Marguerite has been confined to the attic of her stately Chelsea home. Her mother, Cécile, both captor and carer, has done this for Marguerite’s own good. The reasons behind this detention have their origins far beyond the cramped attic which becomes Marguerite’s entire universe.
Marguerite’s only company is a gargantuan copy of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management – a fundamental guide to the culinary and social expectations of wifedom – a sewing machine, a carrion crow in the rafters, and herself. The latter, she will find – as her seclusion terrifyingly lengthens beyond comprehension – will begin to transform itself in unspeakable fashion.
So goes Heather Parry’s latest novel, Carrion Crow, a brilliant Russian-doll tale of confinement. Each restriction on sexual, economic or emotional freedom is nested inside an even more brutal creation, and the novel uncups each of them with precision and great intelligence. Marguerite – queer, desiring, seeking her independence – becomes captive to Cécile, who herself fell foul of the unjust expectations of Victorian society.
What we finally uncover is a dark but primal truth – people will always find a way to freedom. Of any kind, real or imagined, through sane or insane methods – and most often, it’s found in the foggy landscape between the two.
Parry’s work is intimately concerned with the body and its contexts. Her first novel, Orpheus Builds a Girl, was followed by a short story collection, This is My Body, Given For You, and a work of non-fiction, Electric Dreams: On Sex Robots and the Failed Promises of Capitalism.
This body-of-work is, if you’ll forgive the clumsy reversal, about the work-of-body – its productions, desires, interactions, and most resolutely, the politics of those productions. In this, Carrion Crow is a vital, and wickedly wretched, new addition to the lineage. Parry’s impressive talent is like a particularly well-maintained Mother-of-Vinegar, from whose sour brew comes Carrion Crow, if we’re being Beeton about it.
If this wasn’t enough (Parry is also a prolific editor, chiefly for Extra Teeth magazine) – her Substack, titled ‘general observations on eggs’, finds her writing widely on contemporary culture, from Nabokov, travels in Tuscany, literary theory, the politics of social media, and the general ineptitude of the crew aboard Ridley’s Prometheus.
Parry’s finger is always firmly on the pulse, and Carrion Crow, despite its historical setting seething in smog and muck, feels shockingly immediate – in theme, style, and execution. The throb which animates our most contemporary conversations has its origins in an artery that snakes its way back into the past. It’s this historically contextualised politics, Parry suggests, that allows us to follow the blood-drum into a better future.
Interview by James Taylor
Glasgow Review of Books (GRB): Thanks so much for taking the time to chat with us, Heather. For readers perhaps unfamiliar – who was Isabella Beeton, the author of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management? How did you discover her, and why did you decide to give her (or rather, her work) such a force of gravity in Carrion Crow?
Heather Parry (HP): Isabella Beeton was a hugely popular domestic columnist in the Victorian era, who married a publisher and began writing for one of his publications – though she was young, and newly married, so almost all the recipes she published and the advice she gave was gleaned from other sources, or sent in by readers.
This didn’t stop her from publishing her collected columns as Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management in 1861, when she was just 25 years old, and the book became a sensation; within eight years it had sold two million copies, and it has remained in print since 1861 (as of 2016, at least). You can’t really overestimate her influence on generations of British women who were in charge of a household.
My involvement with Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management started when I was a kid; it was one of the cookbooks I remember my mum having, the others being a Delia cookbook and a thick pamphlet-style book from the Be-Ro flour company, kept in a drawer and much consulted.
I can’t remember ever looking into the Beeton book, it just sort of sat there on a shelf, this imposing tome, looking out of time and out of place. As I got more interested in both the intricacies and class implications of food in my thirties, I bought myself a vintage copy of the 1100-page book and became fascinated with the information therein – not just recipes, though there are almost nine hundred of them, but the advice she gives around rearing children, keeping babies alive, feeding a family on a budget, arranging the household staff and the ways she tries to educate young married women on butchery and other macabre realities.
