THOUGHTS ON BOOKS
DIALLING INTO THE GHOST REALM:
AN INTERVIEW WITH PATRICK LANGLEY
by M S Adamska
Patrick’s 2023 novel The Variations begins on a winter morning in the year 1518 in the Holy Roman City of Strasbourg, with an arresting, atmospheric scene. A young woman called Frau Trauffea breaks into song in the street. Her appearance – she is not wearing a hat – and her unusual, forceful gestures, draw hostile reactions from onlookers. She is quickly dismissed as being mad. But then, unexpectedly, another singer joins her – and then another, and then another. Soon it has become a ‘collective possession’.
This tale of the magnetic quality of music, its capacity to express, expose, and even heal wild and strange forces within us is a powerful one, recognisable to the many of us who are susceptible to its enchanting qualities. The tale of a woman ridiculed for demonstrating unconventional behaviour will be equally resonant for any of us who have ever felt, or been considered, strange.
When the tale of ‘the song plague’ has been told, our present-day narrator, whose name is Ellen, reveals that she is descended from Frau Trauffea. But how does she know that? Not because a family tree has been provided, but because Ellen has been told so by her ‘dead’. Ellen is the dean of St. Agnes’s Hospice for the Acoustically Gifted – those, such as herself, whose extraordinary musical abilities are infused with the capacity to hear the voices of their ancestors. It is called ‘the gift’.
The novel examines the lives of three gifted individuals: the aforementioned Ellen, who is not only dean of St Agnes, but its master of bells, her close friend Selda Heddle, a celebrated avant-garde composer and alum of St Agnes, and Selda’s grandson Wolf, who, at the novel’s beginning, appears on the doorstep of the hospice in a state of derangement, singing, in fragmented form, his grandmother’s iconic symphony Snow Trio.
This interview took place on an appropriately wintry December afternoon in Deptford, London, in a café where the noise of coffee machines, 90s shoegaze, and small barking dogs occasionally disrupted proceedings.
MS: I read your novel when it first came out and to prepare for this interview I have been re-reading it, which is a rare treat. In this day and age we tend to not really re-read novels. Are there any books you like to turn to for repeated reading?
PL: I tend to associate repeated reading with childhood. I reread books when I was a child – Philip Pullman’s trilogy, for example – but the thing that stands out is a video. Whenever we visited my grandfather’s house, my sister and I would compulsively rewatch a VHS of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, this eerie cartoon version. The childhood impulse to repeat a story is partly about learning and partly about something else – the pleasure of memory, perhaps, or of the soothing effects of familiar narrative arcs. For The Variations, I was interested in how the stories families tell about themselves – where everyone knows the punch line and the story is endlessly told for precisely this reason – hold a more complex mirror to the childhood impulse to rewind the story the moment it ends.
MS: For Selda, the central character of the novel, ‘rhythmic repetition’ is a characteristic of her early work as a composer. When it comes to music, repetition is a defining principle in both the form it takes and how it’s consumed. Is that something we can approach in literary forms?
PL: There’s this amazing poem by Elizabeth Bishop called ‘A Miracle for Breakfast’. It has an unusual form – a sestina – in which she repeats various key words like sun, crumb, miracle, balcony and coffee at the end of each line, and which become hypnotic devices throughout the poem. The rhythm in which the words are repeated is as much the content of the poem as what is said.
MS: I wanted to ask you about the musicality of your prose and the rhythm in the book, which is so varied and inventive. There are paragraphs of luxurious description, then fragments of ghost voices which make rude interruptions, and then there’s the character called Oriana, who is really a supporting figure but has such a brilliant voice. [She has an oxygen machine, so speaks like this, for example: “Mmm. This wine. Rather lovely. Are you sure. You won’t have. A very small glass.”] How consciously did you manage the musical qualities of the text?
