Not really.
But I wanted to make sure everyone knows that for today and tomorrow I’m reducing my annual subscription fee by a further £15 and sending out signed paperbacks of Villager and Notebook to everyone who takes it out, wherever they happen to be on the planet, whatever the postage costs (I’ll email you for your address once I get notification of your subscription). Many months back, when the hills and forests were huggable and green, my partner Ellie and I headed up to Hembury Woods, on Dartmoor - one of the places that inspired the landscape in Villager - to make a three minute film about the book: me wearing a cheap car boot sale hat and reading a little excerpt from it in the voice of one of its non-human characters then talking briefly about what can be found within it (the book, not the hat). Because we both have brains like overfilled colanders, until the other day we’d both forgotten about it, but having stumbled on it I thought it might be nice to post it here for people who are intrigued to know more about the book and the place it came from.
For many years, I had the flavour of an idea for a book: a novel set over numerous decades, told in non-linear form, featuring many different intertwined characters. A psychedelic novel about folklore, the magic found deep in the layers of the land, the earth-as-goddess, nature, social history, lost visionary music, lots of the life-affirming things about the British countryside and a few of the dark things about it. For many years I fantasised about it, scrapped versions of it, realised I wasn’t quite able to write it, hadn’t lived enough, read enough, walked enough, written enough, failed enough. So I lived more, read more, walked more, wrote other books. Finally, in summer 2020, well over a decade after I’d first imagined the book (in very different form) I sat down in earnest to write it. What emerged was an unstoppable torrent. As I wrote I felt like someone pulling on a rope attached to something undeniable that was already there but obscured by some mist. I just had to keep pulling, keep the faith that the rope would not snap, until an ending emerged. I called it Villager and chose to crowdfund its publication, instead of sending it out to traditional publishers. Less than two years later, it was published, independently, with scant hullabaloo, no useful media friends, no big marketing budget behind it. A successful maker of literary fortunes who hadn’t read it made a sniffy comment about its stubbornness and lack of potential for success. It sold little on Amazon, wasn’t a “media buzz” book, won no awards, but a loyal online following helped sneak it onto the lower reaches of the UK hardback fiction chart during the week of publication. The reader feedback I began to receive about it was noticeably more intense and passionate than the feedback I’d received for any of the twelve books I’d previously written, people began to recommend it to one another, purchase it from independent bookshops, spread the word about it online. I always felt it was a book for the long haul - I certainly wrote it for that, and not for the zeitgeist or quick sales - but who can tell? Good books often get neglected and lost. But this month it has gone into another printing. Many of you are kindly recommending it, and I am so glad to see it being read overseas. Thank you to everyone who is helping it sneak further out there. I’m damn proud of it and, though I realise it doesn’t fit into any conventional genre and the idea of it might not be easy for some to get their heads around, I have faith in it, have faith in the confidence the leap I took with it has given me as a creator of fictional worlds in the one and a half books I’ve written since. I always wanted to write fiction and I waited a long time do to it. I can’t deny it: I want to get Villager into lots of people’s hands. Definitely not everyone’s hands (that would be pointless), but the hands of the kind of people who would enjoy Villager. I am grateful that Substack has been enabling me to find more of those exact people.
If you would like to purchase Villager (or my other books), I also wanted to let you know that Blackwells Bookshop do free delivery to a lot of the world. And here’s a review of the book from The Guardian newspaper which will give you another perspective on it to my own.
Finally here’s another excerpt:
After the third day of recording, which he grudgingly conceded was better, they ascended narrow lanes and crossed tiny humped bridges in the car, going higher and higher, parked, then walked to a stone circle. A scribble of rain had blown in through the gap in the window when they were in the car then gone and in its place there was more damp heat. She told him to place his palms against the stones in the circle and feel all the energy there.
‘Ah, I’m so excited,’ she said. ‘My boyfriend is coming back next week.’
‘Where is he right now?’
‘Spain. He’s been out there since May. He’s in the army.’
He gazed back across the rocks, trying to pick out the car.
‘I think most of it’s probably trash,’ he said. ‘But I dunno. I guess I’ll end up hanging on to the tape.’
But he was not a person entirely devoid of hubris. He had the complacency of many people who arrive in rural Britain from a country populated by bears, coyotes and mountain lions, and the sun massaged that complacency. He was still a newcomer to the moor and even oldcomers to it knew only a fraction of a fraction of what there was to know about it. One of the many things he didn’t yet know about it was that, in late August, in days of heat after heavy rain, on the stretches where it was still most fully permitted to be itself, it breathed and growled as profoundly as it did in the height of the harshest winter. Terrain you’d visited always compacted its scale in your mind afterwards and he had begun to learn that but, even so, the route back to the ruined house was surprisingly arduous. The river told him he was going the right way but it seemed further than before and something had happened in the dripping folds of earth above the banks: an angry awakening, a last wet sucking of life into the lungs before autumn’s dry death. Brown flies clung fiercely to his flesh. Huge tufts of grass shoved him from side to side, arguing over their custody of him. Blue and pink and yellow flowers spilled over the damp ground like ornate vomit. An old octopus of a tree reached down a rough tentacle and anointed his cheek with a bloody scratch. In his shoes, the soles of his feet sloshed about and blistered and began their transformation into a sore kind of paste. Every path became a whisper and then a lie. A stiff gate opened but led directly to a shrub of insanity. The song the old man and his wife had sung was in his head again and he hummed the song and then he barked it at the impassable bracken that stretched all the way up the valley walls and then he croaked it at the sky. An area of oxygen finally widened ahead but the ground beneath it drank his feet then low branches formed a roadblock and he crawled under them then lost most of his left leg in a peaty bubbling hole and had to use all his strength to retrieve it. He could not have been more wet if he was in the river itself up to his neck and the burnt moist state of him attracted more and more tiny winged life and he knew then that one day, once again, this would be the world. Not a car, not a sandwich, not an ambition, not sense, not a cow, not a horse, not love, not a song, not a girl. Just this sucking and gargling and burping thing beneath him. When the dizziness came, and the head pain, just before the light clicked off, it was a relief to submit, to just fall into the mouth of everything and not go on fighting any more. And then night fell smoothly in, and not thirteen yards away the river, which was not interested, continued to yell as it rushed over the rocks.
FWIW I have a request in to my regional library to purchase more of your books. They will also be putting “Villager” in a separate, highly visible display of books recommended by local authors. Next stop, getting more prominent display at bookstores. Hoping this will temporarily make up for not going annual until the budget looks rosier.
“doesn’t fit into any conventional genre and the idea of it might not be easy for some to get their heads around“
Nothing original does. Art is about leaping, landing unknown.