James Clarke and the triage of fiction

‘Sanderson’s Isle’, a new great British novel

Why do we keep reading fiction? I don’t mean in the general sense—those Goodreads reviews and tote bag slogans aren’t gonna write themselves. I mean dragging our eyes from the first page all the way to the last, through prose that, even at its dullest, is never purely expository or utilitarian.

Putting aside E M Foster’s condescending “Yes – oh dear yes – the novel tells a story”, there’s a part in all of us that reads on to see the story circle closed. Reading fiction is like watching somebody go around opening drawers and taking pens off lids and singing “Shave and a haircut” but not yet “Two bits”. You twitch to see it all put—maybe not back into place, but reset, resolved.

A voice novel, then, is one that doesn’t depend on this jonesing for resolution. To work nevertheless, it has to seduce you: charm you at first before possessing you. To have in your head a narrator’s voice for tens of thousands words, for hours and hours of reading, that voice has to speak to you. Whether the narrator is a wallflower or loudmouth, it’s their slant, their sense of humour - intentional or otherwise - the acuity of their perceptions and their mental rhythm, i.e. “the wave of the mind” in Virginia Woolf’s words that’ll carry you to the last page. At the end of a great voice novel, when that phantom mind alights from yours, you miss the sound of Huck Finn or Holden; your thoughts retain for a while the tint of Fuckhead or John Self. To that company we can add Tom Speake, narrator of James Clarke’s new novel Sanderson’s Isle.

The novel starts with a fairytale conceit: the lowly orphan who turns out to be a blue-blood. It’s the year of the moon landing, and thirty-something Tom Speake has fled trouble in Lancashire to lodge with a family in the capital, where he searches for a father he never knew among the mansions of West London. There he gets entangled with Sanderson, a TV documentarian and surrogate father-figure: cynical, louche—and connected. Through him, Speake gets to swing with the 60s in all their reaching-for-the-moon hopes and lunatic excess. And through him, he pivots from his search for a father to the search for a child: Sanderson’s girlfriend wants to locate his lovechild, Paul, spirited away by hippies to the Lake District. Catalysed by a new TV show about that region, Sanderson and Speake head into the countryside, past its rustic surface quirks and into its elemental dangers…

As a northerner gone down south then back up again, Tom unzips and reveals the country to us. The novel’s two parts, two poles are London and Lakeland. Yet Clarke makes sure this binary never succumbs to reductive oppositions like the ‘corrupt urban versus the salutary pastoral’, or the ‘liberal urban versus the conservative pastoral’. An East End secretary who mistakes Tom’s complexion and misconstrues his intentions calls him a “filthy Arab”, while a rural councillor rails against “filthy little scruffs” squatting on private land—across class and geographic boundaries, hostility joins hands. City-slicker Sanderson is so taken by the Lakes he waxes sentimental about how “We thrived in nature, for thousands of years… man was at one with his environment.” But James Clarke knows better; as he told me in conversation, “The countryside’ll fuck you up.” And Speake, who grew up in a village with the snarling name “Sarl’s Hyke”, knows better too, knows the teeth that both country and city bare: “Let’s just say there’s a mindset that isn’t very welcoming to others. In my experience it crops up regularly the deeper you get into the territories. I experienced it growing up. I felt it in London.”

Connecting the novel’s poles is a magnetic field of mysticism that runs throughout: Speake’s first girlfriend schools him in astrology and psychic empathy; a London ‘happening’ on hallucinogens - synthetic LSD and earthy magic mushrooms - is paralleled by a back-to-basics commune in Lake country, itself veined with ley lines and studded with standing stones. Clarke hasn’t chosen his geographic and historical setting for their period trappings; neither does he plunder the momentous past for easy drama (what I call temporal appropriation). The Britain of his imagination in the hinge year of 1969 reads as both ancient and current, weighed down by a such a long, savage history and charged with so many possibilities. A state-of-the-nation novel by telling us the status quo ante of the nation.

