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104 pages

English

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Rupert Thomson's innovative and unsettling writing ranges from dystopian alternative futures to meditations on crime and cultural memory, and from historical fictions to explorations of contemporary gender violence. The essays in this collection argue that Thomson's novels and memoir are compelling case-studies in late twentieth and early twenty-first-century literature, which engage with contemporary cultural and political preoccupations through persistently off-beat and often experimental literary forms, and trouble stable definitions of genre in the process. With chapters focusing on borders, panopticism, haunting, child sexual abuse, shame, atmosphere and intertextuality, this collection offers a critical introduction to an author whose work has been overlooked by the academy for too long. "There's usually more to a 'cult' author than meets the eye: this intelligent, timely, well-informed and wide-ranging collection of essays is aware of this and should help Rupert Thomson's work reach an even wider and more thoughtful audience." (Robert Eaglestone, Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought, Royal Holloway, University of London). "This book represents an important step in building a body of criticism on an important, if until now under-researched, British novelist of the last 30 years. The essays collected here reveal the diverse range of Thomson's writing and locate it thoughtfully within the broader field of contemporary fiction. It provides a series of critical engagements with his writing that broadens and deepens our understanding of his corpus." (Nick Bentley, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Keele University). "Rupert Thomson is one of the most versatile and vital of contemporary novelists, whose work has so far been curiously neglected by critics. This excellent volume goes some way towards redressing the balance, examining the ways in which Thomson's unsettling body of work explores some of the most pressing themes of our turbulent age - borders, power relations, security, secrecy, precarity, etc. Its contributors place Thomson's writing in the context of a range of up-to-date literary and theoretical approaches, making this essential reading for anyone interested in his work, and important reading for those interested in contemporary fiction more broadly." (Bran Nicol, Professor English Literature, University of Surrey)

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Publié par	Gylphi
Date de parution	01 novembre 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781780240596
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0450€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Rupert Thomson
Critical Essays

Gylphi Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays
Series Editor: Sarah Dillon
Gylphi Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays presents a new approach to the academic study of living authors. The titles in this series are devoted to contemporary British, Irish and American authors whose work is popularly and critically valued but on whom a significant body of academic work has yet to be established. Each of the titles in this series is developed out of the best contributions to an international conference on its author; represents the most intelligent and provocative material in current thinking about that author’s work; and, suggests future avenues of thought, comparison and analysis. With each title prefaced by an author foreword, this series embraces the challenges of writing on living authors and provides the foundation stones for future critical work on significant contemporary writers.
Series Titles
David Mitchell: Critical Essays (2011)
Edited by Sarah Dillon. Foreword by David Mitchell.
Maggie Gee: Critical Essays (2015)
Edited by Sarah Dillon and Caroline Edwards. Foreword by Maggie Gee.
China Miéville: Critical Essays (2015)
Edited by Caroline Edwards and Tony Venezia. Foreword by China Miéville.
Adam Roberts: Critical Essays (2016)
Edited by Christos Callow Jr. and Anna McFarlane. Foreword by Adam Roberts.
Rupert Thomson: Critical Essays (2016)
Edited by Rebecca Pohl and Christopher Vardy. Foreword by Rupert Thomson.
Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays (2016)
Edited by Dennis Duncan. Foreword by Tom McCarthy.

Rupert Thomson
Critical Essays
edited by
Rebecca Pohl and Christopher Vardy

A Gylphi Limited Book
First published in Great Britain in 2016
by Gylphi Limited
Copyright © Gylphi Limited, 2016
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form or binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-78024-057-2 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-78024-058-9 (Kindle)
ISBN 978-1-78024-059-6 (EPUB)
Cover image: Darren Ketchum, Tahawus Cabin , 2012.
Design and typesetting by Gylphi Limited. Printed in the UK by imprintdigital.com, Exeter.
Gylphi Limited
PO Box 993
Canterbury CT1 9EP, UK

Contents
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Foreword
Rupert Thomson
1. ‘Risk and Innovation’: Rupert Thomson’s Unsettling Forms
Rebecca Pohl and Christopher Vardy
2. ‘Border Games’ and Security in the Work of Rupert Thomson
Robert Duggan
3. ‘Perhaps That Is What Is Meant by the Word “Haunted”’: Power, Dystopia and the Ghostly Other in Divided Kingdom
Iain Robinson
4. Happier Days for All of Us? Childhood and Abuse in Death of a Murderer
Christopher Vardy
5. The Ghostly Presence of Her: Representations of Myra Hindley in Death of a Murderer
Rhona Gordon
6. ‘The Shame of Being a Man’: Shame, Masculinity and Writing in The Book of Revelation
Kaye Mitchell
7. Something’s Not Quite Right: Atmosphere in The Insult
Rebecca Pohl
8. ‘Candour and Secrecy’: Forms of Fiction in This Party’s Got to Stop and Secrecy
John McAuliffe
Notes on Contributors
Index

