"Maybe the world will end so we won't have to" by Natasha Bell

 

Autofiction layered. Tasha, ie the author (and we learn that 'Bell' is a pseudonym) decides to write about her life by creating herself as a character called Harriet Payne (aka Harry) who herself has the idea to write an autofictional novel representing herself as a character called Natalie Lucas.

There are meditations on writing and whether one should write about the people one loves and lives with, no matter how disguised. 

I found the start very slow. The first quarter of the book meanders as it sets the scene, building up the characters, exploring the themes of autofiction and the writer's life. “While novels need plot and autobiographies need chronological timelines, autofiction’s organising force is emotion, so it doesn't require either.” (Ch 6) I wasn't sure, on the evidence of this first section of the book, that I  agreed. 

And this was yet another book about the tribulations of writing another novel. Her character, Natalie, asks: “Does the world really need another book about how hard it is to write a book?” (The Last Word). No, it doesn't.

I contemplated abandonment. 

Furthermore, It seemed as if the book was aimed at a readership that not only ignored me but semi-actively excluded me. What should I, a man, make of statements such as: “She scrolls on, dismissing quotes from Hemingway and David Foster Wallace as male and uninteresting.” (Ch 2) or “She acknowledges that there are some perfectly nice men, even of the cis-white variety.” (Ch 3)? The "some" and "even" made me feel unwanted. Since 'Harry' seems to read almost exclusively female authors, maybe I should reciprocate. But I decided that would limit my horizons and I wanted to expand them. Isn't that the point of fiction? for the reader to be challenged, to explore new worlds and meet new people, whether they be burnt out cops, daredevil spies, African villagers, Cornish lovers from the eighteen hundreds ... So I persevered.

I'm glad I did. At the 25% turning point, Harry's partner, Ellen, becomes ill. Harry decides write a story in which Natalie's partner (also called Ellen) dies from the same illness, in the hope that the fates will be confounded and Harry's Ellen will survive. At last some real-life drama to which I could relate. Plus, I very much appreciated this really clever idea: whether the Fates, symbolised by a spider spinning its web, could be manipulated and defrauded, especially as it was elaborated into the story of Arachne.

And I enjoyed the added complication that Harry daren't tell Ellen that she is not only using her life as a story ("did it not occur to you that maybe I don't want everyone knowing that I could be shitting into a bag soon?"; Ch 11) but also that, in the story, Ellen dies.  This means that, at some stage Ellen is probably going to find out that Harry has been imagining her death .... This ratchets up the tension nicely.

So, in the end, the autofictional conceit interacted with the very human jeopardy to create a haunting dilemma. And perhaps the slow build-up was needed to achieve this degree of reader empathy. Perhaps.

I also enjoyed the fact that the Acknowledgements involved the character of Natasha who has a dialogue with the author Tasha in The Last Word, which follows the Acknowledgements; thus spreading the story beyond its usual confines, in the way that some films include sometimes meaningful out-takes after the credits or the way Alasdair Gray inserted into early editions of his novel Lanark an erratum slip which read 'This erratum slip has been inserted by mistake'. A character arguing with the author reminded me of Flann O'Brien's brilliant metafiction At Swim-Two-Birds (another novel which starts slowly; perhaps it is a characteristic of the genre).

So I'm glad I stuck with it. In the end it was an enjoyable and even gripping read. And there were some flashes of genius, including “The closest she's ever come to a radical subculture is getting a piggyback from a drag queen at Brighton Pride.” (Ch 5) which made me laugh out loud.

Selected quotes:

• “Stuck on a Mobius strip of her own bad mood.” (Ch 3)
• “Most of life is just an ugly scribble along the middle line.” (Ch 3)
• “The streetlamp puddles like liquid around their feet.” (Ch 5)
• “Her thoughts flickering like a worn-out projector.” (Ch 5)
• “The problem with trying to harness potential is that it increases the stakes of failure.” (Ch 8)
• “She had a tutor once who asked them to switch their first and last lines, to see what reconstruction was necessary to create symmetry.” (Ch 11)
• “What, after all, is writing, but an attempt to secure the last word?” (Ch 13)
• “You’re meant to come here and allow the road to change you, right? what is a pilgrimage if not a belief in story?” (Acknowledgements)
• “Your male characters rarely have two brain cells to rub together in order to contemplate their own abandonment.” (The Last Word)