PL: I think a lot of it’s unconscious. I couldn’t tell you exactly where it comes from and how I make the decisions. It’s quite an intuitive process. The rhythm of things is something that sits slightly beneath conceptual thought; it’s felt. So I think the way I was engaging with that in this book was informed by the fact that Selda is obviously a made-up, fictional composer, but I think of her as working within a tradition of music that’s kind of… how shall I put this… emerging from minimalism and is anti-romantic. If that’s the right way of putting it. It’s not dealing with huge, bombastic, primary-colour feelings. It’s not telling the stories in the music. It’s more about inducing a state within the listener. I think she would think of it as almost like a rebalancing of faculties – a sense of spirit and the intellect, feeling, and all of these things, arriving at a new form of harmony through music that has a certain repetitive quality.
MS: Were you listening to anything in particular when you wrote the book?
PL: The composer who I listened to the most was Eliane Radigue. She emerged out of musique concrète and in the 70s began composing music on an enormous synthesiser called the ARP 2500. She used ring modulation – a kind of feedback system within the synthesiser – to create extremely minimal, drone-like compositions, often influenced by meditative states and Tibetan Buddhism. They’re kind of emptied out of descriptive content, as it were. In a very indirect way, that probably influenced the decisions I was making as I was writing.
MS: Do you generally listen to music when you write?
PL: No. It has to be silence. Sometime I will listen to noise, white noise, just to blank things out. Only if I was in a noisy environment, though – like if I was writing in this cafe, I’d maybe put my headphones on… Having said that, there a lot of voices in the book, for example when the ghosts appear. I wrote a lot of those passages in pubs and cafés. So they were informed by the noise and the almost arbitrary nature of the things people were saying, things that might reveal little glimmers, insights into the way they’re living or what they’re going through at that particular moment. So, usually silence… but if I was dialling into the ghost realm, I could sit in the pub.
MS: It must have been quite difficult to know how to control or limit those voices within the text.
PL: The ghosts were really genuinely quite problematic! They were like a chorus in my head. [Laughter.] They kept wanting to tell all these other stories. That’s one of the reasons why the book is so big and that it came out five years after my previous one. I invited this presence into my mind and it was quite destabilising. So if the book has an odd shape, it’s partly because of them.
MS: Both of your books are really interesting in terms of their position on reality. We are almost but not quite in the realm of the real. You feel when you read them as if you are in a room just next door to reality. I made a drawing to illustrate this idea with some other writers, as I was interested in how you might fit alongside them. It’s very subjective and poorly drawn, not at all exhaustive, but I’ve put you here.
[Shows PL diagram. At the left edge is science fiction. At the right edge is documentary naturalism. At the centre of the diagram is ‘the real’. Patrick Langley is one centimetre to the left of centre.]
MS: Is that an acceptable position?
PL: [Laughter.] Totally acceptable. Consciously it’s leaning into the left side of the graph, but it isn’t substantive in the way that Butler or Orwell would be, although there are fantastical elements in the novel. It proposes a metaphor and then plays it out as though it were realism – but I don’t think it actually feels that far from what it feels like to have a mind. [Laughter.] It’s not that far from my understanding of what it means to be conscious, or to think – having voices in one’s head is not only the province of madness. I can’t remember if Selda actually quotes Whitman in the final draft of the novel, but his famous line about containing multitudes often came back to me while writing her character. We’re all multiple within ourselves.
MS: The gift in the novel is quite positively coded, though those in its possession suffer a lot. You refer in the acknowledgements to H.D.’s The Gift.
PL: I was talking to my friend Francesca about this question of inheritance and the way of relating to one’s ancestry when she recommended that I read The Gift. So I called it ‘the gift’ from that point on as a homage to that book and to our friendship too. The word carries a huge amount of connotations, of course. As Marcel Mauss says, gifts are double edged because they impart responsibility onto the receiver to return the gift in another form. I think the German word for poison is das Gift. There’s something almost mocking about the idea of being gifted, being talented. So using that particular term was a way of playing on all these different things. On the one hand, you have someone gazing into a crystal ball and on the other you have the horrors of a music academy where you’d have your childhood stolen because you’d be playing cello for 12 hours a day. [Laughter.]
MS: Are you ever tempted to head out further away from reality?
