Category: Write like the greats

Three dread words — laid in a row

My first formal title was Efficiency Planning Manager. And the role was bestowed with ceremony.

My boss clicked through vast spreadsheets and explained the title’s constituent parts. 

‘Efficiency’ was when the numbers went down — a good thing, something to be desired: 

It’s all about maintaining the same level of output with fewer FTE.

So said my boss. Which I translated in my head as:

It’s getting the same amount of work from fewer people.

And then, thinking frantically:

It’s firing folk and piling their work on the enfeebled team left behind.

‘Planning’ — that was my responsibility

Setting targets for firings. Nagging leaders to make the cuts. Recording the rounds of corporate bloodletting. 

On good days, I lost myself in the abstraction. I recorded efficiency gains in columns that rippled with colours (angry reds, happy greens). 

On bad days, I felt like a drone operator, sitting in a cubicle in a pressed shirt, maiming people from afar.

Click. There goes your career, Cell G3349. Click. Click. Postpone that mortgage application, Cell G5287. 

Seeing the person was my mistake. My career as an Efficiency Planning Manager was soon over and I picked up the duties of a National Development Manager. Much more… constructive.

Why those titles?

Why those acronyms? Why the advanced level of abstraction? Because if we were honest about our occupations, we might be ashamed. 

I read a lot while I held those jobs. Dad had a new flat with room for me, and I was grateful. We admired the big empty rooms. And put off buying furniture or getting a TV. 

Books we welcomed. They propped open doors and served as coasters. Stacks grew from the carpet like stalagmites. Piles of crushed spines, bearing masculine titles. For Whom the Bell Tolls. Down and Out in Paris and London. The Call of The Wild. 

Steinbeck was my favourite. Other novels were picked up, set down, floated about the flat. The Grapes of Wrath stayed anchored by my bedside. 

The novel brought me back

When I was hollowed out after a day of efficiencies, Steinbeck stirred my soul.

His book followed an uprooted family as they sought work. He made the Joads seem giant in spirit, while explaining why they were unremarkable in the extreme. 

Unremarkable, because a system was running 1930s America. Climate punished the innocent. Corporations bled them dry. And Steinbeck, first as a reporter, then as an author, documented the organised violence around California’s orchards. 

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all.

That achievement of Steinbeck’s would have been enough to make him important to me as I updated spreadsheets. He sharpened my despair — and then tempered it into resolve.

It’s not lightning or earthquakes. We’ve got a bad thing made by men, and by God that’s something we can change.

I heard Steinbeck’s message

Reading The Grapes of Wrath, you side with the migrant farmers, with the Okies and the Joads. These are people who know and love the land. Their honest need to work is more dignified than rich Californians’ obsession with value, price and yield.

And whereas the wants of the Californians were nebulous and undefined, the wants of the Okies were beside the road, lying there to be seen and coveted: the good fields with water to be dug for, the good green fields, earth to crumble experimentally in the hand, grass to smell, oaten stalks to chew until the sharp sweetness was in the throat.

If you don’t understand what your work means in the world of objects and people — if you await results that can’t be perceived by sight, smell, taste or touch — stay your hand. You might be fermenting the grapes of wrath. An efficiency with great cost.

Aidan Clifford writes for Pinstripe Poets – artists who love their day jobs. This post is part of a series called ‘Write like the Greats’. See the rest here.

True crime. Popular since Cain brained Abel.

So let’s make room for the genre and its tensions and its foibles.

Let’s talk about two dramas. One serialised on Netflix. The other in The New Yorker, 60 years prior.

Richard Gadd spilt his guts

Baby Reindeer was mandatory viewing in 2024. Richard Gadd played himself, reliving the abuses he’d suffered as an aspiring comedian.

The title was absurd and chilling. It was the pet name pinned to Gadd by his stalker. It featured in thousands of messages.

I need a ncie boy totake care of me, he who looks likea baby reindeer

Gadd was haunted at work, at home, online.

