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Tell
‘I can talk for as long as you like, no problem. You’ll just have to tell me when to stop. How far back do you want to take it?’
Tell is a probing and compelling examination of the ways in which we make stories of our own lives and of other people’s. Jonathan Buckley’s novel is structured as a series of interview transcripts with a woman who worked as a gardener for a wealthy businessman and art collector who has mysteriously disappeared.
The joint winner of The Novel Prize, Tell is a work of strange and intoxicating immediacy that explores money, art and industry, the intimacy and distance between social classes, and the complex fluidity of memory.
Praise for Jonathan
‘Buckley’s fiction is subtle and fastidiously low-key...every apparently loose thread, when tugged, reveals itself to be woven into the themes [and] gets better the more you allow it to settle in your mind.’ — Michel Faber, The Guardian
‘Exactly why Buckley is not already revered and renowned as a novelist in the great European tradition remains a mystery that will perhaps only be addressed at that final godly hour when all the overlooked authors working in odd and antique modes will receive their just rewards.’ — Ian Sansom, Times Literary Supplement
Tell is a probing and compelling examination of the ways in which we make stories of our own lives and of other people’s. Jonathan Buckley’s novel is structured as a series of interview transcripts with a woman who worked as a gardener for a wealthy businessman and art collector who has mysteriously disappeared.
The joint winner of The Novel Prize, Tell is a work of strange and intoxicating immediacy that explores money, art and industry, the intimacy and distance between social classes, and the complex fluidity of memory.
Praise for Jonathan
‘Buckley’s fiction is subtle and fastidiously low-key...every apparently loose thread, when tugged, reveals itself to be woven into the themes [and] gets better the more you allow it to settle in your mind.’ — Michel Faber, The Guardian
‘Exactly why Buckley is not already revered and renowned as a novelist in the great European tradition remains a mystery that will perhaps only be addressed at that final godly hour when all the overlooked authors working in odd and antique modes will receive their just rewards.’ — Ian Sansom, Times Literary Supplement
189 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 1, 2024
57 people are currently reading
1259 people want to read
About the author
Jonathan Buckley
76 books50 followersJonathan Buckley was born in Birmingham, grew up in Dudley, and studied English Literature at Sussex University, where he stayed on to take an MA. From there he moved to King’s College, London, where he researched the work of the Scottish poet/artist Ian Hamilton Finlay. After working as a university tutor, stage hand, maker of theatrical sets and props, bookshop manager, decorator and builder, he was commissioned in 1987 to write the Rough Guide to Venice & the Veneto.
He went on to become an editorial director at Rough Guides, and to write further guidebooks on Tuscany & Umbria and Florence, as well as contributing to the Rough Guide to Classical Music and Rough Guide to Opera.
His first novel, The Biography of Thomas Lang, was published by Fourth Estate in 1997. It was followed by Xerxes (1999), Ghost MacIndoe (2001), Invisible (2004), So He Takes The Dog (2006), Contact (2010) and Telescope (2011). His eighth novel, Nostalgia, was published in 2013.
From 2003 to 2005 he held a Royal Literary Fund fellowship at the University of Sussex, and from 2007 to 2011 was an Advisory Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, for whom he convenes a reading group in Brighton.
He went on to become an editorial director at Rough Guides, and to write further guidebooks on Tuscany & Umbria and Florence, as well as contributing to the Rough Guide to Classical Music and Rough Guide to Opera.
His first novel, The Biography of Thomas Lang, was published by Fourth Estate in 1997. It was followed by Xerxes (1999), Ghost MacIndoe (2001), Invisible (2004), So He Takes The Dog (2006), Contact (2010) and Telescope (2011). His eighth novel, Nostalgia, was published in 2013.
From 2003 to 2005 he held a Royal Literary Fund fellowship at the University of Sussex, and from 2007 to 2011 was an Advisory Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, for whom he convenes a reading group in Brighton.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 93 reviews
October 7, 2024
Shortlisted for the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize
Some of the stories that Ulla told Lara, things that Ulla had heard from Katia. It’s a bit pass-the-parcel isn’t it? Things will become clearer, I promise. We’ll have to make time for Ulla.
Jonathan Buckley's Tell was joint winner, from over 1,000 entries, of the 2022 Novel Prize, a biennial award for a book-length work of literary fiction written in English offering simultaneous publication by the three leading indy presses who run the prize - Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK & Ireland), Giramondo (Australia & New Zealand) and New Directions (US).
The judges at the time described the novel as follows:
The wealthy businessman, Curtis Doyle, made his fortune in a fashion business, running a chain of shops which bridge the gap between high fashion and affordibility, and now spends much of his time in his large Scottish estate, which is where our narrator, the interviewee, works. The novel opens:
FIRST SESSION
I can talk for as long as you like, no problem. You’ll just have to tell me when to stop. How far back do you want to take it? Because Lily is what it’s about, in my opinion. And the mother is part of the story too. Father too. Goes without saying. But maybe better to pick them up later. Shall we start with the crash? Seems an obvious place.
[Pause]
The interviewer, whose interjections if any are not recorded in the text, appears to be someone hoping to make a movie of Curtis's life and disappearance, rather than an investigator. The gardener's story roams over his late wife; their children including a step-daughter from a first marriage, the wives of the other two children, their sons; some key figures in Curtis's life (such as Karolina, his art dealer, and Lara who was herself writing a novel based on Curtis) and the internal-politics among the staff, particularly Curtis's driver, Asil, and a figure Harry (possibly the maintenance man) whose opinions she often quotes but then disowns.
But our interviewer, whose name we never learn, tell Curtis's story in a roundabout way, the "pick them up later" from her first words something of a signature, punchlines withheld that often turn out to be something of a damp squib, with perhaps was is unsaid or read between the lines (she seems rather obsessed with his love life, although attributes this to others) as significant. And much of her story is also indirect - what she heard from A who heard it from B, who was told by C etc. I would normally leap to the label of Bernhardesque but it almost reminder me more of Tiddler ('I heard it from a' - which I don't mean in a negative way).
The blurb refers to the novel as exploring wealth and the art world- I wasn't so convinced these were key elements, rather than background - but for me the novel's strength is about how stories are told and by who.