Its classic title page defines it as not just a cookbook but ‘a history of the origin, properties, and uses of all things connected with the home life and comfort’ and, while thinking about what is and isn’t included in such a book, I started to realise that, perhaps without knowing it, and like so many other writers in the heart of empire, Isabella had created an enormous and influential work of fiction, that of the ‘proper’ household, in a time when massive wealth was being transferred from the colonies to the homeland at the expense of millions.
The book is full of practical information and often a surprisingly modern attitude to motherhood (without any of the haranguing and blame that is common), and it talks a lot about thrift and getting the most out of whatever food you have, but it undeniably forms part of a social history that ignores the less savoury aspects of Britain’s burgeoning wealth, instead creating for the aspirational Victorian woman an often oppressive model of ‘properness’ into which many women before me have stepped. As the story of Marguerite started to come into view, I realised I would have to put this book, as a character of sorts, at the centre of a novel, one that explored what such a book of fictions might do to a person, and a family.
GRB: In an essay you wrote a couple of years ago, you explore Beeton’s concept of ‘functional derangement’ and its relation to the contemporary human condition, which you define as the expectation to ‘produce, to grind, to cope, but in a context that no sane mind can even attempt to make sense of’. How, for you, does Beeton’s ‘functional derangement’ manifest in the modern day, compared to, or considering, the world of Marguerite?
HP: The original quote is from a section of the book on motherhood, specifically a section which strongly advises against what we’d now call co-sleeping, on the basis that so many mothers unwittingly suffocate their babies in their sleep. But she actually makes another point more strongly, and it’s that babies shouldn’t be allowed to suckle their mothers while the mother is sleeping or trying to do so, and she advises against it so aggressively because this practice, this giving in to a child’s needs at any point of the day and night to the detriment of her own health and ability to rest, will only detract from the mother’s wellbeing. The whole quote at the end of the paragraph is incredible:
In fact, she wakes languid and unrefreshed from her sleep, with febrile symptoms and hectic flushes, caused by her baby vampire, who, while dragging from her her health and strength, has excited in itself a set of symptoms directly opposite, but fraught with the same injurious consequences – “functional derangement.”
Really here, what she is talking about is the labour that is forced upon a woman when the wellbeing of others is placed above her own, and this point feels so startlingly modern that you can’t help but extrapolate it to both the identical and analogous situations occurring today: firstly, that of mothers who are told that at every moment they must attend to their children to their own physical detriment no matter what; secondly, the stripping back of women’s rights on the basis that women matter less than either the foetuses growing inside them or the wills and desires of men around them; and thirdly, the situation the contemporary worker, increasingly forced to labour for the financial betterment of capitalists when they should be at rest, being driven into the ground financially, mentally and physically so that the staggeringly rich can compound their wealth and pay for political influence, with which they will further cement their class and political positions. I can think of no better symbol of a modern capitalist than a ‘baby vampire’, ‘dragging from [the worker] her health and strength’.
Where the world of Marguerite differs from the current world is, I think, a question of the social contract. In the Victorian era, Britain had become the first real global industrial power, thanks to the murderous machinery of the Empire, and with its burgeoning wealth the country could promise its citizens a sort of blanket, trickle-down betterment – which was real, and did significantly improve living conditions – but also an ignorance of how this wealth arose and the promise of class improvement through hard work, the latter of which was largely a fiction.
The narrative in this country for a long time has been that if you simply work hard, struggle, educate yourself and sacrifice within the capitalist structure you will gain capital – most obviously, this has been promised (and given) through private property, rather than allowing workers control of the means of production.
Between Marguerite’s era and now, some people have been allowed to amass great wealth from humble beginnings as a sort of proof of this fiction, and you can see the legacy of that today, when the middle classes spend an enormous amount of time arguing that actually everyone could better their conditions if only they didn’t, for instance, eat so much avocado or go on holiday or if they worked more hours in a day, ignoring the vast class machinery at play to keep some people at the top and some people at the bottom.