His stalker sent 46 Facebook messages, 744 tweets, 41,076 emails.

don’t thnk ill stop baby reindeer

She recorded pleading, abusive, explicit monologues to Gadd’s voicemail. 350 hours in total.

He could’ve listened to his stalker for two whole weeks. And the remarkable thing was…

… he did.

Gadd reviewed his stalker’s raving, so he could devise a one-man show:

I remember during a particularly long night of unrest, the idea came to me. To stage this whole ordeal, one day, when the time was right.

What an opening it might be to layer the voicemails on top of one another and shoot them around a stage in a wash of projected light …

[W]hat better way to start a show than to plunge the audience straight inside the horror of it all?

Baby Reindeer struck the Edinburgh Fringe, then struck a deal with Netflix. Streaming hauled the case into the public consciousness.

nauty boys wil be punishded

It featured real emails. Real texts. We could read them for ourselves. And each episode opened with the claim:

This is a true story

Extraordinary — but precedented. The novel In Cold Blood, published in 1966, was subtitled:

A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences.

Truman Capote let them hang

Back in time, Capote was coaxed from the comfort of New York by the scent of slaughter.

It issued from a farmhouse in Kansas. This was 1959. The New York Times ran the story:

Wealthy Farmer, 3 of Family Slain

It came deep inside the paper, but caught the writer’s eye. Capote recalls:

[A]fter reading the story it suddenly struck me that a crime, the study of one such, might provide the broad scope I needed to write the kind of book I wanted to write.

The kind of book Capote wanted to write was a ‘non-fiction novel’ — a concept he’d been turning over in his mind, until it was worn as a beachcombed pebble.

What would it mean to make art out of reality? Would journalism change if given three hundred pages rather than a single spread?

Like Gadd, Capote couldn’t begin his work until he was drowned in material:

My files would almost fill a whole small room, right up to the ceiling. All my research. Hundreds of letters. Newspaper clippings. Court records–the court records almost fill two trunks.

Visit the writer’s archive and you can leaf through 14 folders, run your finger along timelines, smooth the creases from hand-drawn maps.

And amongst it all, quotes from the people of Kansas, full of winsome rural wisdom:

I don’t see how anyone can sit down to table without wanting to bless it.

Contrast that with the cynicism of the feckless killers, also recorded by Capote’s steel mind:

I believe in hanging. Just so long as I’m not the one being hanged.

Those quotes are as characterful — and as revealing — as the voicemails on Gadd’s mobile.

Well, visiting hours are almost over at the archive. You’ve just enough time to skim the press galleys of In Cold Blood. And I have to turn your attention to the notes in the margin.

Capote’s editor at The New Yorker was fretful. In one place he scribbled:

A device needed for author to account for his knowing what was said in private conversations

In another, simply: 

How know? No witnesses? General problem

Yes, Capote’s omniscience was a problem

The veracity of In Cold Blood has been contested since the year it was published.

A reporter from Esquire spoke to the same Kansas residents as Capote — and found their recollections differed from the words Capote plopped in their mouths.

No surprise. Given Capote interviewed without tape machine or notepad. He relied on his prodigious memory to preserve the testimonies of waitresses and farmhands.

The Esquire reporter concluded:

By insisting that ‘every word’ of his book is true he has made himself vulnerable to those readers who are prepared to examine seriously such a sweeping claim.

And that’s another reason to treat In Cold Blood as a precursor to Baby Reindeer, as Netflix came to regret the promise that they were telling a true story.

The art of non-fiction narrative is fraught

Gadd manipulated events to manage his audience’s interest, fixing them to the sofa as the series rolled on:

[A] lot of stalking is quite boring at times, like it’s a repetitive action and it’s, ‘Oh god, this person’s messaging again.’ And of course, in television, especially a thriller, you need to move certain timelines around, you need to move certain points to the end of episodes to make them pay off a little better.

Capote’s serial was also gripping. But it had the qualities of a fable too. By massaging the details of the murder (such as amplifying the folksiness of Holcomb farmers), Capote could depict two contrasting visions of America:

[T]his collision between the desperate, ruthless, wandering, savage part of American life, and the other, which is insular and safe, more or less.

