I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now. I don’t know how I got there. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped. I’d never have got there alone.

King’s Cross to King’s Lynn, 24 September 2024

I started writing this in my mother’s house, if not (like Beckett’s Molloy) in her room. I’d travelled there by train, using her car for the final leg of the journey from King’s Lynn station to her rural Norfolk village. I had a pile of books by (and about) Beckett on the desk next to me as I started writing: The Complete Short Prose, Nohow On (consisting of the three novels Company, Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho) and S. E. Gontarski’s Creative Involution, although I wasn’t finding much time to read.

My copy of Nohow On contained a train ticket for the return journey from King’s Lynn to King’s Cross but dated September 27, 1999. At that time I had rented out my flat in London and had been making extended visits to Latin America in between supporting my mum in caring for my dad and grandmother in Norfolk (a period I write about in The Future of the Novel). It was on one of these trips the previous year that I’d resolved seriously to become a novelist. I remember the precise place and moment: the day before Valentine’s Day in 1998 at a café close to the Zapotec archaeological site at Yagul in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. I don’t think the site is much to write home about but the moment was significant for me. It’s where I decided, in between reading Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce, that art was the highest form of life, and that, rather than working when I returned to the UK, that I would be a novelist. I was back in Oaxaca the following year trying to finish my first novel and immersing myself in Beckett’s novella The Lost Ones, James Knowlson’s Beckett biography and The Complete Dramatic Works.

Our domestic situation in Norfolk at the time resembled that of Beckett’s play Endgame, which I’d seen at the Barbican’s Beckett Festival a week or so before making that 1999 rail trip. It opens with the younger character Clov poised in an open doorway stage right, the elderly Nagg and Nell in closed dustbins stage left, and Hamm, their son, stage centre in his wheelchair, initially covered by a sheet. After opening the curtains and uncovering the dustbins, Clov removes Hamm’s sheet to reveal an old man in a dressing gown, a whistle hanging from his neck, a rug over his knees. Clov returns to the doorway, halts, turns towards the auditorium, and says the following:

Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. [Pause.] Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there’s a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap. [Pause.] I can’t be punished any more. [Pause.] I’ll go now to my kitchen, ten feet by ten feet by ten feet, and wait for him to whistle me. [Pause.] Nice dimensions, nice proportions, I’ll lean on the table, and look at the wall, and wait for him to whistle me. [He remains a moment motionless, then goes out…]

Hamm eventually (having woken) blows his whistle, and Clov reappears immediately. In our situation at home, my father would tap too loudly on my bedroom door with the handle of his walking stick to ask if it was time for his painkillers, my mother banging on the kitchen wall when our lunch was ready. My grandmother had died a week and a day before my first trip to Mexico.

I’d picked up Nohow On again after all that time to reread its central story – Ill Seen Ill Said – partly as a way of making sense of what was now my mother’s predicament and partly because I was trying to complete my PhD on Beckett’s late prose works –particularly his ‘closed space’ stories in which characters are confined to sealed geometrical chambers within which they barely move. The old woman in Ill Seen Ill Said is similarly beset by moments of immobility in her isolated cabin.

Heading on foot for a particular point often she freezes on the way. Unable till long after to move on not knowing whither or for what purpose.

This captured something of my mother’s state. She’d asked me to come to her from another part of Norfolk the month before as she’d been unable to move from her kitchen for hours, apart from taking herself the few steps backwards and forwards to a nearby loo, her immobility most likely a side effect of her cancer treatment. I’d been in her house more or less ever since, wheeling her from room to room, concerned about how I was to make a living while effectively also being her main carer.

I had cancelled my own doctor’s appointment scheduled for the day after I started writing this piece - the second time I had done so. This was for a recommended PSA test having completed Prostate Cancer UK’s online risk-checker. By the time of my mother’s bone scan at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital at the start of this year (to check if the cancer had spread) the nurse said we could have had ‘a two-for-one offer’: my own scan, due the same day at the Royal London, had had to be postponed. My own diagnosis had been confirmed the week before.

There is no consensus on what goes ‘Ping’ in Beckett’s closed space story of the same name (to paraphrase the title of a short piece about it by Dan O’Hara). Most interpretations rely on David Lodge’s article ‘Some “Ping” Understood’, an early summary published the year after the story, in 1968. In it, Lodge speculates that the word ‘ping’, which is repeated thirty-four times in the text, might represent the sound of the ricochet of a bullet, or of water dripping, or of a typewriter’s carriage return bell.

Head haught eyes light blue almost white fixed front ping murmur ping silence.

Eyal Amiran interprets Beckett’s text as being about an embryonic recommencement of life, as suggested by its first line:

All known all white bare white body fixed one yard legs joined like sewn.

(Beckett famously claimed to have clear pre-birth memories of being within his mother’s womb according to his biographer James Knowlson.)

For O’Hara himself, however, Ping represents ‘the restricted sensory experience of a hospital in-patient’, one connected to a piece of equipment monitoring the final moments of their life through ‘an unsteady sequence of pings – the echoes of a faltering heartbeat.’ O’Hara bases this on the fact that bedside electrocardiographs, or ECGs, came into standard use in the early sixties – ‘a period when Beckett underwent repeated surgery’ - and just before he started writing these ‘closed space’ stories.

