Strange Talk by Lynda Clark review: 'at least 100 pages too long'

Lynda Clark | Contributed

The great ghost story writer MR James has a work called “The Malice of Inanimate Objects”, of which I am inordinately fond. It has a simple concept: the narrator spins a yarn about someone who became convinced that accidents were actually evidence of malign, inhuman intelligence. Tripping on a hose or cutting oneself shaving were not unfortunate slips but a conspiracy of malevolent sentience in objects. I thought about that story a lot while reading Lynda Clark’s Strange Talk since there is superficial similarity. The short story and the novel could not, however, be more different. James always had the capacity, as Joe the Fat Boy in The Pickwick Papers threatens, to “make your flesh creep”. Clark somehow wants something more like slightly elegiac rom-com than horror.

Our central character is Amie Azoic, a famous-ish computer game designer, who lives in her grandparents’ manse and is somewhat, somehow besieged by her own appliances. She can, essentially, hear the toaster’s innuendos, the smoke alarm’s hysteria, the insufferable new Puritan refrigerator, the greedy pedal bin and her computers, VCRs, and other outdated tech she is reluctant to relinquish.

Before we move on to plot, it’s worth noting some details. Amie’s name is a quite clear wink. Amie is French for friend, Azoic is a Greek coinage for lifeless. Her sister – and slight nemesis, married to a rock-star and whose son becomes a “motivating incident” when he turns up unexpectedly expecting a room – is called “Cara”, that is, “beloved”. So the sibling rivalry is an undercurrent; the new resident, as in an Ali Smith novel, is the interruption’s interruption (although I still wonder how much of it derives from a film like Pasolini’s Teorema). Is Auntie Amie frigid? Bisexual? Lonely enough to conjure talking accoutrements, much like a depressive rich Goth version of Belle in the Disney film Beauty and the Beast? In many ways, it really doesn’t matter a whit.

The lineaments are clear. Amie is used to creating controlled environments. When her nephew arrives, disarray is linked to possible redemption. Jay is gay, and working on electronics (and, it transpires, a pyromaniac because of both or neither) and can work with the loquacious objects. There is quirky backstory which neither explains nor justifies the premise.

Coleridge once described “the willing suspension of disbelief”, and it is still a useful way to think about literature: we know that Elizabeth Bennett or Captain Ahab or the planet Solaris don’t really exist, but we’ll go along with it. The problem is when the reader’s willingness runs headlong against the author’s wilfulness. I “get” the idea of projecting volition onto machines – who hasn’t said to the printer “Come on, I really need this done”? But the conceit needs to be precise. Walter Scott once wrote – reviewing The Modern Prometheus, or Frankenstein of all books – “In the class of fictitious narrations to which we allude, the author opens a sort of account-current with the reader; drawing upon him” – alright Walter, maybe add a her? – “in the first place, for credit to that degree of the marvellous which he proposes to employ; and becoming virtually bound, in consequence of this indulgence, that his personages shall conduct themselves, in the extraordinary circumstances in which they are placed, according to the rules of probability, and the nature of the human heart.”

One interpretation would be that depression, in this novel, is manifested as relentless polyphony. But at the same time, we are to accept another narrative. This might have been a quirky, fun novella but Amie has a more significant relationship, with Door. Door, by the way, in never referred to by a specific gender, but then doors rarely are. Also, the subterranean narrative of Door and Amie having fallen out after all these years, is so blinking obvious I could have slammed Door shut, Amie out and the book down. I am being a pedant, but here’s a question. A door is unlike the rude mechanicals: it has fewer than two moving parts, and has no designated input/output: toasters gonna toast, freezers gonna freeze. So why is the door different – since the bed, windows, couches, toilet brushes and carpets have no sentience? Amie’s agoraphobia is not signalled too heavily, but the idea – via Sigmund Freud and Gaston Bachelard – that the house is a psychic metaphor for the psyche is a bit too pronounced.

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It is probably wrong to even ask the question, any more than querying a Caterpillar’s lack of lips to smoke on its hookah in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Had this been a short novella it might have been charming and offbeat. As a 400-page novel, however, it manages to be overly detailed and inconsequential at the same time. The faux-naïf questions of the appliances are entertaining enough, but – and here’s the rub, not to give any spoilers about Amie and Door – the interface of technologies and humans is a real thing. It’s not the same as things like (showing his age) Payne Fisher’s anthropological vegetables and fruits in The Garden Gang, or even Bob the Builder’s charismatic vehicles.

Hidden here is a novel about isolation, fearfulness, resentment, anxiety, and much more. But it’s kookiness overwrites the cooker’s unscrubbed oven and the whimsy takes away from how the whirl of a fan can be more than annoying. Maybe, if the publishers had some gumption, there might have been a scene with “Red Pen” shouting “This is at least 100 pages too long”.

Strange Talk by Lynda Clark, Fairlight Books, £9.99

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