Book review: Push Process, by Jonathan Walker

For those who like this sort of thing, Jonathan Walker’s experimental novel about a postgrad student in Venice who falls in love with photography is very much the sort of thing they will like, writes Roger Cox

When a reviewer is acquainted with an author whose work they are reviewing it’s customary to come clean early on, so that readers may consider the rest of the review with that in mind. I have never met Jonathan Walker, and – as far as I know – I’m not personally connected to him in any way. However, before beginning this review of his experimental novel Push Process – set in Venice in the early Noughties, focusing on a group of postgraduate students, and concerned with both the mechanics and the philosophy of photography – I still feel I should declare an interest, insofar as I am very much his target audience.

For a start, I have long been a fan of works of literature such as, say, Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts, which experiment not just with the way a novel can be written, but also with its physical format. In Push Process, Walker not only weaves atmospheric and often somewhat enigmatic black and white photos of Venice throughout the text of his story about a history postgrad who falls in love with photography, he also includes a selection of some 48 images at the end, all his own. In doing so, he immediately raises questions about what kind of book this is: an illustrated novel? A photography book with a narrative attached? Or something half-way between a novel and a graphic novel, albeit one in which the images only refer tangentially to the text?

Furthermore, Walker’s hero, Richard, spends much of the book wrestling with some of the knotty philosophical questions the practice of photography throws up: the vagaries of the ever-blurry line between appearance and reality and, of course, the great conundrum of how to achieve originality and authenticity (particularly in a place like Venice, where nearly everyone’s a tourist and every vista has been photographed a thousand times before). I’ve long been fascinated by these questions, in particular as addressed in the writings of Teju Cole, whose 2017 book Blind Spot I reviewed in these pages. (And, as the author Ali Millar observes in her blurb on the back of the book, “Push Process is infused with shades of Teju Cole’s Blind Spot”.)

Detail from San Zaccaria vaporetto stop, by Jonathan Walker - one of more than 50 black and white images in Push Process

Finally, by pure chance, I started reading Push Process the day after returning from a trip to Venice. So, still misty-eyed for La Serenissima, with an interest in the philosophy of photography and in books that play with ideas of what books can be... you could reasonably argue that I might struggle to write an objective review. Then again, every reviewer will have their biases – at least now mine are all in plain sight.

For all that it bends and stretches the boundaries of literary genres, Push Process describes itself as a novel, so it seems fair to assess it as such. Plot-wise, there's not much to unravel. Richard arrives in Venice expecting to spend most of his time in the city's archives doing research for his history PhD. However, a chance meeting with two art students, Lars, a sculptor and Merlo, a photographer, sets him on a different path. Before long, he has all-but abandoned his formal studies, doing just enough to keep his funding coming in, and devoted himself instead to capturing the magic of Venice on film, under the instruction of Merlo.

So, a little light on plot, perhaps, but as Scott put it, what is the point of the plot except “to bring in fine things”? And on this admittedly sparse narrative framework Walker hangs all kinds of treats: not just the never-less-than-fascinating discussions about photography and art, but also a genuine sense of being transported – by both words and images – to an atmospheric world of fully-realised characters for whom these questions are not merely of academic interest, but the stuff of life itself.Push Process, by Jonathan Walker, Ortak Press, £14.99