Christopher Ricks’ Beckett’s Dying Words explores similar territory, and this was one of the volumes I took with me on a subsequent trip to Latin America – to Chile in 2000, the year my father died – along with Beckett’s ‘trilogy’ of novels. I spent most of that time in a hut in the foothills of the Andes in the Valle de Elqui, at a Buddhist retreat centre. They were very kind to me, offering me two meals a day and a reduced rate, enabling me to write for extended periods, and I remember joining in with a Buddhist ceremony, one full moon night, even though I wasn’t entirely sure what it entailed. I wrote the Spanish word ‘flojos’ (‘lazy’) on a piece of paper and burnt it, later learning that laziness in the Buddhist tradition can be taken to mean being caught up in the busyness of life to the extent that the most important things get forgotten about.

The significance of that ceremony has been returning to me since I started venturing out again, after my own operation, to the café in my local park where I am editing my new novel; my mum, unable to cope at home, even with our help, is now in residential care. As with all such insights, it doesn’t amount to much in the retelling: that I should stop unconsciously filling my time with activities that distract me from what is most meaningful, which is to say, from trying to ‘give all help and joy to my mothers’ (as the Tibetans say), and from writing – in the fullest sense of the word – writing as a tool, a ‘technology of the self’, to become the person I need, in this lifetime, to become.

It is from the upper level of King’s Cross station that Khaled watches his old friend Hosam Zowa walk across the concourse towards his train to Paris before continuing out towards Shepherd’s Bush Green in the west of the city, his adopted home (in Hisham Matar’s exquisite recent novel, My Friends). Which books does your hometown take you to (on this World Book Day)? Let me know in the comments!

From The Globe on Bankside to the World’s End pub in Camden, here is my own tour of the novel, written in London’s topography (for The London Magazine).

Just wanted to give a bit more context for André Gide’s novel Les Faux-Monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters), first published a century ago today. I wrote about this in relation to AI and novel for the Royal Literary Fund here.

The first part of André Gide’s novel Les Faux-Monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters) appeared 100 years ago, on 1 March 1925, in the literary magazine La Nouvelle Revue Française. Revolving around the theme of originals and copies, the centrepiece of the novel is an exploration of the art of the novel itself, and the relationship between the worlds of fiction and ‘real’ life. Gide’s alter-ego within the novel, Édouard, is also writing a novel called Les Faux-Monnayeurs; he, like Gide, keeps a journal commenting on his own compositional process, with this journal published within (and, in Gide’s case, alongside) the novel. Asked by his friend Sophroniska what the subject of the novel is, Édouard replies ‘There is none…My novel has no subject.’ His aspiration instead is to write a novel that contains everything, that excludes none of his material: ‘I have been working for a year, and there is nothing I haven’t put in: all I see, all I know, all I can learn from other people’s lives and my own.’

Speaking about it two years after its publication as part of a Cambridge lecture-series (eventually published as Aspects of the Novel), E. M. Forster described the novel as being both a ‘curious’ specimen – as though, instead of laying an egg, Gide had set out ‘to lay a paraboloid’ – and as being ‘among the most interesting of recent works’. What was new in the novel, for Forster, was Gide’s attempt to break free from the ‘tyranny’ of novelistic plot ‘and its alternative, tyranny by characters’. The alternative proposal, here, for Forster, was that writers should fully immerse themselves in their material: they should be subdued, carried away, and ‘rolled over and over by it’, rather than trying to control it or use it as a basis to plan or structure the work. Ideas about forgery, inflation and depreciation had, after all, ‘gradually invaded’ Édouard’s book (in Gide’s words) just as theories of clothing invade Thomas Carlyle’s novel Sartor Resartus to the point of assuming ‘the functions of characters’. The novel is also notable, for Forster, in its attempt to combine ‘the two truths’ – truth in life and truth in art – in a sub-genre that we might now categorise as autofiction.

One of the incidents that inspired the novel was Gide seeing a schoolboy stealing from a second-hand bookstall in Paris. It was only after cramming the book in his pocket that the schoolboy realized Gide had seen him, shortly and hesitantly withdrawing his wallet and pretending to search for the money that he already knew he did not have. Georges, the schoolboy in the novel involved in a similar incident of theft is also involved in passing the false currency of the novel’s title, with the real counterfeiters being a gang captured in Rouen in the years before Gide began writing the novel. Newspaper clippings appended to Gide’s compositional journal (from Figaro, 16 September 1906) describe the counterfeit coins as being manufactured in Spain, introduced into France, brought by three professional criminals before being passed by middlemen to ‘bohemians, second-year students, unemployed journalists, artists, novelists, etc.’ for circulation to the public. For some, this illegal trade was ‘humanitarian work: “Once in a while I would give a few to poor devils with money troubles who could use them to keep their families alive. …And nobody was harmed, because we were stealing from nobody but the State.”’

