A.L. Kennedy's Changing People

‘I didn’t want to lie on my back in the night and hope that the phone might ring and there would be a journey and hands that I could hold with my hands.’ So speaks the narrator of A.L. Kennedy’s heartrending story ‘Failing to Fall’, which first appeared back in Granta 43: Best of Young British Novelists 2. As with so many of A.L. Kennedy’s people, this is someone constantly hurtling between poles of overflowing love and indifference, verging on contempt, for humanity. ‘Look for my heart,’ implores the narrator, ‘and you’ll see it beating, even through my coat.’

Kennedy writes with an acoustical attentiveness that borders on the uncanny. Again and again she creates characters with wild inner lives. Many of them are roaring down a meandering river of feeling, shouting into the rapids. ‘Watch for our feet, see our bodies; we all of us have the same music romping inside our heads.’ ‘I wonder if we don’t all wait from time to time, ready to make a dive, to find that space where we can drop unhindered.’ Increasingly enclosed though they are within these all consuming consciousnesses, what makes Kennedy's characters so vividly alive is their sheer abundance of untapped adoration for the world around them, which can often only be slightly expressed in the smallest of gestures: a brush of a shirt-sleeve, the shrug of the shoulders, the muttered goodbye at the end of a phone call.

As a new novel, The Blue Book, is due to shortly appear and Granta publishes a new memoir about her labyrinthine experience of writing it today online, we look back on A.L. Kennedy’s long-standing involvement with the magazine, from her double listing as one of Britain’s Best Young Novelists in both 1993 and 2003. In 2003, her story ‘Room 536’, which was taken from a novel then in progress (Paradise, Vintage 2004) introduces us to a narrator grinding out a path through an unfamiliar and distinctly unreal hotel. The fruit juice at breakfast? ‘I presume it’s filled with some kind of apple juice and, on closer acquaintance, I find this to be so – not very pleasant, but certainly wet and necessary.’ The other guests are at once remote and rendered with a quiet yearning: ‘Around me, various groups and solitaries are hunched over bowls of cereal, plates of glistening stuff, collapsing rolls.’ The hotel that offers no tangible sense of place momentarily becomes the unlikeliest of refuges: ‘I’m home. Perhaps.’

Then, in Granta 72: Overreachers, there is the tender and moving memoir, ‘A Blow to the Head’ concerning the life of her grandfather, a boxer named Joe Price who in later life would lose his vision: ‘Listening to the familiar purr in his voice, I never could understand why anyone would want to hurt him, why anyone would want to punch him in the eyes.’An interesting counterpoint to this is her memoir for granta.com in two parts (click here for Part One and Part Two) on her grandmother, who was ‘was a whole crowd of tricky people to spend time with.’

There is also ‘Story of My Life’, an acerbically funny tale of a ‘dental adventure’, from Granta 105. ‘Sensitivity, you see? It causes thoughts.’

The final piece featured in today’s selection appeared in Granta 93: God’s Own Countries and is entitled ‘God and Me’. God appears in various guises across A.L. Kennedy’s body of work though here, for both first time readers and long-term admirers, were are afforded a rare glimpse into, as she puts it, ‘the Calvinist heritage [and] the forty years of not-doing-so-well putting a certain spin on my preconceptions concerning the Beyond.’ It’s quite a hike at first and she freely admits, it doesn’t immediately have her ‘bursting with love of my fellow man.’ But then: ‘I felt that first piercing of sunlight, that lick of whitegold over a sense of the earth’s curve and all of us, everyone, felt this together and somebody started to fly a kite in the shape of an eagle – all we could hear, the flutter, of this eagle – and colours now, an absurd generosity of colours: layering purples, crimsons, yellows and each new tone seeming to add a new solidity to the range of peaks below us – as if the earth were not quite formed and now it was beginning, becoming itself.’

Granta.com is delighted to present this rich and diverse collection by one of the world’s finest writers. ■