But in Marguerite’s day, it was easier to make people buy into this social contract, and the class system as a whole, as their conditions were broadly improving relative to the rest of the world, and this improvement was paid for by stolen wealth from the colonies. The rate of profit was enormous, the wealth of the capitalist class swelling massively.
Within the middle and capitalist classes, reproductive labour was mostly delegated to poorly-paid household staff, the female head of the house taking on a more managerial role, and that household machinery would be seen as valuable, a crucial element of producing the next striving, thriving British generation, a generation of producers, industrialists, creators, exploiters. The fetishisation of industriousness filtered through to the household.
Now, things are very different. The Empire is all but non-existent, the rate of profit has vastly fallen (as Marx said it would), living conditions are actually diminishing compared to our parents’ generations and there is no longer any (wilful) ignorance as to where all this wealth came from in the first place. Reproductive labour is devalued but still demanded, relegated to work that someone (still typically a woman) is supposed to do outside of their waged labour, highly gendered but secondary to this waged labour, because it’s from this that the richest most readily extract surplus value.
Even the crumbs of private property, thrown so readily to the masses in the Thatcher era, have been monopolised such that even people who have bought into the social contract – who have gone to university at a cost of tens of thousands, married, got a ‘good’ 9-5 job, had a child, played by all the rules – still cannot buy their way in.
So what we have is an increasingly indebted working class (‘working class’ here in its broadest sense, to mean everyone who exchanges labour for wages, as opposed to the capitalist class who extract value from their workers and their capital interests), arguing with itself over who is defined in what class terms, being forced to work more hours with less remuneration, paying sky-high rents to live where the better-paid work is, encouraged to have children but forced to remain in work and to pay astronomical childcare fees (alongside astronomical bills), their pensions being diminished, their working lives extended, their leisure time shrinking and the cost of leisure increasing, their health suffering and the cost of ill health increasing, all trapped within this system with less and less ability to have any effect on it or resist it thanks to anti-democratic laws and policy – and a burning knowledge of the injustice of where this country’s wealth came from and continues to come from. We all have to go on, and keep producing. This is what I mean by ‘functional derangement’ in our society. We are all that breastfeeding mother, being extracted from while she sleeps.
Most notably, for me, at the end of that section, what Isabella is saying is that the taking of energy from the mother will also derange the child, because the milk is taken under duress, when the mother is not healthy enough to give it. I love the vampire reference, because what she’s really saying here is that what you’re feeding from matters. If your source of nourishment is unhealthy, you will be unhealthy. The same goes for capitalism, which is why our current billionaire class are desperate, clinging, pathetic and deranged: because they feed from us, and we all are made so by this system.
GRB: The real life case of Blanche Monnier, the ‘Séquestrée de Poitiers’ echoes through Carrion Crow, as do the figures of Bertha Mason and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Did these cultural spectres, what Gilbert and Gubar call ‘the madwomen in the attic,’ inform how you approached the world of Carrion Crow and your development of Marguerite?
HP: Absolutely, especially Blanche Monnier and Bertha Mason. I’ve only latterly become aware of how many parallels exist between the lives of Marguerite and Gilman; when I wrote the book I knew nothing about her beyond having read ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ years ago. Of course the ‘madwoman in the attic’ is central to gothic fiction and therefore to my approach to literature – not least because as a concept it explores who is made disposable within certain systems, and how we use pathologizing language to exclude and oppress, which are both things I am very interested in.
Jane Eyre’s influence on almost all of contemporary literature means it’s the sort of book that hangs over everything you do as a writer; it is a fundamental part of the landscape on which you build your own narrative house.
