Tell, by British author Jonathan Buckley, is the joint winner of the 2022 Novel prize*, along with Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over**. (BTW I am not late to the party, this is a 2022 prize that is announced in 2024. See below***.)
Tell is compulsive reading.
The text consists of a series of interviews over five sessions. We are reading a transcript of a recording, marked with [pauses], and occasional lacunae that are marked [indistinct]. These gaps in the narrative could be when the speaker has turned away from the microphone, and/or they could be prompts from the interviewer.
The narrator is a gardener who works for a mega-wealthy entrepreneur and art collector who has mysteriously disappeared. It’s not clear how long ago this disappearance occurred, and at first the circumstances and purpose of the interview are not clear either. A police interview perhaps? or an interview with a journalist? It turns out to be an interview with a scriptwriter, so someone wants to make a film or a doco…
So, the unnamed gardener tells what she knows about Curtis. She’s gossipy, and she obviously draws on gossip that she’s heard from other members of the staff. The mansion is described as a ‘palace’ so the staff is large, but our informant is class-conscious too and though she is at pains to stress that Curtis isn’t like other rich people, she might well be labelling it a ‘palace’ to make a point. She is an unreliable narrator. But maybe uber-rich people can buy privately owned palaces in Scotland?
Over the course of the book we learn that Curtis was an adoptee abandoned by his mother, but that after a couple of bad placements, he fell on his feet with lovely people who cared for him like their own. He made his money in the fashion industry thanks in part to his first wife, Lily, who died. There have been women since then, but which ones were lovers is open to our narrator’s conjectures. There are children and grandchildren, and these all provide an opportunity for the narrator to reminisce, ponder, speculate and cast aspersions. Like the structures on the cover of the book, these people are seen from all different angles as she reports from her sources — Asil the chauffeur, Connie the cook, Harry with an axe to grind and so on.
My mother, she always used to say that you can summarise a person with just one story. Absolutely anybody. Capture their whole character in a single scene. There’ll be one story, one anecdote, that tells you exactly who they are. I know that nobody is the same with everyone they meet. We show some people one side, some people another. I agree, But there’s someone at the centre of it, someone who is me. The one who appears when there’s no show put on. (p.69)
Then there’s Lara, who has published an article about Curtis. She approached him to write a book, which hasn’t eventuated. So Lara, who didn’t want to be paid off not to write it, joins the members of the family about whom there is speculation. Curtis, is after all, a very rich man, with money and an art collection for somebody to inherit.
If he’s dead. Lord Lucan gets a mention, so maybe he’s not.
Exactly the kind of book I like!
Jonathan Buckley is the author of twelve novels. You can find out more about him at his website.
*From the prize website:
The Novel Prize offers $10,000 to the winner, and simultaneous publication in the UK and Ireland by the London-based Fitzcarraldo Editions, in Australia and New Zealand by Sydney publisher Giramondo, and in North America by New York’s New Directions. The prize rewards novels which explore and expand the possibilities of the form, and are innovative and imaginative in style.
The other shortlisted titles for the 2022 Novel Prize include Darcie Dennigan’s Forever Valley, Marie Doezema’s Aurora Australis, Florina Enache’s Palimpsest, Vijay Khurana’s The Passenger Seat, Valer Popa’s Moon Over Bucharest, and Sola Saar’s Anonymity Is Life. Read more about their titles here.
** It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over was a DNF for me. It appears to be about zombies, (a YA fad that I thought was over). Paul Fulcher at Goodreads agrees. But FWIW, this is the book description, which shows that the judges perceived it entirely differently and that I missed the point. Plus, there are four- and five-star reviews at Goodreads.
Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is a spare, funny, haunting, and luminous novel that asks how much of your memory, of your body, of the world as you know it – how much of what you love can you lose before you are lost? And then what happens? The protagonist is adrift in a familiar future: she has forgotten her name and much of what connects her to her humanity. But she remembers the place where she knew herself and was known, and she is determined to get back there at any cost. She travels across the landscapes of time, encountering and losing parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, heartbreaking situation after another.
** I am confused about the dates. From what I can gather, submissions opened in 2022, and the winner was announced in 2024, with the books becoming available for purchase in March 2024. So this is not the 2024 prize, it’s the 2022 prize. Submissions are now open for the 2024 prize, which will presumably be announced in 2026, with the shortlist somewhere in between.
Author: Jonathan Buckley
Title: Tell
Publisher: Giramondo, 2024
Cover design: Jenny Grigg
Cover image: ‘Structures (seen/unseen)’ 2019 by Eugene Carchesio.
ISBN: 9781923106017pbk., 194 pages
Review copy courtesy of Giramondo Publishing
ANZ LitLovers LitBlog 
This does sound intriguing. I do love an unreliable narrator!
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By: Eleanor Dilley on February 27, 2024
at 4:34 pm
I was interested to see that a reviewer at Goodreads said she was unlikeable, but I didn’t think so. I don’t mind a gossipy person, it’s human nature really.
