Review by Lee Wright of "The Viaduct" by David Wheldon

The Viaduct, David Wheldon’s first novel, published in 1983, was well received at the time. Following his death in 2022, it was rereleased by Valancourt Books. The story begins with Alexander – more commonly referred to as A., since Wheldon wanted to save time during the writing process (he had originally planned to add the full name later, but A. carried thematic weight in what became a Kafkaesque story). The protagonist being reduced to a mere letter also reflects his loss of personal identity after being released from prison where he served time for writing a seditious book that purported to expose the secrets of the city’s governmental workings. 

Soon, however, he is confronted with new, unspecified charges and escapes his pursuers by fleeing down a stretch of abandoned railway tracks – taken over by nature – built on a viaduct that dominates the city. The viaduct, now blending seamlessly with the landscape, appears as though it were not crafted by human hands, but instead formed by a bizarre upheaval of the earth itself. 

A. is dressed for travel – heavy boots, sturdy canvas trousers, and a pack on his back, which he later exchanges for a worn suit, confusing those he encounters and causing them to believe he is a lawyer. What A. is journeying toward remains unclear; there is no hint of a paradise at the end of the tracks, only more towns and villages. When asked, “Where are you going?” He simply replies, “I’m going on.” 

His journey starts at the terminus, hoping to catch a train, only to find that the railway had been shut down a decade earlier. At the beginning of the novel, beneath the viaduct, several church bells toll, like the sound of a race starting gun. We learn that A.’s cell window overlooked the viaduct, and he would often gaze up at it. Such repeated, obsessive focus on something distant and unreachable might suggest themes of escapism or wistful dreaming.

There is a sense that the narrative may not just be a straightforward recounting of events, but rather a reflection of the character’s inner world – much like Bobby Western in Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger, which also gives off a dreamlike atmosphere. We know nothing of those who pursue him. They are blunt-featured men of practised patience, like Stasi agents. Some of them pursue him on horseback; the most deadly possess a fixed stare that can make a man faint. A. gets beyond the “boundary,” and the city disappears as swiftly as it was created. 

This is where the novel loses its early tension and switches from a slow-burning thriller to a book about everything and nothing. A. meets fellow travellers and villagers who have established small communities, where one man can serve as pastor, mayor, and magistrate. A. and his companions are regarded as directionless and superstitious. The novel portrays life as a constant search for comfort or stability, but this desire for security is ultimately unattainable, illusory. Someone remarks about A. “You were a dissatisfied young man.” This kind of dissatisfaction could lead to a man’s downfall. The story is surreal, and the characters feel more like mere vessels for the author’s voice than fully developed individuals. However, The Viaduct would fit perfectly on the shelf next to works by McCarthy, DeLillo, or Kafka.

About the reviewer
Lee Wright has an MA in Creative Writing and is currently working towards a PhD researching memoir and film. His fiction and poetry have been published with Fairlight Books, époque press and Burning House Press.

Review by Kim Wiltshire of "The University of Bliss" by Julian Stannard

The University of Bliss is a dystopian campus novel set ten years in the future and we join this terrifying new world just as new Vice-Chancellor Gladys Nirvana is about to take up her position at The University of Bliss, or UOB (pronounced YOB) as it is known to its students.

In the political climate of 2035, any academic endeavour is strongly discouraged, with the one poor scholar who managed to publish a book being demoted to Head Trolley Pusher on the university’s very own train. As the management seek higher salaries, fewer pesky academics and more bureaucracy, can the last of the humanities lecturers save higher education from itself? Focussing on Harry Blink, the poor poet who hasn’t published any poetry in years, we meet a range of Deans, Pro-Vice Chancellors and Professors whose sole aim is to disassociate higher education from any notion of learning, instead rewarding those lecturers who spend time on their Lego creativity and awaiting the visit of the Weeping Aubergine / Eggplant from the Light of Idaho. Sounds both surreal and scary? Well, it is. 

I managed to read this book in one day, which is a good thing, and at times it made me laugh out loud and other times nod in sad recognition. Yes, it is a bit broad at times perhaps, and certainly you can feel the author’s frustration with the current higher education climate, but anyone working in the Humanities will recognise the tropes that this novel satirises, such as compulsory attendance at events during Staff Wellbeing Weeks instead of doing any research, 87% of students receiving first class honours degrees and the Creative Writing programmes being viewed with deep suspicion and loathing by those in charge. 

Stannard uses to great effect the dystopian device of keeping the near future near enough for us to recognise many of the directives and initiatives but extrapolating them just far enough for the reader to think: yes, actually, that could well happen. We only have to consider the changes the last decade has seen in higher education, the way league table position and awards are trumpeted at open days whilst redundancy policies are rife, leaving a shrivelled team of lecturers to work forty or fifty hours a week to keep up. And, heaven forfend, should there be a fall in the league table, a fall in the NSS, a fall in the REF, the blame is placed firmly back at those same lecturers’ doors – why aren’t they doing more in terms of outreach, pedagogy, knowledge exchange, public visibility, reflection? The move towards obsessions over lanyards and a consideration of whether robotic dogs might do a better (and of course cheaper) job of teaching students than actual people doesn’t actually seem so ridiculous.