The story of Monnier was the trigger for the development of Marguerite’s story; I had been wanting to write something about women’s violence, about mothers and daughters, because I was growing frustrated at what I saw as a blanket infantilisation of women and an a propensity to excuse even our worst actions, driven by this idea of the sort of divine mother figure, which finds a platform these days amongst wellness influencers and anti-vaxxers.
The idea that the mother is always gentle, always knows better, can never choose maliciously or poorly for her child. This, I think, is so dangerous because it stigmatises those who have been on the receiving end of maternal violence, and it makes it difficult to seek safety and justice for those children.
I have seen women do terrible things to their daughters (and daughters to their mothers) and little is ever discussed of this. I came upon the story of Blanche and it gave a focus to what I was trying to do, not least because it plays into so many tropes of Gothic fiction that even the true story becomes fantastical. I know very little about Blanche and her family, their context and their story, just that this happened to her and it was her mother and brother who imprisoned her. Carrion Crow is an attempt to draw a scaffolding around such almost unreal acts of violence and oppression, to draw real truths out of a fictional history.
GRB: The body, and its boggy, endless landscape, has always been central to your writing. Here – the queer body, the desiring body, the consuming body, is devastatingly restricted to conform to the requirements of a patriarchal society. For all its latterly disturbing illustrations, would you agree that Carrion Crow is often a celebration of the boundless possibilities of the body, particularly with regard to Marguerite and Alouette?
HP: Yes, I think I would, and in fact all the disturbing parts are also part of that same celebration. For me you can’t really extricate the thrillingly sexual possibilities of the body from the possibilities that elicit disgust in us more often.
Every wet, warm orifice or organ is teeming with bacteria and microlife; every part that is sexualised can become infected, full of tumours, afflicted by open sores. I think as you get older you realise that you can become (and often have been) indoctrinated into believing in certain myths about the body, about food and attraction and sex and health, and that many of these myths have robbed you of a lot of potential pleasure, and queerness in particular will bring you to this realisation (though it isn’t limited to it).
I think we really do a disservice to most people (queer or not), by allowing the mainstream narrative to be that sex starts with A and goes through B and C and then ends in D (no pun intended), and by placing these weird taboos on bodily functions generally, convincing people that they have to spend untold amounts of money and energy removing hair or growing hair or trying to remove smells or masking smells with other smells or defying gravity or making parts bigger or smaller or whatever else we’ll come up with next week – basically, by telling people that they are unfuckable and unloveable in their natural state, as if the normal human body is some sort of original sin.
The truth of course is that people have been fucking and loving all sorts of bodies for time immemorial, and not doing one thing or another to your body might make you fall outside of the incredibly thin and superficial boundaries of a certain fleeting idea of “hotness” as policed by some sexless dweebs on the internet but actually, it has very little to do with how attractive people find you.
Each body is considered attractive and amazing to someone, regardless, and they should always be considered wondrous. It’s incredible that our bodies make nutritionally-dense milk and that parts of them become pleasurably engorged and open and whatnot, but it’s just as incredible that they make phlegm in order to carry harmful germs away from your valuable organs, or pump blood to one part or another in the result of things like poisoning, or create highly-pickable scabs over open wounds, underneath which they will generate brand new, much-needed skin cells.
The physical body is a universe made up of an almost incomprehensible amount of constant process and systems, each one standing at the precipice of collapse, attack or malfunction. There are around thirty trillion cells in a human body, every single one of those engaged in a near-endless process of cellular turnover. The fact that we look at our bodies and see them as largely static singular entities is a grand self-delusion. Any day that a person is even moderately healthy is really a miracle, when you think about it.
GRB: In a novel which explores consumption and its restrictions, food, and the luxurious descriptions of it, encompass the writing of Carrion Crow, from chapter headings to indulgently long lists. What does food – external physical items absorbed into the internal boundaries of the body – symbolise in this world of limitation?
