1 House on the Borderland
by William Hope Hodgson
2 Jacob’s Room (#90)
by Virginia Woolf
3 Good Morning, Midnight
by Jean Rhys
4 The Journal of Albion Moonlight
by Kenneth Patchen
5 The Spider’s House
by Paul Bowles
6 Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead
by Barbara Comyns
7 The Unicorn
by Iris Murdoch
8 Europe After the Rain
by Alan Burns
9 Never Let Me Go (#59)
by Kazuo Ishiguro
10 After Sappho
by Selby Wynn Schwartz
Lucy Caldwell’s characters display a quiet resilience. At the same time they are breakable. She depicts their lives at moments of spiritual and emotional loneliness, supported and simultaneously defeated by the anxious sense they have that life is important even when it can never be solved. Read my review of her new collection in the Guardian.
I started this year feeling nourished. I was going to get new work on its feet. Just before Christmas it had taken on the suspicion of a structure. I could hang stuff on it, like oversize baubles on a tree seen from a passing car in a mist. “Development: nothing comes of it but the promise of order. Order itself never arrives; if there’s any risk of it arriving, the task is extended or redefined. Order’s delivery date is postponed, rescheduled. It is pushed forward. There’s never a building, only a building site. One day, the entire surface of the planet will be a project. People want to build but don’t, in the end, want to have built.” I would write something like that, then someone from deeper down in me would add: “A strong smell of toothpaste came from the house next door.” One of my earlier long-range writing projects, starting in the middle 1970s-ish was to oust the text and leave only the subtext. I didn’t see the text as haunted; only that a haunting could be presented in such a way as to suggest the tree it would normally hang from. A long drawn out process. Anyway, I did well this January, February & March, before the other stuff began to compete for my attention. During that period, Kindle advises me, I also read & re-read an inexplicably exciting combination of books, which included Gwendoline Riley & Patrick Modiano; Anita Brookner & Joy Williams; Rose Macauley & Yiyun Li; Krasznahorkai & Lispector. Clarice reminds the world again: “What I say is never what I say but instead something else.” Modiano adds, “The more obscure and mysterious things remained the more interesting I found them. I even looked for mystery where there was none.” Well. So.
JG Ballard was one of the five or six genuinely contemporary UK writers of the mid-to-late 20th Century, and perhaps the only one with a completely individual internal landscape, a fully achieved escape velocity from the UK literary establishment as then comprised, and a genuine appetite for writing into the vast social, political and scientific shifts of the century. His awareness was broad yet finely tunable; his conclusions were always his own. He wanted to be aware of the real time in the universe. All of this is noted and developed in Chris Priest & Nina Allan’s biography of Ballard, published on the 23rd of April. Exciting, too, to see a major UK publisher investing in an unconventional turn on an often stale and trudging genre. Ballard and Priest would both have enjoyed the challenge The Illuminated Man represents to our idea of how a biography should comport itself. It’ll be interesting to see the reactions of the UK literary establishment as comprised today. (Many congratulations to Nina Allan, by the way, on her Ondaatje Prize longlisting for The Granite Silence!)
“What are you having?”
“The idea of reverse-glass painting, Anthony says, was to get at the immanent. It exploited refraction to get at the light inside things.”
“I don’t expect to pay to be barked at by dogs.”
“…Hackney on Sea!”
“So what are you having?”
“Every pebble on that beach had something to recommend it.”
“A tangle of pipes in four colours is still a tangle of pipes. I wouldn’t be surprised to find this was from the 1970s.”
“There are about six people still speaking to her.”
“…the obsession with colour charts and optics, science and spirituality you see burning itself out later in UK religious painting of the 30s…”
“What are you having?”
“I’m not sure it’s a good idea to plant a rose under an apple tree.”
“I went to my lovely friend Richard, the hay man, and like any farmer he recommended…”
“…an aesthetic of semi-abandoned objects.”
“The subtitles of the print I watched did translate the Turkish though, into something like, ‘I love you, I love you.’ I assumed we were to take that as a cry of genuine sexual need on the part of the sailor.”
“It’s like one of those adverts that only really sells being an advert.”
“What are you having?”
“Vanilla, because it’s an ice cream. As opposed to rhubarb sorbet, which is a colour of housepaint.”
Tunnelling my way into a new book through the predictable rubble of notes, journal entries, epistemological cave-ins and losses of nerve, under the working title What For God’s Sake Is This Even.
Meanwhile, publication of The End of Everything will make 2026 a lifetime lifestyle benchmark for me, so here’s the cover in case you haven’t seen it yet–
Pre-order, obviously, at your outlet of choice.
