Is Flourishing Forestalled? Reflections on AI and Fiction

In recent months there have been at least two controversies relating to AI-content and literature. In the first, Olga Tokarczuk, the Polish Nobel Laureate, said she used ChatGPT for her creative process (“How could we develop this beautifully”), noting “that in literary fiction this technology is an advantage of unbelievable proportion”, before having to walk back some her statements later following online outcry, stating AI was only ever used by her for research. In the second controversy, Granta published a prizewinning story which it seems may have been written by AI, and which may even have been reviewed by AI too. (Granta was neither prize-giver nor reviewer here)

These controversies made me realise that I had a different view from most commentators on these topics. At the time I considered AI, by which I mean here large language models (LLMs) largely deployed as chatbots, to be a neutral or possibly even positive tool for fiction writers, indeed for literature as a whole. At the same time, I acknowledged that it seemed obviously a negative thing for readers.

This divergent impact of the technology is a serious challenge for literary production and consumption, one which I am on both ends of as writer and reader. I wanted to work out if giving the topic some proper thought might allow for a more harmonious view of LLMs’ impact, and this blog post is the result of that initial thinking.

But before we begin, three things. One, these are not deep convictions. I would be happy to change them if I read or heard something that suggested I should. I have already changed, and nuanced them, as I wrote and revised this piece. Two, while this post is certainly more “pro-AI” than most voices on the topic, I do not use AI while writing my blog and have no intention to change that. Nor have I yet used it for my fiction. Here, now, you are reading me. My posts are proofread by my partner, who is like me a human being.

Finally, my focus here is on the use of AI by writers like Tokarczuk, rather than attempts to create an entire work of art through prompting alone. In other words, it concerns the writer’s possible augmentation rather than their substitution. I think this is a more interesting area, because the latter remains for now a relatively distant prospect. The former, meanwhile, demands our attention right now.

The Reader’s Perspective

For the reader, I would identify the chief problems with the involvement of LLMs in fictional production as centring on three interconnected topic areas: authenticity, dignity, and complicity in the systematic harms associated with data centre buildout.

Authenticity

While in and out of the ivory tower we might talk about the “Death of the Author”, readers in general want to feel they are reading a real person’s work. The disregarding of authorial intentions in interpreting a work is not the same thing as saying the author does not matter. Their individuality does not, but their abstract personality does. We want the words to feel chosen, otherwise the act of their interpretation stops seeming worth the time. Hence the relative lack of literary interest which the formulaic backs of milk cartons offer. The best books have the greatest sense of chosen-ness behind their words, whether that comes from the painstaking craftsmanship of a Flaubert or the abstract workings of genius that produced Dostoevsky’s more hurried, yet no less haloed, works.

Perhaps this is why ghost-writing appears a lesser crime than the use of LLMs. Even if it is obvious that this political or sporting figure hardly picked up the pen except to place their name upon the cover, we know that someone did. This is also why the overzealous editor, such as in the famous case of the editor Gordon Lish’s treatment of Raymond Carver’s stories, where Lish chopped and chopped and chopped at the texts until we readers ended up with the bare and brutal masterpieces we read today, is upsetting to those who know it without fundamentally compromising the texts themselves.

Perhaps Carver’s authenticity is compromised, but the texts’ authenticity is not – they still stem from a human source. In a similar way, I wrote in an earlier draft that newspapers and social media compromise authorial authenticity by placing heavy pressures upon them to write a certain way. But the end products in those cases are still texts produced by people. Compromised people, confused people, but nonetheless human beings like you or me. They are authentically human documents, reflecting human emotions and human struggles.

Dignity

Depending on the degree of AI infiltration into a work’s creation, of which more below, that’s not necessarily the case with a text today. A work whose words are not entirely an author’s own is no longer an entirely human document in the same way. This matters to many readers. Its importance is not at the level of the text, however. Students often read unseen passages and may well be unable, if not already now then at least soon enough in the future, to differentiate between human and hybrid or even machine-generated documents. Yet once we return to the document as a whole the distinction is more important. The problem with what Tokarczuk may have done, if I understand people’s complaints correctly, is that she denigrated herself as a writer. If you do not respect writing enough to want your own to be your own, the argument goes, you probably should not do it. And if you do not respect writing, why should a reader waste time reading you?

This argument does not have anything to do with the output upon the printed page, but about the context surrounding it. In that sense, it’s a moral accusation, a purity test. But it is one that is very different from being reluctant to read writers who were “bad” people. The alcoholics, the violent, the cruel – literary history is filled with such writers, and ever being replenished in its stock. We regret that Rimbaud stopped writing to be an adventurer, or that Nietzsche’s syphilis meant he was no longer able to write (in a way that made sense), or that Lermontov and Pushkin thought duelling for temporal honour was better than surviving to put more pen to more paper and buttressing their immortal honour.

Such failings fill us with regret for the missed works and unhappy families, but do not change what we have, those eternal masterpieces that fill us with gratitude for their creation. LLM use can make for an entirely different reaction. Usage does not reflect life getting in the way of art, but a kind of disinterest in art. If you don’t want to do the research for your book, why bother writing it? The implicit view behind this is that writing works of literature must be a holistic activity, where the artist must do all of it or none of it. It is a shame for a writer not to do something, not merely a moral failing. To find the traces of LLMs in a novel suggests a flourishing forestalled. The writer could have attained a more full writerly potential through efforts that have instead been replaced by a machine.  