There was something bigger at stake.

Gadd made similar arguments: he was reaching for a more essential story. And he was worth listening to as someone who was simultaneously victim and author, researcher and subject.

The skeleton of the story is absolutely true.

As for Capote, he came close to admitting the true nature of his masterwork. After seeing the 1967 movie adaptation of In Cold Blood, he wrote:

Reflected reality is the essence of reality, the truer truth…

Aidan Clifford writes for Pinstripe Poets – artists who love their day jobs. This post is part of a series called ‘Write like the Greats’. See the rest here.

Remember Raiders of The Lost Ark?

The Ark of the Covenant goes into a crate. A hammer slams, driving a nail. The lid fits tight, wood on wood, hiding the Ark from view. Anonymous hands snap on a padlock and a government employee (flat cap and flat expression) guides the crate along the gangway. The Ark becomes a box among thousands.

Some collections exist to conceal. Others exist to display. Few are copious enough to contain the wonders of centuries. But I’ve just come across literature’s equivalent to the Raider’s warehouse — and the crates are wiiiiide open.

I’ve been reading One Thousand and One Nights

Which puts me in a bind, because I like to credit authors, but the tales just weren’t written that way. There’s no single scrivener or orator to point to. The book is the product of generations of tellers, curators and translators.

So let’s credit the fictional storyteller Shahrazad. The book begins with that character and her tale is the one that envelopes the other rich narratives. Her qualifications?

Shahrazad possessed many accomplishments and was versed in the wisdom of the poets and the legends of ancient kings.

Her quandary? Her husband intends to put her to death… just as soon as he hears the end of her story. So in order to survive, Shahrazad becomes a character revealing characters who share their own fables, histories and adventures.

The result is a series of surprises that feels like touring the warehouse in Raiders. Or traversing dreams in Inception. Or tuning your radio to stations in ancient Persia, India, Greece…

Do that for a thousand and one nights, and you should feel disorientated and groggy. But no. Shahrazad gives her audience moments of stability. They are islands where we can rest, gather our thoughts, remember the pattern of the book, and prepare for the next chapter.

Take ‘Sindbad The Sailor’

Full title: ‘Sindbad The Sailor and Sindbad The Porter’. Did you know about the porter? He doesn’t loom in our culture like his name-fellow. The porter matters, though, because offers the reader stability. He’s a stand-in.

The porter’s summoned to a magnificent estate, where he’s entertained by a wealthy adventurer who happens to share his name:

‘How strange a chance!’ smiled the old man. ‘For my name, too, is Sindbad. They call me Sindbad the Sailor, and marvel at my strange history. Presently, my brother, you shall hear the tale of all my fortunes and all the hardships that I suffered before I rose to my present state and became the lord of this mansion where we are now assembled. For only after long toil, fearful ordeals, and dire peril did I achieve this fame. Seven voyages I made in all, each a story of such marvel as confounds the reason and fills the soul with wonder. All that be-fell me had been pre-ordained; and that which the moving hand of Fate had written no mortal power can revoke.’

Phew. Long extract there.

Thanks for bearing with. I wanted to give you the merchant’s full speech, because it is stuffed with reassurances for the reader:

1. There will be drama (danger and hardship).
2. There will be a broad narrative arc (the rise to wealth).
3. There will be seven episodes (the voyages).
4. There will be a greater lesson (about Fate).

And if that wasn’t enough reassuring predictability, Shahrazad closes each episode in the same way.

An evening of feasting and storytelling winds down. The porter is thanked for his company and given a hundred pieces of gold. The porter then leaves, sleeps, wakes, recites prayers and returns for another tale.

You see why the book is hard to put down. You want to see the porter get richer. You want to hear another of the sailor’s near-misses.

The rhythm pushes you onwards, but the possibility of a full and fully satisfying ending retreats. It’s somewhere beyond the crest of the next tale.

Aidan Clifford writes for Pinstripe Poets – artists who love their day jobs. This post is part of a series called ‘Write like the Greats’. See the rest here.