Some favourite passages:
On Lara's first novel, also based on a real-life figure but fictionalised:
Not sure, though, if she was really straight with the old lady. She said she told her she was going to write a book, but I can't imagine that Hilda ever saw the finished article, not with all the things she'd changed. One big thing in particular. A lot of it was true. The racy stuff. The modelling. Being a muse and all that. Her painting, and the career that never happened. The mother really was a translator and the father was in insurance. All true. But the thing is, they were never Jewish. Very much not, if you get my drift. The real Hilde ran away from Vienna all right, but it didn't have anything to do with the parents being Jewish. You wonder why she did that. Lara, I mean. For the reader's sympathy, I suppose. A cheap trick, some would say. Disrespectful. That said, Lara doesn't make the book-Lara a particularly attractive character. Pushy. Ambitious. Quite self-centred. She tells us too much about her feelings. She's less likeable than the Lara we knew. Or the Lara we met, I should say. The Lara in the book has the same name as the real one, but they're not identical. Similar, but not the same. For one thing, Lara Wyatt in the book has a husband. She talks to him about Hilda's life and how the book is going. Our Lara didn't have a husband. To be perfectly frank, I don't have much patience with all of that tricksy stuff. Can't see the point. 'It's me but it's not me. See how clever I'm being here.' If it's not you, why use the same name? Just tell it straight. Tell us the truth. Or make it all up. One or the other.
On the impossibility of telling your own story:
... because you can't see the back of your own head. You think because you're you, you've got access that other people don't, because they're on the outside and you're on the inside. But on the inside it can be darker than outside. And you're too close to what you're looking at. Like having your nose right up against a picture. You can't really see it. I'm going in circles here. Let's just accept that this is what Lara told us Curtis told her. We can only work with what we know. What we heard.
Having spent 200 pages describing what led up to Curtis's disappearance she acknowledges how stories tend to be reconstructed backwards from what happened:
Anyone who says they knew that a crisis was imminent is doing a bit of a Lara. But we all do it, to make things fit, in retrospect. I know that. Like when you take a photo of something from a distance, and things look closer to each other than they are in reality. When we look back, the perspective is all crushed up. Such and such a thin happened, but when we remember it we can't experience it again exactly as it was. We make a story of it. It's some thing we need to do. There has to be a build-up.
[Pause]
And the last conversation they heard Curtis having before he disappeared. Where the various members of Curtis's domestic staff each assume it was with someone they know, but the narrator acknowledges there are large parts of Curtis's life - his business, his house in London - to which they have no access:
He was yelling. Like I said, yelling was not really his style. Of course, he might not have been angry With the person on the other end of the line. Could have been the message that was making him angry, not the messenger. He was talking to Conrad, I suspect. Harry will tell you it must have been Jan, and Viv's idea was that it would have been Karolina, but it wasn't her, I'm positive. Beneath Karolina's dignity to get involved in anything that involved shouting. I reckon her pulse never ran above fifty beats per minute. And shouting was going to get you precisely nowhere with Karolina. It could have been someone we knew nothing about, of course. Someone in the organization. One of the hundreds of people we'd never heard of Curtis had more contacts on his phone than you or me could run up in twenty lifetimes. The police must have a list.
Although there is a fascinating passage from the other side where the narrator points out that how we appear in other people's memories is not in our control, and indeed we often inhabit others' memories, in juxtaposition with a cast of other characters unknown to us, without us being aware.
A fascinating and well-crafted read, and a compulsive one.
Some of the stories that Ulla told Lara, things that Ulla had heard from Katia. It’s a bit pass-the-parcel isn’t it? Things will become clearer, I promise. We’ll have to make time for Ulla.
Jonathan Buckley's Tell was joint winner, from over 1,000 entries, of the 2022 Novel Prize, a biennial award for a book-length work of literary fiction written in English offering simultaneous publication by the three leading indy presses who run the prize - Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK & Ireland), Giramondo (Australia & New Zealand) and New Directions (US).
The judges at the time described the novel as follows:
Jonathan Buckley’s Tell is a probing, exuberant and complex examination of the ways in which we make stories of our lives and of other people’s. Structured as a series of interview transcripts with a woman who worked as a gardener for a wealthy businessman and art collector who has disappeared, and may or may not have committed suicide, it is a thrilling novel of strange, intoxicating immediacy.
The wealthy businessman, Curtis Doyle, made his fortune in a fashion business, running a chain of shops which bridge the gap between high fashion and affordibility, and now spends much of his time in his large Scottish estate, which is where our narrator, the interviewee, works. The novel opens:
FIRST SESSION
I can talk for as long as you like, no problem. You’ll just have to tell me when to stop. How far back do you want to take it? Because Lily is what it’s about, in my opinion. And the mother is part of the story too. Father too. Goes without saying. But maybe better to pick them up later. Shall we start with the crash? Seems an obvious place.
[Pause]
The interviewer, whose interjections if any are not recorded in the text, appears to be someone hoping to make a movie of Curtis's life and disappearance, rather than an investigator. The gardener's story roams over his late wife; their children including a step-daughter from a first marriage, the wives of the other two children, their sons; some key figures in Curtis's life (such as Karolina, his art dealer, and Lara who was herself writing a novel based on Curtis) and the internal-politics among the staff, particularly Curtis's driver, Asil, and a figure Harry (possibly the maintenance man) whose opinions she often quotes but then disowns.
But our interviewer, whose name we never learn, tell Curtis's story in a roundabout way, the "pick them up later" from her first words something of a signature, punchlines withheld that often turn out to be something of a damp squib, with perhaps was is unsaid or read between the lines (she seems rather obsessed with his love life, although attributes this to others) as significant. And much of her story is also indirect - what she heard from A who heard it from B, who was told by C etc. I would normally leap to the label of Bernhardesque but it almost reminder me more of Tiddler ('I heard it from a' - which I don't mean in a negative way).
The blurb refers to the novel as exploring wealth and the art world- I wasn't so convinced these were key elements, rather than background - but for me the novel's strength is about how stories are told and by who.
