For the ancient Romans, the god Janus presided over beginnings and endings. He was all about transition - looking back to the past and forward to the future, poised on the cusp of change. Cakes of spelt flour and salt would be offered to Janus as one year gave way to the next, but as I can’t eat gluten I’ll leave him to breakfast alone this New Year’s Day, and look back instead over the things I’ve discovered in 2023…and hope to find in 2024.
Living in the glorious back of beyond means certain things have to be sacrificed. Twenty-five years ago, this soft southerner gave up her addiction to live music and theatre in exchange for mountain views, real food, wild swims and hikes in the wilderness. I’d be lying if I said that didn’t cause a certain amount of inner conflict for someone who calls herself a writer.
But I do read a lot, and this year I’ve got through almost as many books as I did in the plague year of 2020 when hibernation became fashionable. Not all were new, but there were certain recurrent themes. Perhaps the strongest betrayed a subconscious wish to sink into the world of the imagination, to get away from the mounting horrors infesting the news.
Zoe Gilbert’s experimental novel Mischief Acts started the year’s slide into the mythic, reintroducing me to the southern English landscape of my childhood and the history buried under the asphalt. The novel revolves around horned god Herne the Hunter. Herne rampaged, Loki-like, through what was once the Great North Wood, still discoverable in placenames such as Herne Hill, Norwood, Forest Hill - and the book magically evokes its buried rivers, dryad-haunted trees and slumbering powers inside a narrative which travels from the medieval past into the 21st century future.
I found the book’s musical echo in Suede’s atmospheric album The Blue Hour, which I’d mysteriously missed on its release in 2018. A deep dive into history and childhood memory, it’s suffused with the liminal landscape of that region between London and the sea, its chainlink fences and flytips, its roadkill and regrets. Almost by coincidence, soon after finding the album, I came upon the fiction of Suede’s bassist Matt Osman - brother of popular novelist Richard - who outclassed his brother’s whodunnits with his absorbing second novel The Ghost Theatre. Set in an alternative Elizabethan England in which birds are worshipped as gods, it made me wonder about the choices we make as artists. Osman is a good musician, solid and unspectacular. He’s always been a necessary base for the wildness of the music and the lyrics of the songs he plays, but in this novel his imagination truly takes flight.
2023 became more and more populated with the non-human. Herne resurfaced when I re-read John Masefield’s classic of Edwardian children’s fiction, The Box Of Delights, and darker creatures crawled out of the pages of Robert W. Chambers’ classic collection of cosmic horror, The King In Yellow. J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World - published in 1962 - predicted our floods and superheated summers and populated its lagoons with monsters both corporeal and psychological. And after a rainsoaked walk around Edinburgh’s Greyfriars Kirkyard, the appearance of a raven on a gothic tombstone had me revisiting the poems and stories of master of the uncanny, Edgar Allen Poe.
On the same Edinburgh visit, I discovered the creatures which come from the mind of artist Peter Howson. His retrospective When The Apple Ripens at the City Museum fascinated me for hours until I suddenly came upon the artist himself, randonly wandering through the galleries. I'm not one to be starstruck, but a morning spent immersed in the world of his tortured Christs, warrior beserkers and wartime atrocities made me too shy to approach their soft-spoken creator, even to ask him to sign my catalogue.
It’s always difficult to deal with the death of those whose work you love. Author Marcus Sedgwick died suddenly just before the start of the year now passing; I still don’t know how he died, or why. I’d discovered his extraordinary but strangely underrated fiction for children when my own kids were young; for me, his books were easily the equals of those by more celebrated names such as Alan Garner or Susan Cooper. Unafraid of the darkness, he never patronised his readers and was a master of writing simply about complex things, particularly about death - although his prose is always vividly, thrillingly alive. This year I read three of his books, borrowing some of them back from my adult son, who read them as a boy and still enjoys them. Witch Hill is a kind of dark fairy tale which is really about overcoming trauma and guilt; My Swordhand Is Singing is a story of redemption, told through the original eastern European folk vocabulary of revenants and vampires; most poignant is his last novel Ravencave, an almost unbearably sad and beautiful story about a lost child.
