Thomas Chadwick
In Conversation
Daniel Davis Wood speaks to Thomas Chadwick about his story collection Above the Fat.
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I’d like to begin at the end of the process, with something that has come about quite unexpectedly for me: Hilary Mantel. The two epigraphs to Above the Fat were some of the last pieces to be added to the manuscript, and one of them is taken from Mantel’s novel Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988). I would not have picked her as an influence on you, least of all with that novel. Why invoke her?
I read Eight Months on Ghazzah Street a year or so ago and was very taken with it. It does what for me all good writing does, which is to force a character to question an assumption they thought was secure. I thought the line in the epigraph captured that in a very direct way — possibly too direct. It asks the character to seek answers in their most mundane day-to-day behaviour — heart, habits, limitations, fear.
The idea that fear can tell us something was particularly important. Fear is normally something to be shied away from, but in the act of shying away we can learn a lot. I put the quote aside and for a while it was attached to another project that hasn’t ever got going, but then, when I came to go through the stories for this collection, fear appeared to be central to a lot of the characters. In some instances the origin of the fear is relatively obvious: economic ruin, heights, flooding, grief. In others, it’s more naïve: finding trousers that fit, getting lunch. But in each instance, the fear is ultimately and hopefully a cause for self-reflection, whether the character knows it or not.
Does Mantel’s work mean something to you more generally?
It has come to mean a lot. I only started reading her novels relatively recently, perhaps four years ago. I’ll confess I’d been put off for a long time because of the noise around the Thomas Cromwell books. I’d studied that period of history a lot at school, and then again at university, and so I think I shamefully thought it had nothing to offer me. Then I saw Mantel speak and was struck by not only her insight and intelligence, but also how funny she was. I picked up a copy of A Place of Greater Safety (1992), her novel about the French Revolution, and from there I started working my way through some of her other titles.
What is it that resonates with you?
Two things in particular. First, her sentences. I feel like the sentences in her novels have been cherished. Almost as if they’ve been carried around in the palm of a hand for several weeks before being placed on the page. They are so well-turned that they can be read rapidly, but at the same time each sentence is freshly weighted in a way that makes it feel as if you are reading the words for the very first time. The second thing I value about Mantel’s work is its feel for history. Obviously this comes across most immediately in her historical novels, but I think it’s just as important to her more contemporary work. Something like Beyond Black (2005), for instance. The novel follows a psychic named Alison around the Home Counties in the late 1990s and is mostly set on a red-brick estate somewhere near the M4, but there is history on every page. It is in Alison’s childhood, in the ghosts she speaks with, and in the world the novel describes. One of the key events in the novel is the death of Princess Diana — a cause for much traffic along psychic paths — but also a moment in which history was forming quite definitely in real time. For me, Mantel’s work captures the sense of history’s weight on the present perfectly.
Well, this is something I’m keen to probe further: this difference in feeling between the writing of the stories (yours) and the experience of reading them (mine), and the way that the passage of time might account for it. When you reflect on them, I’m guessing you see a long process of development, each more recent story being an extension of your skills from the story that preceded it. But when I read them, I’m seeing them all as the products of a process that has already reached its culmination in this book. So take me back to the beginning with a quick sketch: your first itch to write short fiction, your first attempts, your first publication.
My first attempts at writing were all attempts to write novels. To an extent I don’t think that’s ever really changed. Even when I’m writing stories now, I still think of them as part of a novel or look for ways to bring them into whatever else I’m working on.
After about five years of trying to write novels and occasionally producing a short story, I started sending some of the shorter pieces to magazines. Most of them got rejected, but I think the process of receiving rejections was very formative. ‘Stan, Standing’, for instance, started life as a list of “one hundred things that happened to Stan on the way to his brother’s wedding” or something like that. I think I came up with about forty things, then left it. About a year later I did a reading of some of the longer items from the list and people seemed to like it, so I started trying to turn it into a novel. I ended up with a very long piece that had Stan doing all sorts of things on the way to his brother’s wedding, but it wasn’t really a novel or a story — so, again, I left it. Later still, I wanted to enter something to a story competition, so I took my long list of things that Stan did on the way to his brother’s wedding and cut it down to get it under the word limit for the competition. It didn’t get shortlisted, but I got an email saying it was on the longlist and now I had a piece that was much tighter even if it was still a bit too long for most magazines. I spent the next few years gradually cutting words from it to make it eligible for various competitions and magazines. I think it had about three or four not-quite-but-nearly emails before it was eventually published in Bomb, but the story got so much tighter and that was only from receiving rejection after rejection. So I suppose, in that sense, I came to short fiction sort of by accident, as a way to do things with long, baggy pieces that weren’t ever going to be novels.