HP: I think it’s best not to see the food is this novel as symbolic but as meaningful, as it is outside fiction. Food is so strongly ‘classed’ (and by that I mean made to denote class) that almost every dish you can think of has some prior meaning assigned to it in society. And it is not only the dish itself; it’s where you got the ingredients from, how much of a portion you serve, how much of a portion you eat, where you eat it and who with – everything about it.
The same is true in the world of Carrion Crow, and – through the application of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management to both Cécile and Marguerite – it has become a shared language. Cécile’s food language changed as her class position did and now she cannot bear to give that up even as she and it are both diminished, and as she wields it as a weapon against her daughter.
Throughout the novel, the serving and presentation of food allows people to perform wealth and hospitality as well as power, as well as real love, as much in the kitchens of the Cheyne Row house and the house in Scotland, as in the ballrooms of the wealthy and in the pages of Mrs Beeton. Figuring out which is which – and what these foods, and meanings, do to the bodies as they are consumed – is part of the novel’s trajectory.
GRB: Cécile and Marguerite are just two characters in a book filled with warped maternal dynamics, both visited on Cécile in her youth and which Marguerite tries to fulfill in her seclusion. In a world in which patriarchal systems have exploited Cécile too, it’s doubly tragic that it is through Cécile in which they are constructed for Marguerite. Would you say that both these women are victims of the same societal apparatus?
HP: Yes, I would – though they don’t experience it identically, of course. I don’t think it’s unusual that victims of a system often become the means through which that system is perpetuated, consciously or not. And I would say as well that the men in the book are also victims of the same societal apparatus, because it is not just Cécile that does monstrous things to her offspring, and in fact there is much greater violence done by other characters in the book, in the name of the same social machinery, and the act of undertaking this violence causes moral and emotional injury to those individuals as well, even as they amass wealth and status because of them.
In a perverse way, you could say that it is Cécile’s capacity for love that causes her to behave so abominably towards Marguerite – if she did not care, if she had not been irreparably damaged by these systems and so desperate for her daughter to escape her fate, she would not have attempted to subvert Marguerite’s marriage, whoever she believes Marguerite to be oriented towards. But then again, it all depends on what we believe Cécile’s intentions to truly be; sometimes, love makes us selfish, and desperate not to be left, and trapped in cycles of abuse. Love is not always a harmless thing.
GRB: ‘Gothic’ is a term often applied to your work – is it one you embrace, or seek to subvert? In a year bookended by Poor Things and Nosferatu, the Gothic treatment seems to be the most useful instrument in taking the contemporary temperature . . . why might that be?
HP: It is definitely one I embrace, for the simple fact that I think it is broadly accurate (and it certainly is the genre that’s been most influential on me), but I also think there is a subversion, though it is not intentional.
I don’t go into these stories thinking I am going to write a Gothic book, and if I did I think I would find that enormously restrictive – similarly, I would find it restrictive if I was trying to intentionally subvert the genre. I can’t write to prompts, I can’t make a story fit someone else’s template, I basically can’t be told what to do. (Yes, I’m a Scorpio.) It’s just that the topics I am interested in, the atmospheres and voices I like to explore best, are ones rooted in the Gothic.
Of course, there are aspects of my books that go outside of the strict Gothic mould, and the three fiction projects I’m working on at the moment are quite far outside it, with some similar elements. Really, though, I don’t concern myself with how these books might be classified – you can’t, I think, or rather I can’t.
The stories that I want to tell will be told how I think they can be best told and people can decide what they are later. I’ve been described as a horror novelist, Gothic novelist, historical novelist – you can’t too readily identify with any of them, as it restricts what you feel able to do. But Carrion Crow is undoubtedly a Gothic novel, I think, and I’m glad it is.
For me, the reason that we haven’t grown tired of the Gothic after 260 years is that it is primarily a genre discussing dying powers, and that is an evergreen concept. The big old Gothic house, the barren moors, the cobweb-laden attics, the crumbling structures: these are all symbols of enormous societal shifts, of old money and old power making way (through force or political change or economics or circumstance) for something new, yet not being willing to give up their influence.
