Jonathan Buckley’s twelfth novel was the joint winner of the 2022 Novel Prize (along with Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and then It’s Over, in case you were wondering), but I didn’t know that when I picked it up. I’d just been intrigued by the premise. More novella than novel, it’s the transcription of an interview, broken into five segments that are themselves repeatedly interrupted (‘indistinct’ or ‘pause’ is all we get by way of stage directions), creating a disembodied monolog. The interview revolves around a super-rich businessman, Curtis, who has gone missing in winter and is presumed dead – though by accident or design is unknown. The speaker is the gardener from his magnificent Scottish estate, a loquacious woman, who is being interviewed about his life for all she can reveal. The intended project for this information is a film of Curtis’s life, but the interviewer never speaks and we learn nothing about them. Not a conventional narrative, then, but nevertheless an immediately recognisable and understandable format. We’ve all seen talking heads on television documentaries, though given the lack of visuals, the better analogy might be the podcast. It’s easy to read, readily engaging, a clever way of asking questions about storytelling and also – for me at least – extremely difficult to evaluate as a literary experience.
The text is a long ticker-tape of digressive chat, as you might expect. There’s a subtle order at work, though, as our gardener takes us through the particulars and the cast of her boss’s life – the happy marriage to Lily that gave him stability and boosted his fashion business; his two sons, Carl and Conrad, one loyal and one disaffected; his difficult step-daughter, Katia; his wife’s early death and the (speculated) girlfriends who followed her; the woman, Lara, who wanted to write a book about him; and more recently, a life-changing accident that has clearly had a major impact on his mental and physical health, though the long term effects are unclear. The reader is bombarded with information of an uncertain kind, detailed, anecdotal, hovering undecidably between significant and irrelevant, for we just can’t be sure what matters here. The stories, anecdotes and rumours we are told create a patchwork life, one whose interpretations are delivered from a number of perspectives, as the gardener reports the reactions and speculations of other members of the staff, too. The result is the textual remains of a life, a jumble of speech acts derived from multiple sources and then knitted together through one unreliable subjectivity. In other words, a woven web of gossip.
Let’s just pause for a moment and think about gossip and its formal properties, about what makes it an intriguingly primal kind of storytelling. In an article by Amie Souza Reilly on Wuthering Heights, and its uncertain place in the canon, I found this description, which is perfect for the way gossip works in Tell:
Gossip is a framing device, used to let readers see into the lives of characters from a point of view that is both intimate and distant. Gossip is powerful because it gives shape to narrative in a voice that does not come from an actor, but the spectator. And in many novels, the spectator is of a lower social standing. However, the person doing the gossiping possesses a complicated type of influence. Though the gossipers come from lower social and economic classes, their ability to move so closely to those who have privilege makes them privy to secret information. The gossip they share wields immense power, and that is why those with the most authority want to squash it.
Gossip usually constitutes a gleeful deep dive into scandal, immorality, and the emotional entanglements that the gossiped about would rather keep quiet. It’s often a way to peel back the socially composed carapace of a life and delve around in the heterogenous naughty bits that lie beneath. Hence servants make excellent gossips, able to dish the dirt on their supposedly more dignified, well-behaved ‘superiors’. The point of gossip is that it brings every one down to the lowest common denominator of behaviour; it’s a great leveller. It can also be a despised kind of speech, something whose validity and value we doubt. It can be full of agenda, intentionally manipulative, cruel and even malicious. And on the other hand, given its long-term association with idle women, it can be subject to misogynistic dismissal.
Buckley’s interest in gossip isn’t about ritzy scandal, and his representation of it is far from trivial and pointless. In fact he’s taking it very seriously, as one of the fundamental building blocks of narrative knowledge. Whilst the content of the gardener’s gossip is intended to offer us all we might know about Curtis’s mysterious disappearance, the most interesting parts of the novel concern the seemingly inadvertent meta remarks his interviewee makes about the anecdotes she’s telling. (I seem to think of this gardener as female though I can’t recall if this is stated anywhere.) For instance, considering the accuracy and relevance of the material she’s recounting, she says: ‘You think because you’re you, you’ve got access that other people don’t because they’re on the outside and you’re on the inside. But on the inside it can be darker than outside.’ And on another occasion: ‘Where do any of us get the things we say? When you think about it. It’s always recycled. You think something because somebody else has already thought it and said it.’ And looking back over her meandering disquisition, she comments about the strange juxtaposition of people and images in our thoughts, the way this at times defies and yet invites associations. At points like these, the narrative transcends its fragmentary basis and has something more profound to say about the intertextuality in which we all swim.
But there are also serious problems with this book. Gossip is usually interesting to us because we have some form of emotional investment in the person the gossip concerns – we love or hate or are deeply curious. Or else we have a vested interest in the information, hoping it will reduce this person’s power over us, or give us leverage we might otherwise be lacking. It makes perfect sense that the gardener sits at the center of a web of gossip around Curtis because he’s her boss – the quality of her life is dependent to some extent on the state of his. But what interest do we, the readers, have in Curtis? We never get to meet him in an unmediated way. His successes and failures are of no importance to us, or indeed to the direction of the story we are reading. And yes, supposedly there is his disappearance to consider, and the question of whether it was murder, suicide or accident. But the narrative itself is not particularly interested in this problem. Building up a picture of Curtis’s network of family and friends is an end in itself. What we are told brings us no closer to a solution, and the narrative ends entirely unresolved, on an anecdote that the gardener likes simply because it shows a gentler side to Curtis’s character.
What is the purpose of this tale, exactly? What are we as readers supposed to do, other than be an audience to what we are told? Without the dimension of showing, we have no way of verifying information, or using it to deduce and interpret. We don’t feel we ‘know’ Curtis by the end, and frankly, it doesn’t even seem to matter. Nor do we learn anything much about the gardener that might make us care about her. The gardener could be an unreliable narrator – probably is, given chain of people the information has passed through. But you can only identify an unreliable narrator because the narrative shows you divergence between what they say and what happens, and generally the unreliability then matters to one of the character arcs. In Tell, there appears to be no coherent deeper intent to the actual story. Gossip, untethered from intent and purpose, is just dull, a bunch of stuff about people you don’t know, and the novella risks sinking into futility.
I’ve read a number of glowing reviews of this book, calling it subtle and compulsive and claiming it’s a thriller. For heaven’s sake don’t approach it expecting it to be the latter. It’s easy to read, so long as you can keep the names of the big cast straight. It has some interesting things to say about storytelling. And if you like putting the work in, it has some intriguing intellectual literary implications. But… is it more than that? I hesitate over this question, and wonder whether I’ve just lost my reviewing edge, or blindsided some of the subtleties at work. Maybe there are dots whose interconnecting lines I’ve failed to join? So don’t let me put you off if you feel like trying it. Just promise me you’ll come back and tell me what I’ve missed.