Category: Fiction
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A trajectory
General relativity tells us something enticing about time. It doesn’t tell us what many would like it to tell us, that time is simply another dimension which our limited perspective turns into the one-way-street of our experience; it tells us instead that time has a particular relation to entropy, that…
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For the readers
There’s something wonderful about being immersed in the world of a book, something which for me is even more pronounced when that world is invented. Even when a secondary world is dystopian, like Margaret Atwood’s theocracy of Gilead, there’s something about inhabiting it which excites the explorer in me, which…
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Veils of allusion
Iain Sinclair walks London’s sacred geometries, pursuing a dérive that moves obliquely across the familiar, prosaic territories of the city. Or he consecrates the geometries of his walking. Or he territorialises a sacred ambulation. This triangle, of place, movement and meaning, is the tripod on which these two short books…
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Ruthlessly imagined
It’s very unusual for me to read a recently published novel, much less a prize-winning one. This is mainly because my reading is usually thematically led, as in my current exploration of psychogeographic, mnemonically focussed, and narrative-spatialising work, which has kept me busy with the back catalogues of W.G. Sebald,…
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Impossible speech
I have a pet theory. I would like to articulate it eventually through a scholarly monograph, but for the moment it guides my peregrinations through fantasy (and other forms of) fiction, and emerges in partial form in the things I say about it. It is roughly as follows: certain writers…
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Migratory death-drives
Emigration seems to offer a fresh start, a blank slate; this is often what is hoped for by those that practice it. In many cases, of those fleeing conflict or extreme economic deprivation, this is a more than reasonable aspiration, and the contrast that is occasioned by a successful migration…
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A few wooden buildings
Places have memories. This is not to propose the pathetic fallacy that they have feelings, consciousness, thoughts or intentions, but that in the same manner that a certain synaptic pattern preserves a trace of experience in the brain, features of landscape and cityscape preserve traces of biography. Of course subjective…
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The book closed, the world continues
The best speculative fiction, particularly of the secondary-world variety, immerses its readers in its setting, often in initially quite baffling ways, and lets them work out the details of its imagined cultural and social milieu as they go. Sadly Flamesong doesn’t do this, but takes very slim pretexts from the…
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A cautionary elegy
William Boyd thinks that The Radetzky March is ‘one of the enduring monuments of twentieth-century European literature’; I’d never heard of it before a friend recommended it to me. It’s quite likely that Boyd hasn’t heard of the books I think are ‘enduring monuments’ either (although I actually think that…
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Fear of the unknown
I only ever read H.P. Lovecraft’s work in a haphazard manner, and my familiarity with his oeuvre has owed as much to Sandy Petersen’s 1980s role-playing game Call of Cthulhu as it has to the few stories I read before diving into this mammoth volume. His imaginary milieu, the so-called…
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Traces of lives on geographies
I’ve been skirting around W.G. Sebald for years. I read The Rings of Saturn, as I suspect many people have in my part of the country, because it is a travelogue through territory with which I am familiar, and then re-read it in some detail as part of my research…
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A humane document
Mother London was something of a surprise to me, inasmuch as it’s something I needed to read, something that should have been more or less top of my reading list, but which I simply happened to read by chance. Firstly it was chance that I happened to spot it in…
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Sculpted in the clay of language
Christopher Tolkien made it perfectly clear in Beren and Lúthien, published in 2017, that it was the last book he would produce as the editor of his father’s considerable legacy of unfinished writings. As he was then in his 93rd year, this seemed a reasonable point at which to hang…
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The opposite of psychogeography
Patrick Rothfuss is an excellent writer slumming it in the undemanding environs of commercial fiction. Don’t get me wrong – I enjoyed reading The Slow Regard of Silent Things. It is a novella with much to recommend it, a pleasing book, a pretty book, written with a deft touch technically…
Oliver Arditi 