You needn’t be a le Carré nut to enjoy it, though, and while we’re undoubtedly in something of a glut of sequels and reboots, it’s far from unimaginative fan service. A loving tribute to a complicated father (as Harkaway’s dedication seems to acknowledge) as well as an excellent novel in its own right, and only the first of a new series, at least to judge from a broad hint dropped in the end matter. I can’t wait.
Annie Ernaux writes, early on in The Use of Photography, that words give her a more real sense of time than images (looking at the headlines of a newspaper in a photograph). In this book, the presence of images provides material to write against, dispute, and reinterpret; to invite the opportunity to write something a different truth. To bring the outside world in beyond the still lives, to enlarge the stories beyond the distance emanated in the photographs.
“To open up your writing space is more violent than to open up your sex,” A. muses, fondling the intellectual frisson of writing with a collaborator. Even so, the reader is conscripted into the co-creation of the book’s erotic imaginary. Like a communicant at Mass, the reader receives the bread. It is then upon us to do the work of imagining the flesh. In Ernaux’s words, “the highest degree of reality […] will only be attained if those written photos are transformed into other scenes in the reader’s memory or imagination.”
The roots of modern horror lie in the British Isles, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But Americans have made the genre their own, and despite the universal, border-crossing fears of death, pain, and decay that horror exploits, it’s American horror that dominates the form now. As Jeremy Dauber’s American Scary: A History of Horror, From Salem to Stephen King and Beyond points out, American writers, dramatists, and filmmakers would seize on Shelley and Stoker’s ideas. But also crucial to the American psyche is a historical trauma, the Salem witch trials, replete with the trappings of fictional scariness, but with an all-too-real human cost. It’s in that nightmare that the real heart of American horror beats.
The Golden Road is, then, a multifarious and engaging narrative, which, like Indian trade, takes us in many directions, peppered with lively stories and charismatic individuals. It will make you look at the world differently.