Jonathan Buckley was born in Birmingham in 1956 and grew up in Dudley. He studied English at Sussex University, then at King’s College London, where he specialised in the work of the Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay. Buckley is the author of 12 novels and is drawn, as he puts it, to the “polyphonic, multi-faceted, episodic, fragmentary form”. His first, The Biography of Thomas Lang, published in 1997, was told in the form of letters between Lang’s brother and his would-be biographer.
His latest novel, Tell – winner of the Fitzcarraldo Novel Prize in 2022 and now shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize – is a fictionalised, fitful biography of sorts too. It tells the absorbing, complex story of Curtis Doyle, a successful businessman and art collector, who has gone missing from his Scottish estate. His life up to his disappearance – his adoption as a child, the death of his wife, a life-changing car crash in Cambodia – is told from the intriguing perspective, at once intimate and distant, of Curtis’s gardener, who is being interviewed, ostensibly as research for a film about her employer. The novel is composed entirely of her garrulous, perceptive responses (the questions are omitted) and she turns out to be a highly engaging and companionable raconteur. Her reflections – a mixture of observation, deduction, speculation, hearsay, digression and self-reflexive attempts to marshal and define the story she is telling (“This isn’t a TV thriller. There’s not going to be any great revelation”) – make for a vivid, enigmatic and quietly thrilling tale, the more for its mysteries remaining elusive.
Lola Seaton: How was Tell conceived? Did something in particular inspire it?
Jonathan Buckley: Various elements of the book – such as the “big house” setting and the total reliance on transcribed speech – were swirling around for some time. What prompted them to coalesce, I think, was an encounter with Bruegel’s Conversion of Paul – I’m almost certain that this was when I had the idea of focusing the book on someone whose life is divided by a moment of extreme crisis.
Tell is a kind of monologue: not just first-person narration but, as you say, transcribed speech. Was writing “speech” different to writing “writing” (in the sense of narration that isn’t explicitly spoken)?
Very much so. The garrulousness of Tell’s narrator bears little similarity to the style of my previous narrators, none of whom are speakers rather than writers. And it bears hardly any similarity to the form that my own sentences tend to take when left to their own devices. Obliging myself to assume her voice was a stimulating constraint.
The formal set-up – a transcript of recorded interviews for a film – is intriguing, in part because it’s not strictly necessary: by convention, narrators of novels can just “tell” – tell their story – without clarifying the occasion for the telling. Why did you choose to present your narrative this way, through this meta-fictional framing device?
I always feel a need to clarify the occasion for telling. In the case of Tell, the occasion offers an opportunity to raise questions about different modes of narration – the transcripts can be regarded as a novel in themselves, or as an inchoate novel, or as raw material for the project on which the silent interviewer is working, which may or may not be a documentary. The central story has the potential to be converted into a piece of high-end schlock.
How did you discover and refine the voice of the narrator? Did you find yourself reading what you’d written aloud more than usual?
The writing of my books is always a tortuous process. Tell began as a polyphonic novel, with half a dozen speakers, then mutated into a two-part book, with two different narrators (one a speaker, one a writer), before it became apparent that the first part was the stronger, and that the text would become both clearer and more complex if every voice except one were to be ventriloquised by the single speaker whose voice had moved to the foreground – increasing the quotient of hearsay, in other words. And yes, almost every sentence was tested aloud, in a departure from standard procedure.
I loved the natural, gentle humour of the book, and the way this co-exists with its darker tones. It partly derives from the narrator’s amusing idioms (“Odd as a jar of sausages, but kind. She went for a dip in the loch, first thing in the morning. In the buff, which was quite a spectacle, I can tell you.”) Did you enjoy writing it?
I did hope that people would at least smile at certain sentences, but one can never be sure. My wife smiled, but she’s not a disinterested party. As for the enjoyment – it was intermittent, as ever.
Tell is a highly crafted and eloquent piece of writing, but – since it is creating the illusion of speech – not overtly “writerly”; it’s studded with the wonderful colloquialisms alluded to above. Did you feel it was a challenge – or even a sacrifice – to write prose that isn’t conventionally “stylish” (if there is such a thing)?
With any first-person narrative, certain registers have to be set aside – in this case, all “writerly” registers. Many writers, though, can’t resist over-equipping their narrators. I hope the moments of eloquence in Tell aren’t implausible. Certainly there are no passages of Fine Writing.
Did you ever consider writing the novel in a different form – a play, say?
I’ve never been inclined to write for the theatre, and I don’t think the text of Tell would work as a spoken performance, even though the narration is a performance of sorts. As Henry Green once said: “Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself alone at night, and it is not quick as poetry but rather a gathering web of insinuations.” The reader can regulate the flow of the text in a way that an audience cannot. At times the volume of information in Tell is too much to be immediately absorbed – the reader has to step out of the torrent for a moment.
