Unthank Books is still a relatively new publisher, but has already established a strong identity, not least by its beautifully designed covers. It’s a short list so far but uniformly excellent in its choice of authors as much as its covers.
And it is growing apace: this week sees the publication of its latest title, Ashley Stokes’ The Syllabus Of Errors, a series of linked stories set in between-the-wars Europe — think of Roth, Zweig, Brecht/Weill, ‘Cabaret’ — but refracted through the present and recent past. I should declare an interest here: I read the book in manuscript last year, and wrote a short blurb and a longer essay for the Unthank website. I was honestly hugely impressed by it then, and I’m looking forward to reading it again now in print. It plays strongly to my interest in that period, and loses nothing by comparison with Roth, Isherwood or the Manns, while gaining in contemporary interest. It reminded me too of Roberto Bolano, specifically Nazi Literature In The Americas — it could have been titled Nazi Literature In Carshalton, maybe. It has a similar texture to Bolano, an intricacy and detail, a heft, establishing its fictional universe very robustly by its specificity. For example, a story set in pre-Fascist Rome revolves around a mural artist so strongly drawn I thought he might have been based on the real propaganda artist Mario Sironi, but is in fact wholly fictitious. But it is the detailed evocation of the period that impresses.
Similarly with a story set in Weimar Berlin, ‘The Prettiest Girl In Berlin’. the mood of the time is so strongly conveyed — not so much decadence as defeat, despair, the streets controlled by right wing gangs of ex-soldiers, the ‘Freikorps’, and Communist Spartacists — that the story, an ex-soldier close to death searching for a lover who may already be dead, takes on the nightmarish Expressionist quality of a George Grosz painting coming to life.
These are immensely impressive achievements, with too many other examples to list — you just need to read it for yourselves. Appropriately there is the possibility of a translation into German in the offing, and an interview for Canadian radio is promised for the near future. All of which should help to significantly raise the profile of Unthank, and direct attention onto their earlier books at the same time.
The first novel from Unthank I read was Laikonik Express by Nick Sweeney. (Sweeney is also a musician; typically for a writer, he plays guitar — in a brass band: the Trans-Siberian March Band. Check them out; they’re great fun.)
Laikonik Express is a ‘buddy novel’, an ‘On The Road’ for our day. One of the differences between Britain and America: America has On The Road, we have On The Buses, a television sitcom so dire it now has cult status. Shrewdly, Sweeney sets his novel in Poland and Istanbul. He also makes the ‘buddies’ Americans, both writers, friends in Istanbul, one of whom returns to his family’s native land leaving behind a novel ms. found by the other, Kennedy, who follows him to convince him to publish it. This involves a rail trip on the eponymous Express from Warsaw to a summer resort (in winter) on the Baltic, and some life-affirming, at least life-enhancing encounters. I loved it. And it has a brilliant ‘Kennedy’ joke (nothing to do with J.F.K. though).
This was followed by Captivity, by Lander Hawes, which also had, for me, an American feel, despite being set in London. The narrator, a suddenly-famous actor holed up in a luxury flat trying, with the help of his international tennis star neighbour, to outwit the encamped paparazzi, goes into long, meditative riffs on aspects of his — our — lives, such as waking in front of the television news in the early hours, confused and half-sober. As I read these, I was being nagged by a subliminal comparison. I eventually nailed it: Don DeLillo. Not in the sense of influence, but a shared endeavour, capturing the feeling, the texture, of being alive in the contemporary world, attuned unconsciously to the zeitgeist. It’s an impressive act on both writers’ part, and I’m looking forward to how Hawes develops. It is his first novel.
As Killing Daniel is for Sarah Dobbs. This is the most recent Unthank publication before Syllabus Of Errors.
It is a literary thriller involving the murder of a young man, but is not a detective or murder story as such, but something stronger, more poetic. Poetic in the sense of being best approached as what F.R. Leavis described as the ‘Novel As Dramatic Poem’ rather than straight realist fiction.
That is not to say that it is fictionally unreal; quite the opposite. Present-day Manchester and Tokyo are both strongly rendered, as are the characters, and the contrasting cultures. But the plot contains coincidences, parallels, that in a ‘realist’ novel might appear unconvincing. They are there for a purpose. Killing Daniel is ultimately a meditation on Evil, in the way that Brighton Rock is, or Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, although Dobbs counterbalances the evil with good, if humanly flawed, characters. It is a very strong, assured debut, and I’m interested to see what Dobbs follows this up with.
A very strong list, then, and I haven’t mentioned their publication of a completion of Dickens’ Mystery Of Edwin Drood (only because I’m allergic to Dickens). But there are two more reasons to be grateful for Unthank, in the form of two series.
One is the Writers In Conversation series, edited by Christopher Bigsby, and drawing on ten years’ worth of interviews with major writers as part of University Of East Anglia’s International Literature Festival. This is a highly valuable resource, in four volumes so far, an updating of the old George Plimpton Paris Review interviews, which I still have in battered Penguin editions.
The other series is the ‘Unthology’ series: anthologies of short fiction, numbering three so far, with a fourth underway. There is an interesting rationale behind this anthology series: the editors’ belief that with more fiction not only published online but written with that in mind, the tendency is for greater brevity. There’s a lot to be said for brevity, and I would say it, but equally there is a lot to be said for more expansive work, that some ideas suffer from arbitrary limitation.
So the Unthologies actively welcome longer work, although don’t restrict the content by length: there is a very satisfying mix of lengths, styles and approaches in each one, providing an excellent cross-section of contemporary fiction. (The most recent, Unthology 3, contains work by Dobbs, Stokes, A.J. Ashworth, Philip Langeskov as well as pieces by two writers showing up in recent short story prize lists: Angela Readman and C.D. Rose — no relation, by the way, although I am, as it happens, in there too.)
Future plans? Unthank have just signed up Sharon Zink, another contributor to U3, for her debut novel, the wonderfully-titled Sharonville. I have no idea what it’s about, but I’m anxious to find out. And anxious for its success, because Zink has already embarked on another novel — a NASA-set literary mystery with an enthralling premise. Imagine the first men on the moon were actally women. Imagine that the lunar programme continued, to the point of establishing bases there for mining (think of the Sam Rockwell film ‘Moon’), more — to the point where the moon has its own Poet-In-Residence. Imagine that scenario treated by a writer whose father was, I understand, a rocket scientist.
I’m trying to. And I can’t wait to read the actual novel. I just hope the wait isn’t too long.