This is why the books can seem far more tarnished by association with LLM use than by an author’s personal misbehaviour. The latter means we get fewer books, but the former means we get less humanity in the books. It is quite fair, given this, for a reader to turn away, and refuse to read.

Complicity

The last set of reasons why LLM use is unpleasant for a reader rest upon the assertion that LLM use in itself is immoral because of the associated data centre buildout and therefore should be avoided as far as possible. These arguments are not so convincing to me, but they are important to others, and so I am setting them down here.

AI is driving a significant global infrastructure buildout through new data centres and the power systems needed to support them. Mothballed power plants, including those fuelled by fossil fuels, are being brought online provide electricity. New power plants are being built too, many using particularly energy inefficient but rapidly deployable technologies, such as the reciprocating engines and aeroderivative turbines used at xAI’s Colossus plants in Tennessee. While it is true that some of the new capacity being built is renewable and there is a resurgence of interest in nuclear power plants, gas is the primary fuel source due to the operating profiles of data centres. Gas is a fossil fuel. If you care about avoiding unnecessary carbon emissions, you can easily make the case that writers should write the old fashioned way. (The moderately old-fashioned way that is – by themselves, with a laptop or pen and paper.)

A similar situation obtains for water use. We live in increasingly water-stressed environments and should not contribute to this with avoidable LLM use. But just as there are different ways of producing electricity, there are different ways of cooling large industrial enterprises. While closed-loop cooling essentially limits the water use of a data centre by reusing it repeatedly and air cooling uses big fans to achieve the same result, other cooling types can see more wastage and impact on end consumers. (More details in this article from The Atlantic.) If you do not want to contribute to poor use of water, you can argue similarly that writers should avoid LLMs, and you should avoid those who do not. But this water argument, though popular, is weaker than the carbon argument. Near-to-mid-term economic gas alternatives are basically unavailable for data centres, whereas this is not the case for wasting water.

Other problems with the data centres themselves involve their impact on local communities. Power quality decreases (think flickering lights), and then there are things like headaches and other health issues. As with oil and gas production and refining, it seems that data centres are creating sacrificial zones around them, where society supposedly accepts local harm in exchange for global benefits. As with mining and oil and gas, however, there is the problem of environmental justice. This is the issue that such “local harm” tends to be concentrated in areas where people are less able to defend their interests, being poor or of minority groups. If you care about this local impact, you would be warranted to be critical of a writer who used LLMs thoughtlessly.

Finally, there are also impacts on local and regional power prices. But while it might seem as though data centres are entirely negative in their impact here, matters are likely more complicated, so it is perhaps best to focus on the other factors above, especially when their negatives are clearer. (For details on power prices, see section 8 in the International Energy Agency’s “Key Questions on Energy and AI”)

The above are general problems with data centres, ones that we have to think about personally every day unless we consciously add an “-ai” to all of our Google searches and are lucky enough to have jobs where there is no pressure to use the tools. More specific to writing, however, is the matter of copyright abuse. There are ongoing lawsuits against Meta and others over their use of literary (and other written) creations for training purposes without the consent of the creators or their compensation. A writer using an LLM is showing a certain lack of solidarity to their own people, and a reader who wants to show solidarity to the creatives displaced and stolen from by LLMs should not read those who are blasé about the tools’ impact.

The problem with these arguments, except the last one, is that the focus is on our and the writer’s contribution to the bad thing, rather than on the work. This allows the counterpoint of scale to be made. Your average programmer’s agentic workflow is several orders of magnitude worse than a writer asking an LLM a question – for the climate, for water, and for local communities. It becomes too much a matter of purity, rather than possible harm mitigation. I myself find only the dignity, authenticity, and writerly solidarity points convincing here.

The Writer’s Perspective

The previous section was an attempt to explore the arguments about why writers should not use LLMs from the perspective of a reader. The voices against LLMs are significant, strident, and seem to be growing in importance. Yet the problem with all of these arguments is that the closest they get to the text is the thing as a whole. They do not touch the words themselves. Yet adopting the perspective of a writer, I see huge opportunities in LLMs, which would place me on a collision course with readers of my fiction, if I had any.  

One result is that until readers change their minds, those writers who use LLMs (and in a recent survey, it was already 33% of novelists in the UK who do) will take heed of Tokarczuk’s pillorying and simply keep their use a secret. If they do their job well, the readers will never find out. If a reader wants certainty of their book’s purity, the only way will be to return to the old ones. Faced with a cunning-enough writer – and good writers should be cunning – the search for tells will be epistemically hopeless.

But enough of that. What actually are these great opportunities? I see them as three – research, review, and (re)writing itself.

Research

Literature has, at best, a tenuous relation with the kind of truth found in history books. Yet while fiction is false, its truths are not. These truths, literature’s defenders claim, are higher. That’s why we read great works to begin with. You do not, or rather should not, read War and Peace or Life and Fate to learn about the facts of the Campaign of 1812 or the Soviet experience of the Second World War, though Tolstoy researched his epic extensively and Grossman was a journalist within the Red Army.

We read these and other books for a truth about human nature and human experience. Stalin or Napoleon may feature and strut about the stage, but their words are not their own. However historical or accurate a writer may try to be, a physical truth of what happened in the past is unreachable, merely a shadow cast upon the wall.