But I would stress that this is not just a book for those working in humanities in HEIs across the UK, this doesn’t just speak to that handful of Creative Writing academics who get asked ‘Yes, but what are you employability statisitics like?’ It is for anyone who values education, who values culture, who considers the world their children or grandchildren are going to inherit in terms of learning, philosophy, literature and art. It is a highly readable novel, biting, funny and fast paced, but at the same time, do take a pause every now and then to consider the world Stannard is creating – how close do you think we’re getting to that now?

About the reviewer
Kim Wiltshire is a writer and academic, Reader and Programme Leader for Creative Writing at Edge Hill University. She writes scripts, short stories and was a British Academy Innovation Fellowship researching ways of embedding arts into healthcare settings during 2022 and 2023. 

Review by Peter Raynard of "From Our Own Fire" by William Letford

As a planet we may or may not be near an apocalyptic ending. But the notion of such an event, whether triggered by contagion, nuclear war, robotic takeover, or ecological disaster, has never been more in the forefront of our minds. Art has reacted, as it should, through books like The Road, and TV series such as Black Mirror and Sweet Tooth.

Letford’s latest book From Our Own Fire (his first in seven years), is a speculative poetic response to this contemporary terror, one that takes a very different path both in form and subject from his previous work.

          The global economy is gone
          Good. It was just
          murmurations in the sky
          Opulent and undecipherable

The book is written as the journal of a stonemason and his working-class family, the Macallums. Hybrid in form, a page of prose is followed by a linked poem throughout. 

We are embedded in the family’s survivalist response to what appears an hyper-capitalist gear change by the ruling elites. A rogue robot, The Intelligence, nicknamed Andy by the family, is on the loose, casting chaotic AI on an already chaotic situation. ‘During the days Andy worked on the messages, the Baked Bean hoarders were out in force. Supermarket shelves emptied and people stepped out of their front doors like meerkats. In the middle of the madness, Joomack invited me to a tattoo party.’

In Letford’s first two Carcanet collections (Bevel in 2012, then Dirt in 2016), his ambit was the lives of the working class. The loiterers, barflies, manual workers, from the place he came from, and those of his travels. Giving voice to the working class, often with the lyricism of the Scottish dialect. 

From Our Own Fire has a similar cast list, but is a much more inventive and frightening book for all that it foreshadows. It could have been overdramatic, but in Letford’s hands it is done with poignancy, humour, and beauty.

About the reviewer
Peter Raynard is a disabled working class poet. He is the editor of Proletarian Poetry, featuring over 150 poets. His poetry books are Precarious (Smokestack Books), The Combination: A Poetic Coupling of the Communist Manifesto (Culture Matters), both in 2018, and Manland (Nine Arches Press) in July 2022. His debut pamphlet The Harlot and the Rake: Poems after William Hogarth, an ekphrastic heroic crown of sonnets, is forthcoming in September 2023, with Culture Matters. Instagram & Threads: @peteraynard

Review by Paul Taylor-McCartney of "One Drop" by Peter Kalu

Having recently completed a PhD in which I creatively and critically explore the function of memory in dystopian fiction, I was very much looking forward to reviewing Peter Kalu’s own, unique, contribution to the genre, One Drop. 

In war-torn Britain, inseparable Black Radicals, Axel and Dune, are arrested, have SIMs implanted in their heads and are placed in a prison camp for those who defy the white supremacist government, known as the Bloods. 

At its heart, this novel is a love story about surviving against all odds. The peculiar horror here is that all prisoners have to suffer as their SIMs brainwash them with the Bloods’ evil philosophy, whilst drones constantly monitor their movements and thoughts. In order to combat this living nightmare, Axel and Dune have to take the brew called ‘maidenhair’ (and in increasingly heavy doses) as well as applying a resin to their hair in order to create a temporary shield against the drones’ memory re-writes. Most strikingly of all, Kalu’s protagonists recount some of their happiest memories from their lives before imprisonment, referred to as ‘storyfying.’ This form of resistance – of subjective memory cast in direct opposition to collective compliance – is a defined trope of the dystopian novel and is explored with masterful nuance by the author. Similarly, Offred retreats into the past, to escape her present, in Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, whilst the rebels recite whole books from memory at the end of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Of course, memories being wiped entirely from an individual’s mind have featured elsewhere in the genre, as evidenced in Anna Smaill’s The Chimes, Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police and Philip K. Dick’s We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, which later became the hit sci-fi film Total Recall. As Rafaella Baccolini (2003) argues, ‘in order to fabricate a single, true, hegemonic discourse, which citizens unquestionably follow … it may be necessary to erase memory itself.’ 

The passages where Kalu’s narrator has to observe, up close, his non-binary partner retrieve fewer and fewer of their own memories, make for some of this novel’s most memorable, albeit disturbing, scenes: 

         ‘You remember any of this?’
         ‘Nope.’
         ‘Nothing at all?’
         Maybe they heard my disappointment because they squeezed my hand and said, ‘It’s alright. I don’t need thousands of memories. I only need to hear your voice, Ax. Everything’s in your voice. I hear you and I know I’m alive.’

