychological change to thrilling effect. Magogodi oaMphela Makhene’s Innards (Atlantic), chronicles of Soweto under and after apartheid, forcefully uncovers a corrosive history.

It was a great year for historical novels of all stripes. AK Blakemore’s followup to The Manningtree Witches, The Glutton (Granta), takes a tall story from the annals of revolutionary France – a man who ate everything, from buttons to babies – and spins an irresistible picaresque of social upheaval and individual appetite. This is a book joyously in love with language, in all its possibilities. Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds (Hutchinson Heinemann) follows an English servant girl on the run from a plague-hit early American colony: it’s both a gripping survival story, and a subtle allegory for the centuries to come.

Two energetic and hugely enjoyable books shook up the historical novel. Francis Spufford’s Cahokia Jazz (Faber) portrays a noirish murder investigation in an alternative 1920s America, in which Native Americans play equal part; and The Ghost Theatre by Mat Osman (Bloomsbury) is a gleeful romp through the playhouses and back alleys of a twisted version of Elizabethan London.

Salman Rushdie spins a magical realist saga of medieval India in Victory City(Cape), his first fiction to be published since the attack against him in 2022. Meanwhile Tom Crewe’s The New Life (Chatto), about gay pioneers in 1890s London, has extraordinary physical presence, exploring bodies as well as minds; and Adam Mars-Jones writes 1970s England meticulously back into existence in the latest instalment of his witty and humane series about one man’s life and thoughts, Caret (Faber).

Contemporary Britain is the focus of Diana Evans’s lyrical and excoriating A House for Alice (Chatto), which sets one woman’s desire to return to the Nigeria of her youth against the backdrop of the Grenfell tragedy. Eliza Clark’s Penance (Faber), about the murder of a teenager by her peers, and the true-crime vultures who follow in its wake, is a disturbing and fiendishly clever portrait of Brexit Britain and online communities: how the longing for identity can be weaponised and twisted into dangerous new shapes.

In Julia (Granta), her companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four, Sandra Newman revisits a vision of England’s future that has receded into the past. By mirroring Orwell’s plot from the female perspective, she burrows deeper into the structures and effects of totalitarianism in an ingenious novel that thoughtfully complicates the original.

An unmissable rediscovery from 1973, Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brooke (Daunt), turns a cold eye on the family dysfunction of the English upper class. Through scalpel-sharp prose and bitter comedy it lays bare the darkest human impulses, but if you’d prefer sunnier Christmas reading, turn instead to Samantha Harvey’s Orbital (Cape). In the tale of six astronauts circling the Earth, Harvey beautifully evokes the wonder and fragility of our planet and its inhabitants. An uplifting book, in every sense.

THE GUARDIAN

 

James Joyce

Where to start with: James Joyce

Always wanted to tackle the great Irish writer but not sure Ulysses is for you? This handy primer may just help you find a way in

Justin Jordan
Friday 18 February 2022

The books of James Joyce, along with Middlemarch and War and Peace, were among the titles that many vowed to read when the UK was plunged into its first coronavirus lockdown. Almost two years later, we now know that most of us filled all that time indoors with Netflix and Zoom quizzes rather than catching up on lengthy classics (apart from the author David Mitchell, who did read Ulysses in 2020). But with this month marking the centenary of Ulysses and 140 years since Joyce’s birth, perhaps now really is the time to familiarise or re-familiarise yourself with the influential modernist writer.

Best fiction of 2021

 

Best fiction of 2021 
Illustration: Maïté Franchi

Best fiction of 2021

Dazzling debuts, a word-of-mouth hit, plus this year’s bestsellers from Sally Rooney, Jonathan Franzen, Kazuo Ishiguro and more

T

he most anticipated, discussed and accessorised novel of the year was Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You (Faber), launched on a tide of tote bags and bucket hats. It’s a book about the accommodations of adulthood, which plays with interiority and narrative distance as Rooney’s characters consider the purpose of friendship, sex and politics – plus the difficulties of fame and novel-writing – in a world on fire.

Rooney’s wasn’t the only eagerly awaited new chapter. Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s magnum opus The Books of Jacob (Fitzcarraldo) reached English-language readers at last, in a mighty feat of translation by Jennifer Croft: a dazzling historical panorama about enlightenment both spiritual and scientific. In 2021 we also saw the returns of Jonathan Franzen, beginning a fine and involving 70s family trilogy with Crossroads (4th Estate); Kazuo Ishiguro, whose Klara and the Sun (Faber) probes the limits of emotion in the story of a sickly girl and her “artificial friend”; and acclaimed US author Gayl Jones, whose epic of liberated slaves in 17th-century Brazil, Palmares (Virago), has been decades in the making.

Pat Barker’s The Women of Troy (Hamish Hamilton) continued her series reclaiming women’s voices in ancient conflict, while Elizabeth Strout revisited her heroine Lucy Barton in the gently comedic, emotionally acute Oh William! (Viking). Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness (Canongate), her first novel since the 2013 Booker-shortlisted A Tale for the Time Being, is a wry, metafictional take on grief, attachment and growing up. Having journeyed into the mind of Henry James in 2004’s The Master, Colm Tóibín created a sweeping overview of Thomas Mann’s life and times in The Magician (Viking). There was a change of tone for Colson Whitehead, with a fizzy heist novel set amid the civil rights movement, Harlem Shuffle (Fleet), while French author Maylis de Kerangal considered art and trompe l’oeil with characteristic style in Painting Time (MacLehose, translated by Jessica Moore).