If we take a pessimistic or reasonably cavalier attitude towards truth in fiction, something that is done by most writers except for dedicated historical novelists, what obstacle to using AI for research could there be? What stone would my country house be made of in this location? What would a woman at a ball in 1843 typically wear? What on earth did people eat? These are questions where a specialist might have an answer, or they might have an opinion. A writer, determined, with unlimited or even limited time, should be able to find adequate answers to all of these. But for a “good enough” answer, the regurgitations of an LLM are fine. The fact is that regurgitations allow a writer to get on with the business of writing, not scene decoration. Later, should the writer feel a certain guilt before the truth, they can do their fact checking.

I am not saying that writers should cease the search for knowledge. I know, from experience, the joy of stumbling upon a thread or marginal detail in a history book that has inspired the mind to race to spin together a new story. Simply put, you cannot get inspired if you don’t keep your eyes open to the world’s offerings, whether in book or brick before you. The output of an LLM is limited, a thin stream of light upon a fact (or fabrication) that misses entirely that the real fascination lies just beyond the glowing rim in the half-darkness. But that same limitation nevertheless gives quick answers – not the telling detail but the good-enough background detail – which allows action, broadens the space for writing even as it narrows the space for inspiration. The overall effect is at least neutral, when used responsibly.

Again, to speak from experience, so many of us are crushed by the weight of jobs and responsibilities that writing is often only really possible about what lies in front of us. Relationships, workplaces, mental health. To research properly something else, or other lives, takes too much time to be practical in many cases. It is the domain of those with wealth, with working and well-earning or very patient spouses, or of a few professions like some of those in academia. LLMs allow imaginative but time-pressed contemporary authors to write something which retains a modicum of accuracy in its details beyond more sad girl fiction and professors having affairs with their students. Not everyone can be Kafka, after all.

Review

I noted in the first half of the post that almost any book you read today will have been through many hands before it reaches your own. At minimum, that’s agent and editor. It’s still an authentic document; it’s just not really entirely the writer’s authentic work.

Most books do not get that far, however, drowning under the weight of so many rejection letters no more helpful to the recipient than a rejection letter to a recent graduate for their hundredth job application. How on earth can a writer improve in such circumstances, when they hardly know where they are going wrong? Through feedback, among other things. An established writer may have writerly friends to review their work. In the 19th century, at some literary salon, they all may have read their work aloud by a crackling fire. Yet try finding a group for writing literature online. Not a group for fantasy epics or erotic vampire tales, but actual literature. (And when you find it, let me know). It’s not at all straightforward.

I dislike using this “democratisation” argument about AI because I am a snob and disagree with it temperamentally, but it is absolutely legitimate here. An LLM can give feedback, just as it lets you research in a way that might otherwise only be possible to the very privileged. With sufficient prompting it can be loaded up with whatever personality or perspective you need and can focus on exactly what you want attention focused on. It won’t be perfect, but no beta reader is. What matters is the accumulation of perspectives, and LLMs can provide this. A writer, looking to improve, can now access far more feedback than ever before. If they are willing to take it on board, their potential achievement should also be greater.

A counterargument might be that the writer who claims they have no readers should go outside, maybe call their mother. But most friends and family are poor readers. Even if they seriously read fiction to begin with, which in this day and age is by no means guaranteed, they will be prejudiced by their acquaintance with you. Criticism will be voiced softly, misdirected, take months to arrive, or be left unsaid. With an LLM you can force it to give proper feedback instead of mere flattery, though of course many users do not.

In sum, unless you are already very much established, this is a clear instance where the machine is far better than the human alternative.

Write and Rewrite

Beyond reviewing, a writer can use AI to rewrite their texts, with as much variety as Queneau’s Exercises in Style. Indeed, they can use LLMs to generate text itself, a little or a lot. Tuhin Chakrabarty, an academic, caused something of a scandal when he and his colleagues published a paper suggesting readers preferred the output of AI trained on expert writers to the writers themselves. I struggle to defend either writing or rewriting using LLMs, but the point is that one can do it, and a writer may reasonably think it’s a good idea while they work.

Each person, writer and reader, needs to think about what authenticity and the dignity of the work means to them and at what point they would admit that to have been unfairly compromised. For me as a writer, the words must be my own or the accepted suggestion of another. The research can be from an LLM, but not the written words themselves. Otherwise, I’d be ashamed to call myself a writer to begin with. AI could provide suggestions, but anything rewritten or generated too much. For me, the use of the rewritten (“make this dialogue more punchy”) can only be to force me to reconsider what I’ve written, never to replace it.

Yet just because I do not like it, that does not mean this should not be an option, or that it is a bad one. This blog is written, after all, by someone who believes in writing as a skill and method, that even great texts can be torn apart and analysed, and that training can bring writers closer to them. I cannot, therefore, deny that LLMs can do a lot of the work for us. Henry Gifford, in “On translating Tolstoy”, noted the Russian’s preference for adjectival constructions indicating action (“freshly-picked strawberries lay on the table”.) I’ve written (without originality) about Conrad’s adjectives and Tolstoy’s physicality, while others have noted the way the latter’s characters contradict themselves.

Trained on all this and more, an LLM should be able to do a reasonably good job, especially if we focus on the individual paragraph or sentence, and are ourselves clear about the output we desire. LLMs probably cannot make a bad reader into a good writer. But I think they certainly can make a good reader into a better writer.