Some favourite passages:
On Lara's first novel, also based on a real-life figure but fictionalised:
Not sure, though, if she was really straight with the old lady. She said she told her she was going to write a book, but I can't imagine that Hilda ever saw the finished article, not with all the things she'd changed. One big thing in particular. A lot of it was true. The racy stuff. The modelling. Being a muse and all that. Her painting, and the career that never happened. The mother really was a translator and the father was in insurance. All true. But the thing is, they were never Jewish. Very much not, if you get my drift. The real Hilde ran away from Vienna all right, but it didn't have anything to do with the parents being Jewish. You wonder why she did that. Lara, I mean. For the reader's sympathy, I suppose. A cheap trick, some would say. Disrespectful. That said, Lara doesn't make the book-Lara a particularly attractive character. Pushy. Ambitious. Quite self-centred. She tells us too much about her feelings. She's less likeable than the Lara we knew. Or the Lara we met, I should say. The Lara in the book has the same name as the real one, but they're not identical. Similar, but not the same. For one thing, Lara Wyatt in the book has a husband. She talks to him about Hilda's life and how the book is going. Our Lara didn't have a husband. To be perfectly frank, I don't have much patience with all of that tricksy stuff. Can't see the point. 'It's me but it's not me. See how clever I'm being here.' If it's not you, why use the same name? Just tell it straight. Tell us the truth. Or make it all up. One or the other.
On the impossibility of telling your own story:
... because you can't see the back of your own head. You think because you're you, you've got access that other people don't, because they're on the outside and you're on the inside. But on the inside it can be darker than outside. And you're too close to what you're looking at. Like having your nose right up against a picture. You can't really see it. I'm going in circles here. Let's just accept that this is what Lara told us Curtis told her. We can only work with what we know. What we heard.
Having spent 200 pages describing what led up to Curtis's disappearance she acknowledges how stories tend to be reconstructed backwards from what happened:
Anyone who says they knew that a crisis was imminent is doing a bit of a Lara. But we all do it, to make things fit, in retrospect. I know that. Like when you take a photo of something from a distance, and things look closer to each other than they are in reality. When we look back, the perspective is all crushed up. Such and such a thin happened, but when we remember it we can't experience it again exactly as it was. We make a story of it. It's some thing we need to do. There has to be a build-up.
[Pause]
And the last conversation they heard Curtis having before he disappeared. Where the various members of Curtis's domestic staff each assume it was with someone they know, but the narrator acknowledges there are large parts of Curtis's life - his business, his house in London - to which they have no access:
He was yelling. Like I said, yelling was not really his style. Of course, he might not have been angry With the person on the other end of the line. Could have been the message that was making him angry, not the messenger. He was talking to Conrad, I suspect. Harry will tell you it must have been Jan, and Viv's idea was that it would have been Karolina, but it wasn't her, I'm positive. Beneath Karolina's dignity to get involved in anything that involved shouting. I reckon her pulse never ran above fifty beats per minute. And shouting was going to get you precisely nowhere with Karolina. It could have been someone we knew nothing about, of course. Someone in the organization. One of the hundreds of people we'd never heard of Curtis had more contacts on his phone than you or me could run up in twenty lifetimes. The police must have a list.
Although there is a fascinating passage from the other side where the narrator points out that how we appear in other people's memories is not in our control, and indeed we often inhabit others' memories, in juxtaposition with a cast of other characters unknown to us, without us being aware.
A fascinating and well-crafted read, and a compulsive one.
November 20, 2023
Seize the day and all that. That wasn't the way Les took it. No silver linings with granddaddy's clouds.
Overall fairly engaging, but not to the point where it was able to have a dig at my brains and have a cheeky pluck at it. Read it, left it, and will forget about it very soon. Didn’t make me feel anything strongly enough. Not mad about it, yet not particularly glad about it. A massive lack of ‘plants’ or ‘art’ references (in my opinion); and I don’t understand why it’s done that way since the main characters are literally a gardener and an art collector. It just makes them and some of the other bits so unconvincing.
‘And Harry took the opportunity to wind him up a bit, about Curtis and Lara, which was a risky thing to do, when you bear in mind that Asil put his sister's boyfriend in A&E when he found out he was two-timing her. Safe to say there was a bit of friction between those two—Asil could be a bit of a dick at times, you have to say. Pardon the language. Harry's niece, she was a plumber and she played for a football team, and Asil thought that was pretty funny. Women and football. A woman plumber, come to that. He had some very old-fashioned notions. The relationship between Katia and Ulla, for example. It made him queasy. But in his defence, I don't believe he ever tried it on with any of the girls. Jacqui would definitely have been game. But I think it would have gone against his principles, mixing work and pleasure like that. And he wouldn't have been one for a meaningless bit of fun.’
'—everything seemed to interest him. Almost everything. Not sport. He wasn't interested in sports. Not at all. A waste of time, to his way of thinking. Told Lara he could never sit through an entire football match. Odd, because he was a very competitive person. When you're in that world, everything's a competition, isn't it? So maybe sports wasn't serious enough for him. Not enough at stake.'
Unreliable narrator, and not a likeable one at that, which is absolutely fine, except I don’t find her to be a well-written ‘woman’ character or a gardener/plant person. I don’t think this is an unusual flaw, it’s like how Dan Brown wrote about cities/places he just don’t know enough of very audaciously, and how too many writers just don’t write ‘women’ well enough (usually it’s fine and excusable, but when it’s worse than usual, it stands out, and that’s not so fun to read; and to clarify, Buckley’s wasn’t too terrible, but I just think it might ‘read’ better if he wrote the narrator as a man instead). And the latter issue, José Donoso called it one of the greatest tragedies (in ‘literature’)—that they are so shit at doing so (he was referring to his contemporaries and those mad brilliant Latin American writers (a lot who I also like, obviously) at the time).
‘A standard housewife was what he'd wanted, but Hilde was never going to be standard housewife material. Back home, she'd been part of an arty crowd. She'd studied textiles and fashion at college, because textiles and fashion were female territory. but what she really wanted to be was a painter. She had lessons with various artists, in lieu of payment for modelling. There were some disreputable specimens among her friends. Hilde's parents were liberal-minded, but not that liberal. When they let her go off to England they'd hoped they were saving her soul. That was the story. But after the war she found out that someone she'd known in Vienna had also made it to London. She'd been one of his models, and his muse. In England she became his muse again, and quite a bit more. She'd been quite a bit more in Vienna too. She told Lara his name and Lara looked him up. You can see his pictures in a few museums, apparently. There's one in London somewhere.’