I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation (over email) with David Rose over the last few weeks. I first encountered David’s work through Vault, his ‘anti-novel’, and have been catching up, ever since, on his shorter fiction. He is consummate, his mastery of the form remaining woefully under-acknowledged. We talked about Interpolated Stories, his recent collection for Confingo Publishing, the future of the novel and the short story, and much else besides.

SO: I have recently been reading D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Future of the Novel’. This is an essay from 1923 in which he argues, in particular, for a rapprochement between philosophy and fiction.

I came across a line where he describes the modern novel as being like conjoined twins, in terms of the relationship between popular and literary fiction, and it reminded me of a similar point that you made in your piece on modernism and the anti-novel for 3:AM, in which you say ‘The anti-novel was in fact born with the novel...and has shadowed the novel through its history; matter and anti-matter.’ So it made me wonder (as a possible starting point for our exchanges on the future of the novel and the short story) whether you were aware of this essay of Lawrence’s and what sort of influence (if any) his fiction and non-fiction has had on your own work.

DR: Oddly and sadly, I hadn’t ever come across that essay by Lawrence. I have some of the essays and most of the short stories and novels in a Penguin uniform edition from the 1970s but that essay isn’t included. I have huge admiration for Lawrence and his intuitive and incisive mind, and his body of short stories is maybe his most important work, but I don’t think I have been influenced by him (nor could I point to any other influences).

I entirely agree with that link between philosophy and literature, and one I would like to restore between the short story and philosophy. I have been rereading some of the essays in The New Aestheticism (ed. Joughin and Malpas) and in particular, their introduction. They quote Schlegel – “Where philosophy ends literature must begin...” and go on to discuss the role literature is equipped to play in that relationship.

That essay on the anti-novel was cobbled together as a puff for Vault, using Josipovici’s book as peg. I’m not happy about his conflating Modernism and the anti-novel and redefining Modernism as beginning with Cervantes as a result, but that’s an aside.

I hope to expand on the link between short fiction and philosophy and other discourse, and the way ‘foreign material’ incorporated into literary texts become naturalized, in light of Thomas Mann’s assertion that the relationship between a novelist and his research material is always one of parody, of irony (I can’t offhand find the quote), and the role that creates for fiction in exploring philosophical ideas (scientific ones too, e.g. Sheldrake’s theory of Morphic Resonance).

SO: Thanks, yes, that Lawrence essay on the future of the novel is, perhaps, a little obscure. He wrote it in the U.S. in 1922-23 and it was probably written partly in response to a 1921 book of the same name in which Meredith Starr interviewed sixty English writers on the novel’s future. It was also partly written in response to his reading of Ulysses, which he’d received from his publisher on 6 November 1922 and returned a fortnight later with the comment that it had wearied him: ‘so like a schoolmaster with dirt and stuff in his head: sometimes good, though: but too mental.’ His publisher wanted to publish these comments, something Lawrence thought would be unfair to Joyce. He turned, instead, to the general topic of the novel and its future, his essay appearing in the Literary Digest International Book Review in April 1923. (All this from Bruce Steele’s wonderful introduction to Lawrence’s Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays.) Can you say more about the relationship between a fiction writer and their research, and how it opens up a space to explore philosophical ideas?

DR: I must try to read that essay of Lawrence’s – very typical of his pugnacious but intuitive insight. I have read elsewhere his view of Ulysses – not dissimilar to Virginia Woolf’s, or Nora Joyce’s come to that.

On Mann’s comment on the way factual research inevitably becomes parody when fictionalized, I would say that his point is made by a reading of The Magic Mountain; his examination of the choice before Germany – East or West, liberalism or tradition – is entirely serious on his part, but it isn’t like reading Oswald Spengler. The famous irony alters the experience, as it transmutes the material of the ideas.

That was brought home to me by the experience of writing Interpolated Stories and pondering the results. The academic discourse (some of it intentional parody, although a lot of academic discourse is itself unintentional parody), although resistant, is always at risk of naturalization, subsumed into the fiction. There’s a wonderful metaphor for that in an aphorism of Kafka’s, one of his Zürau Aphorisms, in which leopards habitually break into a temple and drink up the wine, so predictably that it becomes incorporated into the ritual. That became the ending of an unpublished short story in which authorial interjections are directed to the narrator – unironically – with the same risk.

So the issue is not one of “shoehorning larger and larger chunks of reality” into fiction, in response to David Shields. It’s the way fiction’s suppleness manages the introduction of “foreign matter” such as philosophical, scientific, academic discourse; that suppleness, fluidity, gives fiction licence to broach philosophical ideas unburdened by the need for rigour, logic or in the case of scientific theory, falsifiability criteria. The ironic distance is the space in which fiction, like poetry, “may be able to say what philosophy can know it cannot”, as David Wood puts it (in Philosophers’ Poets quoted by Joughin and Malpas). Ideas can be advanced tentatively, played with, presented narratively in concrete form, pro and contra.

But there’s a two-way advantage: that opens up a way out of the two-dimensionality of narrative, gives it another dimension.