The result of this LLM use and misuse will not be strictly original, but then what is? I don’t fundamentally believe writers create works devoid of the impact of others. Most of us are under the “Anxiety of Influence”, as Harold Bloom called it. Flaubert, who hated cliches, makes me feel like every sentence is a discovery. But the vast majority of writers, including very great ones, do not. There are enough metaphors and images and similes out there that seeking a truly original one is probably a poor use of time. Why not instead bash out a mediocre novel, then go through it, page by page, asking a friendly LLM to make it like your favourite writer – in my case Tolstoy – with the following or similar prompt: “rewrite this to include more adjectives associated with labour, and remove all similes and metaphors. Add additional focus upon body parts and separately identify instances where characters can organically contradict themselves.”

You can do it easily enough.

But should you?

Originality and Atrophy

Well, that’s really up to you, writer. Readers will hate you for it if they ever find out. Before you do, though, think back. Did you become a writer to write, because you loved language itself, or because you’re a little Napoleon wanting to control some small corner of the world? (I worry it’s the second for me). It seems awfully unfair and uncool that we can outsource a lot of work to the machine. At the same time, it also seems hard to argue that partial outsourcing is a not an effective way of building something that is impactful as a work of fiction. Increasingly so, given the pace of advancements in AI over the past few years. It’s a real dilemma.

Tokarczuk, possibly, was asking AI for ideas. Which is a great way of forgetting how to have them for yourself, but it’s probably not a bad way of getting a few of them to begin with. Again, the writer has to decide how much to give up for this, not the reader.

I am a person who thinks it’s important to take care of myself, and the last thing I want is for my brain to atrophy, as it seems is happening to many that rely overmuch on AI, whether friends, family, or colleagues. Yet I still use LLMs during the course of my day job, when I have to and sometimes when I do not. AI use is only one thing, alongside my sugar and vitamin intake, the amount of sleep I get, the amount of sport I do, the number of interesting conversations I have, and how much time I spend on my phone, which has an impact upon my becoming the person I want to be. A thing to be monitored, analysed, and motivate remedial actions as necessary.

But these are decisions for me as a writer and human to make, based on the outputs I want from my limited time on earth, and me alone.

Conclusion

I’ve tried to approach the AI topic here from two angles – that of the reader, and that of the writer. Readers want to feel that they are reading a writer, not a machine’s output. They value authenticity and the sense that they are reading something that has had thought and care put into it. The writer who is blasé about LLM usage can, fairly I think, be criticised for not caring enough about their calling. And if they do not care about their books enough to write them themselves, why should a reader care enough to read them?

For the writer, however, AI offers significant benefits, as long as they are willing to use it sparingly and carefully. It can help with reviewing, help with research, and possibly even help with rewriting. At the same time, the writer needs to take care not to become too reliant on it, lest they lose their ability to be inspired or think. We come back to the classic question about cyborgs and transhumanism. How far can we change before we give up who we are? I think that AI is suddenly forcing writers to think about this question with real urgency, and the answers are far from clear.

Still, I want to end by going back to the Cambridge study I linked, which indicated that many writers feel significant anxiety about their livelihoods in an age of LLMs, whether they use it or not. I am reasonably confident that we will see the quality of literature becoming better with the assistance of LLMs. But literature is written by people and for people, and for writers and readers as a whole, the technological ascendency of LLMs is far from benign. We are sinking into a sea of slop and gradually losing our ability to value what is truly good. Perhaps, terrifyingly, a hundred years from now, a few of us will look back and find that the most brilliant tool for writing was created, but that that very same tool destroyed the readers and the writers needed to make proper use of it.

Anyway, those are my first thoughts. As this is a highly emotive topic, and if you’ve read this far you’ve hopefully been prompted to have some thoughts of your own, so what do you think about all this?

Vladimir Nabokov – Pale Fire

Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire is an extraordinary work of fiction and at points probably the most fun I’ve had reading in a long while. It is also a great challenge to your blogger qua blogger. Should you take a (spoiling) glance at Wikipedia you would see that some of the major critical questions surrounding the work concern whether half of the cast of characters even exist within its world, or whether they are instead the ravings of the probable madman who is our narrator. When I write about literature I try to grasp onto what is solid – I focus, as this blog’s name suggests, upon stories. Here, therefore, I have my work cut out for me with all this confusion. Or I would, if the work did not at the same time contain such a holistic richness, where language, form, structure, and apparent plot, work together to deliver ideas and thoughts with the maximum impact, that there remains plenty to say.

With Pale Fire the challenge of writing about it comes not only from an atmosphere of uncertainty, but also from the very structure of the work. I write long-ish blog posts, but I try to spare readers whole monographs. Yet Pale Fire contains multitudes. It is not only a poem of 999 lines in rhyming couplets by a murdered author. It is also accompanied by foreword and commentary and index by another man, one who claims to be friends with the author, and whose commentary, besides being some five times the length of the author’s work, also seems to be as much an adventure story as attempt at close analysis. It is a confession, a tale of daring escape, and an academic satire, even before we try to think about its relation to the poem itself.

Even working out how to read the book is a choice and challenge. In the “Foreword”, Charles Kinbote, our guide and colleague of the deceased poet John Shade at an American university, describes how we are best to read Pale Fire. First, he tells us, we read his commentary, and only then do we read the poem with the notes, before we finally read the notes a third time on their own again. I ignored this bizarre suggestion and read the poem first, then put the book down for a month, then read the poem again, before reading the commentary in isolation afterwards. Such an approach I think makes sense, because in essence Pale Fire is two stories in contention – the poem and Shade’s narration fight the tale and narration of Kinbote in his critical apparatus, where Kinbote is actively trying to control our understanding of the former.