I’m back from the theatre

The play ended with a girl leading her father beyond the city walls.

The girl was Electra. The man, Oedipus. The city, Thebes. Perhaps those names strike dissonant cords of memory.

As they exited the tragedy, the outcast king questioned whether his people were at peace.

He’d put out his eyes to break a curse, to make water return to his parched land. Now his shirt was soaked with blood and rain — but were his people glad?

Yes — they rested

Actors, who I’d seen dance for hours, sat on stage and breathed. They’d delivered the story to its only conclusion.

I almost said ‘to its only logical conclusion’, but logic was one of the weaker forces on-stage. Sin and superstition and emotion had far greater influence over events.

That’s why it reminded me of Starve Acre

A play written in ancient Greece by Sophocles, adapted by Ella Hickson in 2024, reminded me of a horror novel by Andrew Michael Hurley.

Both feature rational men grappling with the supernatural.

Both propel their plots through revelation. And that’s the technique I want to pick apart, today.

So, tracing the course of action and reaction in both stories, what do we notice?

They run like police-procedural dramas

Evidence emerges, complicating and clarifying crimes. But it emerges from unusual sources.

In Oedipus, understanding comes from oracles, prophets and servants breaking old oaths of secrecy.

In Starve Acre, it bubbles up from psychics, relics and tattered woodblock prints.

It’s the rational protagonist, Richard, who owns the barren farm called Starve Acre. When we meet him, he’s enduring winter in his silent home, haunted by recollections of his recently deceased son — and of his own boyhood.

The memories overlap, because Richard grew up on the farm. Then he inherited it as an adult — a tumbledown estate that included his father’s library.

In this little room, [Richard’s father] had arranged the physical world, the whole of history, into something as watertight as a policy document. And yet, what took him decades to build, he managed to dismantle in less than a week.

Putting it right, Richard finds prints of the neighbouring fields.

The edges of the prints were either torn or perforated with needle holes, meaning that they had probably come from a larger collection, and Richard suspected that the whole had been reduced to its parts during his father’s demented reshuffling and that there were more sheets loose in the study somewhere.

That sentence is like a bugle horn

The hunt is called early in the book and winds until two pages from the end. Prints appear at judicious moments, deepening the dread of the reader, who can feel the past polluting the present.

No wonder the author made Richard an archaeologist, scraping in the dirt. It’s dangerous to raise bodies from the ground. Dead men can tell tales.

Aidan Clifford writes for Pinstripe Poets – artists who love their day jobs. This post is part of a series called ‘Write like the Greats’. See the rest here.

Has anyone ever tried to convince you to write like Dante?

Probably not, because who writes poetry anymore?*

Modern pen-pushers are busy with blogs, emails and social posts.

But we should remember the medieval poet Dante Alighieri. (And not just because it’s Valentine’s Day and he was drippingly romantic.)

We should remember him for his push to reach people — for writing to the broadest possible audience.

In a sense, he opened the doors of heaven to common readers.

You see, Dante had a theory. (It’s all spelt out in an essay titled ‘On Eloquence in the Vernacular’.) He argued that ordinary language could be used for extraordinary art.

Poetry didn’t need to be composed in Latin. The dialects of Italy had a music all of their own.

And that meant artists could — and should — address the living, breathing people of Florence, instead of the ghosts of the Roman Empire.

And sure, Dante made that argument in Latin. (Ironic…) But his masterpiece was in ‘vulgar’ language.

When he wrote The Divine Comedy, he used his native Tuscan dialect.

And generations of adoring readers agree: the language was up to the task. Hell, purgatory and heaven could be spoken of in the common tongue.

So the next time you’re dealing with a difficult stakeholder… who’d prefer if you used fancier, Latinate words…

… think of Dante.

He championed his native dialect so skilfully that it effectively became the language of a whole country. 

Because, in a final flourish, I’ll reveal that Dante and The Divine Comedy are significant chapters in the story of how Italian became Italian. Or as some know it, la bella lingua.

The beautiful language.