PL: When I was younger and starting out, maybe. But I think probably in the novel form I’m more interested in characters and what they’re experiencing. Perhaps with short fiction. I had a story in The New Yorker this year called ‘Life with Spider’, that’s further over. There’s a giant spider.
MS: That sounds quite scary. Or friendly? They can be friendly.
PL: No – quite scary. I think of it as a funny story as well, but there’s something about the short-story form that means I feel more able to let some of this material in.
MS: It’s interesting that you write short fiction as well because The Variations is a long book which fully assumes its status as novel, if that makes sense. A very confident novel.
PL: When it got bought in the U.S. the editor there said, it’s a “very novelly novel.” I thought it was a double-edged compliment but then I read another book recently and I thought, “This is a novelly novel” and I really liked it.
MS: On which note, you might be horribly offended by this – for me it’s a compliment – I couldn’t help but think of Dickens when reading your book.
PL: I’m not offended in the slightest. There’s an aura to my novel that’s quite Dickensian, especially Bleak House, that foggy density of atmosphere.
MS: Dickens-dislikers often complain his characters are too caricatural.
PL: Dickens’s writing was rooted in sketches – he originated in Sketches by Boz. There’s some truth in the criticism that his characters are sketch-like, but I think of him as a territorial writer. He’s exploring terrains, territories – often, these seem to exist within his own mind.
MS: And Ballard?
PL: Ballard was a formative writer for me. A transitional writer from children’s literature to adult literature. Speaking of repetition, his novels are trauma loops. They’re always the same story, the same arc.
MS: He has a foot in sci-fi, but then there’s also the historical one – Empire of the Sun (which I haven’t read) – which is apparently quite un-Ballardian.
PL: Yes. Empire of the Sun is a really good book – that’s the novel I read when I was a child that acted as a bridge from children’s into adult literature, alongside Robinson Crusoe. It’s like an origins story: “So this is why your mind is so weird!” [Laughter.] I can’t see Doris Lessing on your diagram.
MS: No. You wouldn’t. I’ve never read any Doris Lessing.
PL: Lessing is a big influence. With her and Ballard, there’s that turn towards ‘inner space’, the post-Laing fascination with the world of the mind. I would put William Golding in there as well. I step out into this part of the diagram because it offers a more complete way of writing about the human mind and the human spirit. I’m always looking for fictional forms that reflect how reality is processed by the imagination, that capture something of the irrational nature of being.
MS: The book is divided into three sections: Ellen, Wolf and Selda. Ellen and Wolf are first-person narrators – and then Selda’s section is narrated in the third person. Did you always know it was going to be that way?
PL: Yes. She’s quite a distant and unknowable character. It’s important for the book that she is never fully known. I was thinking of how, as a grandparent, she was symbolic of but also embodies the theme of ancestry. So there’s this grand ancestry in the form of ghosts – a multitude of unknowable and past lives that impinge on the present moment – and there’s a kind of unknowability about them. This triggers a kind of nervous breakdown in Wolf in the central section.
I thought of the Selda section differently – a scattered summary of intense scenes from life, such as might flash through Selda’s eyes in the moment of death. These same moments are mythologised within family lore, particularly the highly dramatic birth of her daughter by candlelight, which over time becomes an anecdote endlessly retold over the dinner table.
MS: And is music part of your origins story?
PL: Somehow I haven’t mentioned my grandmother yet, though the relationship between us was the inspiration for the novel, rather than her as an individual. She was a répétiteur.
MS: I saw that in the acknowledgements also. Please tell me, what is a répétiteur?
PL: It’s a behind-the-scenes job, but a very skilful one. She would look at the score for an opera or a symphony and condense it down to a piano piece that she could play on her own, so that singers could rehearse with her without the need for a full orchestra. A large part of her job was performing these acts of musical translation and distillation. She also worked as a session pianist and did quite a lot of work for the BBC. In the end, almost nothing of her actual biography made it into my novel. One detail that I did work in was that she once worked for a mime troupe, who hired her to improvise while they mimed.