In art, the decisive breakthrough, in my opinion, was not Cubism per se but the use of collage within Cubism – the importation of the external world in the form of tickets, wall paper, bills, but far more significantly, of newspaper clippings, not merely as materiality but as discourse – the textual matter, the headlines and following reportage detailing with the then current Balkan War and the economic and political condition of Europe, topics which as an anarchist Picasso was deeply engaged with (see Cubism and Culture, Antliff/Leighten 2001).

Thus, in Interpolated Stories, there is enacted a clash of discourses, in which fictional discourse is given the opportunity to justify itself, demonstrate a superiority it might have over other discourses, its lyrical realism being hard-fought for and hard-won (one hopes), gaining that extra dimension as a result.

It is also nourished by the fresh currents of thought flowing through its texts. By coincidence, I have been reading Steven Matthews’ Beckett and Cioran in the Cambridge Elements series, in which Matthews notes the affinity between the two authors, both resident in Paris, aware of each other’s work even before meeting in person – an affinity resting on shared philosophical concerns: with the Presocratics, with scepticism, mysticism and irrationality, with an antipathy to professional, jargonized philosophy. Matthews demonstrates how that philosophical groundview provided not only a programme for Beckett’s fiction but also directed its form, toward brevity – the Textes pour rien/Texts for Nothing as opposed to the earlier novels – and ultimately in the direction of the aphorism.

SO: I am finding the enacted clash of discourses in Interpolated Stories fascinating and have been wondering about the nature of the interpolations. Initially I read them straightforwardly (and perhaps somewhat simplistically) as late(r) authorial interjections, but latterly I have been reading them as the first-person discourse of an additional (commentarial) character which serves to trouble the pre-existing discourse. One of the things I write about in The Future of the Novel (after Timothy Bewes’ Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age) is that the future will be one in which the ‘thought’ of the novel will no longer be locatable subjectively within a character, narrator or author but will emerge from a non-anchored, non-centred ‘free indirect’ perspective. Are you sympathetic to that interpretation of the interpolations – that the interplay that this new first-person ‘character’ creates with the existing characters serves to create a point-of-view that cannot be inhabited subjectively? Or am I reading too much into them?

DR: I’m not familiar with Timothy Bewes’ book, but it sounds very interesting. And yes, you are correct in seeing the interpolations as being, except for the first story, non-authorial, anonymous and purposely disruptive. All this is, now, theorizing after the event; my approach to writing has always been intuitive and heuristic, although I do find the theory side fascinating in and for itself.

The opening story, never intended at the time as forerunner of a series, was simply an expression of exasperation at much of current short fiction, including my own, the frustration manifesting as ‘self-vandalization’, as a friend put it. I didn’t expect to publish it. Only after some reflection did I see potential for other forms of interpolated discourse, and began to explore some of the possibilities. Putting “Amongst the Corots” first in the collection made chronological sense but is slightly misleading, and I suspect others too assumed all later interpolations were authorial.

As I remember, the next story I tried the idea on was “Like It”, about the working class technician, installing the temporary toilets at an outside production of Shakespeare and his unmediated response to watching the performance. I feel that almost all comment these days on Shakespeare comes from the academics, often with an agenda, hardly ever from ordinary theatre goers, hence the parodic nature of the academic discourse used to break and and in places overlay and obscure the narrator. (The rule I set myself was not to revise in any way the original text except to obscure by overwriting in a few places.)

I then applied feminist discourse to “Smoke”, which was originally based on a true local story; post-colonial discourse to “Empire”; historiographical discourse to “Edvard Munch Surveys Staines Bridge”. The latter presented problems in that the original text already had interjections in bold, first-person comments by Munch in a third-person narrative. I decided to stick with my rule and add the discourse in the same bold type, and hope that the difference between first and third person would bring sufficient clarity.

But I wanted to find other forms of interpolation, so I turned to “Cobblers”, about a children’s entertainer who has had no desire to be a father, perpetuate his genes, and disrupted it with interjections by the unborn souls, drawing on Eliot’s poem “Animula”.

The final two stories differ again in that they were ‘through-composed’ as it were – written from scratch, to see if that would work in the same way. “Decrescendo” is a metaphysical story with Biblical interpolations; “Under the Plan” drew on a TLS review of several books on the Eugenics movement in early to mid-Twentieth century America – which in its application predated and influenced Nazi eugenicist ideology. The Kellogg family were ardent supporters of eugenics, encouraging not just repressing procreation by “unfit” women but encouraging it among the fit, by sponsoring Healthy Baby competitions for example. There are also quotations from the infamous Scopes trial – which wasn’t about the teaching of biological evolution, as assumed, but of a vicious form of Social Darwinism – and from a judge defending the decision to forcibly sterilize a young woman deemed mentally deficient.

Having finished what had become a series, I assumed they could only be published individually if at all, and sent “Smoke” to the magazine Confingo, who accepted it. Tim Shearer, its editor, when I mentioned others in the same vein, asked for the word count of each, and proposed publishing them as a small collection.

Meanwhile, I had started another series of disrupted texts, again using pre-existing stories but applying erasure or the imposition of symbols or other non-linguistic code, most of them published individually in an American journal, Exacting Clam.

