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– IAIN SINCLAIR – I wonder about the downbeat adventures of Benjamin Markovits in Germany, even though they could come straight from a recovered letter home. I believe the ­elegantly measured opening of ‘The Difficult Question’ by Anakana Schofield: the rain, the red Clarks sandals, the dead father who refuses to save himself in the crashed plane. The authorial voice has the confidence of Bolaño or Sebald – which is to say that we invest our trust in the skill of the storyteller. And we grow uneasy when the magician tries to explain the trick. So here is a true story. My wife told it to me on her return from a day’s outing to Oxford. Why was she there? I was at home in Hackney, sitting at the desk where I am sitting now, niggling at another commission, another rapidly approaching deadline. There was no time to look out of the window, but I could hear pigeons massing on the tiles. Squirrels headbutting speckled glass. Recently arrived parakeets screeching from tree to tree. Anna goes, early, into the hotel where she has her meeting, wondering if there is time for coffee or a drink. Someone she recognises is established at a ­table with her laptop. Is it? The woman with the busy screen, fingers flying across the keyboard, is a writer. She comes here to this commercial space, not to a ­library or a coffee shop, because the atmosphere feels right, it’s not oppressive. Most of the passerines are tourists or business folk. xiv
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– Introduction – I am interrupted at my desk, to hear the stop-start, digressive movements of the episode. As it is recounted. As it is remade into a serviceable anecdote. The other writer in the Oxford hotel is also stalled, but she says that she’s happy to join Anna for a drink. Two commissions are put on hold. Can I guess who the woman was? I don’t have to try, Anna tells me: Joanna Kavenna. I wonder, now, if Kavenna was working on ‘Realia’, her piece for this book? Does Anna’s intervention cast even the palest shadow on Kavenna’s text? ‘For some reason Anthony had put his invented woman in an invented house by his invented version of the Thames – and this was why he was in Oxford.’ Kavenna writes about Virginia Woolf ‘refusing the “reality” of others’. A place, a set, let us propose the lobby or the bar of a hotel in Oxford, a former bank. There is a theme, in the stories written by women, about bereavement. The drama begins after their fathers die: as fiction, as fiction derived from an actual trauma. Dark forebodings, paradoxically, bring a sharper light to the landscape. To the road of exile, the airport runway, the dead path down which ghosts shuffle. To validate the story, I would have to cook up the tension. Who was my wife meeting? Was the writer composing a blackmail letter to a former tutor? Had she drifted into an episode of Morse? Were these ­modest coincidences a blip in the space-time continuum? Did any of it really happen? Five writers deliver. Five writers invoke other xv

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– IAIN SINCLAIR –

I wonder about the downbeat adventures of Benjamin Markovits in Germany, even though they could come straight from a recovered letter home. I believe the ­elegantly measured opening of ‘The Difficult Question’ by Anakana Schofield: the rain, the red Clarks sandals, the dead father who refuses to save himself in the crashed plane. The authorial voice has the confidence of Bolaño or Sebald – which is to say that we invest our trust in the skill of the storyteller. And we grow uneasy when the magician tries to explain the trick.

So here is a true story. My wife told it to me on her return from a day’s outing to Oxford. Why was she there? I was at home in Hackney, sitting at the desk where I am sitting now, niggling at another commission, another rapidly approaching deadline. There was no time to look out of the window, but I could hear pigeons massing on the tiles. Squirrels headbutting speckled glass. Recently arrived parakeets screeching from tree to tree.

Anna goes, early, into the hotel where she has her meeting, wondering if there is time for coffee or a drink. Someone she recognises is established at a ­table with her laptop. Is it? The woman with the busy screen, fingers flying across the keyboard, is a writer. She comes here to this commercial space, not to a ­library or a coffee shop, because the atmosphere feels right, it’s not oppressive. Most of the passerines are tourists or business folk.

xiv

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