Inglorious
by Joanna Kavenna
shortlisted for the Orange Broadband prize
shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys prize
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To get a taste for Joanna's writing
• read the synopsis of Inglorious below
• read what the press had to say
• scroll down to read - exclusively for newbooks - an article by Joanna.
Synopsis
Rosa is a dynamic journalist in her thirties with a handsome boyfriend in politics and a group of prosperous friends. Her life is the very picture of glamour and achivement. But after her mother dies, Rosa suffers an attack of 'what's the point?' and walks out of her job. Before long she finds herself dependent on the patience and charity of friends, some of whom are far less supportive than she imagined. As she tries to find work, to wade through the books she's always meant to read, and to appease her worried bank manager, her bid for freedom turns into a slow, comic fall from modern grace.
What the press say
'Rosa is an unforgettable narrator, stumbling around on borrowed heels. Her tone lies somewhere between that of Bridget Jones and Philip Larkin.' Spectator
'[An] exuberant debut novel... This journey into a nervous breakdown is described with such relish and mordant humour that it remains as gripping as many more epic voyages.' Guardian
'Inglorious has a compelling anarchic energy.' Observer
'Kavenna shows all you need to do to fall out of step with your peers is stop striving for the things we judge each other by. A brave, honest look at life in the twenty-first century.' Glamour
Joanna Kavenna on leaving the city (and returning...and leaving...)
"It was Johnson who said that if you're tired of London you're tired of life and it's one of those much-repeated and inherently ridiculous phrases which linger in the brain even after you have dismissed it as meaningless. At various points in the last decade or so I have been very much tired of London, though not at all tired of life, and I have moved away only to return again later. That's meant I've oscillated wildly for more than a decade, and while doing so I've come to suspect that my uncertainty about the city is somehow bound up with a general sense of uncertainty about modern life and my small place in it, thought that may just be an attempt to dignify my indecisiveness.
I began as a fervent admirer of urban life; when I was 21 I wanted urgently to live in London. I had grown up in a village and then later in a small town, and I was seduced by the imperiousness of a vast city. I had certainly read too much Henry James and Baudelaire and had got myself into a ‘flaneur' state of mind: I thought that true experience must consist of walking the streets of London observing the amazing diversity of life and experiencing sudden moments of being, ‘apparitions in the crowd' and so on.
I was doing a doctorate, so I had infinite time and little money. Each day I intended to sit in the British Library and devour classics of verse and prose but London was simply too distracting. So I wandered around Bloomsbury, staring up at grand facades and thinking about Virginia Woolf and her friends. I perceived the city as a many-layered place, and I was attracted by this sense of the weight of ages, all the lives that had been passed here, the work that had been done, and the millions now spilling along the streets. As part of my dutiful observance of the modernist creed I spent long hours sitting in cafes, overhearing fragments of conversations and imagining that if I heard enough of these fragments I would understand things better.
At that time, I had a thousand impulses and ideas and yet I couldn't really produce anything. That might be as much a part of youth as city life; certainly I was turning swift circles, looking busy while achieving little. In a burst of distracted energy I had written a novel, of sorts, but inevitably enough I couldn't persuade anyone to publish it. So I signed on at a temping agency and got some secretarial work. I had a decent job as a secretary at the National Theatre, with an unusually humane boss. He would walk past my computer and see my novel, which I was re-writing in a futile enough way, on my screen. ‘I'm terribly sorry to break your concentration,' he would say politely, ‘but when you have a moment could you possibly type a letter?'