Kae Tempest is a contemporary performance poet and polymath who writes about the struggles of modern life as though they were relating heroic tales of battle and tragedy. I watched Paradise, their retelling of Sophocles’ Philoctetes starring Lesley Sharp, via the National Theatre’s online subscription platform. Their long narrative poem Brand New Ancients even begins with the word “See”, just as the Old English epic poem Beowulf begins with the exhortation ‘hwaet’ (it means something like “Hark!) to summon the audience’s attention. Kae’s newest collection Divisible By Itself And One is more diffuse but no less powerful, dealing with themes of transformation and rebirth in the face of pressure to conform. I sought out Kae on YouTube and was struck by their lightning-conductor charisma; in performance, they have a kind of emotional recklessness which seems to keep nothing back for themself. I hope they prove strong enough to withstand the sheer intensity of the power that runs through them, because many cannot.
Notable non-fiction I’ve read this year includes Derren Brown’s 2016 reworking of Stoic philosophy, Happy, which tends to get filed under self-help in bookshops but resists the silver-bullet solutions - all that talk of “manifesting” your ideal life - that typify the genre. Brown takes a simpler approach which has more to do with managing expectations. It might all veer a little close to the meatball surgery of cognitive behavioural therapy at times, but it works: it helped one of my sons through a difficult patch, and it helped me, too. David Aaronovitch’s Voodoo Histories examines and ultimately debunks the conspiracy theories that have infected the world as thoroughly as Covid; just as interesting in the context of our crazy modern politics were his theories of why people believe them, what psychological need is being served. Meanwhile I devoured Grayson Perry’s The Vanity Of Small Differences - bought at his recent retrospective Smash Hits - which brilliantly explores Britain’s bizarre obsession with class - and through the unlikely medium of tapestry.
Films come to us these days in many ways. I live way out on the edge of rural Scotland, Christopher Nolan’s magnum opus Oppenheimer was worth the four hour round trip to Inverness to see it on the big screen, but streaming platforms let me discover new talents I just couldn’t find without easy access to an arthouse cinema. This year I fell in love with the films of indie director Lorcan Finnegan via his fable of isolation, parenthood and gender roles, Vivarium: his folk horror Without Name was, if anything, even more complex and disturbing. Slow-burn atmospheric horrors like Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men and Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor also stayed in my mind for weeks.
I watched Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon in our wee touring cinema, the Screen Machine, which opens up access to big screen experience for those who can’t easily make the long trek into the city. Community services like this bridge the gap between multiplex and living room and it’s sad to see it struggle for the necessary funds to bring the arts to those of us who live on the edge.
What am I most looking forward to in 2024? Diving into some of my Christmas reads, from Jerome Seligny’s massive work on David Bowie, Rainbowman, to Hilary Mantel’s essay collection A Memoir Of My Former Self, Paul Lynch’s Booker prizewinning Prophet Song and Naomi Klein’s glimpse into the madness of our culture wars, Doppelganger.
On TV, old favourite Doctor Who has been rescued from the doldrums by Russell T. Davies and David Tennant and looks to have a bright new future in the hands of new Doctor Ncuti Gatwa, and I can’t wait to watch the new series of Slow Horses, starring a down-at-heel Gary Oldman, on AppleTV. On the big screen, I’m also keenly anticipating Alex Garland’s movie Civil War, although I’m afraid it may be all too prescient. And if I have a fairy godmother lurking anywhere, I’m not bothered about going to any balls - what I want most is a plane ticket to London and a ticket to see David Tennant’s Macbeth at the Donmar Warehouse before it closes. Because when you live on the edge, sometimes - just sometimes - you need to plug back into the centre.