ANT002 - Reading as creative collaboration & masters of description
Welcome back to the second issue of A Novel Tribe, where I explore the creative act of reading and the writers who truly understand this collaboration, embedding it into their work
When I think about what makes the written word so enjoyable as a medium, I immediately consider its sensory breadth - how it encapsulates all of vision, sound, smell, taste and touch. Not just that, but it can transcend sense entirely, moving to the next layer of how these things make us feel and think. You can experience sense through the mind of someone else.
What’s unavoidable though, is that it is incomplete in its communication of all of these senses. Unlike the visuals of film, the sounds of music, the taste of cooking or smells and touch of immersive artworks, the written word is one step removed from what it communicates.
While a writer can decide how they describe something and the infinite levels of complexity and detail they choose to include, this is only half the work. It is the reader who must take the words and complete them - imagining the beach, hearing the waves, feeling the cold sea, smelling the salt and tasting the ice cream. This act of completion is carried out differently by every reader.
The fact that the communication is imperfect and leads to a different result every time, that the reader is adding context from their own lives - the road they grew up on or a field they walk through, their favourite whisky in the smokey jazz bar, people they know - makes the message all the more powerful. For it becomes intensely personal. It becomes realistic through the necessity of adding their own reality to it.
In this way, reading becomes an undoubtedly creative act, one of collaboration rather than simple consumption. The more experienced the reader, the more naturally creative they become and the more vivid the scenes they craft, the more deeply the emotions are felt, the more enjoyable the experience is. It takes a certain level of skill and effort to engage in this collaboration but the results are all the more rewarding - art that we create ourselves, using the experiences that affect us, will naturally be very affecting.
The best writers understand this deeply. They include a careful sprinkling of detail that gets across what is interesting, unique or important, but otherwise get out the way of a readers imagination. It might not matter if the sky is blue, grey or pitch black, this is your day. They are there to help when you need it and trust when you don’t, using the minimum number of strokes to make a form that you as the reader can bring to life.
Today’s issue is dedicated to those writers. Those who’s selection and depiction of detail is simply inspired. Who let the story lead the way but, when they do step in to help, provide flourishes of brilliance to guide our imagination.
Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours
John Locke
It is no surprise that the old masters excel at this. Ernest Hemingway, known for his brisk and to the point prose, doesn’t describe things as much as simply point them out. Take The Sun Also Rises for example, a drunken romp of a book about a riotous group of friends travelling to Pamplona to see the bullfighting festival. Skimming through it, it strikes me just how much dialogue there is - the kind of wonderfully natural dialogue that could only have been lived - but it is interspersed with perfect description. Literal details (“a dark muzzle and the shadow of horns”), casual remarks that give the unconscious tone of a personal record (“the bus went quite far and made a good breeze”), actions (“something that was beautiful done close to the bull was ridiculous if it were done a little way off”) and atmospheres (“There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening”). It plays out vividly in the mind and becomes riveting through his sheer class.
John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row takes a more poetic angle. A book that feels all about description, a loose and yet incisive sketch of a place, it brings to life the calamities of a rabble of down-and-outs in a poor area of California during the Great Depression. The sea is “a wave churned basin, creamy with foam, whipped by the combers that roll in from the whistling buoy on the reef” and rock pools “fantastic with hurrying, fighting, feeding, breeding animals.” The row at dawn “seems to hang suspended out of time in a silvery light” as cats “drip over the fences and slither like syrup over the ground.” Characters with “flaming orange hair and a taste for Nile green evening dresses” decide not to wash their face “as a kind of penance”, drift about “like a small cloud” and wake clumsily so that their mind “broke the surface and fell back several times.”
Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.
