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This Thursday, a book is being published which I’ve waited for for well over a decade.
After my first ever interview at Canongate, in 2007(!), I was thrilled to be given a stack of books to take home with me. I can’t remember what exactly was in most of the pile now, but two titles in particular had a huge impact.
The first was @scarthomas’ The End of Mr Y. It was a stunning hardback with black sprayed edged pages and a deep red cover, and the contents were just as exciting: a mind-twisting adventure story about a cursed book, a hidden dimension, and a mouse-god named Apollo.
I’ve been lucky enough to work many times with Scarlett now, on both her adult and children’s fiction, and her curiosity for the world and ability to weave myriad complex ideas into adventure never ceases to amaze me.
The second was a signed and numbered proof with nothing but a typographic shark on the cover.
The Raw Shark Texts proved to be a perfect pairing for Mr Y: just as clever, just as fast-paced, just as intriguing. Based on the idea that life can survive anywhere, it suggested the existence of a predator, a shark, that survives in streams of language and feeds on memories.
It included a use of typography I’d never encountered before - including a particularly memorable section where a shark made of words swims up and out of the pages toward you, as though in a flick book. It was playful, and inventive and utterly brilliant.
The campaign for The Raw Shark Texts also led to one of my favourite pieces of book marketing: perfectly pitched, wonderfully simple and enhanced, as all things are, by the presence of Tilda Swinton.
I wasn’t at Canongate for the publication of The Raw Shark Texts, but I knew there was another book under contract, and was excited to see what Steven did next.
The years passed. No new book.
I’d bump into Steven at parties and publishing events, including the celebration in 2013 when he was chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young British, and we’d chat about his work writing for Doctor Who and on a host of video games.
More time passed. My role at Canongate changed. And changed again. Still no new book.
And then...
...one day...
...I heard a whisper that a new Steven Hall book had landed.
...one day...
...I heard a whisper that a new Steven Hall book had landed.
Soon the whispers became rumours, and the rumours became fact and, more than that, it became clear the new book was good. Really good.
Really really good.
Maxwell’s Demon is infused with a love of language. It’s set firmly in the book world - reclusive novelists, intimidating agents, pretentious writing students - and has plenty to say about some of our industry’s biggest debates, but does so in a book with the pace of a thriller.
It’s also packed with all the same typographic trickery and the devious twists and turns and the mind-bending conceptual ideas that I loved in his debut and, just as with The Raw Shark Texts, left me dizzily reaching out to grip the table beside me, just to check it’s real.
Because that’s the genius of Steven’s writing. He makes you question the existence of the world you thought you knew. Reading him feels how I imagine stepping out onto the surface of the moon and looking at the earth below you might; your perspective will never be the same again.
Maxwell’s Demon is out this Thursday - 14 years and 5 jobs after I first encountered Steven’s work.
It was worth the wait.
It was worth the wait.
(And I would apologise for the incredibly long, slightly self-indulgent thread...but if you’ve made it to the end then hopefully you didn’t mind too much!)
