The following piece inspired a panel event of the same name, which took place at Waterstones, Gower Street in July 2017. Authors Alice Jolly, Roopa Farooki, Charles Palliser, Clare Morgan and Miranda Gold discussed literary fiction in the digital age and the crucial role played by independent presses in cultivating a diverse, vibrant literary landscape. The event was chaired by Jacqui Lofthouse.

Reading as Alchemy

A failsafe cocktail of vodka and poetry got me through the damp October I spent at UEA. Student essentials: one to trick me on to the makeshift dance floor, the other pulling back the curtains, hauling me into the day. The vodka offered an immediate (if predictable) metamorphosis; the poetry was, and continues to be, subtly transformative, its potency less easily measured. 

Nine o’clock on a Monday morning may not be the obvious highlight of a fresher’s week and, trudging through the drizzle across campus, I hardly imagined it would be an hour I would come to treasure. Four of us would turn up at Marina Mackay’s office, her Scot’s voice lifting our eyes on to the sonnet she’d place in our hands and those fourteen lines would sit silently on the page until, iamb by iamb, they began to speak. One voice became several, spiralling out far beyond the page. Clarity can be seductive, but when you are drawn into a world shaped out of words, one that takes its time to let you in, the effect is enduring. It is another way of listening that flashes up another way of seeing.

It was poetry that first taught me what it meant to stay on the page, which is another way of saying it taught me how to read and, later, how to write. The concentration of meaning invites a curious, lingering attention. It’s something of a cliché to talk about the affinity poetry has with music, but the only danger with clichés is that we stop hearing the truth they hold, not that there isn’t any truth within them. Cliché or not, the crux is that poetry suspends the reader, holds them there – and not just because of the shapes it takes in front of our eyes. Formal structures offer a stabilising counterpoint but they don’t simply contain the poetic expression, they enable it, they give life to it. And then the visceral shock when poet breaks an established rhythm: we are anchored by an intrinsic logic, then shown its fragility. The effect is physical – because rhythm is physical: it bypasses that cerebral clutch for the explicable and goes straight to the heart of knowing. It can offer one of those rare moments when we can both have the experience and the meaning. The connection between form and content, inviolable, allows for that elusive synchronicity. The day to day has little patience for ambiguity, it’s frightening because it holds us up – but on the page there is space to absorb it, and the questions unfold rather than confront. For me, it is layer of language beyond dictionary definitions that allow this – the aural and metrical qualities, those that embody rather than denote meaning.

If the novel were to try and impersonate poetry it would stall pretty quickly, but novels that tap into some of poetry’s magic are often the ones that give flesh to the bones of narrative and we feel the breath flicker, the heart pulse. Turning the page comes more naturally than staying on it of course – and this is compounded by the velocity with which our world moves – but if there is one thing we share with every era before us, it is surely the fear that we cannot keep up; every age has its Frankenstein. We read first for plot, but we don’t simply read for plot. When else can we sustain the impression of living and feeling inside another skin? Of feeling the texture of experience through the texture of language? That’s why picking up a book can feel like such an investment, it asks something of us, even if we’re not conscious of it. That’s the paradox – it draws us in precisely because it makes a demand on us – we want to care, we want to find significance and be part of creating it and, perhaps most importantly, we want at once to find ourselves in another world yet still find something of a mirror there too – it’s about touching the distant and realising it’s not so far away.

Doubtless, there is an impulse for momentum – that forward drive, whose counterpart in fiction is narrative, is essential, it creates that sense of urgency which can’t be separated from the instinct for survival. But just as we might want to live for more than simply getting through the day, pulsing from one event to the next, we might want to stretch out both sense and sensation that is layered on the page. What and who is drawing that narrative on? What is it that pulls a reader right inside the core of a single moment when the only medium is words? Words absorbed by the imagination and transformed. It sounds almost like alchemy – and maybe it is. Reading and writing, two supposedly solitary activities, are, in fact the most intimate of unions.  When the words on the page spark recognition or tap into a latent but never fully articulated sense we might have always had, it can feel as though those words might have been written for us, that we understand and are understood. It is not about time or place, it is not about facts or details – it is about making a connection; particularities are just the writer’s way of opening the door to the world of the story and the reader’s map in. That feeling of exclusivity may just be another clever illusion – one that is multiplied by as many readers as the book has – but that doesn’t make the experience or effect insubstantial. The shifts fiction creates may be intangible, delayed. Explicit protest and high drama are not the only routes to change: we might locate something that sends us into the world a little differently, building a slower but possibly more enduring momentum.