So this was a couple of years ago, and then ‘Birch’ made it onto the White Review prize shortlist pretty soon after that. Did ‘Stan’ ignite a sort of creative streak for you? How did you get from there to ‘Birch’?
In some ways ‘Birch’ goes back even further. The background to the story is drawn entirely from a conversation I once had with someone about timber prices in the 1990s. The basic story is that as the internet took off, there was an exponential rise in demand for paper. This led to many trees being cut down to produce paper and pulp, which in turn drove down the price of timber. The market only evened out, I was told, when firms started planting fast growing trees — such as birch — to satisfy the paper and pulp markets.
I had this story in the back of my mind for several years before I got round to trying to write about it. There were two things that I thought were really interesting about it. First, it struck me as a good example of the materiality of the internet. The cloud is an inappropriate metaphor for the internet — James Bridle’s New Dark Age (2018) is excellent on this and many other points — and the story of the internet and the timber trade seemed to capture the, for want of a better world, real world effects of the web. Secondly, and this has become more pressing in recent years, the timber trade is a good example of the UK’s reliance on the wider world. The UK has not been self-sufficient in timber for several hundred years. Also because of the length of growing seasons in the UK compared to, say, Scandinavia, Germany, Russia, or North America, UK softwoods are not as strong as colder climates where growth is slower. So timber not only emphasised the materiality of the web, but also was a way into the web of international interdependence which, as I was writing about it, seemed to be overlooked.
The result of all these interconnections was an image of a man surrounded by a birch wood that he was patiently waiting to come to maturity. This image never made it into the finished story, but ‘Birch’ was my attempt to prepare the ground for that image, so to speak. In that sense, I wrote the version of ‘Birch’ that was on the White Review shortlist relatively swiftly, in two or three months, but the ideas had been forming for almost a decade, and I have documents going back years on my computer with little descriptions of a man surrounded by birch trees.
There is a lot more I could say about ‘Birch’, but I’m conscious that not everyone is as interested in the timber trade as I am.
You know, I wasn’t interested in the timber trade at all until I read ‘Birch’, and that cuts to the heart of what I admire about your work. It’s an article of faith for me that there’s brilliance to a story or novel when it can take a subject I have zero interest in and find a form that earns my interest. The interest comes from the form, in the first instance, which in turn generates an interest in the subject — not vice-versa. The same thing happens for me throughout Above the Fat, especially in the title story.
I want to come back to this topic of the UK’s place in Europe in a moment. For now, can you walk me along the path that led you from ‘Birch’ to the other stories: ‘Purchase’, ‘A Sense of Agency’, ‘Bill Mathers’, et al, up to ‘Above the Fat’? I notice that during this period you started moving towards shorter forms than ‘Stan’ and ‘Birch’, opting for 2,000 words rather than 5,000, but then you came back to longer work with ‘Above the Fat’. Why?
I actually wrote most of those stories before ‘Birch’. Of the group of shorter pieces that you mention, I think ‘A Sense of Agency’ was the first, and I remember working on that for quite a long time. It’s in the first-person voice, which I would hardly ever use now, so it feels like a slight outlier in some ways. ‘Purchase’ I wrote very quickly and the reason for its brevity is simply because I entered it into the Ambit short fiction prize, which had a 1,000 word limit.
‘Bill Mathers’ came a little later as a story, although it had existed as an idea for some time. My original plan was to create a Twitter feed from the perspective of the narrator, who would relate a new thing that Bill had said each day on the state of literature, angling, politics, et cetera. I decided that in order to not run out of material, I’d better have a bank of things that I could use, so I kept a list in a notebook. I never got round to putting it online, but I did find the notebook a couple of years later and decided that it might be easier to turn the tweets into a story.
What about the other stories? Particularly the opening and closing sketches: ‘A train passes through the Ruhr region in the early morning’ and ‘The Beach at Oostende on a December evening’?
‘A train passes’ also started out as a list, but again I don’t think I planned to write it as a story. I was on a train from Brussels to Dortmund in the early morning and I made a list of everything that I could see from the window. My plan was to use the list to help write a scene in a novel, but then it was published in Corda, which was set up in the wake of the EU referendum.
In a way, though, ‘A train passes’ did lead to the other two shorter pieces in the collection. When I was putting Above the Fat together, I wanted there to be some sort of thread that ran through the collection. Given that ‘A train passes’ is set in the early morning, it made sense to add a short piece for the end of the day – ‘The Beach at Oostende’ — and something at lunch — ‘Death Valley Junction’. Apart from these last two, though, all the shorter pieces were written between 2013 and 2017. I think ‘Birch’ taught me a lot about the sort of fiction I wanted to write, ultimately. The earlier pieces feel like scouts, looking for different paths, styles, ideas. I think in that sense they were experiments, although at the time I was just trying to write.