The point of all these techniques is, as you put it, to “trouble” the reading, disrupt the text. That need for disruption is dealt with by a recent book by Alva Noë, The Entanglement (Princeton 2023), reviewed in the TLS (I have since read it). He argues that full human consciousness depends on the disruption of our “natural”, biological and habitual level of conscious being by a second-order of self-consciousness in which art and philosophy break through habit to expand the possibilities; disruption is their prime role (he does redefine the terms aesthetics and philosophy to widen their accepted meanings).

All that does, I think relate to your point about that non-anchored, non-locatable perspective, and the “third voice” you spoke of early in your Substack essay. Interestingly, Steven Matthews indicates that the term itself was first used by Cioran, in the closing pages of his Précis de décomposition (a copy of which Beckett had in his library) where Cioran “makes a demented wish on behalf of the writing voice... [‘to live and die in the third person’], as though some displaced rendered of Not I, again.”

Matthews also, in his conclusion, points to an essay by Cioran – “Beyond the Novel” – in which Matthews senses “a corrosion or collapse of the human ability... to produce a work that might conceal its creator.” Increasingly, that seemed to have been Beckett’s aim. And maybe what Bewes too has in mind.

SO: Again the idea of disrupting our habitual level of consciousness echoes something Lawrence writes about in his Future – as suggested in the title given to the essay by his publisher: ‘Surgery for the Novel – or a Bomb’. The novel was, for Lawrence, ‘in a rather dirty, messy tight corner. And it’s either got to get over the wall, or knock a hole through it.’ Clearly he favours the latter:

Eventually, though, first one and then another of us filters through the gap to find ‘a new world outside.’

What would you say is wrong with so much of current short fiction? And is the prescription entirely encapsulated in the Noëan disruption that you describe?

DR: I do love Lawrence’s forthrightness, and over-the-top challenges to received opinions and literary practice.

What do I feel is wrong with much current fiction? An intricate question. In part, it lies in a sociological problem, paradoxically related to the current interest in the short story, which is at its highest for many years, possibly. The problem is an opposed squeeze on the form: an increased production, from the C/W industry, with the increased accessibility for publication on the internet, in one direction, and the disappearance of so many of the print outlets, together with literature’s widespread loss of cultural prestige and influence in the other, both of which result in even more publication on the internet, where much gets lost in the information ocean, but even so, leaves a glut of stories in the public domain. But there is perhaps a readership deficit – no one is reading these stories because they are all busy writing their own.

This democratization is welcome, but it tends, I suspect, to reinforce the reliance on pure narrative – a reliance strengthened by narrative – story – being purloined by commercial advertising and in personal counselling – at the expense of experimentation. The welcome freshness in the short story comes from content – minority-cultural settings, characters, plots – rather than from formal innovation, which in my view is essential if short fiction and indeed literature itself is to regain its prestige. The Chekhovian ‘glimpse’ is no longer adequate in a culturally diverse world.

Narrative is two-dimensional – everything is depicted within the plane of narrative, without a level of enactment. Reality, the world, is infinitely complex, and fiction needs to mirror that more convincingly. It needs further dimensions, including discursive disruption, not for the sake of disruption in itself (Noë’s argument is that any reflection at all, which is inevitable in any activity at all, any self-consciousness, is unavoidably disruptive), but to allow further semantic levels.

I am not advocating simply the larky, ludic side of Postmodernist short stories of the likes of Barthelme, Sukenick, Coover, valuable though they were, but a more serious engagement with philosophy, other discourses, as a way of adding those further dimensions.

For example, the series of stories following the interpolated series used other disruptive impositions to either reassert or undermine the original text. Thus, a story about a blind piano tuner, afraid of losing his wife from his inability to articulate his moments of epiphany, had large sections of narrative erased, isolating those moments; a mock biography of Linnaeus had a repeating sequence of vowels picked out in bold, representing a sequence of genetic code, with a ‘mutation’ in the final iteration, undermining the Linnaean system; a story narrated by an artist, rival to Jackson Pollock, has imposed apparently cryptic numerical symbols which actually relate to specific canvases by Pollock (who himself incorporated such symbols into his paintings, and gave many paintings a numerical title), thus allowing Pollock to answer the narrator's charges. How far the technique worked is another matter but that was the intent.

In the matter of the interpolations, they act as an ironic counterpoint in what then becomes a polyphonic text. To extend the musical metaphor, I’d describe narrative as plainchant, where the world is symphonic. Musicologists have noted that most symphonic development is so intricate that no listener, even the composer, can follow every line simultaneously. But the important point, for me, is that the listener senses that felt complexity of the individual symphonic world.

Narrative is and will always be a central component of fiction, of any length, and there will always be the demand for sheer narrative, pure story. But if literature is to restore its link with philosophy (in the manner of Beckett, for example) it can’t rely solely on narrative thrust. I don’t maintain that there is only one future for the short story or that disruption in various forms the sole way forward. There is many avenues to explore: that “third voice” you have mentioned in previous Substack posts; other voices too, discursive, disembodied; tenses – what would it mean to write without the Future Tense? Only in the Future Tense?