*I do, but that’s beside the point.

Aidan Clifford writes for Pinstripe Poets – artists who love their day jobs. This post is part of a series called ‘Write like the Greats’. See the rest here.

Authors are great exaggerators

I realised that while hammering out an essay on Jules Verne.

Verne conceived of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea after seeing a submarine — well, a model of one — at the world fair.

So a machine that took passengers under water existed in 1867.

Verne’s innovation was making the technology sleeker, grander, faster — capable of wonders:

A masterpiece containing masterpieces.

The adventure had its engine

Once Verne had conceived of a submarine with sodium-mercury batteries and floodable tanks, he could derive the rest of his plot.

A craft like Nautilus could travel for 20,000 leagues under the sea. It would be a pity not to make the journey.

Verne saw technological possibilities

I have always made a point in my romances of basing my so-called inventions upon a groundwork of actual fact, and of using in their construction methods and materials which are not entirely without the pale of contemporary engineering skill and knowledge.

But I have a frustration with A Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Because ripples from the invention don’t reach wider society.

What happens under the sea stays under the sea. And that leaves a lot unexplored.

This thought strikes me, because I’ve just read High-Rise by J. G. Ballard — a science fiction author who more sociologist than inventor.

The high-rise is another exaggeration

Ballard was writing a hundred years after Verne. Submarines had gone nuclear. Skyscrapers propagated like mushrooms.

He lived in a city enamoured with concrete. London poured the material into high-density building projects: Balfron Tower, Trellick Tower, The Barbican.

Those developments were big. So Ballard went bigger in his novel High-Rise.

With its forty floors and thousand apartments, its supermarket and its swimming-pools, bank and junior school — all in effect abandoned in the sky — the high-rise offered more than enough opportunities for violence and confrontation.

Did you catch that last part?

If Verne was turned on by engineering and inventors, Ballard was stimulated by architecture and theorists.

Theorists like Newman who suggested that people need to be surveilled to stay civilised. Like Ehrlich who thought a ‘population bomb‘ would cause catastrophic overcrowding. Like Calhoun who stuffed rats into a box (this was science in the ’70s).

They gave Ballard a set of anxieties to dramatise.

He soon recognized the extraordinary number of thinly veiled antagonisms around him. The high-rise had a second life of its own… At times he felt that they were all waiting for someone to make a serious mistake.

Over the course of the novel, the middle-class residents devolve into:

… small groups of killers, solitary hunters who built man-traps in empty apartments or preyed on the unwary in deserted elevator lobbies.

Even the main characters are exaggerations

And they are exaggerations of the reader. You can choose your avatar.

Will you be Anthony Royal, who attempts to restore order to the high-rise?

Dr. Laing, who passively follows events?

Or Richard Wilder, who thrives on the carnage?

These pure types — made by Ballard to represent the id, ego and super-ego — allow readers to tussle with themselves during passages of awful beauty.

First she would try to kill him, but failing this give him food and her body, breast-feed him back to a state of childishness and even, perhaps, feel affection for him. Then, the moment he was asleep, cut his throat. The synopsis of the ideal marriage.

Ballard housed big ideas in big structures

He enlarged the deliriums of a decade, so we can see where their shadows stretch into our own.

Aidan Clifford writes for Pinstripe Poets – artists who love their day jobs. This post is part of a series called ‘Write like the Greats’. See the rest here.

Are you sure, Monsieur Verne?

The way scientists and writers interact — I’ve seen it described as a codependency.

Authors take inspiration from science.

Their stories expand what readers can imagine.

Those readers include scientists who engage with experimental ideas.

They pull on pristine lab coats and test whether fictions could enter reality.

That’s how Argonaut Junior was built

Jules Verne saw a model of an early submarine at a world fair in 1867.

He wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea.

The book was read by an engineer called Simon Lake.

Lake built a submarine incorporating Verne’s fantasies: ballast tanks for stability… diving planes for control… Breakthroughs that redrafted what a submarine could be.