Here I’ll begin with the poem, then the commentary, and try to suggest how they fit together.

Poem

Pale Fire is a poem of 999 lines, broken into a mirrored four-canto structure (166-334-334-165) with the last line remaining unwritten at the time of John Shade’s murder. It is rhymed throughout in heroic couplets (AABB etc, iambic pentameter), which provides an ironic contrast with the relative mundanity of its autobiographical contents. (Here I should note that I am assuming Shade is telling the truth, that his narrator is himself, rather than some distanced figure, which is not really something one is normally supposed to do with poems these days). John Shade describes topics like his early life, his family and his views on life after death. At its centre lie his love for his wife and his grief over his daughter’s death by suicide.

Probably the most sensible critical approach to the book as a whole is to see it as showing the interplay of reflection and masking, self and other. Hence the two sides of the work, Shade and Kinbote, the mirrored structure of the poem, and plenty besides. In the poem, Shade shows more ambivalence to the topic of reflection and deception than his editor. “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane”, the poem’s first couplet, describes the death of a bird from a false assumption regarding transparency. In trying to recover the memory of his parents, who died young, Shade can only create shadowy images that have no substance – many reflections, but not the real thing. Shade’s poem shows him holding on to a sense of the real which poetic reality disappoints, at least to begin with.

Disappointment and pessimism come across elsewhere in the poem too. Madness stalks Shade, even before we get into the “outside” world of Kinbote, such as through the figure of his Aunt Maud, who suffers from dementia and can speak, but never find the right words. The greatest cause for sadness, however, is his daughter Hazel, whose ugliness and ungainliness seem to curse her to her early doom (“no lips would share the lipstick of her smoke”), and who on the night of her death is betrayed cruelly by a date. But it is here, unlike with his parents, Shade succeeds in recreating his daughter’s life. Poetry helps him to build a parallel image to his experience of her final evening as he watches television and waits for her to come home, one where he imagines her final moments. And this allows the positive couplet in Canto 4, where “I’m reasonably sure that we survive / and that my darling somewhere is alive”.

While the poem is a place of unsatisfactory reflections, that is far from the whole story, as his eventual hope for Hazel shows. Its most moving passages are when the poet does strike out in love and successfully grasps on to his object:

And I'll turn down eternity unless
The melancholy and the tenderness
Of mortal life; the passion and the pain;
The claret taillight of that dwindling plane
Off Hesperus; your gesture of dismay
On running out of cigarettes; the way
You smile at dogs; the trail of silver slime
Snails leave on flagstones; this good ink, this rhyme,
This index card, this slender rubber band
Which always forms, when dropped, an ampersand,
Are found in Heaven by the newly dead
Stored in its strongholds through the years. 

This might, to an expert, be bad poetry. I find it moving. It’s a dance in time and reference between mundanity and the heavenly. And whereas pessimism might have lines supporting it elsewhere, here we have anything but that. It is not resignation in the face of the world – note the active verb “I’ll turn down”, and words like “passion” and “pain” which speak of emotions not blunted by the hardships of life. While Nabokov’s work is filled with irony – Shade expresses hope about waking up on the 22nd July as normal but in real life he is shot and never sees the day) – the poem, taken as Shade’s testimony, is free of this. Instead, it is connection, which indeed is the other value of the couplet structure – the iron bond of rhyme that links each line to line. Couplets might be humorous in essence, but sometimes we need them.

If I were to try to sum up the poem, then, which is difficult because as with all poetry it’s unfairly dense and could handle a much deeper analysis than what I’ve provided, I would say this: in a world of distorting and uncertain reflections and pain, through focused love towards those nearest him – his wife and daughter – Shade manages to create a work that ends with hope.

Solus Rex

The novel Pale Fire takes its name from the poem, Pale Fire, but it could easily have had another title – Solus Rex. This is the title that our commentator, Charles Kinbote, admits he would have given it. Kinbote is a larger-than-life figure, a madman in the Nabokovian mould. He is many things, and possibly none of them – a professor, an exiled king, a menace to his students and his colleagues, and an inveterate inventor of fictions. He claims to be protecting Shade’s legacy by publishing his poem, but then admits that Shade’s wife Sybil refuses to answer his letters, and he speaks of himself as of a man in flight from dangerous pursuers – he refuses to go to a library to check anything and is writing his notes in a remote log cabin.

His commentary is as multiple as he is. The one thing it is not is good academic criticism. Kinbote states the obvious and calls it analysis with the same brazenness as a certain blogger; at other times he simply refuses to do his job altogether – “my readers must do their own research” he declares. His index cheerily damns his colleagues by mentioning them in their connection with Shade and then noting “Not in the index” to show they aren’t worth any further consideration. In places his interpretations are so bizarrely off the mark that I found myself writing things like “no, I don’t think so”, in the margins. Towards the end of the book, faced with a momentary upsurge of academic integrity, he admits that a fair few of Shade’s “discarded drafts” were lines he simply made up. It would be a shock, except that his attempts don’t even manage to mimic the iambic pentameter correctly. No great poet, this editor.