Many possibilities opening up; as the novelist Bill Broady said on the matter of the breaking of the narrative plane: “it’s like splitting the atom – the possibilities are endless”. But only if they’re explored.

The short story is best placed to explore them, due to its brevity, its protean nature, and only experimentation will allow future possibilities to be opened up.

Kemi Badenoch provoked a backlash recently when she said she had become working class on returning to the UK from Nigeria aged sixteen. The Tory leadership candidate worked at McDonald’s on her return to the country of her birth, and she used this as an example of a step down in social class. In Nigeria she’d had a middle-class upbringing, being ‘driven to school every day’. Now she was having to support herself, was not always able to afford her own bus fare, and was sometimes going hungry.

The novelist Ross Raisin used his own experience of “working either in kitchens or around kitchens, in hotels and bars and restaurants” (The Guardian) to wonderful effect in Ghost Kitchen, which won the BBC national short story award earlier this month. I had the great pleasure of being a judge with Ross on this year’s Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, so I thought I would explore one or two aspects of his story using the values that guided our deliberations for that prize to see what this might tell us about the future of political fiction (with the following being my own views rather than those of the Orwell Foundation).

A key principle of the prize is to put aside one’s own political or ideological beliefs and to assess the submitted novels and short story collections on their own merit. This, for me, gets to the heart of an aspect of what the greatest political fiction writers do: convincingly inhabit political positions antithetical to their own, something that is, of course, extremely difficult to do. It brings to mind a (half-remembered) story that John Yorke (author of the seminal Into The Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them) once told in a writing workshop I attended on story shape or outline. Yorke talked about working with mining communities around the time of the 1980s UK miners’ strike. In workshops in these communities, he tried to get participants to write a story from the viewpoint of a miner crossing a picket line to continue work during the strike. They refused to do it.

It is not difficult to understand why. Our political predilections run deep; we can think of them as ‘tribal’. Yet the greatest political fiction manages to transcend these affiliations – or perhaps it manages to plumb their depths. As perhaps the greatest political novelist – Tolstoy – writes (at the end of his short story Sevastopol in May 1855)

Where in this tale is the evil that should be avoided, and where the good that should be imitated? Who is the villain and who the hero of the story? All are good and all are bad…

The suggestion here, then, is that, rather than going ‘beyond good and evil’ (in the phrase of Nietzsche’s from his Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future), there is a recognition of both aspects within characters whose opinions may range across the political spectrum. Yet this is not a representation of some insipid political relativism; at its best such writing requires rigorous critical thought and ruthless political acumen. The ability to inhabit the political views of one’s enemies (while undoubtedly continuing to disagree with them) requires, in other words, an intellectual courage and clarity that can seem to be in ever shorter supply.

The purpose of political fiction, on this basis, is to extend beyond ideology or rhetoric to arrive at a truth that will effect change. This – truth – Tolstoy concludes, is

The hero of my tale – whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful…

Truth, then, is that to which political fiction aspires, a truth that transcends narrow affiliations; this is – truly – a tall order, and one towards which few successfully ascend.

Clarity of expression is another of Orwell’s injunctions: good prose, for him, ‘is like a windowpane.’ (Why I Write) It is an apt image for Ross’s story. Sean, the protagonist, ends up operating a deep fat fryer in a ‘ghost kitchen’ or ‘dark kitchen’. These are kitchens with no windows and so “no way for anybody on the outside to see in”. Often located on the urban fringe, they are, “concealed islands that sometimes create the conditions for darkness to flourish”. (The Guardian) One of the great gifts of the story is the shedding of light on these spaces. Ross also had a series of “fascinating conversations” with couriers (Sean’s other trade), which led him to a deeper level of critical and creative engagement with the precarity of the gig economy.

Orwell also said he wanted ‘to make political writing into an art’, and that he couldn’t write a political book or essay ‘if it were not also an aesthetic experience’ (again in Why I Write). One of the ways in which ‘Ghost Kitchen’ is a masterful expression of the art of political fiction in this sense is in its plotting and pacing and – specifically – in the symmetry of its structure.

Sean becomes a cycle courier after a tragic family incident involving his brother Frank. Much hinges on the nature and outcome of that tragedy, and Ross skilfully withholds and discloses key elements of that tragedy at precisely the right moments in the story. The name Frank is mentioned fifteen times in total, and the concentrations of these references disclose something of the story’s symmetrical structure.

Frank is referred to once in each of the first three parts of the story: in the first paragraph, where Sean, on his courier route, has finally mastered his bike, ‘which had been Frank’s’; in the fifth, where he lingers over the smell of fish and chips at the ghost kitchen’s collection point before zipping his courier bag shut, a smell that reminds him ‘of childhood, of Frank’; and in paragraph nine, when the laughing face of a student receiving a stack of pizzas on a sodden doorstep reminds Sean of his brother, even though the student is ‘at least five years younger than Frank would be now’.