So let’s look at ‘Red Sky at Night’, the last long story in Above the Fat. It’s a story that came into being while we were putting this collection together; you’d already written the others, but this one pushed its way through while the editing process was underway. And, not coincidentally, it emerged against the backdrop of the Brexit negotiations-cum-debacle.
I like ‘Red Sky’ on its own terms and I also like its contribution to the collection as a whole. To me, it picks up on a recurring situation throughout the collection, and it represents both a culmination and a reversal of this situation. The situation is one in which your protagonists — all men — are simply stuck, stuck in one physical location, in England, while their memories and manic thoughts lead them to become unmoored in time. In the shorter stories, like ‘A Sense of Agency’ and ‘And the Glass Cold Against His Face’, your characters are literally placed in confined spaces. In the longer stories, like ‘Birch’ and ‘Above the Fat’, your characters waver between being stuck in England and feeling more liberated in Europe: in Sweden and France, respectively. In ‘Red Sky at Night’, Paul, too, is in a literally confined situation — almost barricaded into Patras, cut off from the rest of the world — and he yearns for freedom. But this time — and here’s the all-important reversal — your protagonist is stuck in Europe, so that England is the distant place, the site of liberation.
Well, I think all fictional characters are stuck. Even characters that seem quite liberated on the page are still stuck on the page. Maybe this is one of the reasons we like to read, because fiction acts as a mirror to our own terms of confinement. In everyday life we can travel and move and avoid facing up to things, but fiction forces its characters to confront aspects of themselves they would otherwise prefer to ignore.
In the stories in the collection, then, being trapped physically is a relatively clunky metaphor for the way the characters are trapped emotionally, with the added benefit that being stuck might help nudge the characters towards some form of realisation. I also think it’s a result of my limitations as a short story writer. There are writers — Lydia Davis, Georges Saunders, Italo Calvino — who can paint all the broad brushstrokes of narrative with a very small number of words. I find that the only way I can condense a longer story into a small number of words is to restrict the narrative to a very specific place and time.
That’s true, but it doesn’t strike me as a shortcoming. I’ve always thought of it as planned out, an intentional constraint.
It’s definitely something I learnt by trial and error. I remember writing ‘Stan, Standing’ and getting to a point where I set myself the task of writing a draft where Stan never leaves his own hallway. It was the same with ‘Above the Fat’, where I decided the whole story would take place in the time it took the protagonist to fry an egg. By the time I wrote ‘Red Sky at Night’, I’d set up my restrictions before I even started writing. There was never a draft where Paul wasn’t stuck in Patras.
But this story came about — an English protagonist stuck on the continent — after the Brexit referendum, during the negotiations. How did that context shape ‘Red Sky at Night’?
It’s impossible for it not to. At the same time, I think all the stories are shaped by it in some way. That context has been there for a long while — certainly for as long as I’ve been alive — and Brexit was a large part of British politics long before there was a name for it. For me the story that’s most closely related to the referendum is ‘Birch’, which was mostly written in the autumn of 2016, right after the result of the vote; I feel I was trying to make a fairly deliberate point about the UK’s indelible connection to Europe.
I’ll confess I hadn’t noticed that reversal in ‘Red Sky at Night’. I think part of what I was trying to do was take a character who was very comfortable with where he stood in the world and make him uncomfortable. For Paul, though, this is less to do with Brexit and more to do with climate change. I wouldn’t suggest that Paul was a climate change denier, but I think he is in denial about how comfortable he is about his perspective on climate change. It has, in a way, become simply another way of presenting himself to the world. What he discovers when he tries to actually act on his convictions and take the boat home, not the plane, is that it’s really difficult and it might be that he was simply using climate change to hide other bits of anger in his life.
Well, very much related to that: you’re obviously in a strange and difficult situation — but a creatively productive one, if Above the Fat is anything to judge by — in that you’re an English writer based in Europe at this particular moment in time, writing about both Europe and England in a way that recognises their intertwining. I can’t think of a lot of writers who are doing this right now, at least not consistently; Chris Power and David Szalay are notable exceptions, though they’re both still based in the UK. In any event, I wonder whether you feel a responsibility to write in this way, about these concerns. I guess I mean this: how do you answer the politics of your situation in your creative practice, without being didactic?