September 2026; 239 pages
Published by Renard Press in 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Shantaram" by Gregory David Roberts

'Shantaram' means 'man of peace'. The title is, presumably, ironic. While the first half of this sprawling novel establishes the possibility of an arc of redemption, as the narrator protagonist, on the run from an Australian prison where he has been serving a sentence for armed robbery, opens a free clinic in a Bombay slum. In the second half, he joins the Bombay mafia and goes to war in Afghanistan. Throughout, he celebrates the macho qualities of a fighter, loyal to his comrades, prepared to kill or be killed. The many philosophical discussions between him and his fellows gangsters therefore sound like an attempt to reconcile the violence and criminality of his lifestyle with the need to justify himself to himself as a good man.

It might be based on real life events but, according to the author quoted in wikipedia, "some experiences from my life are described pretty much as they happened, and others are created narratives, informed by my experience. I wanted to write two or three novels on some bare elements from my life, allowing me to explore the themes that interested me, while keeping the narrative immediate by anchoring it to some of my real experiences. They're novels, not autobiographies, and all of the characters and dialogue is created." At first, assuming the novel to be fundamentally autobiographical, I found it difficult to criticise. Maybe there was indeed a devastating fire on the day he moved into the slum, prompting the immediate foundation of his health clinic, but such a coincidence in timing seemed a little novelistic. But if it is meant to be a novel, then it is open to criticism on those grounds.

The protagonist-narrator was a Marty Stu, that is, a male character who embodies the ideals, if not of the author, then of the readership, spawned from wish-fulfilment. Lin was a hero, being strong, brave and great at fighting, able to endure hardship and torture, good at making friends and learning languages, a successful businessman in a variety of black market fields, loyal and with significant medical skills. He acts in Bollywood. Her even turns out to be so good at writing short stories that the editor of one newspaper (a friend) recommends them to the editor of another. Thank goodness he can't ride a horse!

Too good to be true.

On the other hand, the level of detail in the setting supporting the verisimilitude is relentless. This is why so many people believe the novel to be a memoir. It feels true; it seems certain that the author (who was indeed an armed robber who escaped from an Australian jail and was eventually recaptured and wrote the novel while completing his sentence) lived among these people and had many of the experiences recounted. There are some great descriptions!

• “The umbilical corridor that connected the plane to the airport.” (Ch 1)
• “I stepped down to the street with the words of the young Canadian’s warning wheeling and turning in my mind like gulls above a spawning tide.” (Ch 1)
• “the carnival of needs and greeds” (Ch 1) describing an Indian street.
• “Skeined all over the buildings like metal cobwebs were complicated traces of electrical conduits and wires.” (Ch 3) Though I suspect the traceries were more of a fractal branching structure, far less organised than the geometrical perfection of a cobweb.
• “The smell of man-sweat, both fresh and fouled into the stitching of leather gloves and belts and turnbuckles, was so eye-wateringly rancid that the gym was the only building in the city block that rats and cockroaches spurned.” (Ch 40)
• “Money stinks. A stack of new money smells of ink and acid and bleach like the fingerprinting room in a city police station. Old money, vexed with hope and coveting, smells stale like dead flowers kept too long between the pages of a cheap novel.” (Ch 41)

Even though the other characters are backed up by a plethora of details they played fundamentally stereotypical parts. There is the wise guru who acts as a father figure, the elusive love interest, the friendly servant and companion (a comedy role, of course), the loyal friend. There is even a Jesus figure who dies only to be resurrected in an improbable twist (when a second character also returns to life, seriously scarred, I was reminded me of Voltaire's comedy classic Candide, in which a number of apparently killed-off characters reappear, usually with bits of of their buttocks missing).

EM Forster suggests that we are prejudiced to like big books because we don't want to admit that all that time we have invested in reading them was wasted. I think the opposite: for me a big book needs to justify the hours it mined from my life. The plot was epic in its ambition and marked by significant gear-shifts. It started as a travelogue to the seamy side of Bombay, the days spent touring sights such as the slave market, the nights drinking with other ex-pats. Lin then visited his guide's village. This section felt like Christopher Isherwood's autofictional work Goodbye to Berlin, with Karla playing the role of unapproachable love interest Sally Bowles. On the return to Bombay, we move into a redemption story as the hero moves into the slum and sets up a free health clinic. Suddenly he is captured by police and we have a prison story. Then, in another change of pace, he is released and becomes a member of the Bombay mafia. Yet another shift sees him travel to Afghanistan to fight against the Russians with the mujaheddin. Finally we have the endpiece, marked by death and resurrection, in which all the buried threads and revealed and untangled.