The characters are subpar at best, but the style and structure is quite neat, so I’m a bit conflicted, perhaps a 2* is most fitting, which to me, personally here translates to ‘it’s an okay book, but I don’t feel compelled to read any more of his other work/writing’. Also, I feel like there was not much substance in the ‘he’s rich but he’s nice’ concept. It’s one of the most common ‘tropes’ in East Asian TV-dramas, so if you’ve had a taste or more of those, Buckley’s won’t impress much. I wanted it to obviously, but it just didn’t. It just wasn’t convincing or exciting to me. It was just lacking of a lot of things. The ambiguous play on death/suicide also didn’t move me at all. It’s like he dead or what, you know? But ultimately I don’t even care anymore. It almost felt like the writer just added that bit in just because. Like a bland garnish on a dish that’s just really unnecessary. It seemed so out of place that it almost made me feel like he only did that because he wasn’t sure how to wrap it up.
‘Noisy rock was very much his thing, and he had things to say about the subject, about the way everything gets lumped into categories, so if you liked Led Zeppelin that meant you were a Heavy Metal fan, so you must have liked Black Sabbath and Deep Purple and every other big-din outfit. But there were nuances, and the nuances are getting lost now, when you have all these experts pontificating about a period that was finished before they were born. You know, you hear these people talking about how something captured the zeitgeist. Any given year could have a dozen zeitgeists, if you ask me. Pick a year and look at the albums. Sex Pistols, Sister Sledge, Bob Marley, John Denver - all the same year. That's my thing, that period.’
And lastly/ultimately, what left me most unsatisfied is how lacking the book is of any art references (or basically anything related to ‘art’) considering how it’s marketed as such/so—yet no convincing elements of plants/art. Plants and ‘art’ are the reason why I chose to read this, and perhaps because of that I didn’t get the experience I want; I feel a bit robbed of my time and (reading) effort. It’s definitely not a book for me, but I didn’t think it was ‘bad’. Another reader, with different interests, might find some ‘joy’ in it.
June 4, 2024
58th book of 2024.
I'm slightly behind with my Fitzcarraldo subscription, but I'll try and catch up in the coming weeks. I'm sort of drowning in pages at the moment (in reality: at all moments). This was the joint winner, with It Lasts Forever Then It's Over, of the Fitzcarraldo 2022 Novel Prize. Winners are published simultaneously by Fitzcarraldo in the UK and Ireland, New Directions in the US, and Giramondo in Australia and New Zealand. There were over 1,000 entries, and these two winners came out on top, which is amazing to me as I gave It Lasts Forever Then It's Over 3-stars and here I am with 2-stars for Tell.
It's a short novel but has some very long paragraphs. The book is a transcript of a gardener talking about her employer, a rich art collector, Curtis Doyle, who has gone missing. There are also lots of references to the 'crash', that slowly reveals itself too. It reminded me of Henry Green's Loving, which I half-slogged through earlier this year. I just don't go for the small politics of country manors and staff. Green's novel was the original inspiration for the English show Downton Abbey, supposedly, that was all the craze however many years ago now. I guess today's equivalent is the popular series, Bridgerton, on Netflix. I've watched none of these, but this is the sort of thing it reminds me of.
The problem with having a novel like this is it all falls on the voice. The narrator's voice just isn't strong enough to support the novel. It's colloquial and mostly dull. I kept comparing it to books like Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, which is carried along by Portnoy's outlandish voice, humour and, well, frankly, all the sex talk. I was never that interested in what the gardener here was saying about her colleagues and Curtis, and without that, the novel just falls flat of anything it wants to achieve. According to the blurb, it examines 'wealth, the art world [...] social classes [...] the ways in which we make stories of our own lives and of other people's'; none of this is particularly realised. Class comes up from time to time, the art world mostly fades from the text. I feel a lot wasn't delivered. A shame, because the transcript thing might have been brilliant, if handled better. The only breaks in the text are comprised of things like '[Pause]' or '[Indistinct]'. The novel starts,
I'm slightly behind with my Fitzcarraldo subscription, but I'll try and catch up in the coming weeks. I'm sort of drowning in pages at the moment (in reality: at all moments). This was the joint winner, with It Lasts Forever Then It's Over, of the Fitzcarraldo 2022 Novel Prize. Winners are published simultaneously by Fitzcarraldo in the UK and Ireland, New Directions in the US, and Giramondo in Australia and New Zealand. There were over 1,000 entries, and these two winners came out on top, which is amazing to me as I gave It Lasts Forever Then It's Over 3-stars and here I am with 2-stars for Tell.
It's a short novel but has some very long paragraphs. The book is a transcript of a gardener talking about her employer, a rich art collector, Curtis Doyle, who has gone missing. There are also lots of references to the 'crash', that slowly reveals itself too. It reminded me of Henry Green's Loving, which I half-slogged through earlier this year. I just don't go for the small politics of country manors and staff. Green's novel was the original inspiration for the English show Downton Abbey, supposedly, that was all the craze however many years ago now. I guess today's equivalent is the popular series, Bridgerton, on Netflix. I've watched none of these, but this is the sort of thing it reminds me of.
The problem with having a novel like this is it all falls on the voice. The narrator's voice just isn't strong enough to support the novel. It's colloquial and mostly dull. I kept comparing it to books like Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, which is carried along by Portnoy's outlandish voice, humour and, well, frankly, all the sex talk. I was never that interested in what the gardener here was saying about her colleagues and Curtis, and without that, the novel just falls flat of anything it wants to achieve. According to the blurb, it examines 'wealth, the art world [...] social classes [...] the ways in which we make stories of our own lives and of other people's'; none of this is particularly realised. Class comes up from time to time, the art world mostly fades from the text. I feel a lot wasn't delivered. A shame, because the transcript thing might have been brilliant, if handled better. The only breaks in the text are comprised of things like '[Pause]' or '[Indistinct]'. The novel starts,
FIRST SESSION
I can talk for as long as you like, no problem. You'll just have to tell me when to stop. How far back do you want to take it? Because Lily is what it's about, in my opinion. And the mother is part of the story too. Father too. Goes without saying. But maybe better to pick them up later. Shall we start with the crash? Seems an obvious place.
[Pause]
April 28, 2024
The flowing narrative made me eager to see what it was all about. Maybe I got over eager because I felt rather flat when it ended.
I'm a fan of the show rather than the tell, and Buckley really gave us 'Tell' in this one. So maybe I should not be as disappointed as I am. For me, the story's 'telling' method did not give intimacy and depth, and I couldn't quite grasp what it meant to convey.
"An ARC gently provided by author/publisher via Netgalley."
