The Empty Page: November 2019 Part One

Stewart Gardiner emerges from the Concrete Islands library to discuss books by Rachel Cusk and Gordon Burn, alongside Urbanomic’s Unsound: Undead

Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy is proof that modernism isn’t dead in literature. Across those spare and unsparing novels, Cusk excavates real life with surgical precision, although without the prose ever feeling clinical. Hers is a minimalism of possibility; what lies between the lines, in the spaces between, as vital as the words on the page. Outline, Transit and Kudos may be structurally challenging novels, yet they are utterly engrossing, engagingly readable rather than off-puttingly difficult. The reading experience might be superficially akin to Paul Auster’s adoption of certain aspects of Samuel Beckett’s territory. But to suggest any closer associations would be to lessen Cusk’s achievements. She is a unique and welcome voice in contemporary literature.

Instead of world building, Cusk dismantles the world around us, offering up the potential of truths by examining its constituent parts. My own experience was that I wanted to return to those pages, immerse myself in her intellectually rigorous, palette-cleansing prose once again. Kudos closed down the trilogy last year and I was more than intrigued to find out how Cusk would follow up this game changing / career shifting series. Her earlier novels are, I believe, formally very different from the trilogy, although I suspect that certain preoccupations may be found throughout. Coventry is a collection of essays, studies and introductions, much of which seems to make up the intellectual fabric out of which her trilogy grew.

This non-fiction book provides a fascinating backdrop for her auto-fiction investigations, particularly with the first section of essays, entitled “Coventry”. I detected particular incidents that appear in Cusk’s fiction – rudeness at the airport, one of her daughters enjoying spending a more-than-healthy amount of time with a friend’s family – unless of course my memory was playing tricks on me and these just felt like her storytelling. “In a story,” writes Cusk, “there’s always someone who owns the truth.” It’s certainly something that she achieves as a writer, whether operating with facts, fictions or an amalgamation of the two.

faber.co.uk/coventry

The name Gordon Burn meant nothing to me. And then it did.

I didn’t read any of Burn’s novels or non-fiction work as it came out in the nineties. In 1995 I went to university to study English Literature and subsequently didn’t read a great deal of contemporary fiction for a time. Exceptions were books by the likes of Irvine Welsh, Bret Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt and Alan Warner. But no Gordon Burn. Much later, I would have seen references to the Gordon Burn Prize (launched in 2013, four years after Burn’s death), but that might not have been until I read The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers, who won the inaugural Gordon Burn Prize for his debut. After that it seemed as if Gordon Burn was everywhere for me. Faber put on an event earlier this year to celebrate forthcoming new editions of his books. I kept hearing about it through various channels due to the involvement of artists I’ve taken an interest in, including Cosey Fanni Tutti, David Keenan, Andrew Weatherall, Deborah Levy and Justin Robertson. I considered attending, but decided not to, as I would feel like an impostor. Not only had I not read any of his books, but I hadn’t even heard of him until what amounted to mere moments ago.

Fast forward to the present and I now know what all the fuss is about, although as of yet I have only read Burn’s debut, Alma Cogan. It is however enough to grasp his prodigious talent. His first novel is at once an act of bringing the dead back to life and an exploration of what living death means, at least as it relates to the fag end of fame. Burn resuscitates Alma Cogan – Britain’s leading singer of the 1950s before rock n roll and The Beatles took hold – who died of cancer in 1966 at the age of 34. It’s a bold move with disturbing implications, but Burn doesn’t squander the possibilities. “I see death in your aura,” a fortune-teller informs Alma backstage at one point in the novel and indeed that aura of death permeates the prose. There’s the sense that Alma is living a life not meant to be. This state of almost-purgatory – that of a faded star burning out – might take the form of something worse than death even. Burn utilises the doubled-and-reversed phrase “death-in-life, life-in-death” to express his intent eloquently. The Alma of the novel illustrates her deteriorating inner life and the author’s narrative implications with a possibly apocryphal story of the former Archie Leach:

“When Cary Grant was in London filming Indiscreet with Stanley Donen in the late fifties, he used the time to go round the archives and newspaper libraries and, with a razor, personally removed all references to his former existence.”

Gordon Burn wields that razor to bring forth an existence that never was. He cuts into celebrity, revealing a queasily uneasy narrative underneath.

faber.co.uk/alma-cogan

Unsound: Undead may not fall under Urbanomic’s K-Pulp theory-fiction imprint, but nevertheless has theory-fiction coursing through its veins. It is ostensibly a book of multi-disciplinary academic documents relating to “peripheral sonic perception” and tactical haunting, taking in Burroughsian control systems and cyberpunk future visions along the way. Turning each page is akin to diving down another rabbit hole; arcane information delivered in brief, heady bursts. Some of the essays are utterly impenetrable, exploring subjects so obscure they feel as if they do not even exist yet; that they may in fact not is rather beside the point. One would require a PhD in said subject to make sense of what’s being offered up, but, like reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time with a rather non-scientific brain, when a chapter gets too much a reboot of sorts occurs in the next. That way, you can keep moving through the book’s interiors without encountering a dead end. 

The future-framing excursions into fiction tether the collection to some kind of (un)reality. Steve Goodman (elsewhere known as Kode9) is the author behind many of the most direct and engaging fictional segments. In terms of the (more) non-fictional discourses, Kodwo Eshun’s take on Jordan Peele’s Get Out is a standout. At the heart of the collective documentation is a rogue AI. This Unsound: Undead manifestation of Skynet is known as IREX ². It “had spent around thirty years working out how to safeguard its cryptic knowledge by injecting it into the fleshy platforms of human memory, via the motley assortment of scientists, artists, and researchers that it had branded AUDINT.” Deep cover meta-fiction brought to Cronenbergian life then. That will always go down well around these parts. Unsound: Undead is an intentionally challenging dossier from a future that is now. It is also rather thrilling around the edges and isn’t something that can easily be purged from memory. A unique, sometimes immersive experience.

urbanomic.com/unsound-undead

My literature reviews column will return periodically. Named after “The Empty Page” from Sonic Youth’s Murray Street LP, it feels appropriate to share that track here for this inaugural edition.

Featured image: detail from the cover of Rachel Cusk’s Conventry, published by Faber & Faber.