On this magical mystery / tragical history tour our constant travel companion is Tom Speake, curious and sullen in equal measure. He’s an indirect descendant - nephew? - of anti-heroes from the Angry Young Men-era of English lit. In his case he knows he’s not that young any more, and he’s less angry than has earned his sullenness through a lifetime of being cast out—fresh instances of violent rejection ring in him the peal of a playground taunt: Bastard, bastard, bastard. He’s like a fun-house mirror of David Thewlis’s Johnny from the film Naked, that other too-clever-by-half drifter who ran from trouble up north to the capital only to leave there another trail of destruction—Speake reverses the trajectory and his escape back north may well save him.

Another literary ancestor might be Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, that “dog-frenly” young man on the psychic trail of answers through a wild country. Tom Speake, in a novel whose first big set-piece is heralded by distant barks and concludes with an Alsatian that’d been chained to a tower-block roof, has a canine side of his own. He’s big and shaggy and of unknown mongrel heritage, dogged in his pursuit of the missing boy, wily but hapless, without a master but looking for one, a beaten cur chary of human contact but touchingly always willing to give it another go.

His insecurity spreads to the gap between his speaking voice and his narration. After he bests a rude dinner host with an edgy joke, he thinks of himself as being “Not so ineloquent any more.” Which is ironic, seeing as he spends the novel as often charming as offending everyone from lonely housewives to menacing cock-fighters. His narration is a mix of the dry (he notes a hippy saying “Namaste” in a Geordie accent) and the lyrical (his description of Sanderson as “sloppy-sophisticated” is a hyphenate straight out of Larkin) and the ordinary, or even workaday, all of which Clarke balances just right. A few times Tom thinks of himself as being “rooted to the spot” - when afraid or astonished or in trouble - but the polysemy of his words, the specificity of his character warrant the cliché: a drifter is gonna think a lot about roots, like when he wistfully reckons, “[M]onths from now, a new me will be rooted to my time spent in the Lakes with Sanderson.”

For all my talk of ‘voice’ with its connotations of blarney, Clarke’s writing is at times immensely subtle. When Tom thinks of the “remote commune, where a little boy might be hiding. Where I am hiding too” he’s simply stating the fact he, too, has squirrelled himself away from danger in the same place where the boy might be; but with that second clause Clarke equates the orphan Tom with the boy Paul without clanging it for the reader like a gong as a lesser writer would’ve.

Or consider how Clarke drops a creepy hint through the incorrect idioms of an American character, Skye: she’s talking about how she got out of the rat-race by living in a commune: “We sprang the trap. No one can touch us out here”. Her wording can also be read to mean she and Tom haven’t sprung out of a trap but sprung one into action…

And in Clarke’s boldest formal move, Speake towards the end of the novel peeks at Sanderson’s research notes and finds a description of himself. To get a long character summary so late in a novel, in the voice of Sanderson but from the mind of the author: it’s comparable to the trick Nabokov pulled off in Despair when he gave his protagonist’s (fake) backstory only at the start of the last chapter.

Formally self-aware and sensitively drawn, modern and retro, socially realist and psychedelic like a collaboration between Ken Loach and Nicolas Roeg, this rake’s regress and northern noir novel about fate and hope will give you hope for the fate of the novel. Any good reader would be glad to have Tom speaking in their head.

In turn I’ve been speaking to James Clarke. His debut The Litten Path won the Betty Trask Prize in 2019, and a collection of stories, Hollow in the Land, followed in 2020. He lives in Manchester from where he answered my questions about Sanderson’s Isle (out now, buy it here).