I'm a fan of the show rather than the tell, and Buckley really gave us 'Tell' in this one. So maybe I should not be as disappointed as I am. For me, the story's 'telling' method did not give intimacy and depth, and I couldn't quite grasp what it meant to convey.
"An ARC gently provided by author/publisher via Netgalley."
March 22, 2024
Tell is a novel by British author, Jonathan Buckley. Self-made multi-millionaire and art collector, Curtis Doyle has disappeared, the blurb tells us, and we are being told about his life by the gardener on his Scottish estate. It’s a bystander’s perspective, an unfiltered ramble that offers opinions and anecdotes, her own and the hearsay and gossip of others who surrounded the wealthy businessman, describing a generous if somewhat quirky employer.
The gardener lists members of his extended family, friends, business associates, employees, office staff, lovers, an art curator, and a biographer, quite a large cast, and describes their relationships and interactions with the man. From snippets and scant mentions, we learn how Curtis made his fortune, married, fathered two sons, was widowed, had a debilitating accident. We hear a bit about birth parents and foster parents, all of it second- or third-hand.
The reader might wonder, with all the detail the gardener provides, when she actually had time to garden. She often refers to Lara, a journalist writing a memoir about Curtis. Can we rely on her narrative? Is there anyone with whom the reader can connect, about whom the reader might care?
That this is an interview with someone preparing to make a film about Curtis is only mentioned in the last fifteen percent of the tale, while the mystery of his disappearance and unknown fate doesn’t even get a mention until the story is ninety-five percent done.
While the format is a little different, this doesn’t detract, but this novel suffers from a bad case of blurbitis, where the blurb creates expectations in the reader that are either unrealised, or presages an event that, frustratingly for the reader, doesn’t occur until the final pages. Only that it is mercifully short saves it from being a DNF, but readers may still wonder about the point of it.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Fitzcarraldo Editions.
The gardener lists members of his extended family, friends, business associates, employees, office staff, lovers, an art curator, and a biographer, quite a large cast, and describes their relationships and interactions with the man. From snippets and scant mentions, we learn how Curtis made his fortune, married, fathered two sons, was widowed, had a debilitating accident. We hear a bit about birth parents and foster parents, all of it second- or third-hand.
The reader might wonder, with all the detail the gardener provides, when she actually had time to garden. She often refers to Lara, a journalist writing a memoir about Curtis. Can we rely on her narrative? Is there anyone with whom the reader can connect, about whom the reader might care?
That this is an interview with someone preparing to make a film about Curtis is only mentioned in the last fifteen percent of the tale, while the mystery of his disappearance and unknown fate doesn’t even get a mention until the story is ninety-five percent done.
While the format is a little different, this doesn’t detract, but this novel suffers from a bad case of blurbitis, where the blurb creates expectations in the reader that are either unrealised, or presages an event that, frustratingly for the reader, doesn’t occur until the final pages. Only that it is mercifully short saves it from being a DNF, but readers may still wonder about the point of it.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Fitzcarraldo Editions.
February 25, 2024
2.5
I'm not entirely sure what to make of this book. It simply wasn't for me.
Told in the form of a rambling, stream of consciousness interview with a gardener employed by a rich man, it tells a sort of story about Curtis who is rich for some reason I cannot recall. There is a large cast list of relatives, lovers/friends and family whose names seem to mainly begin with the same letter/sound - Curtis, Carl, Karolina, Katia...
I admit it, I got hopelessly lost. There was talk about an accident but I couldn't remember if it had actually been mentioned. There was talk about a wife, Lily, but I couldn't recall how she had died. There was talk about fostering and brothers and all sorts of people wandered in and out of the story. However I've still not a single clue what the real point of the book was.
I don't mind a book that goes nowhere but perhaps the format of one, very long, quite dull interview, with no paragraphs or chapters and few breaks simply didn't work for me. I slogged to the end.
Thankyou to Netgalley and Fitzcarraldo for the advance review copy.
I'm not entirely sure what to make of this book. It simply wasn't for me.
Told in the form of a rambling, stream of consciousness interview with a gardener employed by a rich man, it tells a sort of story about Curtis who is rich for some reason I cannot recall. There is a large cast list of relatives, lovers/friends and family whose names seem to mainly begin with the same letter/sound - Curtis, Carl, Karolina, Katia...
I admit it, I got hopelessly lost. There was talk about an accident but I couldn't remember if it had actually been mentioned. There was talk about a wife, Lily, but I couldn't recall how she had died. There was talk about fostering and brothers and all sorts of people wandered in and out of the story. However I've still not a single clue what the real point of the book was.
I don't mind a book that goes nowhere but perhaps the format of one, very long, quite dull interview, with no paragraphs or chapters and few breaks simply didn't work for me. I slogged to the end.
Thankyou to Netgalley and Fitzcarraldo for the advance review copy.
August 11, 2025
Eager to write in different manners and structures, there's a refreshing novelty to Johnathan Buckley's books. Here we are given the transcripts of five sessions of interviews with a gardener employed in a vast Scottish estate. Their purpose is to discuss her employer, Curtis Doyle, an extremely wealthy businessman, to make a film of his life. Through the discourse, she eventually tells of his disappearance and suspected suicide.
Buckley explores the divisiveness of wealth and class. When we think we’ve broken down barriers and glass ceilings, the British class system remains perfidiously pervasive. Through wealth, Doyle earns the right to confront it, but to ingratiate himself with it is something that's forbidden.
He refreshes the adage that money doesn't bring happiness, while leading us to question the validity of the narrator and the motives of everyone else caught in a maelstrom of feelings distorted or driven by career, romantic aspirations, or a desire for wealth. Buckley deftly offers us the delicious premise that everyone forms their own opinion of everyone else, irrespective of the truth or anyone else's viewpoint. A view dictated by their aspirations and desires, constructing who you are to satisfy their self-esteem, self-aggrandizement, or gain. Our singular life exists in many forms in the minds of others.
'We're keeping strange company, every one of us. This isn't the only world we live in, the one that's around us, the one we see. We're characters in hundreds of different worlds. All of us.'
Our true life may never get expressed and we are often complicit with this.
'The point was that most people make themselves whatever other people want them to be. What Ulla was saying was that we shouldn't do that to ourselves, and we shouldn't do it to other people. Being free, that was more important than anything.'
Doyle's true feelings become an enigma, subjugated to the whims of those around him, however much he tries to impose his equability over them. In the end his desire for freedom has its consequences.
