James Clarke and the triage of fiction

‘Sanderson’s Isle’, a new great British novel

(This piece originally appeared on my Substack, Artless. Subscribe to that here.)

Why do we keep reading fiction? I don’t mean in the general sense — those Goodreads reviews and tote bag slogans aren’t gonna write themselves. I mean dragging our eyes from the first page all the way to the last, through prose that even at its dullest is never purely expository or utilitarian.

Putting aside E M Foster’s condescending “Yes — oh dear yes — the novel tells a story”, there’s a part in all of us that reads on to see the story circle closed. Reading fiction is like watching someone go around opening drawers and taking pens off lids and singing “Shave and a haircut” but not yet “Two bits”. You twitch to see it all put — maybe not back into place but reset. Resolved.

A voice novel, then, is one that doesn’t depend on this jonesing for resolution. To work nevertheless, it has to seduce you: charm you at first before possessing you. To have in your head a narrator’s voice for tens of thousands words, for many hours of reading, that voice has to speak to you. Whether the narrator is a wallflower or loudmouth, it’s their slant, their sense of humour — intentional or otherwise — the acuity of their perceptions and mental rhythm, i.e. “the…