SOMEBODY'S VOICE by Ramsey Campbell -- a review and interview with the author

SOMEBODY’S VOICE by Ramsey Campbell

Review by Gary Fry

 

The theme of abnormal psychology is common in Ramsey Campbell’s work, and more recently he’s focused specifically on what he terms “the comedy of paranoia”, the way beleaguered characters negotiate contemporary life and are frequently tipped into feelings of nebulous persecution. In many of the non-supernatural novels, his troubled characters’ pathologies precede the narratives’ onset (The Face That Must Die, The Last Voice They Hear, Silent Children, Secret Stories), but in the similarly social realist shorter fiction we often see how negative experiences precipitate mental collapse (“The End of the Line”, “McGonagall in the Head”, “Unblinking”, and any number of others). With the exception perhaps of The Count of Eleven, we’ve yet to have a novel-length account of incipient psychological disintegration that doesn’t involve outré elements (as in, say, The House on Nazareth Hill). But now here is Somebody’s Voice.

The story involves crime novelist Alex Grand attempting to salvage his reputation after being accused in his latest work of appropriating the experiences of an abuse victim. He agrees to ghost-write a memoir based on the childhood of Carl Batchelor, who was ostensibly sexually abused as a girl (Carla) by her father. Carl has since transitioned into a man.

Thus begins one of Campbell’s most headlong thrillers. Indeed, its page-flipping structure, alternating between present and past accounts, is almost unprecedented in his work. Yes, earlier novels have employed cliff-hanger chapter endings, propelling the reader forwards to learn “what happens next”, but rarely with such a relentless purpose. Which is not to suggest that the novel courts commercial potboiler status. Quite the contrary. The main theme – the incremental disintegration of identity – is as serious-minded as anything in the author’s catalogue and might even be his central concern as a writer. In fact, the development of events leading to a significant revelation in Alex Grand’s life boasts an uncomfortable intimacy which fans of Campbell, particularly those familiar with his autobiographical essays, will find both disturbing and moving.

The literary aspirations embedded in a popular thriller form are reinforced by an ending that prioritises psychological closure over any reader hunger for melodrama. There is here no sinister denouement in some dank cellar (such as we find in, say, Psycho, a work with which this novel shares kinship), rather an intense court case during which the multiple strands Campbell has masterly marshalled come together in a painful moment that crowns the book’s themes. Campbell is not above conventional resolutions (his supernatural fiction contains any number of breathless final scene confrontations) but in this novel he explores his lead character’s inner life, a quieter consideration that relies on reader investment in that dimension of fiction.

I doubt I’ve read a more convincing account of incipient paranoia, the way an underlying issue is gradually exposed by stressful events involving livelihood and interpersonal attachments. Campbell’s blurring of two broad storylines is a technical tour de force and packed with suggestive nuance. Alex’s stress-induced tendency to register experiential patterns where there are perhaps none (e.g. the parallels between two families depicted in the novel) forces the reader to share his doubts and suspicions, deriving suspense from his increasingly fractured perceptions. Individual characters become inherently ambiguous – Carl’s dogmatic certainty (authentic or feigned?), Alex’s father’s crankiness (illness or guilt?), his partner Lee’s editorialising (occupational hazard or deliberately disorienting?). It’s hard to know who or what to believe. This is far more insidious than the horror of event; it’s the stuff of literary frisson.

And the prose? Well, that’s all grist to the savage mill. Take the following extract:

Beyond the promenade the pier reaches for the horizon, where the sky is paler than the water. Waves intermittently topped with foam ripple around the pier, a sight that make Alex feel unstable. The promenade is crowded, and he feels safe because none of the people know him. All the same, he feels watched. Anyone could use a drone … but now he realises that he’s thinking of his latest novel’s plot. Once the book is written, all these ideas will be out of his head.

Except hold on. Forgive me for tricking you. That wasn’t Campbell at all. That was rather how a lot of merely good writers might put it. But this is how Campbell does so:

Beyond the promenade the pier pretends to reach halfway to the horizon, where the sky is a paler grey than the water. Waves intermittently topped with foam tug at the pier in an insistent bid to draw it out to sea, so that Alex has to keep reminding himself that the land is stable underfoot. The promenade is crowded, and he finds he feels safest among people who don’t know him, but how will he feel when nobody does? Even if he can’t see anybody watching, that doesn’t mean he isn’t being watched. Anyone could use a drone to watch and lie in wait – for his detective, he means, or a potential victim. Once the scene is written the idea will be out of his head.