In contemporary times, Maggie O’Farrell’s This Must be the Place has long stuck in my mind. Bringing to life the tumultuous marriage of a reclusive and slightly mad former film star, its witty descriptions create a personal feel and say as much about the cast of narrators as what is around them: A young boy was “dressed in a weird, padded-jacket thing that looked as though it had been made by free spirited people under the influence of something fun”; “She had a face that seemed somehow exaggerated, as if viewed through a magnifying glass”; “Claudette balances in her bare feet on the edge of the bathtub. One hand grips the sill, the other pincers a near-expired cigarette”; “There is something very unmarried, uncoupled about him.” At other times they act as small cinematic asides: “A cascade of chow fan and spring rolls falls to the floor, and how pretty it looks there”; “He dodges a man holding the leashes of no fewer than five dogs and sidesteps a leaking gutter”; “The wind comes at them horizontally, whipping through a line of ragged trees… in a manner that feels distinctly derisive.”
The zipping, rhythmic first paragraph of Mark Haddon’s The Red House contains my personal favourite line of description of all time (see below) and is full of captivating detail. An energetic child is “a kind of boy-liquid which had been poured into whatever space he happened to be occupying” while a man’s luxuriant hair “like the tusks of a bull walrus, a warning to beta males.” Scene setting is at times reflective (“Behind everything there is always a house, compared to which every other house is large or colder or more luxurious”), at others haunting (“Deep in the watches of the night, when the old and the weak and the sick let go and the membrane between this world and the other stretches to almost nothing”) and always acutely observed (“It squeezes through the old putty that holds the leaded windows fast to puddle on the sills”). A blend of literal (“Cladding over thirties brick, a broken greenhouse, rhubarb and rusted cans of Castrol for the mower”) and figurative (“Then it comes, like a great grey curtain being dragged down from the hills, the fields smudged and darkened”). He describes things like flossing teeth in great detail that would become dull in lesser hands but is engrossing here.
Cooling towers and sewage farms. Finstock, Charlbury, Ascott-under-Wychwood. Seventy miles per hour, the train unzips the fields. Two gun-grey lines beside the river’s meander. Flashes of sun on the hammered metal. Something of steam about it, even now. Hogwarts and Adlestrop. The night mail crossing the border. Cheyenne sweeping down from the ridge. Delta blues from the boxcar. Somewhere, those secret points that might just switch and send you curving into a world of uniformed porters and great-aunts and summers at the lake.
In 2021 Booker shortlisted The Fortune Men, Nadifa Mohamed leans on the true story of Mahmood Mattan, a Somalian sailor and petty thief who was wrongfully convicted of murder in 1952. Avoiding the temptation to philosophise and add judgement or meaning to the pages, she instead directs her talents to recreating the gritty world of Cardiff’s Tiger Bay - and the motley cast of characters who live or pass through there - in intricate detail. Presumably trusting that this recreation will be the strongest exposure and condemnation of injustice available, her belief in the strength of her words is well placed and leads to a novel that is as entertaining as it is powerful.
‘The King is dead. Long live the Queen.’ The announcer’s voice crackles from the wireless and winds around the rapt patrols of Berlin’s Milk Bar as sinuously as the fog curls around the mournful street lamps, their wan glow barely illuminating the cobblestones.
Her character building seems to know no bounds, effortlessly bringing to life a disparate array of people only bound by the multicultural and transient neighbourhood they inhabit. From hard-working Welsh shop keepers (“you are a perpetual motion machine”) to Jamaican boxers (“His hair is close cropped with a sharp side parting razored into it’s gleaming whorls”), racist policemen (“his bulk almost darkening the room”), surly bartenders commanding their patrons with a “lion tamers bark” and mad sailors (“Tahir is on a road no one can or will walk down with him, his limbs spasming from invisible electric shocks, his face a cinema screen of wild expressions”), it is the range of faces that truly give the place its fiery atmosphere.
Down the street Mr Zussen is leaning out of his pawnbroker’s, peering worriedly at the overflowing drain in front of his shop. He looks like a character from the Bible, a long white beard hanging down to his navel, his tall, nervous, rumpless body seemingly centuries old, his hangdog face usually looking out impassively - decade in, decade out - from his glass service hatch. She loves him and all the characters she has grown up with, loves their solidity and earthiness.