In fact, Shantaram is at least five books, held together, to some extent, by the on-off love affair between Lin and Karla. Each book is studded with set pieces, such as the rescue of Lisa from Madame Zhou's brothel (which has, in the warning that if Lisa returns she will have to stay, a strong echo of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice), the trip to the slave market, the Indian village experience, the fire in the slum, the fight with feral dogs, the cholera epidemic, the picnic high up in an unfinished tower block, the prison, the cold turkey, the battles in Afghanistan, and the culminating gangster fight. Not so much five books, perhaps, as a whole series of frequently stand-alone episodes in a miniseries.

Within each story, the narrative was frequently paused to make room for a chunk of character analysis, to dump a chunk of background information, or to reflect, wearisomely, upon philosophy. Sometimes the same ideas were repeated. This gave the whole thing a blocky feeling.

It sometimes felt incoherent. What was the point of the training of Tariq? I suppose it could be argued that this is how real life works, and this adds to the authenticity of the narrative. But it is a novel, and sometimes the narration seemed to be spur of the moment. For example, we have met Maurizio and Modena before but it is only when their story is foregrounded that we hear their back stories. We only learn about Lin's first-aid training when he needs it to cope with the cholera epidemic. This 'just in time' narration detracted from the verisimilitude, making it appear, rightly or wrongly, that the author was inventing details as necessary to bolster a narrative that was already underway.

There were also a lot of characters and I found it quite difficult to work out who was who. Or, in the end, as the death toll mounted, to care.

It is narrated in the first person and the past tense.

There are a lot of philosophical musings and aphorisms, particularly about freedom:

• “The facts of fugitive life is that you have to keep on escaping, every day and every night.” (Ch 1)
• “Every day, when you're on the run, is the whole of your life. Every free minute is a short story with a happy ending.” (Ch 1)
• “Imprisonment meant that they took away the sun and the moon and the stars. Prison wasn't hell, but there was no heaven in it, either. In its own way, that was just as bad.” (Ch 2)
• “With my fugitive life began, I was exiled from my family, homeland, and culture. Years into the banishment, I realized that I was exiled to something, as well. What I escaped to was the lonely, reckless freedom of the outcast.” (Ch 10)
• “The past reflects eternally between two mirrors - the bright mirror of words and deeds, and the dark one, full of things we didn't do or say.” (Ch 2)
• “The real trick in life is to want nothing, and to succeed in getting it.” (Ch 4)
• “If fate doesn't make you laugh ... then you just don't get the joke.” (Ch 8)
• “God is impossible. That is the first proof that He exists.” (Ch 9)
• “Justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.” (Ch 11)
• “Happiness is a myth. ... It was invented to make us buy things.” (Ch 13)
• “Why do bad people suffer so little? And why do good people suffer so much?” (Ch 14)
• “You can only ever be yourself. The more you try to be like someone else, the more you find yourself standing in the way.” (Ch 39)
• “Heroes only come in three kinds, dead, damaged, or dubious.” (Ch 41)
• “Luck is what happens to you when fate gets tired of waiting.” (Ch 42)

Selected quotes:

• “It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured.” (Opening sentence)
• “Two pairs of clear, pale blue eyes stared at me with the vague, almost accusatory censure of those who have convinced themselves that they found the one true path.” (Ch 1)
• “We Indian fellows, we don't worry about the foreplayings. We go straight to the bumping and jumping.” (Ch 1)
• “Each table had four or more cedar chairs - sixty-minute chairs, Karla used to call them, because they were just uncomfortable enough to discourage customers from staying for more than an hour.” (Ch 2)
• “This is ... a no that means maybe, and the more passionate the no, the more definite the maybe.” (Ch 2)
• “I hate it when people take so long to drink a single glass. It is like putting on a condom to masturbate.” (Ch 2) I'm not sure this metaphor works.
• “I told him once he's so shallow that the best he can manage is a single entendre.” (Ch 2)
• “Federico has found religion. It is a tragedy. He no longer drinks or smokes or takes drugs. And of course he will not have sex with anyone - not even with himself! It is an appalling waste of talent.” (Ch 4)
• “A dream is the place where I wish and a fear meet. Where the wish and the fear are exactly the same ... we call the dream a nightmare.” (Ch 7)
• “Good doctors have at least three things in common: they know how to observe, they know how to listen, and they're very tired.” (Ch 10)
• “My face reddened with that special guilty blush of the completely innocent man.” (Ch 14)
• “The little grey daydream-space where memory meets inspiration.” (Ch 26)
• “He was one of those guys who smile as a tactic.” (Ch 26)
• “My heart, sometimes, was a graveyard full of blank stones.” (Ch 27)
• “The glamour that laminated the movie world.” (Ch 29)
• “You guys haven't got the brains of two fleas on a pariah dog's balls.” (Ch 29)
• “Heroin is a sensory deprivation tank for the soul.” (Ch 30)
• “A cat can make you look clumsy, and a dog can make you look stupid, but only a horse can make you look both at the same time.” (Ch 30)
• “Every door is a portal leading through time as well as space.” (Ch 37)
• “Indra, known as the Poet, spoke almost all of his sentences in rhyming couplets. They were deeply moving in their beauty, for the first few stanzas, but always found their way into sexual descriptions and allusions so perverse and abhorrent that strong, wicked men winced to hear them.” (Ch 40)

Short verdict: I loved the initial travelogue and the redemptive arc in the slum. I started becoming disenchanted during the prison scenes. I was indifferent to the mafia stories. The Afghanistan section should have been another book.  I was bored in the final section, skim-reading to get to the end.

I read it in seven days.

July 2026; 933 pages
First published in Australia and New Zealand by Scribe Publications
My paperback 'twentieth anniversary' edition was issued by Abacus in 2023.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Departure(s)" by Julian Barnes

Although this has a story in the heart of it, an account of the relationship of two friends which is, so far as I can judge, true except for the changing of names, this is a memoir, rather than a novel, although he describes it as fiction. Autofiction? But not really. In five parts, Barnes considers getting old and dying in a sort of meandering, digressive exploratory disquisition. He promises this will be his last book. 

Selected quotes:

• “My memory - that place where degradation and embellishment overlap.” (part 1)
• “Mostly I write fiction, which requires the slow composting of life before it becomes usable material.” (part 2)
• “Stephen was - is - was - tall and gangling. His trousers often seemed too short for him, flesh showing above his socks, and when he threw his arms about he appeared to be heading off in different directions at the same time.” (part 2)
• “Marriages are like kitchens. ... The first time you put a kitchen in, there's always something wrong with it. Sink in the wrong place, freezer next to the oven. Not enough drawers, too many shelves, and so on. ... Then the second time you rectify the mistakes of the first one, and get what you wanted.” (part 4)
• “An English suburban teenager ... My flesh didn't seem at all sad to me (or at least, only sad from under- rather than over-consumption).” (part 5)
• “When, in the plenitude of her existence, my wife was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor and was dead thirty-seven days later, I raged against the dying or her light, but I didn't imagine that some cunningly concealed fairness or justice came into the matter.” (part 5)
• “As you get older, you get hardened in your least acceptable characteristics.” (part 5)
• “You’re allowed to be old, but you’re not allowed to behave like an old person.” (part 5)

This may be somewhat self-indulgent but it is intelligently and elegantly written and contains some perceptive insights into the human condition.

April 2026; 158 pages

Published by Jonathan Cape in 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Also by Julian Barnes and reviewed in this blog:

• England, England: a comic novel
• The sense of an ending: a novel

"Americanitis" by Miles Beard

Autofiction. In a book dedicated to his dead wife, Miles Beard, author, writes about the death of the wife of Miles Beard, narrator. 

This is a palimpsest of narrative layers. Much of the narrative is a memoir written for his therapist. Miles the narrator himself has an alter ego called Alazon who acts as an internet troll. Real people such as singer-songwriter Sophie Auster appear. 

There's a version of the 'Hero's Journey' in the structure of this book. It starts in the protagonist's home world of Scotland which he then leaves for a dream-like research fellowship in the US which culminates in a near-breakdown and a nightmarish journey (very On the Road, very Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, also autofictions) from East to West Coast before he returns home. In the US section (from which the novel takes his name: Americanitis being a nickname for neurasthenia, a nineteenth-century psychological exhaustion attributed to the stresses of  urban civilization) he faces trials and ordeals. But the ultimate tribulation assails him back in Scotland. At the end he emerges a wiser and perhaps a better man. 