The author draws a perfect timeline of Doyle's isolation from society. His stratospheric success clouds his difficulty in forming consequential relationships, which eventually overwhelms him. A pivotal car accident is the turning point in his life, making him question the value of his material wealth and the otherwise barrenness of his life.
Buckley adeptly signposts the warnings.
Excluded in childhood, he struggles to assimilate with his adoptive parents, and when he finds his biological mother, she is attentive but cold. Restricted by convention, her punctiliousness aspires to something greater than her class will allow her, though by luck, unlike his mother, Doyle overcomes class restraints. Naturally, this success is only financial. How did he do that? Buckley doesn't answer this, and perhaps the point is that given a modicum of determination, luck is the predeterminer. And given success, do its rewards necessarily make life better? We might all say no, but do we believe that?
He makes few friends. Relies on casual affairs for emotional sustenance, though Buckley points out that this is not predatory behavior but that of one who is unfamiliar with negotiating emotional terrains. He forms romantic relationships through professional associations and calls awkward meetings with his staff, socially ingratiating himself with them. The key women he has affairs with are clearly of a social class above him: an author who wishes to write a biography and an art buyer who hangs the walls of his mansion with contemporary art. Doyle has little to offer culturally or intellectually to these relationships. When they leave, one suspects he’s bereft of a value in life, and mopes around becoming increasingly isolated and glassy-eyed.
The book is rich in detail and appended stories, which only emphasize the loneliness of Doyle’s life; he’s surrounded by a rich cultural heritage and his vast commercial enterprise, with hundreds of employees. It lacks the commonalities of Buckley's writing: the lyrical and philosophical musing (Xerxes) and the extensive art references (The Grand Concert of the Night), but its ideas have clarity and precision.
I liked this, though with hardly any dialogue, and a narration exclusively by the interviewee, it afforded little texture to the writing, and at times was unvarying.
Buckley explores the divisiveness of wealth and class. When we think we’ve broken down barriers and glass ceilings, the British class system remains perfidiously pervasive. Through wealth, Doyle earns the right to confront it, but to ingratiate himself with it is something that's forbidden.
He refreshes the adage that money doesn't bring happiness, while leading us to question the validity of the narrator and the motives of everyone else caught in a maelstrom of feelings distorted or driven by career, romantic aspirations, or a desire for wealth. Buckley deftly offers us the delicious premise that everyone forms their own opinion of everyone else, irrespective of the truth or anyone else's viewpoint. A view dictated by their aspirations and desires, constructing who you are to satisfy their self-esteem, self-aggrandizement, or gain. Our singular life exists in many forms in the minds of others.
'We're keeping strange company, every one of us. This isn't the only world we live in, the one that's around us, the one we see. We're characters in hundreds of different worlds. All of us.'
Our true life may never get expressed and we are often complicit with this.
'The point was that most people make themselves whatever other people want them to be. What Ulla was saying was that we shouldn't do that to ourselves, and we shouldn't do it to other people. Being free, that was more important than anything.'
Doyle's true feelings become an enigma, subjugated to the whims of those around him, however much he tries to impose his equability over them. In the end his desire for freedom has its consequences.
The author draws a perfect timeline of Doyle's isolation from society. His stratospheric success clouds his difficulty in forming consequential relationships, which eventually overwhelms him. A pivotal car accident is the turning point in his life, making him question the value of his material wealth and the otherwise barrenness of his life.
Buckley adeptly signposts the warnings.
Excluded in childhood, he struggles to assimilate with his adoptive parents, and when he finds his biological mother, she is attentive but cold. Restricted by convention, her punctiliousness aspires to something greater than her class will allow her, though by luck, unlike his mother, Doyle overcomes class restraints. Naturally, this success is only financial. How did he do that? Buckley doesn't answer this, and perhaps the point is that given a modicum of determination, luck is the predeterminer. And given success, do its rewards necessarily make life better? We might all say no, but do we believe that?
He makes few friends. Relies on casual affairs for emotional sustenance, though Buckley points out that this is not predatory behavior but that of one who is unfamiliar with negotiating emotional terrains. He forms romantic relationships through professional associations and calls awkward meetings with his staff, socially ingratiating himself with them. The key women he has affairs with are clearly of a social class above him: an author who wishes to write a biography and an art buyer who hangs the walls of his mansion with contemporary art. Doyle has little to offer culturally or intellectually to these relationships. When they leave, one suspects he’s bereft of a value in life, and mopes around becoming increasingly isolated and glassy-eyed.
The book is rich in detail and appended stories, which only emphasize the loneliness of Doyle’s life; he’s surrounded by a rich cultural heritage and his vast commercial enterprise, with hundreds of employees. It lacks the commonalities of Buckley's writing: the lyrical and philosophical musing (Xerxes) and the extensive art references (The Grand Concert of the Night), but its ideas have clarity and precision.
I liked this, though with hardly any dialogue, and a narration exclusively by the interviewee, it afforded little texture to the writing, and at times was unvarying.
March 30, 2024
I am really sorry that I have to say that I agree with most of the 2 stars reviews over here. I wanted to like this book, but in the end it was only an effort into reading something that didn't bring me any joy. First, I had no idea what I was reading in the first part ("First session"), and if the idea was to throw there all the possible names of characters expecting the (presumably smart) reader to make sense of them later on, it didn't work for me. I managed to understand something only after I sketched a character map on the paper with the possible relationships between them. Even like this, I still didn't find satisfying also the rest of the parts. I had somehow a problem with the style, which was, for me, simply bland. I've read amazing novels in the past composed from monologue-like stream of thoughts (Mathias Enards's "Zone" is one example), much more difficult than this one. If one would not rely on the blurb on the 4th cover, one has to endure almost half of the novel of details and name after name after name of characters introduced without understanding who they are and why are they there, who is talking and why. I understand, this is supposed to be a clever writing technique, to let the reader build the story based on the received details, but overall the writing was so boring to me that it doesn't even help to do such a thing. In a funny way, the only really enjoyable pages were the last 3-4 ones, which are explicitly described as containing a separate story, related at some moment by the main character (in absentio). Maybe that should have been the story written in the first place, giving up all the writing fanciness.
March 4, 2024
What an absolute bore fest. This is literally only 200 pages long and it’s took me about 50 years to finish it. The premise is that there’s an art dealer who’s gone missing and so a man is interviewing his gardener about him and the whole book is told as the transcript of the interviews. It was captivating for the first few pages but after that it got so dull and I found myself really bored and not wanting to keep picking it up. The sense of tension and mystery was so weak, if there even was any. Really not a fan of this one.