Yet, something was awry. My pace was ridiculous; I was simply doing everything too fast. I suffered a series of accidents caused by my general carelessness and my obsession with speed. I was cycling furiously one day and was almost killed as a lorry changed lanes suddenly. My bicycle was dragged into the wheels of the lorry, and I somehow threw myself to one side. I was left lying on the side of the road, next to the mangled wreckage of my bike. I was chastened by that, but I still couldn't quite calm down. A few weeks later I was knocked off my bicycle again and this time I had to spend some weeks in bed recovering from my injuries. That period of enforced idleness quite changed me. I became contrite and felt as if I had just fallen out of love. I had never much minded being woken at dawn by the noise of the city, the shriek of brakes and general clatter beneath my window, but now as the familiar sounds disturbed me I turned my face to the wall and tried to go back to sleep. I lost my curiosity and wonder and for the first time I felt as if the city was a predator. The vastness and indifference I had previously admired seemed more like malevolence and I even managed to add agoraphobia to my general malaise.
I decided I needed to escape from London to another city. So I spent some time contriving a plan and eventually found something to do in New York, where I assumed I would feel invigorated by novelty and difference. For a while this worked, but once I stopped living cinematically, in that pseudo-reality in which everything is scenery, I began to notice the man who was paid nothing to walk two pampered dogs every day; the other man who fished through rubbish bins for food; the many people who were slowly dying in the gutters, the crazy density and the way my flat was infested with cockroaches and rats.
I had a small moment of clarity one day when I asked for a tuna bagel and received the meal of a giant - a massive pile of tuna, slapped around with a bottle or two of mayonnaise, ladelled onto a bloated piece of bread and the whole thing wrapped in miles of cling film and plastic bag and finished off with an enormous paper carrier. It was then that I finally realised that the city is a big sprawling shrine to modern capitalism and consumerism and everyone living there is forced to some degree to worship these forces. You can't live in the city and not consume vigorously, devoutly.
For some years after that I kept thinking about how I might escape city life, but all I really did was move from one city to another. I lived in Munich, Oxford, and Paris. I experimented briefly with Berlin, Tallinn and Sydney. Sometimes I thought I could stay in one of the places I had found, but usually I would decide I had to go back to London again. I spent a year in Oslo and that was a wonderful place. The setting of Oslo is more beautiful than any other city I've seen - a clear blue fjord on one side, grand ancient mountains rising on the other. But I ran out of money and had to find something else to do. In my many returns to London I have tried out various parts of the city - Brixton, Bethnal Green, Angel, Hendon, Clapham, Kilburn, Camden, Ladbroke Grove. Always there is the honeymoon period, the thrill of exploring a new area, but this is quickly replaced by the now-familiar sense of unease.
In recent years I have managed to spend some of my time in a rented cottage in the Lake District. I was nervous about the prospect at first; I thought I might feel not-at-home here too and then I would be forced to acknowledge that this feeling had nothing to do with location or the city at all, and was simply my natural mode and thereby inescapable. I thought I might blow my whole theory apart, prove that I had been aspiring to an illusion all these years. And my escape is only cosmetic, in a sense. I am still bound by the rules of contemporary society, and because I rent my cottage I have no control over how it is heated and lit, what mega-corporations sustain my existence there. It is not a utopia by any means; the surrounding farmers struggle to make money and work constantly. The village is half empty most of the time, because so many of the houses are second homes. The school closed down a few years ago, and now the few remaining children are driven miles by bus each morning.
And yet when night falls there is only darkness, without the sallow flicker of neon, and I have become aware of the seasons because they are painted so vividly across the countryside. We are reasonably isolated, but not lonely at all. I find that waking to the sound of a rising chorus of birdsong and the contrapuntal boom of the river, and walking over the broad backs of the fells, is so astonishingly consoling that it makes me embarrassed about how simple my desires really are. I perceive that it does me, at least, some good to live quietly and at a distance from others. It is a small revelation, and one I could have gained by reading anything from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Virgil to good old Wordsworth. Yet there are things we nod sagely at and things we really feel, and anyway I began as I wrote as a paid-up urbanist, deeply in love with the noise and hustle of the city. Now, every day I feel a weird sense of joy, or rather a joy which I am not yet accustomed to, though I know that this equilibrium may be temporary, that before too long I may have to go back to London again."