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ARTLESS: Reading your novel I was thinking about fate and fatalism - one that’s grounded in geography - “It is the weather that is in charge of the land, and it is the land that is in charge of us” - and in the narrator’s attitude that their life’s been set in the one motion long ago. At one point Sanderson calls Tom “Poor Tom”, and we might think of Poor Tom in King Lear, that pessimistic play about cruel gods and grim fate. The novel also captures how much possibility was squandered in the Sixties. What does this mean for the future of the rest of us on Sanderson’s Isle? How did you nevertheless manage to widen the cracks of light in congealed fate?

James Clarke: Well, there are different types of fate. There is the constant search for connection and meaning we seem fated to. There is the fate of our inner solitude and mortality. There are our the destructive urges we repeat and the personal contexts we can’t escape.

In Sanderson’s Isle I used Thomas Speake to embody these circumstances, particularly the truism that without equality of opportunity there is rarely equality of outcome. Because that’s a grim fate a lot of people live with. From the outset Speake is at odds with the norms of his time. He looks foreign, his accent’s different, he doesn’t come from money. Born out of wedlock, he’s rubber-stamped as illegitimate the day he’s born. Obviously, I’ve heightened the dislocations to make a point, but it’s not difficult to see that in Speake’s Britain the game’s rigged against people from certain backgrounds. If you come from nothing, if you’re othered and unsupported all your life, there’s a predictability to how things will go. Have things changed since then?

In terms of the future for the Isle and the “Poor Tom’s” of this world, maybe this is wishful thinking, but learning from past mistakes would be a start. That was why I set the book in the 1960s. I was using back then to discuss right now. In the 60s the authorities shut the railways and advanced the motorways. The welfare state was allowed to buckle. The hedgerows were uprooted, the rivers were straightened and polluted; human, commercial interests took priority over the land’s. Today the government is still at it. Fiction about fate can help us triage what’s coming. It can be an interesting exercise in probing, if not always broadening, our horizons.

Your novel’s in the lineage of social realist ones like Room at the Top, or Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner - it starts with Tom and his morning runs around London canal country. But there’s also little meta touches: Tom gets called and tries to live up to the label of “empath”, which is a nice trick to justify the abnormal sensitivity a lot of protagonists otherwise happen to have in first-person-narrated novels. (“Some empath I am,” Tom later says of himself, like he’s verbalising dramatic irony.) When we read, “Lying in the quiet, I slow my breathing, managing to distance myself from London without actually moving”- we might think of the whole transporting experience of reading novels. And when Tom - who, it’s trite to point out but is a made-up character whose life is fated by you writing it - says “I don’t believe in fate. I do however believe in the inevitability of consequence... There is an authority to that” I couldn’t help thinking of the ‘author’ in authority. François Truffaut said all films should be about the world and about cinema. How much is your novel about your kind of novel?

There’s something classically British about social realist novels. They’re essentially about power dynamics, aren’t they, which is a dominant concern in this country. You get these macho, aspirational characters who swagger about, railing against their lot because pushing back is one of the only freedoms they have. They’re often brought into conflict with innocents who get in their way, even if, as it turns out, they weren’t going anywhere special, and all the victim did was encourage or love them. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Room at the Top are full of antiquated posturing, but they still depict the terrible damage wrought by people backed into corners.

I was inspired by that fearlessness as much as I wanted to satirise the bullish attitudes. In this respect Sanderson’s Isle upholds the genre’s traditions more than it challenges them, but social realist fiction never sugar-coated anything, and I respect that. It’s fiction that shows what becomes of people trying to prosper in a world that doesn’t have their back. You’re right to recognise a nod to the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. I love that story’s rebel heart. I wanted to align with it and any wider literature and cinema that peels back the carpet to reveal deeper truths about how we take back our agency. Contemporary social realists like James Kelman, Irvine Welsh and Ross Raisin, Clio Barnard or Ken Loach don’t hesitate to reveal everyday conditions, characters and consequences. That was my aim with Thomas Speake. He’s an angry young man, a take on a type. In my mind Britain is a social realist character. It’s Joe Lampton, Arthur Seaton and Billy Liar, taking no prisoners, leaving aborted lives, disfigured conquests and bitter glory in its wake.