In that regard, we live in a very Gothic time – there is only so long that money can be gathered up from the masses to be deposited into the pockets of a handful of the megarich before the regular people revolt. That time has been put off and put off and put off by a political system that is increasingly engineered to disenfranchise and disempower normal people, so we are in a very strange moment whereby the system’s legitimacy is long dead but the people have been convinced they don’t have the power to change it and its totems, its figureheads refuse to die.
Capitalism is a disintegrating house surrounded by a garden on fire, and we’re forced to live in it alongside ghosts and vampires. To be a massive cliché and quote Gramsci – ‘The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters’.
GRB: Even before Cécile imprisons Marguerite, the limits of her freedom were clear – her lover, Alouette, and her proposed husband, Mr. Lewis, were parallel nodes in the impossible choices she had to make, between her desires and economic and social stability. The end of the novel being secret for now – is true freedom ever possible, in the world of Carrion Crow?
HP: It’s difficult to answer this question without going down the ‘none of us are free under this system’ route, which is not wrong but it does single out the current system when really, all ways of arranging a society require the giving up of some freedoms in order for us to cohabit in civic space with many thousands or millions of strangers.
The point of opting-in to society is that you accept some restrictions on your freedom, and the act of governing (in the most theoretical sense) is to constantly interrogate what we jointly believe those restrictions to be. In that sense, no one in Carrion Crow is free, and no one alive today is free.
But I tend to approach the concept of freedom from a more existential angle. If ‘freedom’ is being able to create your own meaning in life, recognising that you have choices in every single moment, in response to every single thing that happens, and that through these choices you make and remake yourself and can reconstruct yourself in an entirely different model, becoming a different person through making different choices – then yes, I think there is freedom for Marguerite. You could say that she exercised her freedom in that book by making the choices she did, even if those choices involved self-delusion and self-sacrifice, as so many often do.
GRB: While it might not read like a traditional Marxist text on the surface, Carrion Crow has so much to say about class, capitalism, and the body under labour, and you’ve written extensively on it elsewhere. Would you say that Carrion Crow, in its exploration of women’s bodies as produced and productive under a gendered economic reality, is a work of capitalist resistance?
HP: I am hesitant to use the term ‘resistance’, because I think we have done to that word what we always do now, which is to strip it of its real meaning, subsume it within a consumerist lexicon that has commodified social justice language, and apply it in such a manner that defangs it completely, telling ourselves that, for instance, buying a candle and an eye mask from a company that employs slave labour somehow constitutes ‘resistance’.
But I do think that one of the aims of Carrion Crow is to show that none of us are apart from our class position, that our class position is primarily economic (not, as we constantly waste our time discussing, whether or not you eat kale), and that the effects of this are pretty much inescapable, trickling down to all of our interpersonal relationships as well as how we move through the world.
I don’t believe that novels should function as moral fables, and I think that novels that seek to do that as their primary concern are often bad. But as my frankly oppressively long answer to your second question probably shows, Marxism is how I understand and critique our society so that will always form the foundation of my fiction, no matter how well I do or don’t cover over it.
GRB: What preoccupies you about exploring the historical moment? Both Orpheus and Carrion are set in centuries prior to ours, but their concerns are, of course, absolutely (and perhaps depressingly) timeless. What brings you back to exploring the past as a way of explaining the present?
HP: Honestly, I really don’t see myself as a historical novelist (perhaps incorrectly), but I am drawn back to the (relatively recent) past again and again, perhaps because it feels easier to extrapolate meaning from things that have already happened – deduction is the only strictly logical type of reasoning, after all.
I am really into a bunch of novelists that captured not only their immediate present but the encroaching future too – especially J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick – but I admire them so much because I simply don’t have the confidence to cast out into the unknown like that. Not to say that the past is a matter of fact – the many and varied interpretations of it disprove that – but I think it is at least less slippery than either the present or the future.