April 9, 2024
Sat down to begin reading, couldn’t stop. The entire novel is told through a transcribed interview with a gardener employed by a fantastically wealthy, rags-to-riches British businessman and art collector. Compulsively readable and feels incredibly voyeuristic—the story initially focuses on the businessman’s interpersonal relationships (a beloved deceased wife, women that were professional contacts and potential romantic companions, children jockeying for status and an inheritance), but as it sweeps along, all these vivid portraits of the rest of the household come in.
It’s one of the best first-person voices I’ve read this year. Really incredible and such a realistic, detailed portrait of the art world and wealth and the strange dynamics of the British class system. The ending is quite sweet—I don’t want to spoil it, but it feels like a true love story in the way Thomas Bernhard’s Old Masters is a love story.
It’s one of the best first-person voices I’ve read this year. Really incredible and such a realistic, detailed portrait of the art world and wealth and the strange dynamics of the British class system. The ending is quite sweet—I don’t want to spoil it, but it feels like a true love story in the way Thomas Bernhard’s Old Masters is a love story.
June 18, 2024
This will not be reviewed on the blog - Unfortunately, despite the fact that there were a lot of themes discussed, especially social class, the prose did nothing for me.
December 21, 2025
Most of my GR compadres did not like Buckley's latest tome, the Booker-nominated One Boat, but it came in 4th in my longlist rankings and I was looking forward to reading others of his books. I read this primarily because it was short, the premise sounded intriguing, and it fulfilled one of my last remaining 'Read Harder Challenge' prompts (to read something from the Goldsmith's Prize 2024 shortlist) for one of my GR groups. And I'm glad I did - there's something to be said for authors who you can identify right off by similarities in their novels, but I somewhat prefer those who take different approaches to each of their offerings - and Buckley is one of the latter.
This setup and plot by all rights should not work - and I realize for many it DIDN'T - but I thought it was unique, daring and very well executed. The book consists of the transcripts of five sessions conducted apparently by a scriptwriter or film director who is intending to make a film on the life and mysterious disappearance of fashion mogul Curtis Boyle, missing and presumed dead, perhaps a suicide.
The interview is with his unnamed, though longtime and loyal female gardener, each session lasting about an hour. Although one never QUITE figures out what happened to Conrad (and the open-ended denouement is entirely appropriate), the serpentine revelations about not only his life, but all his various family members, and the gardener herself makes for some lively investigation.
My only complaint is that there are SO many characters to keep track of - and it doesn't help that Curtis's two sons are Conrad and Carl, so sometimes I had to stop a second to remember who was who.
This setup and plot by all rights should not work - and I realize for many it DIDN'T - but I thought it was unique, daring and very well executed. The book consists of the transcripts of five sessions conducted apparently by a scriptwriter or film director who is intending to make a film on the life and mysterious disappearance of fashion mogul Curtis Boyle, missing and presumed dead, perhaps a suicide.
The interview is with his unnamed, though longtime and loyal female gardener, each session lasting about an hour. Although one never QUITE figures out what happened to Conrad (and the open-ended denouement is entirely appropriate), the serpentine revelations about not only his life, but all his various family members, and the gardener herself makes for some lively investigation.
My only complaint is that there are SO many characters to keep track of - and it doesn't help that Curtis's two sons are Conrad and Carl, so sometimes I had to stop a second to remember who was who.
January 11, 2024
Framed as a series of interviews in which a gardener narrates the story of the wealthy man she once worked for, Tell is a novel which blurs the lines between object and subject; a tale which asks what it means to be both at the centre of a story and stood watching at the periphery: observing, second-guessing, and recounting an ambiguous version of the truth.
Told mostly in one, relentless stream (albeit broken up with the occasional note from the unnamed interviewer, that the speaker has made a [pause] or said something [indistinct]), Buckley's prose feels so true to life, his ability to embody the voice of his protagonist so vivid and realistic and well-pitched, that half-way through reading I found myself googling the name of the businessman being described, to double-check if this really was a piece of fiction. The transcript form chosen by Buckley added a sinister sense of something clinical and professional - as if the interviewee was telling their story to a detective or an investigative journalist - but the strength of the novel's voice and depth of its characters made me feel immersed throughout, almost as if I was in the room myself.
This was a delightful read - thank you to NetGalley and Fitzcarraldo Editions for the ARC of this book!
Told mostly in one, relentless stream (albeit broken up with the occasional note from the unnamed interviewer, that the speaker has made a [pause] or said something [indistinct]), Buckley's prose feels so true to life, his ability to embody the voice of his protagonist so vivid and realistic and well-pitched, that half-way through reading I found myself googling the name of the businessman being described, to double-check if this really was a piece of fiction. The transcript form chosen by Buckley added a sinister sense of something clinical and professional - as if the interviewee was telling their story to a detective or an investigative journalist - but the strength of the novel's voice and depth of its characters made me feel immersed throughout, almost as if I was in the room myself.
This was a delightful read - thank you to NetGalley and Fitzcarraldo Editions for the ARC of this book!
May 2, 2024
A diverting, if disappointing read. Good on storytelling in all its forms: gossip, rumour, journalism, investigation, novel-writing, self-making. The Brownian motion of fate, chance encounters--these become the framework upon which we hang the narrative of our lives. But Buckley's characters are straight out of central casting--the self-made millionaire, the plump, bland failsons, the Prada-clad art world ice queen--or composites so clumsy the sutures show. Worst is the narrator, whose voice rang increasingly false, until she ceased to be a believable person and became pure literary means to an end. Finally, I'd caution any potential readers to skip the blurb: it spoils the who, what and why which give the book its forward motion; without their impetus the whole thing goes slack, like a marionette with its strings cut.
