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Afterlife

Afterlife (Picador, 2009) was my first novel. It grew out of a continuing interest in the sense of waste and unfulfilment widespread among those coming of age in the first half of the 1970s, as the energy of the previous decade died away without the immediate emergence of another cultural phase. Disappointment is common to all generations, but I wanted to explore the particular character of my contemporaries’ discontent, through the conflict between talent and ambition, and between desire and hatred, and to consider the price of staking everything on poetry when the art may not even prove to be its own reward. The narrator, Martin, revisits the events of more than thirty years before, in the heatwave of 2006, when the tensions in a group of Cambridge friends transplanted to the Welsh borders reached a violent drug-fuelled conclusion. At the centre is the poet Jane Jarmain, who since her early death has become famous, even legendary, her work exploited by her one-time partner, Alex. When Alex revisits the scenes of his youth, a reckoning with the past looms. Martin’s account of things is in one a sense a leisurely repentance, and in another an intimate act of revenge. Escape from the fevered, hallucinatory landscape of the past is not, it seems, an option. With a cast of characters including authors, critics, graduate students and other ‘brilliantly-sketched Seventies grotesques’ (as one reviewer put it), as well as a series of precisely wrought parodies, the novel relies on careful research for its meticulous recreation of literary culture of the 1970s.