Overall, this is brilliant and important novel. A fast-moving, well-structured narrative moves swiftly through its scenes to reach a satisfying climax and, in keeping with the genre, Kalu leaves enough questions unanswered for the reader to speculate about what kinds of future may be waiting for those who manage to survive the many terrors of the camp. Perhaps Kalu’s greatest achievement is that he skilfully revisits and reinvents the slave narratives of the late twentieth century by other notable black authors such as Haley, Walker and Morrison, to remind us how easily the past can be resurrected when both political and populist views become, once again, about binary oppositional thinking and the rise of violent extremist ideologies. Both timely reminder and proof of Kalu’s sheer verve and originality as an author of speculative fiction, One Drop is a thought-provoking and inventive exploration of hope coming from the most hopeless of places. 

About the reviewer
Dr. Paul Taylor-McCartney is an author, researcher and lecture, with interests in dystopian studies, children’s literature and initial teacher education. His poetry, short fiction and academic articles have appeared in a range of notable UK and international publications including Aesthetica, The Birmingham Journal of Language and Literature, Writing in Practice (National Association of Writers in Education), Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine and Dyst: A Literary Journal. He lives and works in Cornwall. You can find out more about him and his work by visiting https://paultm.org/ 

Review by Karen Rust of "City of O" by C. M. Taylor

This is an engaging and fast-paced read that sets the scene immediately. A bomb hits the factory where country boy Juan’s parents work, orphaning him. As Juan surveys the rubble, a stout man in a bowler hat rises from the embers, points at him, and heads towards the city. Four other figures appear from the devastation, dressed as colourful harlequins. They head off in the opposite direction, never acknowledging Juan. 

Juan has three choices: to stay in the village, to head to the city, or to follow the harlequins. He chooses the city and is talent-spotted by the mysterious Alex to join the Boundless, a higher echelon of city society.  

C. M. Taylor builds his world with precise strokes, never telling more than is needed. The city is full of familiar places, from the Sydney Opera House to the Louvre and Kings College Chapel. The rich can pay to have a beach, or the Alps brought into the city on a whim. City society has a strict hierarchy with Extras and Intransigents at the bottom, The Boundless (the movers and shakers) in the middle, and Shapers (trendsetters) at the top. Juan is living the life, earning big as a trader with the clothes and flat you’d expect and a non-stop round of parties, drugs, and transitory hook ups, delivered in other worldly form. 

Chapters about Juan’s life in the city alternate with those about the travelling harlequins. Whilst the city chapters are dry satire, the harlequin tales are bawdy and surreal with references that link their path to Juan’s as they journey through the desert and eventually reach the city. 

City of O is pure escapism and great fun to read. An allegory for materialism versus meaning in life, it will make you laugh, flinch, and ponder. Highly recommended. 

About the reviewer
Karen Rust has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Leicester. Her work features in literary magazines including Mooky Chick, Ellipsiszine & Cabinet of Heed. She ghost-writes biographies for Story Terrace and runs creative writing workshops for young people through Writing East Midlands. She is currently working on a YA cli-fi thriller which she hopes to finish by Easter.

Review by Elizabeth Morgan of "The Last Children of Tokyo" by Yoko Tawada

Generations after a fictional (and very vague) environmental catastrophe, Japan struggles. The elderly often outlive their grandchildren in the world of this novel, a feat of magical realism and ecocriticism. Young people have fallen sick, due to the older generation’s negligence of the natural world. In this post-Fukushima society, reflections of intergenerational suffering are astute. Guilt for his generation’s selfish actions towards the planet are present always, in the elderly protagonist. 

This is also an exquisite feat of psychological exploration that ties the past to the future. In banning the naming of foreign cities, the author not only nods to Orwell, but leads us to remember isolationist Japan during Edo times. Tawada’s imagination leaves us with painful questions. Why is the prose describing irremediable catastrophe of nuclear meltdown so arresting - and yet, the creeping effects of pollution and global warming more subtly written? Present, too, is the fear of surveillance - quite popular with dystopian authors, as the elderly protagonist writes: "He was already well into it when he realised he’d included the names of far too many foreign countries. Place names spread throughout the novel like blood vessels, dividing into ever smaller branches, then setting down roots, making it impossible to eliminate them from the text. He’d had to get rid of the manuscript for his own protection, and since burning it was too painful, he had buried it." 

Mumei, the protagonist, is introduced to us in his silk pyjamas, waking up one morning. This is a Kafkaesque opening (reminiscent of the awakening in "The Metamorphosis"), bleak; yet the author still makes room for aesthetically gentle prose. Typically Japanese literature contemplates beauty, even in the remains of horror.  We are left understanding that we must rage on for all that is withheld by the government, never relaxing our search for protecting those simple pleasures we rely upon for happiness. 


About the reviewer
Elizabeth Morgan is a twentysomething who enjoys reading Japanese literature.