The additional phrasings are essential; don’t let any monomaniac fool (“eliminate unnecessary words at all cost!”) claim otherwise. This tricksy stylistic second version has hypnotic impact as, page after page, the author’s inventive ingenuity plays games with readers’ minds. Campbell’s sentences simply work harder than those of other writers, their resonant references to many others offering the book internal intensity.

Consider the following examples. When Alex’s editor partner Lee (already craftily characterised as an arbiter of both his written and spoken text) brings in drinks, she “resembles a quotation, flanked by inverted commas on the empty mugs she holds.” Later, when Alex awakens from sleep, he observes:

[…] Lee’s sunlit face gazing down at him. Mist drifts across it, so that he wonders if he’s only dreaming he has come back to himself, or are his eyes behaving unlike his? He’s struggling to grasp his consciousness when he realises he’s seeing steam from one of the mugs of coffee she’s holding.

On another occasion, Alex and Lee dine together:

He has a glass of merlot first, and several with the steak, which isn’t as rare as he prefers. No doubt that’s his fault or would be said to be. “No blood tonight,” he confines himself to saying, which earns him a puzzled if not worried look.

These are just examples of two characters consuming drinks and the accumulative, off-centre, menacing fun Campbell has with the theme. There are many, many other repeated issues with just as much suggestive material baked into them. It’s collectively intoxicating.

To enhance readability, the narrative’s dialogue is as lean and rhythmic as it surely can be. Some pages even resemble a stage-play script, such is the unnecessariness of said-isms and other behavioural directions Campbell makes plain with only his (admittedly eccentric) command of how people communicate. Yes, the talk is stylised, but so is most fictional dialogue, and few other writers capture the way speech in real life frequently lapses into unwitting revelations, engagement at cross-purposes, and attendant misunderstandings.

As the book advances, and Alex’s fracturing mental state grows more pervasive, Campbell’s modulation of prose becomes apparent. His depiction of perception and consciousness starts slip-sliding away, inducing a reality whose stability is all a-wobble. Too many words in a Twitter post “[blush] as if they’ve been caught out”. A street-sign announces, “NORTHAMPTON SAINTS WORK MIRACLES”, which, despite Alex’s religious preoccupations at that time, turns out to refer to just a rugby team. A house full of loud music “beats like a massive heart.” All of this is perfect tonal accompaniment to the fragile psychology under scrutiny. Dark fiction is not all about event; it’s also in the communication, the words that count.

But event there is, and certainly dark. Some of the book’s earliest passages, involving scenes of abuse, are as disturbing as anything in the author’s oeuvre. Couple this with a rich, lived world full of earthy detail, and the whole thing comes to pungent life. I particularly enjoyed the various church sequences, as well as the oily, fractious team dynamics described in the taxi company scenes. And the dysfunctional family get-togethers will make you cringe like some socially awkward fly on the wall.

Which leaves only one issue to address. In the current cultural climate, it might seem unwise for an artist (let’s be direct, a cisgender male) to depict a transgender character (Carla/Carl), particularly one whose behaviours are questionably dishonourable. But I should point to context. In a series of more recent socio-political fictions (e.g. Thieving Fear, Think Yourself Lucky, and plenty of short stories), Campbell has examined many important aspects of contemporary life, remaining informed and relevant when other senior artists might be forgiven for losing touch with our youthful culture’s pulse. It is therefore not unusual for him to incorporate in his work transgender issues, which, despite having a long history, have risen to the media fore latterly. Certainly anyone suspecting a cynical attempt to court publicity from controversy is way off the mark.

As to depicting transgender characters in fiction, I have some sympathy with those who might claim, on the basis of difficulties faced by members of the community, that any and all artistic presentations should avoid negative attributes. However, Carl is revealed to be nothing less than recognisably human. Yes, he’s more than a little slippery on the matter of truth, but as one of the novel’s main themes concerns the capacity of anyone to accurately recollect the past, I don’t consider that an egregious fault on the character’s part (let alone the author’s).

On another sensitive issue, in my reading of the novel, the causes of Carla’s desire to transition cannot be reduced to the ostensible abuse she suffered as a child. There are carefully crafted scenes in which she experiences at a later period what might be described as gender role strain, prompting feelings about her status in society at large. Let me quote (necessarily at length) to illustrate one example:

Some of the female parties I picked up [in my taxi] bothered me more. Most of them acted glad, saying things like “Let’s hear it for the girls,” but too many seemed to think I mightn’t be as competent as my male colleagues, unless they had some other reason for wanting a man. Some male fares were so courteous it felt patronising, and others asked how much extra I’d charge to pleasure them […] As for the men who tried to advise me how to drive, most of them weren’t joking at all.