A concentration of seven further instances occurs around the story’s midpoint, when Sean is attacked by three boys, who are ‘keyed up, wild’ and who make off with his courier bag full of takeaway. It is this incident that resurfaces the trauma of what happened to Frank, and it is in this moment that Sean’s character starts to change. After it, he begins responding to the victimisation of one of his colleagues at the ghost kitchen, a colleague who becomes a kind of surrogate brother to him (another element in the story’s symmetry). The remaining five references to Frank in the story occur in the concluding paragraphs, where what really happened to him is revealed, and Sean experiences the painful consequences of acting to protect his colleague.

The author and critic David Lodge said (in The Art of Fiction) that ‘Symmetry matters more to writers of fiction than readers consciously perceive’. This symmetry is an example, for me, of what makes Ross’s ‘political writing into an art’ in this story.

I don’t know if Kemi, in the future, will ever mine her own fast food experience to such wonderful fictional (rather than purely political) effect. If she does, then these are some of the characteristics that could guide that endeavour.

One of my favourite moments from the Karl Ove Knausgård event last night at Foyles in London was when he described reading Proust as a 26-year-old, “and then eighteen months later I could write.” He’d found his voice, in other words, though he didn’t make the connection with Proust’s influence at the time. He spoke about previously having read the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard and (consciously or unconsciously) copying Bernhard’s writing style, with highly unsatisfactory results. Having found his own voice though, post-Proust, his writing flourished. He said it became a lot more like reading, as though he had somehow managed to step aside and wanted to find out, like any other reader, what would become of his own characters.

One conclusion to be drawn from this is that influences must become fully internalised before they can be owned; this takes time. Another is that influence ‘is not a kind of copying’ (in the words of the great Fredric Jameson, who died last week). It is, instead,

…permission unexpectedly received to do things in new ways, to broach new content, to tell stories by way of forms you never knew you were allowed to use.

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In his introduction to Samuel Beckett’s collection of three late novels, Nohow On, S. E. Gontarski identifies a new character – the nameless ‘him,’ ‘her,’ ‘one,’ or ‘it’ – as the second of Beckett’s major fictional innovations, the first being that of ‘voice’: the ‘progressive disintegration of literary character’ that dominated the novels from the post-war Watt onwards. The transition from the latter to the former is announced in the sixth and seventh sentences of the story All Strange Away:

Out of the door and down the road in the old hat and coat like after the war, no, not that again. Five foot square, six high, no way in, none out, try for him there.

The short prose works leading to the three late novels feature nameless characters enclosed – perhaps even entombed – in a series of claustrophobic spaces: from All Strange Away’s cuboid which is ‘tightened’ to three foot square, five high, around a solitary male figure, its ceiling then further lowered ‘down two foot’ to form, now, momentarily, a ‘perfect cube’ around a solitary female character, which then becomes the rotunda ‘as in the Pantheon of Rome or certain beehive tombs’ that is taken forward into Imagination Dead Imagine and which there contains ‘two white bodies’, a male and a female, lying on the ground, and continues with the enclosure of one who is ‘perhaps not alone’ within Ping’s white walls ‘one yard by two’ and ceiling of ‘one square yard never seen’, to The Lost One’s flattened sixteen-metre-high cylindrical abode ‘where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one’, and into the vacant spherical chamber of the unpublished Long Observation of the Ray.

These short prose pieces are typically referred to as Beckett’s ‘closed space’ stories, but I prefer to think of them as ‘closed system’ works. This is a concept from science in which external factors or variables that could alter an experiment or problem are eliminated, thereby simplifying it. Which variables was Beckett controlling for, then, in these closed system works? What was he trying to achieve with such radical reduction?

Imagination Dead Imagine offers a clue. Here, the fact that there is ‘[no] trace anywhere of life’, that ‘waters, azure, verdure’ after ‘one glimpse’ are omitted, vanishing endlessly, presents ‘no difficulty’. Instead of the usual interaction between character and setting, we have two seemingly inanimate bodies ‘bent in three’, lying on their right sides such that they are ‘back to back head to arse’. Each is located within its own semicircle on the ground of a rotunda three feet high and three wide. With no way into the vault, and none out, the only movement is that of the bodies’ left eyes, ‘which at incalculable intervals suddenly open wide and gaze in unblinking exposure long beyond what is humanly possible’, as though trying to make sense of their shared predicament.

Neither is named, nor needs to be named. Instead, they are identified as ‘the white body of a woman finally’, a body that would merge ‘in the white ground were it not for the long hair of imperfect whiteness’, alongside the body of her male partner, which is ‘inscribed’ in the rotunda’s other semicircle. Yet while more or less inert, they are not dead: ‘Hold a mirror to their lips, it mists.’ Nor are they sleeping: there are ‘a thousand little signs too long to imagine’ to the contrary.

What they are doing is ‘talking to themselves in the last person’ – to adapt a line from All Strange Away:

Light off and let him be, on the stool, talking to himself in the last person, murmuring, no sound, Now where is he, no, Now he is here.