You’ve said that the novel is partly about “the pleasure of narrating”. What is the pleasure of narrating? I hear in the phrase the implication that “narrating” is a basic, perhaps universal pleasure to be found in every-day life as well as in more formal kinds of storytelling like writing novels.
This touches on something that has been important to me for a long time – my refusal of the idea that we necessarily understand ourselves as protagonists of the story of our lives. Last week I read a book by the philosopher Charles Taylor, in which he states that the sense of having a story is integral to what we call being a self. I think this is false, which is not to deny that many people do think as Taylor thinks. Curtis, for one, is a person who once had a strongly narrativist sense of self, and is perhaps now adrift after losing it. The narrator of the book, whose stories are continually ramifying, might be taken to be someone who demonstrates that narration can be an imperative and a pleasure without constituting an explanatory master-narrative, and that spoken/written narration, with its rapid switches, diversions and interruptions, enjoys a freedom that the hypothetical film of the book could not emulate.
Your narrator, though not a “professional” storyteller, is a gripping and perceptive one, even if her narrative is a first draft, the raw material taking shape as she tells it (“Is this the place to talk about Lily? If you’re going to have flashbacks, Lily has to be the main one”).
I’m very glad that you found her to be an accomplished storyteller – some readers have been rather less rapt. But I think she has a good sense of when an illustrative anecdote might be of help, and for all her digressions, she never loses the thread entirely. And one does have the sense, I hope, that she’s not without a self-editing function.
You’ve said you’d be “very uneasy writing any book with an omniscient narrator”, that your books are “always to some extent about a speaker, or multiple speakers”. Why does omniscience feel unnatural?
Perhaps it’s because I tend to focus on situations in which opacity and perplexity are pervasive. Omniscience generally entails transparency. Though there are several practitioners of omniscience whom I admire greatly. Muriel Spark, for instance. Nobody does omniscience quite like Spark.
How do you see the relationship between character and voice? We usually think of characters in fiction as needing to be described, but the narrator of Tell feels very real, even though we don’t know all that much “about” her.
Having put together the words from which she is made, I can’t judge her substantiality – I see the sentences, but not the person. And I have a sense of the earlier drafts from which these pages were constructed – my books always become shorter with every draft. With Tell, refining the voice was obviously very important, but with all of my books what comes first is an overall tone, or climate, or in some cases an image. Here the seed was an image of the landscape, and the house within it, and the garden – the narrator’s domain – forming a bridge between the two.
The book is composed not of chapters but recording sessions, the narrator’s speech broken up by the odd “[Pause.]”. What were the considerations governing the story’s pacing?
I was aiming for a measured release of information and complications, interspersed with episodes of digression and extemporisation. Though she reveals long before the end that she is not leading us towards anything that one might call closure, I’d hope that the reader would enjoy her company enough to stay with her until she reaches whatever her destination may be.
The Goldsmiths Prize was set up to reward fiction that “breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form”. What can an “innovative” approach offer the reader (and writer) that a more conventional novel might not?
It might bring about some modification of one’s understanding of what fiction and language can do, and of one’s understanding of the world. As Henry James said, fiction is a house of a million windows. So many have yet to be opened.
Was there a piece of art, literature or music that was particularly significant in the writing of this book?
No individual work comes to mind, but an exhibition that I saw in Vienna a few years ago – “City of Women: Female Artists in Vienna 1900-1938” – definitely played a part in the creation of a substantial segment of an early version of Tell, of which only a small remnant remains.
Why do we need the Goldsmiths Prize?
The corporate publishing and bookselling that prevails in this country is not at all conducive to a healthy literary culture. The Goldsmiths Prize is a much-needed corrective.
What past British or Irish novel deserves a retrospective Goldsmiths Prize? Why?
Rosalind Belben’s Is Beauty Good or Dreaming of Dead People. Belben is not without champions – Kirsty Gunn wrote an excellent piece about her earlier this year, following New York Review Books’ reissue of The Limit – but she should be much more widely known. Is Beauty Good or Dreaming of Dead People – both, scandalously, out of print – are deeply strange, uncompromising and extraordinarily powerful novels. As Gunn puts it: “Belben, like Spark before her – and more so – has no intention of setting and holding to any but her own rules and she writes about stuff that can be awful and brutal and shocking in the most jaunty, beautifully put together way.”
“Tell” by Jonathan Buckley is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. The winner of the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize is announced on 6 November. Read more interviews with the shortlisted writers here.
[See also: Neel Mukherjee: “Isn’t all writing a form of appropriation?”]
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