But codependency isn’t healthy

At least in the field of psychology, codependecy describes a relationship that’s unbalanced — askew.

One person enables the destructive behaviour of the other.

And when you list the inventions ripped from fiction, the roll call is chilling: Tasers, atomic bombs, chemical weapons.

It’s as if blueprints for modern violence were encoded in stories, awaiting discovery.

And readers have been better at taking author’s ideas than their warnings. So codependent is right.

Still, I love these cautionary tales

If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be reading “Dial F for Frankenstein” — an Arthur C. Clarke story about the dangers of intelligent networks.

I can’t imagine it will have anything to say about the spread of AI…

Aidan Clifford writes for Pinstripe Poets – artists who love their day jobs. This post is part of a series called ‘Write like the Greats’. See the rest here.

The unease starts with the title

Yellowface winks obscenely from bookstore shelves. It stimulates. It sets the machinery of the mind in motion… and then jams its gears.

The reader gets the term is racially charged. Recalls ‘Blackface’ – yep, that’s a thing. Thinks of Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But that’s about all they can manage.

How does that relate to the eyes in the cover art, eyes which avoid inspection?

All the bookstore browser can do is guess wildly.

The cover tells them they don’t know squat. The first sentence (shared above) throws them further off-kilter.

So far, so mysterious

Okay. I give you full permission to unclench. I won’t spoil the novel.

I won’t pull quotes from the depths of its sleek interior; doing so would be like dragging props from a haunted house.

Looking at Kuang’s tricks in isolation would be educational. But it would dull the shock of reading the book and catching the fairground ghouls in context.

Let me show restraint, then

Let me leave most ghosts un-busted.

We won’t go further than her opening line – but that’s enough to make you want to read the whole darn thing.

There are terms for a book that dilates your pupils and parches your throat. It’s a page-turner, suspense novel, thriller.

And in Yellowface, Kuang has engineered a haunted house-rollercoaster hybrid.

The stakes are high. The protagonist: floundering. And the reader (speaking for myself): strapped in for the ride.

How does she do it?

She opens ‘curiosity gaps’: she dangles the prospect of knowledge, but withholds it until it is earned.

When Kuang writes, “The night I watch Athena Liu die…” she skips ahead. She flaunts future events in a way that moves the reader ahead of the action.

From that acrophobic position, they’re left to wonder, “How will the story fill in the blanks?”

Often, readers know how a chapter is going to climax. But as to how will the plot ratchet to that giddy height… Kuang keeps that back.

Her message – the same message as is beamed by title, cover and blurb – is firm: “Read on and find out.”

Aidan Clifford writes for Pinstripe Poets – artists who love their day jobs. This post is part of a series called ‘Write like the Greats’. See the rest here.

Any ending is temporary

That becomes clear on the first page of White Teeth, when a despondent Archibald Jones tries gassing himself.

The act should have ended Zadie Smith’s novel before the debut had properly begun. But…

‘No one gasses himself on my property,’ Mo snapped as he marched downstairs. ‘We are not licensed.’

Archie survives to reach an ‘End of the world’ party that’s petering out in a North London suburb.

Defying apocalyptic prophecies, the world is alive and well on 1 January 1967. In fact, it seems to spin faster than ever, because…

Clara Bowden walks down the stairs

Clara was nineteen. Archie was forty-seven.

Six weeks later they were married.

A chance meeting leads Archie and Clara to the altar, and Zadie Smith to a problem: How did the marriage come about?

History enters as the central character of White Teeth:

… it’s about time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings. Clara was from somewhere. She had roots.

And so the beginning retreats

Clara marries Archie, because of a love affair gone sour.

That affair began because Clara was door-knocking for the Jehovah Witnesses.

She was proselytising because her mother, Hortense, was a devoted member of the church.

Hortense was devout, because the church gave her a feeling of security she had lacked, ever since she was born during an earthquake.

And why? We can keep asking.

Why had her mother, Ambrosia, given birth as tremors brought down a church around her screams? Because she’d been left in Jamaica. She’d been left in Jamaica, because it was convenient for the English captain who’d got her pregnant. She stayed, because the earthquake convinced her that Revelation had come.

