←Geoff Nicholson obituary
Текст: During 2014, hundreds of photographers, amateurs and professionals, Londoners and tourists, snapped images of 58,000 London streets. The vast project – inspired by the novel Bleeding London – culminated in an exhibition at City Hall and prompted imitation by camera enthusiasts elsewhere in Europe. It was one of the high points of the 50-year career of the author Geoff Nicholson, who has died aged 71.
Bleeding London was the 10th of 17 novels that Nicholson wrote between 1987 and 2024, alongside 10 works of nonfiction, a plethora of short stories and anthology contributions, and several popular blogs. His surreal, complex and sometimes transgressive comedies were only erratically successful from a commercial point of view, although his third novel, What We Did on Our Holidays (1990) was turned into a 2007 film,
Permanent Vacation, starring
David Carradine.
But several of his works won critical acclaim. Bleeding London (1997) itself and his debut novel, Street Sleeper, were shortlisted for literary prizes.
Bedlam Burning (2002) was a New York Times notable book of the year and Day Trips to the Desert (1993) was a Radio 4 Book at Bedtime.
Nicholson did not capitalise on these early successes and remained – unlike the more celebrated figures to whom he was sometimes compared, such as
Jonathan Coe or
Will Self – something of an outsider, at least in the UK. But his work attracted a cult following, nowhere more so than in Los Angeles, where he lived and worked between 2006 and 2018.
Living near Hollywood with
Dian Hanson, his second wife, whom he married in 2006, Nicholson was a
contributing editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an established presence on the local literary scene. It was there that he began to write more insistently about maps and walking – exploring the relationship between
emotions, behaviour and geographic location – a focus which has chimed with growing interest in psychogeography.
Nicholson was born in Hillsborough, a working-class suburb of Sheffield, the only son of Geoffrey, a carpenter, and his wife, Violet. After passing his 11-plus, he attended the city’s King Edward VII grammar school, and then, from 1972, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he studied English. After a further degree in drama at Essex University, he settled in and around
London, working in bookshops and pursuing literary ambitions in the evenings.
He scripted a play for Radio 4, wrote travel pieces, food and theatre reviews for Time Out and sundry other outlets and sold sketches for TV shows such as
Not the Nine O’Clock News and Chris Tarrant’s Saturday Stayback. He had stories published in Ambit, the quarterly counterculture literary magazine. In 1987
JG Ballard, the science fiction writer whom Nicholson succeeded as Ambit’s fiction editor, described Street Sleeper as “witty, zany and brilliantly comic”.
The lead characters in Nicholson’s novels are often slightly lost, unsure what to make of what is happening to them. Not infrequently their dilemmas lead to violence. Usually, the denouement is humorous, with multilayered plots resolved in elaborate, improbable, even apocalyptic farces. Having little control over their lives, his characters seek comfort in an intense attachment to things. Nicholson writes a lot about – variously – the electric guitar, deserts and cocktails.
He had a lifelong love of the
Volkswagen Beetle, and collected hundreds of toy models of the car. The motor features prominently in two of his novels. Sexual fetishism crops up a lot too, most notably in Footsucker (1995), whose hero is aroused by women’s feet, and Sex Collectors, a work of nonfiction published in 2006 that is based on interviews with collectors of pornography.
But as Nicholson got older, his engagements with the world became simpler. Walking is the theme of five of his last eight published works, albeit that in
The Miranda (2017), the perambulation comes only after an episode of ultra-violence. The note, though, in this later writing is gentler and the prose ever more crystalline.
Nicholson could dissect and explain the most abstract ideas. As one New York Times reviewer put it, he was “the rare writer capable of making reference to Jacques Lacan [the French psychoanalyst] without inspiring the reader to toss his book out the window”.
It was a time that coincided with a calmer period in his life. After Dian and he divorced, Nicholson returned to Britain in 2018 and settled in the
Essex town of Manningtree. Shortly afterwards, he was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer. For the most part that was controlled and he had a new partner, Caroline Gannon, whom he had first met during the Bleeding London project.
He went out walking, every day, padding streets near and far. Always armed with a camera, he did his research, took photos, picked up items of interest – an unusually coloured rock, a discarded magazine or an item in a junk shop that took his eye.
