In retrospect, though, there’s something almost quaint about the oral-culture hypothesis. We might say that it was largely developed during the Zuckerberg Parenthesis—a period of history, inaugurated by the invention of Facebook, in which social media ruled. No one inside this parenthesis imagined how much of a threat artificial intelligence would soon pose to the conversational internet. We have already entered a world in which the people you encounter online are sometimes not actually people; instead, they are conjured using A.I. that’s been trained on unimaginably vast quantities of text. It’s as though the books have come to life, and are getting revenge by creating something new—a marriage of text, thought, and conversation that will revise the utility and value of the written word.
This constant return to the scene of writing—this demand that we grasp the text not just as a written thing (this being the demand of classical postmodernism, with its delight in self-reflexive textual play) but also as a writing, as the product of a writer struggling with her material, encoding that struggle into the text itself, and producing some unaccountable hybridity in excess of the “real”—is Lacey’s great breakthrough. Coupled with that is the refusal of the conflation of the person writing (the author-as-mere-author) with the act of writing itself. To write is to pass the material of one’s life through an inscrutable matrix that somehow defies the laws of physics by yielding something more than what went in. In this mysterious sense, something happens when a person writes that is profoundly impersonal. If there is a primal scene of contemporary autofiction, it is this passage through writing from the merely personal to the impersonal—and Lacey has pointed the way there precisely by refusing to write a properly autofictional work.
For those of us who’ve lost faith in fiction at some point in our lives as writers or readers, Lacey’s highwire act of juxtaposition in The Möbius Book serves to rekindle our conviction in the value of its ability to reveal rather than to obscure the mysteries of human life. “At most, a religious service might change its attendants, just as art can change its viewers,” she writes, “and perhaps the thing that religion and art share is that mysterious progression: the emotional and visceral process of one idea breaking down to make way for the entrance of another.” And in this multifaceted and endlessly rewarding text, breakdown comes to represent not only rupture but also the tenuous beauty of belief in something entirely imaginary, even after it’s already been lost.
Old place names recall old ways of belonging. They often reference characteristics of the land or its use, the people who lived there, or the non-human lives they were enmeshed with. A great many of these vivifying genii loci are birds, although their identities aren’t always obvious because language evolves over time. We need a guide.
Enter Michael Warren: teacher of English, amateur ornithologist and a man who lives in a Britain different to the one most of us inhabit: a medieval one, which by some magic has “survived in another dimension parallel to our own”. The gift he bestows in this gorgeous book is that, by the end, we live there too, newly able to read the growth rings of place, and to perceive an alternative land shimmering over the one we already know.