Keep pulling threads and you’ll get tangled.

Clara knows and respects that history

It informs her present. Britain’s colonial past gives her a particular place in multi-cultural London. Jamaica influences the way she dresses, cooks and speaks. And a more recent, more personal history affects everything from her spirituality to her dental health (hence the title, White Teeth).

There’s a reason Zadie Smith uses a line from The Tempest as an epigram:

What’s past is prologue

While I learnt about Clara and the generations above her, a couple were added below. Irie Jones — daughter of Archie and Clara — appears in later novels by Zadie Smith, turning White Teeth into a kind of prologue.

So it’s ending isn’t any sort of conclusive ending, just as the beginning isn’t actually the beginning. The book is a slice of family history, which stretches backwards, which goes on.

Aidan Clifford writes for Pinstripe Poets – artists who love their day jobs. This post is part of a series called ‘Write like the Greats’. See the rest here.

It is a time of time

There was snow last night, I’m told. By the time I was awake, it had been overtaken by grey drizzle.

But the mind can play tricks. I can imagine the dancing snow, even as I look out on a pavement dressed in rain.

The snowflakes would have whirled in the lamplight, like moths out of hibernation.

They would have settled to reflect the sulphurous yellow.

They would have been disturbed by foxes searching for scraps, disappearing in the early hours.

It’s poignant to contrast the past with the present. Or to guess at what the future might hold.

And these are the kind of temporal games that occupy us in early January, as we reflect on a lost year and hope that better days lie ahead.

Time-travel with me

I’ve been darting around history thanks to three novels:

A Visit From The Goon Squad, which was sometimes about the 1970s, sometimes about the 2010s, sometimes about the years in between.

White Teeth, which ranged even further. It had chapters about a 1857 uprising in India and a hurricane that hit Britain 130 years later.

Hamnet, which followed the historical figure Agnes Hathaway as she became wife, mother and witch.

Time is a goon

In those novels, time is an antagonist for men who had an appointment with glory, and missed it. For women who had beautiful boys, and lost them.

In A Visit From The Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan showed the same cunning as Zadie Smith in White Teeth. Both books opened many windows onto their characters.

Readers could peek through at the jumbled pieces of jumbled lives. They would have had to squint to see any evidence of Fate.

Fate is a foe

I was gripped by the way Maggie O’Farrell manipulated time. Hamnet — a book that did believe in Fate — seized my heart and squeezed.

O’Farrell stuck to a stricter schema than the other writers. Readers would tense at the end of each happy chapter, knowing the next wouldn’t be so kind.

The reader gained that foresight, as Hamnet reliably switched between two epochs in Agnes’s life.

One sparked by an encounter with a Latin tutor called Shakespeare.

Another which unspools from the moment a boy — Agnes’s boy — descended the stairs in Stratford.

Hamnet has lost track of what he is meant to be doing. He has momentarily slipped free of his moorings, of the fact that Judith is unwell and needs someone to care for her, that he is meant to be finding their mother or grandmother or anyone else who might know what to do.

From that moment, my panic only mounted. I’d be entranced by courtship, marriage negotiations and homemaking and then recall the death that was to come.

It was almost enough to make me put the book down, so Hamnet could live longer.

Later, and for the rest of her life, she will think that if she had left there and then, if she had gathered her bags, her plants, her honey, and taken the path home, if she had heeded her abrupt, nameless unease, she might have changed what happened next.

Books are made of moments

Can you recognise a pivotal moment while you’re in it?

Rarely. Unless you’re revisiting a chapter of a book.

It’s easier to feel the weight of time once it’s slipped away (a realisation that should send you stumbling to the Historical Fiction shelves in your library).

A heavy absence sits at the centre of O’Farrell’s story. As Hamnet leapt the final three stairs, according to his habit, I realised I was seeing a ghost.

Aidan Clifford writes for Pinstripe Poets – artists who love their day jobs. This post is part of a series called ‘Write like the Greats’. See the rest here.