All this, however, is secondary to the real part of the commentary – Kinbote’s description of his own life as exiled king of the north-European country of Zembla. More than academic score-setting, this is the reason for his notes’ existence. Kinbote believed that, over the course of his short “friendship” with Shade, he had convinced him to write this story as his poem. Shocked to discover that “Pale Fire” has nothing to do with this, Kinbote first attempts analytical pirouettes to find connections, then abandons the attempt, leaving the commentary an almost-standalone narrative of the life of Charles “the Beloved” of Zembla, from boyhood sexual escapades to the revolution that forces him to undertake a daring escape into exile. How much of any of this is true is the big academic question, indeed whether Zembla exists within the story to begin with.

Throughout, there are clues towards deeper truths, hints scattered among the pages. Kinbote is a lover of masks and subterfuge, unlike Shade – indeed, “King Charles” fled Zembla with the help of a disguise. Whereas in the poem, Shade tries to define the truths of his life among the many reflections and distortions of it, Kinbote’s section almost seems an attempt at the opposite – a befuddling of the truth which, somehow, still pokes out here and there. The reason why this works is that Kinbote has a certain amount of conscience, as mentioned above. He would prefer to omit than to lie outright, and sometimes he fails to omit things. Hence the occasional allusions to sexual misbehaviour, such as “his penetrating into the bedroom where his friend sat and shaved in the tub”, which is an index entry under his own name. Hence also the hints that his friendship with the Shades is not exactly all he claims it is. For example, regarding dinner parties he notes that “of the dozen or so invitations that I extended, the Shades accepted just three”. Then there is his reported speech to Sybil on one occasion, which begins as a benign monologue, only to be increasingly sullied with phrases like “do not interrupt me”, or “let me speak”, all within one long run-on sentence, as if he hopes we will not notice.

The two together

“Pale Fire”, the poem, has been published separately. The commentary, to a certain extent, could be too. What then, is the purpose of their cohabitation in one book, beyond merely providing the scaffolding for some academic satire? The treatment of grief within the work is what led me onto my own answer. Shade and his wife grieve the loss of their daughter. Those other poems of Shade’s which Kinbote quotes in the commentary all mourn for her too, directly or less so. His long poem itself is, at its heart, a working out of that grief, a transition from pessimism to hope for the future.

Kinbote’s relation to grief is entirely different. The high point of Shade’s grief within the poem he criticises as stylistically weak (“too laboured and too long”), then he steals the manuscript, convincing a weeping Sybil Shade on the day of her husband’s death that he ought to be the one to edit and publish his last poem.

Stepping back, then, we have two kinds of interaction. Kinbote scorns reality and is obsessive, sexually so even, about his favourite poet. The repeated suggestion regarding his past loves is that he has used and discarded them and that at no point has consent been anywhere in his thoughts. His relation to his colleagues is inimical – he seeks to crush or manipulate them, as he ultimately seeks to do to Shade himself by forcing him to write a poem about his (probably invented) past as a king. For Kinbote, simply, people don’t really exist.

Shade comes across as someone who is the opposite. His love for his wife and daughter are fundamentally unself-centred. His relationship with Kinbote, what we can read of it anyway, seems to be further evidence of a kindness and tolerance that Kinbote lacks. At one point Kinbote lets himself in to the Shades’ abode through a door left ajar, causing Shade to utter “an unprintable oath”. Shade had (apparently) mistakenly thought Kinbote was a travelling salesman. But still the Shades invite him to sit down and have a cup of tea. The walks the two men take, likewise, seem more like the poet is humouring the annoying (and lonely) foreigner Kinbote, than truly forming the deep friendship with him which Kinbote claims for himself.

In other words, the book is contrast of isolation versus connecting – the binding couplets placed against the commentary which is largely disconnected from the commented. This is perhaps the work’s most moral message, one that brings together all of its elements – the different forms, the trickery and disguises, the reflection. One life succeeds, another fails – it’s simply the case that the wrong man died. Nabokov liked his irony, of course. I have also failed to give any indication of how funny this book is. There’s not just the fun of puzzling it all out, but actual belly-laugh humour here. I think that’s why Pale Fire is so impressive. While I did find the Zembla story tedious at times, the novel as a whole is peerlessly readable. It’s funny, it’s allusive, it’s thoughtful, it’s moral. It’s basically impossible to read without finding at least one moment you can celebrate.

In short, it’s one of those books that is truly inspirational. It is quite simply a reminder of the heights that truly the best literary works can reach.  

Body and Soul – David Szalay’s Flesh 

Flesh, the Booker-prize-winning novel by the British-Hungarian author David Szalay, is many things. So is its central figure, the Hungarian István, whose rags-to-riches-and-back tale covers more ground than many of us can expect to experience in our own lives, from soldiery in Iraq to bouncing at nightclubs in London and finally hobnobbing with politicians over billion-pound property developments. The mere accumulation of believably rendered scenes, however, is not what makes this interesting as fiction. Instead, it is Flesh’s rendering itself that is exciting. Through a bare, pared-down style, which is especially visible in its shockingly direct dialogue, the novel is a brilliant example of saying without stating and showing without quite telling.

 The work’s title sets out its thematic scope right from the get-go. István is a man who appears to be someone wholly devoid of interiority or reflection – all body, no mind. He spends much of the book in a kind of passive role – things happen to him. Those things, often as not, involve sex. Whether that’s his sexual initiation at the hands of an older woman or the affair with his boss’s wife that sets off his rise to the upper reaches of British polite society, interlocking bodies are almost always involved. Despite his taciturnity and passivity, István succeeds in life. At least to a point. This result raises questions about whether such things as interiority and reflection are really necessary and has allowed some commentators on the novel to turn it into a kind of guide to practical stoicism.  

