'What if, hey?' The wonderful Russell Hoban

Hello! I wanted to write today about John Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things, which Daniel of Hibernian Homme so kindly sent me earlier this year, and which I saved to be my first guilt-free, non-Roehampton read of the Christmas holidays. I’m battling through a stupid cold which is stopping me writing, stopping me talking (how can something so minor be such a bugger?) and in the midst of this weird islanding by mucous, I’ve been following our young hero David as he treads his way through the forests of fairy tale and nightmare.

I wanted to talk about that, but today I read of the death of Russell Hoban, and those are strange and sad words to type. Hoban is one of the most wonderful writers I’ve ever read, and every interview with him I’ve read (and one I had the luck to see, with Hans Ulrich-Obrist) convinced me he was a modest man too, and what is more an enthusiast, a man who loved art and movies and music and books, London and ghost stories and whiskey, with enthusiasm and a deep engagement. He loved working and he loved others’ work, and increasingly that was the energy driving his novels.

In the last ten years he has produced as many novels for adults as he did in the first thirty years of his career (though that’s setting aside his masterpiece of children’s fiction The Mouse and his Child, and a string of beautiful and unique picture books like The Twenty Elephant Restaurant), shorter than those others, in some ways denser and in some ways lighter, and all essentially novels of romance: telling the reassuring story of what new possibilities open up when we recognise that we are not alone, but telling it slant. Relationships in Hoban novels are as often with beautiful women as with works of art, imaginary beings, historical figures, whatever: all of them direct, honest, sensual, liable to be difficult. His other novels are not always as optimistic, though they are pretty much all ambitious, satisfying, lyrical and strange.

In more than one place, I read that he was looking forward to seeing his YA novel published next year, Soonchild – he almost talked about it with the expectation of it being a last published work (though he did also say he felt ‘physically unwell’ if he wasn’t writing, that he’d never retire, that he was working on new stuff) so there’s an extra sadness in that not happening. The death of a writer always carries that bitterness of knowing no more new writing is coming, but I suppose it has the consolation that the life in their work is ineradicable, so long as it goes on being read.

And though I will come back to The Book of Lost Things, it is nice that the strange versions of Snow White and The Goose Girl and Rumpelstiltskin in John Connolly’s novel take me back directly to the Grimm Brothers’ Household Tales, and particularly the edition illustrated by Mervyn Peake for which Russell Hoban writes an introduction. It’s a quite wonderful introduction going into the grain of peculiarly fascinating stories like The Goose Girl (one of my favourite fairy stories as a boy, which might mean something), right into the sound of the original German, the place of the story in the household, and the philosophical idea of the household of the world, the ‘story of us’:

We make fiction because we are fiction. Because there was a time when “it lived” us into being. Because there was a time when something said, ‘What if there are people?’ A word, perhaps, whispered in the undulant amorphous ear of the primordial soup: ‘What if there are people, hey? What if?’

It lived us into being and it lives us still. We make stories because we are story. The fabric of our myths and folk tales is in us from before birth. The action systems of the universe are the origin of life and stories. The patterns of blue-green algae and the numinous wings of the Great Nebula in Orion and the runic scrawl of human chromosomes are stories. Begotten by no one knows what, stories beget people to live them. We are the offspring of immeasurable ideas.