Treacle Walker (4th Estate), a flinty late-career fable from national treasure Alan Garner, is a marvellous distillation of his visionary work. At the other end of the literary spectrum, Anthony Doerr, best known for his Pulitzer-winning bestseller All the Light We Cannot See, returned with a sweeping page-turner about individual lives caught up in war and conflict, from 15th-century Constantinople to a future spaceship in flight from the dying earth. Cloud Cuckoo Land (4th Estate) is a love letter to books and reading, as well as a chronicle of what has been lost down the centuries, and what is at stake in the climate crisis today: sorrowful, hopeful and utterly transporting. And it was a pleasure to see the return to fiction of Irish author Keith Ridgway, nearly a decade after Hawthorn & Child, with A Shock (Picador), his subtly odd stories of interconnected London lives.

Damon Galgut’s first novel in seven years won him the Booker. A fertile mix of family saga and satire, The Promise (Chatto) explores broken vows and poisonous inheritances in a changing South Africa. Some excellent British novels were also listed: Nadifa Mohamed’s expert illumination of real-life racial injustice in the cultural melting pot of 1950s Cardiff, The Fortune Men (Viking); Francis Spufford’s profound tracing of lives in flux in postwar London, Light Perpetual (Faber); Sunjeev Sahota’s delicate story of family consequences, China Room (Harvill Secker); and Rachel Cusk’s fearlessly discomfiting investigation into gender politics and creativity, Second Place (Faber).

Also on the Booker shortlist was a blazing tragicomic debut from US author Patricia Lockwood, whose No One Is Talking About This (Bloomsbury) brings her quizzical sensibility and unique style to bear on wildly disparate subjects: the black hole of social media, and the painful wonder of a beloved disabled child. Raven Leilani’s Luster (Picador) introduced a similarly gifted stylist: her story of precarious New York living is full of sentences to savour. Other standout debuts included Natasha Brown’s Assembly (Hamish Hamilton), a brilliantly compressed, existentially daring study of a high-flying Black woman negotiating the British establishment; AK Blakemore’s earthy and exuberant account of 17th-century puritanism, The Manningtree Witches (Granta); and Tice Cin’s fresh, buzzy saga of drug smuggling and female resilience in London’s Turkish Cypriot community, Keeping the House (And Other Stories).

Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Open Water (Viking) is a lyrical love story celebrating Black artistry, while the first novel from poet Salena Godden, Mrs Death Misses Death (Canongate), is a very contemporary allegory about creativity, injustice, and keeping afloat in modern Britain. Further afield, two state-of-the-nation Indian debuts anatomised class, corruption and power: Megha Majumdar’s A Burning (Scribner) in a propulsive thriller, and Rahul Raina’s How to Kidnap the Rich (Little, Brown) in a blackly comic caper. Meanwhile, Robin McLean’s Pity the Beast (And Other Stories), a revenge western with a freewheeling spirit, is a gothic treat.

When is love not enough? The summer’s word-of-mouth hit was Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss (W&N), a wisecracking black comedy of mental anguish and eccentric family life focused on a woman who should have everything to live for. Another deeply pleasurable read, The Hummingbird by Sandro Veronesi (W&N, translated by Elena Pala), charts one man’s life through his family relationships. An expansive novel that finds the entire world in an individual, its playful structure makes the telling a constantly unfolding surprise.

There was a colder take on family life in Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms (Granta): this honed, painfully witty account of a toxic mother-daughter relationship is her best novel yet.

Two debut story collections pushed formal and linguistic boundaries. Dark Neighbourhood by Vanessa Onwuemezi (Fitzcarraldo) announced a surreal and inventive new voice, while in English Magic (Galley Beggar) Uschi Gatward proved a master of leaving things unsaid. Also breaking boundaries was Isabel Waidner, whose Sterling Karat Gold (Peninsula), a carnivalesque shout against repression, won the Goldsmiths prize for innovative fiction.

It will take time for Covid-19 to bleed through into fiction, but the first responses are already beginning to appear. Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat (Faber) is a bravura exploration of art, love, sex and ego pressed up against the threat of contagion. In Hall’s version of the pandemic, a loner sculptor who usually expresses herself through monumental works is forced into high-stakes intimacy with a new lover, while pitting her sense of her own creativity against the power of the virus.

A fascinating historical rediscovery shed light on the closing borders and rising prejudices of current times. In The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz (Pushkin, translated by Philip Boehm), written in 1938, a Jewish businessman tries to flee the Nazi regime. The J stamped on his passport ensures that he is met with impassive bureaucratic refusal and chilly indifference from fellow passengers in a tense, rising nightmare that’s timelessly relevant.

Finally, a novel to transport the reader out of the present. Inspired by the life of Marie de France, Matrix by Lauren Groff (Hutchinson Heinemann) is set in a 12th-century English abbey and tells the story of an awkward, passionate teenager, the gifted leader she grows into, and the community of women she builds around herself. Full of sharp sensory detail, with an emotional reach that leaps across the centuries, it’s balm and nourishment for brain, heart and soul.

THE GUARDIAN