Voices in Beckett’s novels can be read as natural and non-pathological expressions of ‘inner speech’ – the activity of talking to and with oneself, within oneself – although an inner speech that is ‘detuned’ or defamiliarized as a means, in part, of exploring its functioning (as Marco Bernini argues in his book Beckett and the Cognitive Method). Bernini uses a term coined by the Austrian linguist Franz Stanzel to explore Beckett’s fictional voices. ‘Mediacy’ refers to the distance between a narrator and their setting: at one end of the spectrum there is ‘an external and disengaged narrator’ recounting events and describing characters from a third-person viewpoint; at the other, we gain access to a fictional universe as though we were directly experiencing it from a first-person perspective.

There is also a intermediate position, which Stanzel refers to as “figural narration”. Bernini characterises this as an ‘interweaving’ of the voices and worldviews of narrator and character(s), as though the latter ‘bends over’ the former, enabling us to hear their thoughts and beliefs, and experience their perceptions. David Herman describes it, in Basic Elements of Narrative, as a ‘blending’ of first- and third-person narration: a narrator recounting events that are ‘filtered through the perspective or focalizing perceptions of a reflector figure, that is, a particularized center of consciousness’. The first sentence of James Joyce’s story ‘The Dead’ is a well-known example of this: ‘Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.’ The narrator, while maintaining his independent position, is identified with his character through the simultaneous retention of Lily’s word ‘literally’ (in preference to the more accurate ‘figuratively’, say, or ‘metaphorically’) and the omission of the reporting verb ‘she thought’.

It is these more or less stable perspectives that Beckett sought to isolate and undermine in his closed system works. He used his systems to essentialise both character and setting, radically simplifying the latter as a means of better understanding the former. Instead of exploring characters as distinct, subjectively inhabitable presences, he relinquished entirely any claim to represent a stable perspective, preferring, instead, to observe the moments in which a ‘voice’ emerges within an authorial consciousness that is simultaneously reflecting on the nature of that emergence: ‘Five foot square, six high, no way in, none out, try for him there.’ The isolation of these figures within a laboratorial enclosure might seem like an abstraction or like wilful obscuration, but its purpose is quite straightforward: to understand, more clearly, what actually transpires within the creative process itself.

These are voices, then, speaking from a unique and ultimately uninhabitable fictional perspective, one that transcends the ordinarily exhaustive list of personal pronouns referencing ‘grammatical persons’. In using his closed systems to explore such voices, ‘Beckett did something new not only with his own fiction but with fiction in general’ (Gontarski), something that will continue to reverberate into the future of the form.

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Hello, and welcome to a new Substack exploring the future of the novel. I’m a novelist based in London, and I’ve spent the past couple of years thinking and writing about this topic for a book of the same name (forthcoming in 2025 from Melville House). Mine will be the latest in a long line of titles by working novelists exploring the novel’s future, going all the way back to the great Henry James himself, in 1899.

This Substack will be a space for readers and writers to congregate to explore the novel’s past, present and multiple possible futures. The purpose will not be to try and guess what the novel of tomorrow might look like; instead, we will try to figure out how we want it to look, and how, collectively, we might get there.

One of my starting points is that the future of the novel is dependent on the health (or otherwise) of the ‘anti-novel’. This term for experimental long-form fiction was popularised by Jean-Paul Sartre but can be traced to the writer Charles Sorel, whose novel The Extravagant Shepherd was re-titled L’Anti-roman (The Anti-novel) as far back as 1633. Sorel’s work critiqued all that was conventional in fiction, and championed (as I will here) ‘the need for innovation in the field of literature’.

This will be a place, then, to discuss literary invention in all its forms, and its relationship with more mainstream forms of fiction. After all, if the novel is dependent on the anti-novel to refresh and revive it, then the opposite is also true: the anti-novel has always needed its more popular sibling as a necessary foil – if only to establish an ironic distance from it.

Each week I’ll explore a specific aspect of a contemporary novel – character, voice, setting, etc – and what it might mean for our literary futures. Here are some of the things I’ll look at.

• The novelist Rachel Cusk said, a few years ago, that she didn’t think literary character existed anymore, that it is ‘resting on old, possibly decrepit structures’. What, if not character, will be the basis of the novel of the future?

• Some novelists attack the continuing emergence of technology without acknowledging that the novel – and writing – are themselves forms of technology. What role will new technologies have in tomorrow’s novel?

• Have we actually entered a ‘postfictional’ age, as Timothy Bewes argues in his recent book Free Indirect, one in which the traditional first-, second- and third-person perspectives are abandoned entirely?

I hope you will join me here to explore new forms in fiction.

Free subscribers will get at least one free post a month.

Paid subscribers will get:

• one in-depth post a week about innovative novel-writing processes, ground-breaking novels, novelists’ lives and other stuff;

• access to my ongoing conversations with agents, publishers, novelists and others about the novel’s future; and

• access to our own private chat channel, which is a place to:

  • meet, greet and compare notes with others who care about the novel’s future; and

  • ask me any questions (which I will try to answer in upcoming posts).

Founding subscribers will get all of the above, plus a signed and dedicated copy of The Future of the Novel when it is published next year – as well as my undying gratitude.