So music has always been quite central, certainly to her life, and more broadly to my family. But she’s not like Selda at all. She had lots of anecdotes she would tell about the people she worked with. She was a curious mixture – she often name-dropped but in a very understated way. So she might mention a person called ‘Ben’, and you’d say, “Who’s Ben?” And she would say, “Oh, Benjamin Britten,” and so on. Or the time she went for dinner with Pierre Boulez and at the end he wanted to take some food home so he asked for a “baggy dog” – not a “doggy bag.” She would come out with these things all the time.
While I was a child, the existential question of ‘where I came from’, and the world of music that my grandmother’s stories evoked, became synonymous on some level. She taught me ‘Chopsticks’ on her Steinway grand piano – I ended up writing about that instrument in a very exaggerated, eroticised and comic kind of way. So music and family history were interwoven somehow. Then I played in bands when I was growing up and later made a lot of computer music with an artist friend of mine.
MS: Do you still make music?
PL: No. I had to choose at a certain point and it was writing.
I was listening to an interview with Kevin Barry, an Irish writer I really admire. He’s an exceptional writer of the voice, much more kind of rhythmically jarring and gnarled than my stuff. He mentioned in passing that he thinks of writing as a ‘disappointed music’, and it would be easy to think of music in similar terms – a disappointed or incomplete writing. When I made music, there were so many layers of meaning that I was unable to reach, such as irony, humour or eeriness. This obviously reflects my limited compositional abilities, but it also says something about how language, by virtue of being less direct, can carry different layers of meaning. Sorry, I can’t remember what the question was now! [Laughter.]
MS: Don’t worry! It was about your relationship with making music.
PL: Oh yes. Well, if we’re talking about the novel, John Cage was the most obvious influence. Chance was of course central to his work. At an early stage of writing, still unsure about certain aspects of the novel’s form, I wandered into a library looking for a sign – some kind of confirmation that a more fragmentary approach to dialogue would work on the page. I chanced upon Cage’s book A Year from Monday. On the first pages I looked at, fragments of text were floating on the page like ghostly voices in a room. I thought, “It’s the spirit of John Cage! The ghost of John Cage is talking to me through all the randomness of the universe!” [Laughter.]
MS: That’s great! A lot of what we see in the novel are fractured, dysfunctional relationships. But what’s wonderful is the fact that there are elements of reconciliation that never happen in the reality of the book – but happen in the reader’s mind. That harmony is taking place for us and us alone, in our reading. You leave it to the reader to put it together.
PL: Both my first book and this one have discrete sections where there are silences between them, which sometimes end abruptly. I like narrative forms that make use of silence in the same way that music – particularly more modern, certainly postwar music – makes use of silence. So in my first novel, there are scenes from these two brothers as they go through life. There are leaps in time from one section to the next. The reader can guess what’s happened in between.
MS: And in The Variations we have leaps in time, and a sense of space – which can be experienced as a painful distance – between these three characters who are nonetheless deeply connected.
PL: Yes, they are always connected. One of the implications of the gift, both magical and disturbing, is the idea that individuals don’t really exist – at least in the sense that an individual’s existence is directly, causally dependent on a multitude of others, most of them dead and forgotten. For Wolf, confronting this fact has a dissolving effect on the ego. For Selda, it prompts a desire to find harmony between individual and collective consciousness. She’s coming to terms with her place in a vast, unknowable, dissonant pattern.
To put it more simply – the only hope is to make art! [Laughter.] Art is the only thing that will save her. To some extent, I believe that to be the case for myself. It’s one of the questions that she’s there to try to answer: how does one make sense of one’s position in relation to history, be it family history or in a larger sense? It’s an incomplete project. It would have felt emotionally false if there was some kind of cathartic release at the end. I like the idea of that harmony existing only in the reader’s mind, never to be achieved in the novel, however much the characters strive for it. For Selda, that is her whole quest as a composer: to make out of the dissonance of history a story that is harmonious.
Patrick’s book The Variations, came out 2023 and his preceding, debut novel, Arkady, in 2018.
Both are published by Fitzcarraldo Editions – and both are absolutely brilliant.