The Scotsman Abroad | On Graham Joyce

Yesterday I received an email that brought both my partner and I to an absolute standstill.

We've both been reading Graham Joyce for years, you see; Memoirs of a Master Forger was my first of his works, whilst the other half has had a passion for his ghostly prose since The Silent Land. Invariably, one of us will manage to bagsy his new book before the other does, such that it's become something of a game between us.

So the news that he has cancer, that he nearly died six months or so ago... let's say it cast a dark cloud over the remains of the day. Per the press release I received:

Graham Joyce received a standing ovation at the 1,000-strong awards ceremony of the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton on Sunday 2nd November 2013. Picking up the Best Fantasy Novel Award for an unprecedented sixth time in his career, Joyce was earlier this year diagnosed with aggressive lymphoma cancer. The event marked his first public appearance since his diagnosis.

Joyce won the Best Fantasy Novel Award for Some Kind Of Fairy Tale, a story in which a young girl thought to have been abducted from the woodlands of the East Midlands returns to her family after twenty years. 

Six months ago Joyce had the experience of being revived by an emergency resuscitation team at the Leicester Royal Infirmary. Joyce said, “Just being able to stand here today is a wonderful award, thanks to the doctors and nurses of the NHS.”

Inadequate as it is, I can only express how happy I am that the doctors and nurses of the NHS managed to bring the man back, and how sorely I hope that he has many more years of good health ahead.

In any event, I've seen a fair few folks express curiosity about his work since the bad news broke, and I'd love for them to discover him as the other half and I have, so I thought I'd gather together links to the reviews I've written of his books.

Here's what I had to say about The Silent Land.

Here are my thoughts on the book he won the Best Fantasy Novel Award at the weekend for.

And to top it all off, my most recent article for Strange Horizons was a glowing review of his new novel, The Year of the Ladybird:

Almost forty years on, the scorching summer of 1976 is remembered by many; however the relative tenor of the tale depends upon the perspective of the teller, very much in the mode of local legend. Some speak of it as a bastion of all that is great about Britain... or all that was, once. Others recall the summer as a season of suffering; of water shortages, hellish heat, economic depression, and — what with the National Front nearing the peak of its power — political volatility. 

Each of these ideas has a part to play in Graham Joyce's new novel, but like the infamous insect invasion The Year of the Ladybird takes its evocative title from, they're in the background, by and large, adding if not narrative impact then immersive depth and telling texture to the text's redolent setting: a ramshackle holiday resort in a nation coming of age just as our protagonist David Barwise does over the course of this slight but delightful ghost story.

Graham Joyce is, in short, an awesome author: if you've been on the fence about his fiction, get the hell off it.

My thoughts, and my partner's, will be with him and his during this difficult time.

Book Review: The Silent Land by Graham Joyce

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"A young couple are caught in an avalanche during a ski-ing holiday in the French Alps. They struggle back to the village and find it deserted. As the days go by they wait for rescue, then try to leave. But each time they find themselves back in the village. And, increasingly, they are plagued by visions and dreams and the realisation that perhaps no-one could have survived the avalanche..."

***

Years ago, Jake and Zoe met on the piste of a ski resort. For them, it was love at first snow, a holiday romance that outlasted the holiday, but not the romance; for fate, however, their meeting was but the first link in a great chain which, a decade later, leads the young couple back to the Alps - and into the arms of calamity. At the crack of dawn on the second day of their return trip, Jake and Zoe get "up early to beat the holiday-making hordes for this first run of the morning. Because this - the tranquility, the silence, the undisturbed powder and the eerie feeling of proximity to an eagle's flight - was what it was all about." In a fit of unadulterated pleasure, Jake whoops at the mountain, and the mountain roars back, a "great mass of smoke and snow" on its breath: an avalanche.

The couple have little time to prepare for its calamitous embrace - nor, indeed, do we (readers, meet the deep end). The snow crashes down on us as it does Jake and Zoe, tearing the terrified young lovers from one another and us, momentarily, from them. It seems Zoe's thought that "she could die in that place, and happily," is to be put to the test, for when we come to with her, she is alone, upside down, and trapped under tonnes of hard-packed powder. Her panic-stricken struggle to survive is one of the most unnerving sequences in genre literature in recent memory - an almost unbearably tense exercise in the buried alive mode of claustrophobic horror - but for all her efforts, she cannot overcome nature; it's no contest. Zoe feels "a terrible surrender" pass over her as her consciousness begins to shut down. It's a truly terrible moment.

And then, "like light through a stained-glass window in a cathedral," Jake's voice penetrates the powder, awakening his lover from her deathly slumber. In short order, he digs her out, they dust themselves off and start down the very mountain which has so nearly meant the end of them both. They encounter no-one, curiously - not even a search and rescue team - but of course the slopes would have been cleared, wouldn't they? Curiouser, however, is that on returning to their luxurious hotel, they find it empty. It must have been evacuated, they reason. Along with the whole of the rest of the town, evidently: there's not a soul about in all Saint-Bernard-en-Haut. Jake and Zoe have the whole place to themselves.

Reading that back, it feels a little like I'm giving the game away, but that's not the case at all. As a matter of fact, the blurb is more of a spoiler - and there's a great deal more to the latest Graham Joyce than even that nutshell synopsis makes plain. The avalanche, the rescue and the revelation of the resort's profound emptiness are all said and done within the first chapter and a half. The Silent Land is a short novel, to be sure, without the trimmings of a supporting cast or needless narrative red-herrings, but it's a mouth-watering roast of a story in itself, swaddled in diversionary carrots and tatties or not.

At the eye of this particular storm, Joyce gives us Jake and Zoe. An uncomplicated pair of lovers in love; smart, young and energetic. Theirs are the only voices you will hear in The Silent Land, and they're such fantastic characters you won't mind for a moment. Some might say there's not a lot to them, but there doesn't need to be. Jake is practical and protective, though Zoe's no pushover: she's a strong-willed optimist, hardly in need of coddling (though not always averse to it). They complement one another wonderfully, this couple. Their adorably explicit banter reveals them for the tender morsels they are in the unfathomable space they have been stranded in; together, in spite of the encroaching icy cold of the desolate landscape they haunt, Jake and Zoe bring to The Silent Land all the warmth of a well-stoked fire.

It's tough to discuss much of The Silent Land without outright ruining it, and I won't go down that road for the sake of a few more paragraphs. Suffice it to say that we have here one of the very best, and certainly the most affecting novel of Graham Joyce's storied career. It moves along at the perfect pace: even as things become increasingly desperate for Jake and Zoe, the narrative doesn't miss a beat. Joyce's prose has a hazy, unhurried quality akin to a dream - or a nightmare - that delivers you whole cloth into the stark wintertime world of his latest and potentially greatest.

Needless to say, Saint-Bernard-en-Haut proves a tremendously affecting place to spend some time. For myself, I was near enough to tears as I turned the last page of The Silent Land - only the hardest of hearts can hope, I think, to remain unmoved by its pitch-perfect denouement. Lively, warm and honest, the company for the duration of your stay couldn't be better either: the underlying love story between Jake and Zoe is touching and brilliantly bittersweet. In the end, The Silent Land is an emotional tour-de-force, slight in stature at just over 200 pages in my proof copy, yet utterly remarkable in its raw power.

***

The Silent Land

by Graham Joyce

November 2010, Gollancz

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com
IndieBound / The Book Depository

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