[…] There was just one party of four men that left me feeling vulnerable. They were so noisy and restless I suspected they were coked as well as drunk, and when I delivered them to a street with no working lights in Birkenhead they tried to convince me they’d paid in advance. I kept the doors locked and said I’d call the police unless they paid up, and when they told me to do it and started suggesting what I could do to myself I made the call. They began trying to smash the partition and the windows, and one of them phoned someone to help. I heard a front door slam somewhere up the road – at least I wasn’t parked outside the house they would be visiting – and more men than I’d got in my taxi appeared in the headlights, brandishing baseball bats. I was getting ready to drive at them till I saw red and blue flashes in my mirror. They were lights on a police car […] The men with bats vanished back into the dark, and the police made my passengers pay up, and would have arrested them if I’d pressed charges. Because I was afraid of making trouble for the firm, I let the men go. I drove some way to keep the police in sight, and then I parked while my legs stopped shaking and the rest of me did.

[My boss] said I’d done all the right things and told me I was brave. I wanted to believe him, but I couldn’t help thinking the party wouldn’t have tried to steal from any of the other drivers. Some of my confrontations with passengers made me feel I was playing a role that wasn’t quite me yet – that wouldn’t be till I grasped what it was.

As we see clearly here, Carla’s decision to transition arises from long, complex psychological engagement in life and cannot be reduced to a univariate cause. Any close reading of the novel reveals that Campbell richly dramatizes that.

Finally on this matter, let me add that I, too, am a cisgender male, but I’ve done modest work to understand salient issues. I took a lot from Susan Stryker’s sterling book about the movement (Transgender History, 2017) and have followed various debates in social media involving the likes of Julia Serano, Juno Roche, and others. I’m certainly not suggesting that this grants me special insights into the area, rather claiming that I’ve made concerted efforts to appreciate its contours, just as I try to understand many lived experiences different from mine. Life is always challenging if one arises from circumstances that vary from what we inadequately term “the norm”. Indeed, anyone with a serious interest and investment in the discussion offered here might read (or reread) the autobiographical essays I alluded to earlier, those detailing Ramsey Campbell’s own upbringing. Struggles come in many forms.

Campbell is aware enough to include in Somebody’s Voice a meta-discussion of issues arising from artists appropriating the experiences of people with unique personal histories. Given the points I’ve addressed above, it would disappoint me if the novel were problematised or even dismissed on the basis of these fictional strands. Indeed, the book is more firmly oriented around the theme of existential identity, memory, and the past. Alex’s increasing inability to determine whether his recollections are accurate or inventions gets to the heart of what it is to be captured in time and space with significant others. These are universal concerns that transcend socio-cultural and/or biological divisions. Ultimately, Somebody’s Voice is about the challenges of being human, and surely that’s something we can all agree on. It’s also one of the most gripping reads I’ve had in years. As the saying goes, win win.

 

An interview with Ramsey Campbell about Somebody’s Voice

Gary: Thanks for letting me see a copy of your new novel in advance of publication. As you can see from my review, I hugely enjoyed it. Perhaps you can tell me a little about the novel’s origins.

Ramsey: A couple of years back a survivor of child abuse was interviewed on my local radio station (BBC Radio Merseyside) in a phone-in show. A caller commented that the lady had been very brave to talk about her experiences so publicly, and the presenter (Roger Phillips) responded that she was a very good writer as well. Now, since the book was ghostwritten, she wasn’t the writer, and this immediately started me thinking how such a confusion of identity might develop. Suppose the writer’s memories became increasingly entangled with the subject’s, and both proved to be unreliable? Somebody’s Voice was the eventual result.

Gary: Embedding such a complex theme – that of identity and memory – within a convoluted thriller narrative is quite an achievement. How did you go about crafting the book?

Ramsey: The process was just as instinctive as it has been for most of my tales – I gathered material until the book felt impatient to be written and then set about it. With all my recent novels I do have a general sense of the important events of the narrative, but their order of occurrence in the book is defined in the actual writing. Once the book was under way the structure felt increasingly inevitable, especially the way it’s progressively undermined by revelations – even its voices are. 

Gary: I know you take pleasure in rewriting, particularly stripping back unnecessarily verbose scenes. But with a plot so watchmaker intricate did you find yourself rewriting sections or shuffling material around? 

