Annual Pleasures
by Sarah Tolmie
I spent 2023-4 (I chunk time in academic years) trying to figure out what weird fiction was. For those of you with access to journals that normally publish articles on Middle English poetry, I can direct you to one result of it: ‘Would’st thou be in a Dream, and yet not sleep?’: Piers Plowman, Gormenghast, and the World of Weird Fiction, The Yearbook of Langland Studies, Volume 38, Issue 1, Jan 2024, p. 123 - 165. Weird venue for a manifesto, you say. Yeah. I’ve come to the conclusion that the weird often combines technicality, one way of coping with the unknown, with other, more fabulist, methods. Often the weirdest stuff ends up directed to niche audiences. What is it that M John Harrison said in Wish I Was Here — good luck with trying to be weird, see you at the ceremony?
In 2024-5, the process was still going on in another way: basically, I was just sitting around with the idea in my head and seeing what I was attracted to. A bit like dowsing. A new book by Helen Marshall is always an event in weirdness, so if you haven’t already, take a look at The Lady, The Tiger and the Girl Who Loved Death. Someone just directed my attention to Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker, which I had somehow missed entirely; I haven’t read it yet but it is number one on my holiday list. It sounds like a posthumous work of A.S. Byatt, like he had a wicked months-long séance while writing; we shall see. I have hopes. I was also lucky enough to be a beta reader of the amazing Pam Mordecai’s first collection of ghost — duppy, as she says — stories, Two Days in Mayaro, which comes out next year with Goose Lane Press. Order it now!
So much for contemporary works such as you usually see on year-end lists. I’ve spent much of the rest of the year reading Joseph Conrad. Or, to be perfectly honest, listening to it, as read by the Australian Peter Dann for Librivox. He’s an excellent reader of Conrad, proof that you can find absolute gems on Librivox, despite what audiobook snobs say. Librivox is one of those things that give me hope that regular humans are still reading, sharing books aloud. Speaking of generally vital crowdsourcing, this was also the year in which I started giving Wikipedia a monthly donation. I’ve always used it a lot but it was crucial to a book I wrote this year. It was time, and the evil stupidities marshaling themselves against it need combating.
But. Moving on. Conrad. Weird, eh? Why read Conrad in this day and age? Inexcusable old white guy? Well, it’s because, in my mind, Conrad is a weird writer. He’s always been an odd fit in the canon: a Pole who writes in English, a man whose books are set everywhere other than Europe in a Eurocentric tradition. A man on his second career. A modernist who grew up reading patriotic Polish romances. I think it’s his extreme psychologism that gives him away. It’s like his characters are scarcely on Earth at all, despite all the circumstantial detail; they’re so deep in their own heads. Most of all, what makes me feel a kinship in weirdness with Conrad is the extent to which his characters remain complete mysteries to themselves. There’s a lot of willful blindness about, but even more sheer unknowability. People experientially contending with the limits of knowledge is the heart of weird fiction to me, individuals just being thrown back into a state of dogged, often confused, will. His protagonists do it all the time. Their heads are chock-a-block with knowledge, but it almost never helps them: it’s the wrong knowledge at the wrong time, or the right knowledge rendered suddenly inaccessible by a panic attack, or huge amounts of distracting knowledge that won’t help you at the moment, and so on. People think they’re doing one thing, but they’re doing another. Ironic but weirdly attached narrators see some of it, cranky or disaffected readers see more, but nobody ever sees it all. Never a full revelation or resolution.
Conrad stories just sort of stop with a bit of a sputter. Language frequently outruns itself, not lost in its own convolutions like Henry James, but as if it’s just dropping a pin in meaning and rushing along before it all gets away. There are actual grammar fails and a feeling of precariousness that you just don’t get with Virginia Woolf, say. There’s a wonky, struggly weirdness to Joseph Conrad altogether. I really identify with it. I expect the comparison would horrify him, but to me it all reads a lot like Mervyn Peake. Gormenghast on the South Seas?Hearing it told in the dispassionate voice of a middle-aged Australian — Peter Dann — is also strangely suitable. The last thing you’d want for Conrad is RP. I don’t think he ever even really aspired to be an “honorary Englishman” like Tom Stoppard. He wanted to make a living. Dann’s Melbourne accent keeps things de-centred, antipodean; Australia’s a lot closer to Malaysia than London. Anyway, it works for me. If you’re prepared to look at weirdness in this way, it might work for you, too. It’s all on YouTube. Ramp up your ad blocker, and you’ll be okay.
Best wishes to all in 2026 amid the global storm.
Sacraments for the Unfit, which Aqueduct released in 2023, is Sarah Tolmie’s sixth book with Aqueduct Press. Others include The Stone Boatmen, nominated for the Crawford Award in 2015, and The Little Animals, winner of the Special Citation at the Philip K Dick Awards in 2020. In addition to publishing short fiction, novellas and novels with Aqueduct, she has released two novellas with Tor.com, The Fourth Island and All the Horses of Iceland; the latter was listed as one of the top fantasy books of 2022 by The New York Times. She has also written three volumes of poetry for McGill-Queen’s University Press; the second one, The Art of Dying, was a finalist for the 2019 Griffin Prize for Poetry. In her other life, she is a Professor of English at the University of Waterloo. Her website is sarahtolmie.ca.
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