Much of this discovery fed its way into
The Suburbanist, published in 2021, in which Nicholson poked fun at the staid, predictable routine of lower middle-class life and the arrogance of its intellectual detractors. In his final work, the nonfiction
Walking on Thin Air (2023), he wrote candidly about his illness, although it was more a celebration of life than of mortality. He did not expect this to be his swansong, but A Life’s Journey in 99 Steps proved to be a prophetic subtitle.
He is survived by Caroline.
Geoffrey Joseph Nicholson, writer, born 4 March 1953; died 18 January 2025
The City Changes its Face by Eimear McBride review – romantic friction from the new bohemians
Текст: In literary terms, Britain was a duller place 15 years ago: Booker judges looked for novels that “zip along”, editors were saying no to
Deborah Levy and the publisher Jacques Testard couldn’t get a job. There was nothing for it but DIY: new houses, like Testard’s Fitzcarraldo Editions, and new prizes for new authors shut out by the risk-averse mentality that prevailed after the 2008 recession. Leading the way was Liverpool-born, Ireland-raised writer
Eimear McBride, whose 2013 debut
A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, a looping soliloquy published by Norwich startup Galley Beggar Press, won the inaugural Goldsmiths prize for experimental fiction as well as the Women’s prize (then known as the Baileys), traditionally a more commercial award, in a sign that the thirst for novelty perhaps wasn’t so niche after all.
McBride’s new novel,
The City Changes Its Face, is a stand-alone sequel to her second book, 2016’s
The Lesser Bohemians, which was told by teenage drama student Eily, who comes to London from Ireland in the mid-90s and falls for Stephen, an actor 20 years her senior, with an estranged daughter Eily’s age, living overseas after her mother couldn’t hack Stephen sleeping around – a snag for Eily, too.
The action resumes here in 1995, yo-yoing between the recent past – in particular, a momentous visit by said daughter, Grace – and a narrative here and now in which Eily hasn’t been leaving the house after a breakdown and Stephen is in a West End show, kissing his female co-lead on stage, something Eily’s sort-of not-quite OK with. McBride’s cutting between time frames repeatedly leaves us poised on one ticklish moment only to switch to another – whether Stephen has returned from work to find Eily and Grace drunkenly quizzing each other, or he’s just been left bloodied by a shattered jar of piccalilli during a row with Eily at home, where innocuous-sounding exchanges about sandwiches and tea can’t mask the volcanic undertow bubbling up from the individual miseries of their past (addiction, abuse, self-harm).
What unfolds is a two-for-one trauma plot involving love between bruised souls who aren’t walking on eggshells so much as tiptoeing blindfold across a tripwired minefield. This being McBride, it’s the telling that’s as important as the story; in seeking to portray what it’s like to live in a body and a mind, she operates at a frequency most novelists ignore, intuitively able to recognise how something so apparently insignificant as the position of type on a page – indentation, spacing, line breaks – can be pressed into communicating nuances of thought and emotion. And as in
The Lesser Bohemians, frequent interruptions in a tiny font are deployed to show Eily quibbling with herself (there are more conventional tools for that, but McBride fights shy of commas and speech marks, never mind brackets).
The novel’s drama lies ultimately in the dance of Eily’s thoughts as she decodes Stephen’s words, calibrates her own, watching his gestures, craving, ultimately, for the validation she finds in his desire. Anything that makes that place harder to reach, whether Grace’s arrival or his refusal to ignore the marks on Eily’s wrists, fuels tension. For Eily, Stephen’s solicitousness for his daughter represents a threat, even though she likes Grace, who likes her too. The novel is most alive in that humanly messy tangle of almost unaccountable selfishness and anger, not least when her hopes of getting back into bed with Stephen – who is plagued by anxieties of his own – are stymied by Grace throwing up after one too many whiskies with Eily in the pub.
While it’s not period fiction – there are mentions of Kwik Save and the bookseller Samuel French but not John Major or Britpop – there’s an elegiac quality to the still-ungentrified dossiness of its north London setting, where any problem can be eased for a time by the discovery of a forgotten four-pack, a cadged ciggie or nipping out for chips. And while the end of the book leaves us hanging, true, the ceaseless friction to its central relationship means it carries far more oomph than McBride’s previous novel, 2020’s unsatisfyingly wafty
Strange Hotel. You sense that in revisiting
The Lesser Bohemians she’s continuing a project that’s far from done, and this reader, at least, would be glad if she decides the life of Eily is the place to be.
The City Changes its Face by Eimear McBride is published by Faber (£20). To support the
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