The question of what happened to his wife is drip-fed through the first three-quarters of the book; it becomes a puzzle for the reader to solve. The narrative shifts into another gear once enlightenment dawns. So for the bulk of the of the book it is the challenges which create a stimulating and engaging read, whilst towards the end I was gripped by the story.

It's not an easy read. The author (who is also the narrator, who is also the protagonist) researches into and lectures on literature. This is reflected in a number of throwaway cultural references, many of which I found obscure. It is also, from time to time, modelled in the prose. But it is beautifully written with characters who were three-dimensional and complex adult humans and a protagonist who is a modern Everyman in his hypochondria, his double standards, and his moral weaknesses. His tortured journey is one with which we can all empathise, if not identify. 

A fascinating and brilliant exploration of some of the darker experiences of life.

Selected quotes:

• "The autobiographies of artists tend to present the quotidian sides of the practitioner as metaphors for their craft rather than deal explicitly with that craft." (Ch 3). I've noticed this. It frustrates me. Sometimes you read a biography of a writer than doesn't acknowledge the fact that they spent perhaps several thousand hours cooped up in a small room sitting at a desk writing each year.
• “Creativity isn't necessarily straightforward in its dealings with the world. To put it another way, no one has ever convinced me that the geniuses who have the lasting human touch we call art are either monsters or role models, or even that they should be. Shamans don't have to be horrible or nice.” (Ch 6)
• “What counts about artists is that they perceive reality differently. In any clinical sense they're not schizophrenics ... because they produce something coherent in its own terms that is valued by their communities.” (Ch 6)
• “Back at the house it was, indeed, cocktail hour, a misnomer they deployed in a casually ironic manner that failed to convey their drink of choice or the typical duration of imbibing.” (Ch 9)
• “Just because you wander in the desert it doesn't mean there's a promised land at the end.” (Ch 10)
• “When someone asks how we're doing we have to say ‘not bad’ because anything more positive than that and you'll get the shit ripped out of you for being so up yourself.” (Ch 11)
• “Sarah went on to talk about the parallax of narrative, how the introduction of distance between what the reader is told has happened and what the characters seem to experience as having happened had undermined not just our ability to tell stories with any objective understanding of what we wanted them to be about, but to tell stories even about ourselves in good faith. It has always been the case, of course, that narrative is a multifaceted thing. But the postmodern turn had submerged us beneath plunging depths of doubt, she said, and, like our expulsion from the Garden of Eden, it was irrevocable.” (Ch 15)
• “I had to inhabit her mind, become her, sink beneath her skin, and then ask myself questions only philosophers should ever have to ask. Questions like: what is the nature of being alive; what is it that makes life worth living; what is the process of death; and on whose timeline of it do we deserve to adhere.” (Ch 23)
• “Our utterances derive value not from their murky, ephemeral Intent but, latterly, their reductive interpretation, a recipient act we could only ever play the smallest of parts in shaping, mainly by attempting to precogitate that reductivity in the first place.” (Ch 23)
• “The key to living is accepting that we are monsters and yet lovable as well.” (Ch 24)
• “Heart is bursting. It's kind of sad that the human body only has so many ways of processing experiences. It feels exactly like I'm about to deliver a conference paper.” (Ch 25)

September 2024; 220 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Some of those cultural references:

• 'Alazon' is explained as a stock character, an imposter, in Ancient Greek drama, such as the braggart soldier, the Miles Gloriosus. 
• The protagonist's thesis is said to focus on "Nadar, Tennessee Williams and Charles Mingus" (Ch 1) I presume that Nadar is the pioneer of aerial photography (from hot air balloons) who died in 1910 althouygh I'm not clear how he firts with Tenessee Williams and Charles Mingus. In any case, Beard only seems to research Mingus.
• Is "Propp, the old Russki fool" (Ch 1) the writer of 'The Morphology of the Folktale'? 
• Is "Geoffrey Braithwaite" (Ch 4) meant to be the protagonist of Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes? 
• In New York Beard stays in a room on the thirteenth floor of the Hotel Pennsylvania; he believes "it was Frank Olson's room". Olson was a biological warfare scientist who died falling from his room on the tenth floor of the Hotel Statler, later renamed the Pennsylvania; there is a theory that his death was an extrajudicial murder by the CIA. 

Can anyone tell me the title of the essay by Tom Wolfe that the partygoer refers to in Chapter 5?