Such a view is wrongheaded. If the novel shows that a man can reach the top of the world without interiority or reflection, that fact reflects poorly upon that world. So much is possible, certainly, except what truly matters – mainly, in this case, love. The view also downplays those little, quietly articulated, developments within the novel, that show István changing even as the world does not. The growth of his imagination and empathy, for example, and his attempts to move from passivity into a certain kind of activity. That none of this is ultimately rewarded says nothing against him. Instead, after so much time spent meditating on flesh, we are left wondering how the world and people might change if we wanted to value mind also.  

Plot  

István comes from relative anonymity in small-town Hungary and ends up, briefly, at the top of British polite society. During his rise, two things stand out: the role of chance, and that of his own relative passivity. An older woman begins his introduction to sex as a teenager, less with his consent, than with his compliance. When the affair is discovered, István and the woman’s husband fight, with the young man accidentally killing the older in a brawl. After his release from a young offender’s institute, István loafs. An attempt at intimacy with his uncle’s stepdaughter leads to him being rebuffed, but it plants the idea of joining the army in him. After a tour in Iraq and therapy for PTSD, he becomes a bouncer in the UK, where one night he comes across a man being attacked by a mugger. István doesn’t rescue him so much as make it impossible for the mugging to continue by crying out. Nevertheless, it’s enough.  

The man saved, to István’s good fortune, runs a bodyguard service. After training, István receives as his clients a very wealthy Scandinavian couple, the Nymans, who divide their time between London and the countryside. The much-younger wife, Helen, begins an affair with István, which comes into the open after her husband’s death from cancer. For a few years, they enjoy their life openly. But her son from her marriage, Thomas, is destined to inherit everything from his father upon reaching the age of twenty-five. Thus István’s stint at the top becomes time-limited. The novel sketches out the shape of its arc early enough, even if the exact shape, the clicking together of the pieces of the decline, retains its capacity to surprise.  

Chance and Passivity 

The role of chance is so important within the novel because of István’s essential passivity, or at best reactivity. The older woman begins their affair by unexpectedly asking if she can kiss him. As for the heroism that fends off the mugger late at night, it’s described like this:  

“Help,” a voice says.  

The voice sounds strangely normal, like someone just neutrally saying the word. 

Maybe it’s for that reason that he does nothing for a second or two. 

Then he starts to move towards it, past the weakly lit display windows of the bookshop. 

“Hey!” he shouts. 

Which seems to be enough. 

At key moments like these, István’s actions have been prompted by external stimuli, and always with delays, as if he is a simple, slow, organism. His PTSD centres upon his failure to rescue a friend from a burning military vehicle in time – for too long, he simply watched the flames in shock, he thinks. Even his language is reactive: “Sure, thanks.” “Okay.” I remember making a mental note when I first saw a sentence of dialogue from István which required a second line in the book – it was so unexpected.  

Yet in spite of this essential reactivity, István’s ascent is meteoric. As a bouncer, then later as a bodyguard, he is in roles where his passivity and silence become virtues. Even with the women who fall for him, such as Helen Nyman, it seems that his reticence is taken by them as a sign that he can be trusted for a clandestine affair. Later, once he moves into British polite society, his lack of personality means that he can easily “fit in.” His interests, such as they eventually are, appear to be expensive cars and watches. He does not rock the boat. He barely makes it bob, stepping in.  

The World Attained 

By all of this I read Flesh as having a clear moral implication. If so much of our world is achievable without much thinking or conscious action, what does that say about the value of our world?  

István gets to his position without friends of any sort, without any extended dialogue. He is addicted to cigarettes, then later adds alcoholism, while Helen’s son Thomas eventually has develops a heroin addiction. The only changes for István between rags and riches is the quantity and brand of what he’s smoking. At one point, after Iraq, in one of the novel’s most memorable moments, we learn about the development of his habit: 

When he went to Iraq he smoked ten to twenty cigarettes a day. 

Now it’s forty. 

There is something gleeful about the narration here, a kind of revelling in self-destruction. It’s shocking to me because normally in our stories we expect our characters to be moderately rational, to want what’s best for them, to grow in positive directions. Instead, here, Szalay has István only get worse. And we could not expect for things to be otherwise, or hope for that, because István lacks the kind of interiority that might make such a thing possible. Yet in spite of that he still “grows” socially and financially, time and again. 

The sex of the novel ranges from exploitative to hateful, and only rarely does it seem loving or a meeting of two minds and bodies in mutual recognition and respect. But that it happens over and over, especially within the contexts of infidelity, also becomes an argument of sorts. The world, as it comes to István at least, is full of unhappy people, trapped in unhappy situations. He can give them sex, but it is hard to say if he can achieve anything more. The material success of the Nymans has clearly not saved them, in any serious way, from the unhappiness that seems to afflict most of the characters of Flesh. The novel’s willingness to indicate a change in material conditions, especially through brand names for cars, watches, and cigarettes, is contrasted with this lack of any kind of change to the people consuming them – still sad, whether they know it or not.  

We can also think about the dialogue again in connection with this world-critical angle. Taking a page at random, here’s a snatch of dialogue between Helen Nyman and her sister-in-law Mathilde, while Helen’s husband is in the hospital for cancer treatment: 

“And how are you?” Mathilde asks her. “Are you okay?” 