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By: Lisa Hill on February 27, 2024
at 4:37 pm
This sounds a tricky style to pull off, but really well achieved. I’ve never read Jonathan Buckley and had no idea he’d written so many books, I’ll look into him.
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By: madamebibilophile on February 27, 2024
at 7:30 pm
I’d never heard of him either. It seems well worth hunting out some of his other novels, if this one is anything to go by.
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By: Lisa Hill on February 27, 2024
at 7:33 pm
I was very eager to read your review, as I’d literally just finished reading Tell. It was my first novel by Buckley, although I’ve two or three gathering dust on the shelf, thanks to several fabulous sales by NYRB Classics (“the more you spend, the more you save”! I’m such an easy mark!).
Somewhat to my surprise, I loved Tell and found it an easy read. I’d feared it would be a bit tedious; as you point out, the story is essentially a long monologue by a single narrator who doesn’t always (or even usually) have first hand knowledge of her facts; for large chunks of the story, she’s simply speculating, albeit she points to “evidence” underlying her conclusions. I must admit I was puzzled at this choice of structure, as I think these days it would be more common to switch narrative points of view. That being said, I was quite comfortable with Buckley’s choice after a few pages. As you note, it’s a tricky technique to pull off, but Buckley’s so skillful he makes it seem effortless.
I really enjoyed the novel and am still thinking about it. Aside from issues of class (of which there are many), and the ultimate mystery of Curtis’ fate, can it be that Buckley is telling us that our identity is nothing more than the memories/images we leave in others’ minds? That the stories that are told about us, and the stories we tell ourselves, true or not (I didn’t quite buy Curtis’ totally detached reaction to his abandonment by his birth mother) are essentially all that we are?
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By: Janakay | YouMightAsWellRead on February 28, 2024
at 12:10 am
Yes, that’s what so clever… it shouldn’t work but it does.
I thought the class angle was hilarious… the biggest snob in the story is our narrator!
Buckley’s ideas about memories and the stories people tell made me think of family history research. If people are lucky, and do they manage to trace a tree, and the documents aren’t lies about the parents’ identities, then often all people have is a name. Maybe an address for some point in time. No stories about that name, nothing to make the name into a person. And this is more so, the further you go back, which is what people are so proud of.
(I was briefly chatting about this with a couple of biographers last week. Even if you have letters or diaries, you only have what the person is choosing to share, and now that we are all users of social media, we all know how we edit our external persona, eh?)
Actually I did accept the detachment. He may have had a yearning for a mother, but not that one.
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By: Lisa Hill on February 28, 2024
at 9:36 am
Hi Lisa! I left a fairly long comment, as I’d just finished reading Tell; it seems to have vanished into the bowels of wordpress. If it doesn’t turn up, I may try again. Excellent review BTW; I loved the book!
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By: Janakay | YouMightAsWellRead on February 28, 2024
at 12:13 am
Found it, in (you guessed it) the Spam folder…
And how long have you been an approved contributor to discussion here? I wish WordPress would get its act together…
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By: Lisa Hill on February 28, 2024
at 9:17 am
Glad the comment, such as it was, turned up. WordPress is what it is–not much, but probably better than the alternatives.
On reflection, I think you’re probably right about Curtis & mom . . . his detachment was probably genuine . . .
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By: Janakay | YouMightAsWellRead on February 28, 2024
at 10:54 am
Sounds really interesting, Lisa – I like books which play with structure (also fond of unreliable narrators)!
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By: kaggsysbookishramblings on February 28, 2024
at 6:38 am
I have this on my tbr too – sounds intriguing.
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By: This Reading Life on February 28, 2024
at 8:26 am
Did you get the other one as well?
It annoys me when I come across a book that significant people think is great and I don’t. It makes me think I should try again, and I do, and I still think it’s too ‘whatever’ to be bothered with.
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By: Lisa Hill on February 28, 2024
at 9:38 am
No I didn’t but after nearly a month off work, who knows what might be waiting for me when I get back *rubs hands together in anticipation*
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By: This Reading Life on February 28, 2024
at 7:46 pm
This is the prize for which Jessica Au was the inaugural winner as you know … and yes I agree that its dating is confusing. I noticed that there was a dual winner this time.
Yes, there was. But as I say, I abandoned it. At the page involving cannibalism…
Not my kind of “innovative and imaginative in style”.
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By: whisperinggums on February 29, 2024
at 8:54 am
I edited my comment and botched it .. “the prize for which Jessica Au was the inaugural winner” is what I meant of course! I’d like to read it.
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By: whisperinggums on February 29, 2024
at 8:57 am
Fixed.
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By: Lisa Hill on February 29, 2024
at 9:57 am
Thanks Lisa!
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By: whisperinggums on February 29, 2024
at 10:19 am