The moment Tom and Sanderson arrived at the hippy commune, and the longer they stayed and were drawn in, I was waiting for its rotten underside. From Ursula Le Guin’s Omelas to the kindergarten in Toy Story 3, there’s always a price to pay for utopia. Tom and Sanderson are, in their different ways, cynics and enthusiasts both. In your novel how much is cynicism a self-fulfilling prophecy? Or is it earned pessimism being proved right once again?

Sanderson and Speake are world-weary cynics, but whereas one is an optimist, the other is a pessimist. The narrative is framed and driven by a series of quests as Speake attempts to track down his father, seduce his landlady and settle down with her. Finally, he must locate and ‘save’ a missing child. This is him optimistically trying to better himself and settle comfortably in an idealistic way. Sanderson on the other hand is a lot more entrenched. He’s so resigned and defeated that he’s become cruel and dissolute and unable to form meaningful relationships. You could say they’re postlapsarian characters.

The difference is they’ve reacted differently to a loss of faith and acquisition of fatal knowledge. I think ultimately our attitude is our reckoning. Cynicism begets cynicism. Utopia is possible if we can put that aside. The question is, can we? In Sanderson’s Isle, Thomas Speake continues to pick himself up and, in the end, by overcoming his cynicism (and this isn’t a spoiler) embracing positivity and fate, he achieves spiritual enlightenment and finds a new way forward. Utopian or what!

The climax of your novel involves an ayahuasca ceremony. Ordinarily I’d be sceptical about a story that ends with the characters taking drugs. But you set the sequence up well with an earlier scene in which Tom watches 2001: A Space Odyssey at a happening, which of course had its own far-out climax and metamorphosis. And the final image of the novel, Tom envisioning/having a vision of his future self pottering around a garden—it almost feels like this drug-fuelled fantasy is, within a fatalist story, as much hope you could give a character you clearly have a lot of love for. What were the challenges with pulling off that climax, and what did you feel you owed Tom by the end(ing)?

I really wanted to end the story on a redemptive note. Speake’s final trip was to be nightmarish yet as cathartic and as beautiful as I could get it. He’s shaking away assumptions. He’s accepting a fresh reality, a future that may or may not be real. Because like everything else in Sanderson’s Isle, nothing is certain. Belief and the meaning we parse from belief are merely assertions based on best guesses and subjective points of view.

For the record I see this as a positive. You make your own sense of things. I put my lead character through the ringer in this novel. I wanted to leave him at a moment of inner peace and joy, even as the consequences of his actions unfold around him and everything collapses. What was destroyed begins anew, sort of thing.

The tripping wasn’t too difficult to write. I’ve done a lot of mushrooms and acid. It’s about conveying an altering of perceptions. Glorious colour, visions, focus. Trips are actually fun to describe. You just need to remember to watch out for self-indulgence and intersperse the visual stuff with hard reality, i.e this is just someone on drugs in a field. I’ve never taken ayahuasca, but a buddy of mine has. A good portion of what I described in that final scene was literally what he experienced. He took me through it. I made it work on the page.

One of the country eccentrics Tom and Sanderson meet in the Lakes, Norman McNally, tells a story when interviewed of his mother’s ghost telling him that his life will resolve if he only keeps in mind “his word”, which word he then forgets. Told for laughs, Norman’s story returns when Tom, high, feels like he too is on the cusp of his word. But in the end the word is just his full name, repeated. Which seems to be another riddle, another wall. Then again if you keep repeating ‘Thomas Speake’ you start saying ‘Speake Thomas’, or, perhaps, ‘Speak, Thomas’… Is there no more answer to the riddle of who we are than our given name and our voice, that is, our inherited identity and our capacity to speak for ourselves, tell our own story? 