I moved to Belgium in 2015 and have been living in Ghent ever since. We moved because my wife and I both got positions to study for PhDs at Belgian universities. At the time we just thought of it as a bit of an adventure, the opportunity to study and travel and live abroad. About eighteen months after we moved, the referendum happened and suddenly our decision to relocate was cast into the midst of a wider argument about Britain’s relationship to Europe. In that sense, as our lives have become more intertwined with Europe, the UK has started attempting to disentangle itself from Europe. I think what’s become increasingly obvious is that that process of disentangling is quite difficult. Maybe even impossible. Someone once described Brexit to me as like having each country in the EU crack an egg to make an omelette and then having the UK suddenly demanding its egg back.
I feel like that same entanglement has been present in my own writing, and not just in Above the Fat. In 2014, I started writing a novel set in an apartment complex on the Costa del Sol. It was about two generations of English people who find themselves thrown together on their respective holidays. When I started writing it, Brexit wasn’t even a thing, but over the next four years, as I continued to work on it, I had to keep making changes to try and keep up with the cultural narrative that was starting to unfold. So, in that sense, an interest in how the UK and Europe relate has been central to my writing.
More recently, though, I’ve found myself drawn to writing about small west country villages very like the one in which I grew up, such as in ‘Birch’ and ‘Above the Fat’. I don’t think my interests as a writer have changed, but I do think that I’ve relocated them. What five years ago I thought I could explore by taking characters to Europe, I now think I can explore by taking them to places in the UK. Where before I wanted to examine how the UK might relate to Europe, now I’m more interested in finding out how Europe is already in the UK. In that sense I do feel a responsibility. I don’t think anyone writing today could not, but I also feel a responsibility to take the writing to places where it might not be comfortable, where perspectives might not be clear. The way that we consume media makes it very easy to live within bubbles or echo chambers. I think fiction has a responsibility to look beyond that.
It’s interesting that you’re working in longer forms now, after your earlier attempts at writing novels ended up deflating and gave you the material for your short stories. In a formal sense at least, you seem to be now arriving at your original destination of choice (twice!) despite the detours along the way. Can you reflect on the differences in process as you move from shorter to longer forms? What did you discover about the form of the novel vis-a-vis the short story, in the process of writing, that led you to reach the end of a draft?
Writing anything of any form — novel, short story, haiku — is a constant process of learning and discovery. In that sense, writing functions a bit like teaching. Few things force you to learn something as thoroughly as if you have to stand up and teach it. In the same way, writing about something forces you to learn far more about a subject than if you were to simply read about it. Unlike teaching, though, I feel that the process of learning with writing is very temporary. I know I must have learnt to write short stories, but every time I sit down to write one it’s a bit like starting all over again. Rationally, I know this is not true — there must be things I’ve picked up in the process of writing that I can bring to new projects — but every piece of writing feels like something completely unknown.
It sounds pretty desperate to say out loud, but I think that’s part of the challenge of writing. If there was always a pre-ordained shape and structure, the process and the product would be very different. But because there’s not, because every time you write you have to figure out a form, then you can produce something that you yourself never knew existed. So, in that basic sense, I don’t see a massive distinction between writing longer or shorter pieces. I still don’t really feel like I know what I’m doing and I still feel that I have to figure out what form the piece is going to take all over again.
I finished a draft of the Costa del Sol novel a year or so ago, which I was working on during most of the time I wrote the stories that are in Above the Fat. I guess the most obvious distinction between stories and novels is that if you decide to change the form of a novel it can take a lot longer to produce a new version than with a story where — in theory — you can bash out a new draft in a few days. I’ve mentioned it before, but when I decided to change ‘Stan, Standing’ so he never left his hallway, I was able to make those changes over a weekend. With a novel you can’t do that. Or at least not if you have other things to do alongside it.
I’ve spent the last year writing a new novel about Big Cat sightings. I finished a first draft last summer, but realised before I even finished typing it up that I needed to change the whole thing. I’m still writing the new draft now. I don’t think it’s a source of frustration, though. When I’m working on a longer thing over a much longer period of time, it’s easier to see how the form should take shape simply because you’ve spent a lot more time with it. With stories, where my engagement with them tends to be more sporadic, it can be harder to see that. I spend a lot of time basically just copying them out again and again to try and figure out what’s going on. I once heard Kate Clanchy say something along the lines of how, when she finishes a story, she puts it in a draw and comes back to it a year later. I find that really useful. With novels you end up doing that almost by default, but with stories I find I have to engineer it a little more.
About the Author
Thomas Chadwick grew up in Wiltshire and now splits his time between London and Ghent. His stories have been shortlisted for the White Review Prize and the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize, as well as the Ambit Prize and the Bridport Prize. He is an editor of Hotel magazine.