Mahmood himself is a quiet man, appearing silently on the fringes of groups who “pull their possessions closer when he is around and keep their eyes on his long, elegant fingers.” He is a complex figure, one minute so full of humour and naive hope but the next a misanthrope raging at the world around him. In his inner world we see the frustrations at the discrimination that follows him everywhere, how the English language fails him and the torment of his inability to navigate a land that is at once homely and strange, while from the outside we see how easily he comes across as hateful and violent. Flawed and stubborn, it is easy to become frustrated by his consistently poor choices but only because it is impossible not to root for him as a victim of his times. To fear for and eventually mourn him.
A grey smudge hovers over everything he sees, the result of a hot chink of coal flying from a furnace into his right eye. A pain so pure that it had hoisted him up and backwards on to the cooling clinkers behind his feet.
Mohamed’s scene building prowess is equally as broad and engaging. Memories of trips to London (“the river brooded beneath the bridges, black and muscular”) and praying at the local mosque while docking in Bombay (“It was all peaceful enough to move something in him”) are as enthralling as present day horse races (“the confetti of betting stubs thrown to the wind”), nearby Cardiff centre (“shop fronts drooping loose letters like earrings”) and The Employment Exchange (“job notices flutter from the wall like paper prayers”), but it’s for the novel’s beating heart of Tiger Bay that her best moments are saved. Rattling trams send thuds of air against the windows of quiet houses given a sense of fragility by the blitz. Inside them, men squirm back into threadbare armchairs or punch ancient pillows into shape but outside the streets are brimming of life. A square mile metropolis where Sailors “amble uptown to sink a skinful” and figures laugh behind leaded glass or kiss their teeth before throwing espressos down their throat, its atmosphere is menacing and dark but also exciting and even joyful.
Mahmood turns away from the wreathed and porticoed splendour of Cory’s Rest towards the docks, from where a red mist tints the raw, uncooked sky. He enjoys watching the nightly, industrial spectacle: the dirty sea-water appearing to catch fire as vats of rippled, white-hot furnace slag from the East Moors Steelworks tip into the lapping evening tide.
A dazzling world brimming with real people, Mohamed re-envisions an enrapturing place in Tiger Bay. The Fortune Men is full of the kind of characters and scenes that would turn your head in real life, made all the more intriguing and human for the unabashed attention we are privileged to be able to pay them through her eyes.
I will wrap the road around my waist like a belt, and walk the earth even if no one sees me
Mahmood Mattan - The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed
Watch this captivating interview with photography icon Henry Cartier-Bresson, capturing him full of humour and humility at the age of 92. As interesting for what he doesn’t say as much as what he does, his refusal to let interviewer Charlie Rose over-intellectualise his work and the conversational hoops he jumps to dismiss his own legend as nonsense is forceful and yet charming.
Being famous is very embarrassing
One of tech’s most successful investors, Paul Graham’s essays are more widely thoughtful than most in the space. Start with The Need to Read and move through A Project of One’s Own and Taste for Makers.
Writing is not just a way to convey ideas, but also a way to have them
If there is such a thing as beauty, we need to be able to recognize it. We need good taste to make good things. Instead of treating beauty as an airy abstraction, to be either blathered about or avoided depending on how one feels about airy abstractions, let's try considering it as a practical question: how do you make good stuff?
An interview with Tabitha Lasley on how her memoir Sea State came about and her time documenting, and becoming a part of, the lives of offshore oil workers.
When I was writing, I made a decision just to put down what was in my head. I didn’t think about the consequences. But now I’m starting to worry: what if everyone thinks I’m awful?
There’s a reason rowdy dub jazz quintet Ezra Collective’s 2022 album Where I’m Meant to Be recently picked up a Mercury prize for album of the year - it’s really bloody good. Acoustic musuc that you can’t not stomp to with the occasional words from the likes of Sampa the Great and Kojey Radical. While best for kicking up dust on a hot summers day, it’s bound to raise your spirits as the night’s get longer. Check their Mercury performance for a taster.
I hope you’re continuing to enjoy A Novel Tribe. If you are, the best thing you could do to help right now is to share it with someone you know. Simply forward this email or link them to the website.
Until next time,
MQ.
PS. Jamie Keddy wrote in off the back of the last issue to add that John Steinbeck’s East of Eden is another great example on the theme of books that span entire lives. Have any favourite examples of descriptive writing and selection of detail? Hit reply to let me know.