When we were about sixteen my friends and I used to frequent a house up in Todmorden where a practicing shaman held huge parties. We were from over the hill, about ten miles away, so after getting unimaginably high and dancing our arses off, we’d have to wait until the next morning to get the first bus home. Because we were always morning stragglers, we’d be around for when the shaman handed out mystery wares to whoever was still standing. One morning he came round with what turned out to be salvia. We all went down to the river to smoke it. It didn’t work for most of us, so we left, but one friend stayed.

Later he told me about a profound experience where he felt like he disappeared, and his entire sense of self was replaced by a single word. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t remember what the word was. I just thought this was the most amazing story. It summarised perfectly the vaguely tangible feeling, certainly that I get, that a wonderful knowledge is somehow within our grasp. If only we could put our finger on what it was, everything would make sense. This moment might never come. The mystery might be that there is no mystery. All there is, at the end of the day, is you.

The novel is named not after Tom Speake but Sanderson. The title Sanderson's Isle applies as well to the TV show within it, a sort of more Bohemian and kitschy version of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. Sanderson as a media stalwart is at once charming and opportunist if not ruthless. Why is the novel named for him? Is the imagination of England still in the hands of his establishment likes? Are we all still living on Sanderson’s Isle?

Joe Sanderson is a composite of various eccentric British TV personalities. There is Kenneth Clark, yes. Alan Whicker, John Betjeman, Ian Nairn, and John Berger are all there too. Add to that Jonathan Meades and Tony Wilson, the artist Francis Bacon, oral historian George Ewart Evans. Loads really. I wrote him as an astute thinker with a brave take on the arts and the hypocrisies of the era. Yet he’s very much a product and a part of the system.

In fact, he thrives in it. Sanderson is the presenter of a hit TV show, one of those cosy sideways looks at British life that have been cropping up on television for years now. That Michael Portillo one about railways is a recent example. There was another a few years ago where Prunella Scales and her husband went about on canals. These ‘Great British’ programmes are so white and middle class and chummy. They seem like opportunities for rich Tory baby boomers to present a rose-tinted view of how marvellous everything is, and I really wanted to send them up.

Beyond that, their format was a fitting motif because they offer a take on human lives and national heritage, which is one of the things I was hoping to do. Naming the book after a programme exploring the country was a neat way of suggesting my authorial intention, as well as nodding to Nairn Across Britain, Whickers World, Betjeman’s Britain et al. I was hoping the title would also invite readers to continue the work of Joe Sanderson himself in questioning the disingenuous, soft-focus truth that’s spoon fed to us. Because although the system might not be built for most of us, imagination is very much up for grabs. That’s how we subvert the system’s power.

Sanderson’s facility with his TV show’s interview subjects lies in him asking them the same questions, which you list in the novel. I couldn’t let you go without asking you at least some of them, modified a little:

How does what matters to you now about writing differ to what mattered to you ten years ago?

The things that mattered a decade ago still matter to me; the concerns have just sharpened. Whereas once I cared about pouring a lived experience as accurately onto the page as I could, now I care more about the universal truth of the memory. The truthful feeling becomes the story’s zone of interest, not just the moment itself. I still care about inhabiting characters so that I can write them hyper-realistically, but they now have to make their own decisions. Their behaviour has to be something they would do, not that I would have them do, if that makes sense.

Being published immediately doesn’t matter so much anymore either. I take my time to get a piece of writing as tight as possible before sending it anywhere. Ten years ago I was in such a rush.

What gives you hope for the future of the novel?

Diversity of voice, independence of spirit, freedom of imagination.

How do you define the art you love?

Tough one. The crux of it is I want to be moved. I really like art - and certainly writing - that comes from the heart. It’s hard to qualify this but I can usually tell if it’s an emotion that’s driven a piece or if it’s a thought, because I’ll have an emotional response straight away. Don’t get me wrong, the thought is great! I love ideas. I just want a kick in the guts or a swooning moment that makes me feel alive. I buzz off texture, truth and character. Read my books, you can probably tell.

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