Ramsey: Surprisingly little – certainly no reworking of the structure, and paring away only the usual stuff. I increasingly find that quite a few descriptive observations and bits of behaviour in dialogue scenes can be jettisoned once they’ve helped me compose the first draft, for instance, and some of the actual dialogues found more of a balance between naturalism and succinctness (that’s to say, I condensed them). One major change I did make was to tone down the lurch into overt paranoia prompted by Twitter in the tale, which was originally overstated.

Gary: That sense of paranoia feels organic, entirely emergent from the situations you describe. Was this state of mind something you planned to address in advance of composing the novel? 

Ramsey: I had a sense in advance of the memories and doubts that would gradually emerge, but the mounting paranoia they produced rather crept up on me. Well, I do believe that you can’t write authentically unless you engage your whole imagination with the material. Anything else risks hackwork. A good deal of it wasn’t hard to imagine. While I never experienced the kind of child abuse that figures in the novel (although decades after we moved away from Liverpool I was appalled to learn that a neighbour across the road had been sexually abusing young children, including his daughter, and selling videotapes of his activities), I did suffer the physical kind in my schooldays. Some behaviour by some teachers back then would rightly be prosecuted these days, and I certainly felt at the time that this was simply how things were and that there was nothing I could do. Equally, I know from experience that a child can be compelled to keep quiet about his life – it isn’t an exaggeration to say that my mother indoctrinated me from a very early age to discuss her with nobody, a psychological inability so profound it felt physical. And I’ve had memories resurface decades later. My earliest, of my parents’ struggle that ended in bloodshed when I was three, wasn’t released into my consciousness until years after Jenny and I were married.

Gary: Somebody’s Voice feels like your most expansive meditation on what you've termed “the comedy of paranoia”. When did you first recognise this trend in your work? 

Ramsey: It crept up on me long before I had a name for it. I take John Horridge’s misadventures in a cinema complex in The Face That Must Die to be an early instance, all the way back in 1976. I really became aware of it in the late eighties, specifically in the novella Needing Ghosts, which I found darkly hilarious to write, however nightmarish it grew. Writing it felt like letting my subconscious have direct access to the page – like releasing an aspect of myself I hadn’t been aware of, or at least hadn’t allowed it enough creative freedom. The comedy carried over into my next novel, The Count of Eleven, and took me unawares by directing the proceedings, a course my instincts prompted me to follow (and I’m glad they did). Since then it’s seldom far away, but I’d say however comical it proves to be (and I never know until I write it) it has a core of seriousness. 

Gary: In the afterword to Somebody’s Voice, you mention the crime novels of Steve Mosby and Alex North. What specifically do you feel you took from that work?

Ramsey: I had in mind their complexity of structure, specifically the way different narrative voices comment on or undermine one another, especially in the extraordinary Black Flowers. I think my book develops this in the way that the Carla narrative is never in that person’s voice – it’s an approximation of it produced to order by another character. For me this is central to the novel.

Gary: I’m intrigued by the characterisation in the novel, especially the ambiguity of, say, Alex’s partner and father. Did you have a sense in advance of how that would play out in terms of Alex’s incipient paranoia? 

Ramsey: I don’t really meet my characters until I write about them. As I got to know those two in the process they grew more ambiguous, but that was also the case with Alex. I’ll blame my subconscious again – it knows more about my people than I do until it lets me into their secrets.

Gary: I’m struck here, as in previous interviews, by how instinctual your working method is. Your fellow Liverpudlian Paul McCartney has said that he refuses to question the wellsprings of his creativity lest the magic die. Is that something that resonates with you? 

Ramsey: Very much so. I try simply to engage my imagination (and the reader’s too, I hope) and let themes and resonances emerge in the writing without my insisting on them. They seem increasingly to take care of themselves, as my method grows ever more improvisational.

Gary: Somebody’s Voice is another of your occasional non-supernatural outings, but I understand your next one, Fellstones, returns to cosmic horror. Are you able to offer a hint of what we have to look forward to? 

Ramsey: Fellstones is an English village named for the seven stones that stand on the village green. Paul Dunstan used to live there with the Staveley family, who adopted him after his parents died, but he moved away and changed his name once he grew up. Now they and their daughter Adele have called him back to participate in the Fellstones Festival, and he’s beginning to remember why he did his best to hide from them. By the time he learns the nature of the Fellstones and the reason he’s needed, it may be too late. “He who makes a neighbour of a stone may share its dreams …”

SOMEBODY'S VOICE is available from 22nd June, 2021 in hardcover, paperback and ebook editions: ORDER HERE.