Acknowledgements
Enormous thanks for time and enthusiasm are due first and foremost to Rupert Thomson himself, who braved a room full of academics discussing his work and then, through his gracious and incisive contributions, made our conversations so much stronger. We are especially grateful to him for introducing the collection with such a beautiful foreword, which adds the writer’s perspective to the scholarship at play.
We are also very grateful to Sarah Dillon, our series editor, for having initiated this much-needed series focusing on contemporary writers, and more specifically for her patience with and conviction in our collection, as well as her advice along the way. Our gratitude also goes to our publisher, Gylphi, for the sustained support over the course of this publication.
This volume comes out of a conference dedicated to Rupert Thomson’s writing held in Manchester in June 2013. We would like to thank the Centre for New Writing Manchester, the SALC Graduate School, and GRANTA for sponsoring the event, as well as Waterstones Deansgate and the John Rylands Library Deansgate for generously opening up their events spaces to us.
It has been a real pleasure collaborating with the excellent contributors assembled in this volume, whose chapters are full of insight and rigour and speak so eloquently for the richness of Thomson’s work.
Finally, thank you to Kaye Mitchell for recommending the beautiful strangeness of Thomson’s prose and so getting the ball rolling, before anybody even knew there would be a ball. And to Iain Bailey, for all the help with detail.
Rebecca Pohl and Christopher Vardy, Manchester 2015

List of Abbreviations
Abbreviations of works cited by Rupert Thomson.
Date of first publication is in parenthesis, followed by details of edition cited throughout (if different from original edition).
DL Dreams of Leaving (1987). London: Bloomsbury.
FGH The Five Gates of Hell (1991). London: Bloomsbury.
AF Air and Fire (1994). London: Penguin.
I The Insult (1996). London: Bloomsbury.
S Soft! (1998). London: Bloomsbury.
BR The Book of Revelation (1999). London: Bloomsbury.
DK Divided Kingdom (2005). London: Bloomsbury.
DM Death of a Murderer (2007). London: Bloomsbury.
PGS This Party’s Got to Stop (2010). London: Granta.
Se Secrecy (2013). London: Granta.
KC Katherine Carlyle (2015). London: Corsair.

Foreword
Rupert Thomson
I wrote the first draft of my latest novel, Katherine Carlyle , as I write all my first drafts: flat out, and free of all restraints. It is a headlong plunge into the unknown each time, with no framework, no plan, no end in sight. As Flannery O’Connor put it: ‘I’m like a hound dog; I follow the scent.’ And sometimes that is all there is – a scent. It is exhilarating to write into your own apparent ignorance. Somebody once asked W. H. Auden if it was true that you can only write what you know. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But you don’t know what you know until you write it.’ I set off into the dark to see what I can come back with. Structure, background, continuity – all that comes later. I’m with the French artist, Louise Bourgeois, on this: ‘I trust my unconscious. My unconscious is my friend.’ I’m trying to pin down some kind of psychological truth. I’m after an undertow – the flow of something fresh and unexpected. There’s no need to be afraid, or even wary. No one will ever see my first attempt. I have a number of metaphors for how this process feels. I’m a sculptor with a lump of marble. I’m a driver on a motorway at night who turns his headlights off. I’m an actor, but without an audience. I chip away at something formless. I can’t seem to remember any of my lines. I take wrong turnings, scenic routes. I get lost. I crash. But somehow I make progress. The marble gradually resolves itself into a shape. My characters slowly come alive. When day dawns and the road appears I’m never where I thought I would be. The journey is always unpredictable. There is always risk, exhilaration, mystery, and panic. There is also, hopefully, the discovery of something that feels both recognizable and new.
While my first draft is one hundred per cent intuitive, my final draft is likely to be one hundred per cent rational. During the writing of a book I move inexorably from one part of myself to another. By the end, ideally, I have become my own most ruthless critic. There are conscious intentions and effects, but there are also connections and resonances that occur at a subconscious level, out of my control, beyond my knowing. Louise Bourgeois again: ‘The meaning of things is not always clear at the beginning. It becomes apparent when the work is done.’ It is only when I am publicising a book that I begin to understand what it is that I have written. By then, the making of that particular book will have become a distant memory. At least a year will have gone by. Maybe more. And that distance is useful. Instructive. The Russian film-maker, Andrei Tarkovsky, famously said that ‘a book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.’ Just as a book is the sole property of the writer during the writing, so it becomes the sole property of the reader once it has been written. There is a pleasing symmetry about this transfer of ownership. I’m removed from the equation. The book replaces me. These days, though I am questioned, as most writers are, by audiences at literary festivals or by journalists, I often have the feeling that I’m no longer an authority. I’m just another reader with ideas about something I have read. How intriguing, then, to be invited to the John Rylands Library in Manchester on June 17th 2013 to listen to a gathering of academics deliver papers on my work. When the day came, I was impressed by the variety and depth of the various approaches and responses. I agreed with some, disagreed with others. I was startled, humbled, mystified, amused. As I sat there as unobtrusively as possible, in the back row, Tarkovsky’s words came back to me. Each of the people talking was an authority in his or her own right. Everything that was being said had absolute validity.
It was a privilege and an honour to attend the s