I really did not enjoy history as a kid or as a young adult so maybe my fascination lies in coming to historical (and historic political) study quite late in the day. I really was dragged kicking and screaming to it, but then of course you realise that all the roots of the present moment lie in the past, recent or otherwise, and you don’t truly understand anything if you don’t know where it has come from.
Even things like AI and the obsession with sex robots (which I’ve written about in book form before) are really rooted in our history of colonisation, of creating highly exploitable ‘unpeople’, tied yet again to capitalist interests.
It’s only when your view of the world is really rooted in its historical context that you can begin to devise the best way forward. And I think that it is easier to talk about the present moment when it is displaced into a story about the past, because you can sort of sneak your points past an unsuspecting reader. Everyone expects novels set in this time to be making grand sweeping points about how we live now. It’s less expected in a historical novel so potentially more impactful, but less obvious.
The absolute last thing I ever want to do is patronise or preach to my reader, because I hate it when writers do that to me. Instead I want to be given enough crumbs to find my own way to the meaning of a story, and my favourite artworks do that, often through setting stories in the past. That’s what I want my books to do. And honestly, I just really don’t want to write a novel with the internet in it.
GRB: Books like Carrion Crow feel so important in a period in time where we slide closer to outright fascism, anti-intellectualism, regulation and restriction, particularly with regards to sexuality and the gendered body. Do you feel that literature will continue to be a necessary tool of social liberation going forward?
HP: You know, I feel really conflicted about this because we live in a time where people – and by ‘people’, I mean funding bodies and institutions, and even the general public when it comes to matters of needing to fund art centrally – don’t seem to believe in art for art’s sake.
You notice that demands for social, political or community engagement are tacked on to call-outs for writers in residence or as a condition of funding, which I think diminishes the arts and turns writers into pseudo-social workers, in a context where neither writers nor social workers are being paid properly for the work that they are actually qualified to do.
However, this particular moment is one dealing in the realm of the fantastical, and narrative is such a massive part of that: fascism creates a series of flattering fictions that convince the already oppressed that their oppressor is beneath them, not above, and that is a form of writing as much as anything else. But as we see every day, simply countering lies with truth does not work. So where does that leave the writer?
I think literature can either be escapist or socially engaging, and though both have their place in a future that strives towards a more humane, fair, equal series of societies, for me the most worthwhile literature is the latter – fiction that moves people but also affects them and shows people things they might otherwise not (want to) see. Back in the mid 1970s, Ballard described modern life as a “debauch of fictions”, and said that the function of the contemporary writer is not to add more fiction to the world but rather “to seek its abstraction, to direct an enquiry aimed at recovering elements of reality”.
For me, this has only become more true in the last five decades, to the extent that we’re not only living a world of fictions but also a world of endless performance, one that leaves us depleted, misinformed and ultimately apathetic.
In this context, the job of the novelist becomes that of illuminating, of disentangling some kind of truth from the morass of fictions, abstracting it and presenting it in such a way that it can be discovered by the reader, through emotional engagement, as truth. Ballard said that he always wants to provoke his reader and that’s something I strongly feel about my own work: I want it to provoke, by making the reader feel but also by making the reader see. Once you see, and really feel the impact of what you’re seeing, I think it’s then that you begin to act.
GRB: Heather Parry, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with The Glasgow Review of Books.
HP: It has been a delight. Thank you.
Carrion Crow is published on the 27th February 2025, by Doubleday.
A full list of Heather Parry’s launch events across the U.K can be found here.
About our interviewer
James Taylor is an editorial assistant, journalist, and former Glasgow bookseller. He has chaired events with, and interviewed authors such as Carmen Maria Machado, Andrew O’Hagan, Graeme Armstrong, Coco Mellors, Sean Hewitt, Joshua Jones, Rodge Glass and Nicola Dinan, among others. You can find him @james_angtay.
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