“Yes I’m okay.” 

“You need to look after yourself.” 

“I know.” 

“You mustn’t let yourself go.” 

“I know,” Helen says. 

This dialogue is above all really strange. It is the right words, perhaps even the real words, but on the page it’s startling, as is all of the dialogue of Flesh. There is a distinct unliterariness to it – instead of flowing, the end of each line is like a cliff edge we must carefully lower ourselves down on to reach the beginning of the next. That awkwardness is the point, of course. Here are two people not really communicating to one another. They are, like the many-jobbed István, playing roles. They are also, deliberately, consciously, not connecting. The clipped speech makes it seem that they are all acutely, painfully conscious of the possibility of being hurt and choosing to give the slightest possible opening. Even if István’s own speech lacks this sense of self-protection, it certainly contains its sibling – the self-retention. “Okay” is one of the hardest replies to find an answer for, after all.  

This dialogue relates the other topics, the sex and the material aspects of the world, by being another reminder of this world’s shallowness. Certainly these people could say more. They have, as the novel eventually reveals, more inside them. But the world as it comes to them, by and large, does not bring these things out. A bad world makes for bad dialogue, just as it makes for bad sex. Everyone here is trapped, without even the words to escape their cages.  

The World Missing

f Flesh were merely a parabola of a man’s life, without growth or change, with merely an implied judgement on the world, it would probably still be reasonably good. However, what elevates the novel is the way that it also offers an answer, or at least a hint, of what is missing, and what it looks like. These missing things are threefold – love, imagination, and goodness.  

Love is the first. Flesh is a book that is all about sex, but love is quite clearly absent, most of the time. This is further emphasised by the way that the majority of István’s sexual encounters, indeed his sexual relationships, are infidelities by the second person against their husbands. But from the beginning, with his relationship with the older woman, István is at least aware of love and its importance. He tells her he loves her and she tells him he does not know what that means. He protests that he does, but there is no evidence that this is the case. This show of emotion disturbs the woman and precipitates the end of their affair shortly thereafter. 

Love does come back onto the page until István’s relationship with Helen, half way through the book. This time it is she who confesses her love to him. He does not know how to react, and she even forbids him a response. But she brings the idea of love back into the book, so that when István has a chance to show his affection, and what she means to him, following an accident, he does it. Even if that showing is still just a restrained, pained, retreat into alcoholism, it is a sign of real emotion, however poorly managed. If the novel begins with a statement without emotion, here there is emotion without its statement. 

Imagination is important in the novel as something missing from the main world of the work. In contrast to the materiality of things – the brands, and so on, which suggest a kind of objectifying vision on the part of the characters – imagination, in the form of empathy, provides a counterpoint: a vision of a better way of thinking about other people. After István’s time in Iraq, carrying the weight of his friend’s death in combat, he keeps it to himself except when encouraged to share by therapy. He believes others could not understand. He himself cannot understand art, that legendary transferal medium for emotions, as his trip with Helen to a museum shows. And when the affair between her and him is discovered by Thomas, his response to her suggestion that he might tell his father is simply to say “I can’t imagine it.” At first glance István wholly lacks imagination, the ability to place himself in others’ shoes.  

Again, however, the matter is only a question of seeming. In the background there is therapy, and hopefully independent personal growth. By the time István has a son of his own and has to confront the realities of the boy’s growing sexual maturity, he is able to reflect, looking back into himself at that age, to compare and contrast. It has taken a book, but this is still small progress. We can also see this progress formally. Not merely in the shockingly long paragraph (average length for any other book) of reflection after István discovers a well-thumbed porn mag, but more concretely in the way that the book begins by sticking closely to István, but then expands its reach to give glimpses into the lives of other characters too, such as Helen and Thomas. I would say this is a controversial decision on Szalay’s part in terms of focus, but insofar as it fits into a framework of the novel showing a growing awareness of other people, it makes sense. 

Finally, the last thing obviously missing from the main world of the work is goodness, or positive action. Towards the book’s end, István is faced with that strangest of things to a man whose rise has been given mainly by chance – a choice. It is quite a plain one, between the full and permanent attainment of the earthly riches he has enjoyed for much of the book at the cost of a bad action, or rather continued inaction, versus a moral and “active” action which puts that attainment at risk. In this situation, István makes the latter decision. In terms of these two worlds, it means that he loses this great moneyed world and gains a smaller world, one of reflection and self-worth. He chooses, we might say, soul over mere flesh at last. 

Conclusion  

What is Flesh, in the end? A lot of things. I read it as showing our world as it is – atomised (István has no friends), materially obsessed, helpless – and showing another world, shining through the mist. Ultimately it is no mere dismissal of life. Its title might seem to set off a negative view of the body, but “Flesh” is not body. Rather, it is something less. It is only in combination with mind, and reflection, and thought, that flesh can be elevated into harmony, can become truly “body”.  

What is interesting here is the tentativeness of the work’s conclusions on this front, which has allowed some critics to see it as specifically about masculinity. (Thomas calls István an example of “primitive masculinity”, which supports this). István’s progress, his discoveries, are limited: from nearly no self-consciousness or emotional expression to just a little. If we come to the book to learn, to grow ourselves, we probably could not – we are probably already far more emotionally mature than our hero. But all growth is valuable, is a story, and for the relative rarity of this kind of story, Flesh becomes all the more worth reading.