July 16, 2024
this book has something interesting to say about the nature of prurient curiosity, gossip, the narrative, journalism; but I am not convinced it has actually said it.
narrative voice in this is very much the worst of both worlds — a blinkered single-narrator perspective, limited to dropping little breadcrumbs of interesting information about other potential interviewees (?) that never amount to anything, limited by this imputed formal constraint to a rather unbeautiful sort of prose; but at the same time, an unconvincing voice that rang falser and falser as the book went on — for a book about a gardener talking about an art collector, there were very few 'plants' in this and very little 'art', which mystified me — and felt much more like a device than like a fully-realised character. perhaps not surprising, because none of the characters in this felt particularly fully-realised; stock figure of hokey self-made rich art guy, stock figures of unsuccessful younger generation, stock figures of Art People ... and the device of the interviews themselves was unconvincing: the placement of [inaudible], [pause], etc. never convinced me that the putative intervening material had really been conceived and then discarded.
left with the question: why would they want to make a film about any of this lot?
narrative voice in this is very much the worst of both worlds — a blinkered single-narrator perspective, limited to dropping little breadcrumbs of interesting information about other potential interviewees (?) that never amount to anything, limited by this imputed formal constraint to a rather unbeautiful sort of prose; but at the same time, an unconvincing voice that rang falser and falser as the book went on — for a book about a gardener talking about an art collector, there were very few 'plants' in this and very little 'art', which mystified me — and felt much more like a device than like a fully-realised character. perhaps not surprising, because none of the characters in this felt particularly fully-realised; stock figure of hokey self-made rich art guy, stock figures of unsuccessful younger generation, stock figures of Art People ... and the device of the interviews themselves was unconvincing: the placement of [inaudible], [pause], etc. never convinced me that the putative intervening material had really been conceived and then discarded.
left with the question: why would they want to make a film about any of this lot?
Read
September 23, 2024Why I read it: My downfall... it's a Fitzcarraldo...
Thoughts: How TF did this win a -- oh, not a Nobel, a Novel prize. Okay, that changes things. Still, I can't believe this won a prize at all. Reading this, I had that feeling a lot of museum-goers have when they look at modern or abstract art and think "I could've done that myself," but clearly they couldn't have, since they lacked any inclination to do so. Still, I could have written this. Anyone could have written this. The story itself is so boring and the narrative style is so commonplace, anyone could have written this. It doesn't take vision or inclination.
The back cover promised me "A work of strange and intoxicating immediacy, exploring wealth, the art world, and the intimacy and distance between social classes, Tell is a probing and complex examination of the ways in which we make stories of our own and of other people’s lives." And for a while, I really thought it was going somewhere. There were some interesting segments, especially when the interviewee talks about Hilda/Hilde; there's stuff there about the relationship between art and artist, the history of female artists existing in a male-dominated field, the relationship between subject and would-be biographer. You can expand that to the rest of the novel, for sure. By and large, Tell is about how stories are told, who tells them and why. It's just a shame that this story was told as longform gossip, with no actual hard facts.
I also have to say that I was expecting an actual mystery, too. The back cover starts by saying Curtis Doyle has disappeared, so I thought that would take center stage. If the back cover had said this was going to be the fictional biography of a fictional rich guy I don't give two shits about, told through the voice of a well-informed (not to say "gossipy") gardener who worked at his massive Scottish estate, and that his disappearance would occur literally in the last 10 pages after being told "I'll leave that for later" countless times, I would've never bought this book in the first place. But maybe that's just me not managing my expectations.
Would I read more from this author: No.
Would I recommend it: No. This immediately joins the physical Donate pile in the garage and the intangible repository of titles and knowledge in my head, to be trotted out only when it seems like a relevant addition to a conversation or another book review. Key takeaway elements: telling your story so many times, whether true or false, you start to believe it and drink your own Kool-Aid; everyone is NPCs to rich people and they're the main characters; do authors have an obligation to present the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth if they purport to have written about a real person.
Thoughts: How TF did this win a -- oh, not a Nobel, a Novel prize. Okay, that changes things. Still, I can't believe this won a prize at all. Reading this, I had that feeling a lot of museum-goers have when they look at modern or abstract art and think "I could've done that myself," but clearly they couldn't have, since they lacked any inclination to do so. Still, I could have written this. Anyone could have written this. The story itself is so boring and the narrative style is so commonplace, anyone could have written this. It doesn't take vision or inclination.
The back cover promised me "A work of strange and intoxicating immediacy, exploring wealth, the art world, and the intimacy and distance between social classes, Tell is a probing and complex examination of the ways in which we make stories of our own and of other people’s lives." And for a while, I really thought it was going somewhere. There were some interesting segments, especially when the interviewee talks about Hilda/Hilde; there's stuff there about the relationship between art and artist, the history of female artists existing in a male-dominated field, the relationship between subject and would-be biographer. You can expand that to the rest of the novel, for sure. By and large, Tell is about how stories are told, who tells them and why. It's just a shame that this story was told as longform gossip, with no actual hard facts.
I also have to say that I was expecting an actual mystery, too. The back cover starts by saying Curtis Doyle has disappeared, so I thought that would take center stage. If the back cover had said this was going to be the fictional biography of a fictional rich guy I don't give two shits about, told through the voice of a well-informed (not to say "gossipy") gardener who worked at his massive Scottish estate, and that his disappearance would occur literally in the last 10 pages after being told "I'll leave that for later" countless times, I would've never bought this book in the first place. But maybe that's just me not managing my expectations.
Would I read more from this author: No.
Would I recommend it: No. This immediately joins the physical Donate pile in the garage and the intangible repository of titles and knowledge in my head, to be trotted out only when it seems like a relevant addition to a conversation or another book review. Key takeaway elements: telling your story so many times, whether true or false, you start to believe it and drink your own Kool-Aid; everyone is NPCs to rich people and they're the main characters; do authors have an obligation to present the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth if they purport to have written about a real person.
August 30, 2025
Second attempt at this author but the short sentences, minimal punctuation and stream of consciousness style are not working for me. No flow to the writing, nothing of interest in the the first 70 pages. Monotonous and frankly boring!
January 30, 2025
Was recommended by a colleague who is terribly bright so I’m sure I’m missing something. Was fine, I really struggled to get into it and was left wanting a lot. Definitely won’t be picking it up again any time soon!
May 23, 2024
Mind-bogglingly terrible. So many awful things here, & in so few pages! A gardener reminisces about her mysterious super-rich employer & thus we piece together his life & relationships, none of which are very interesting, tho we are made to understand this is all preparation for a film. Dropping phrases like "the accident" & "we'll get to that later" builds up the hope of some eventual surprise or revelation, but there is absolutely nothing forthcoming. What is the point? Incredibly rich people have complicated lives too? The conceit of having the book appear as the transcription of a series of interviews is pointless & boring; sections are intermittently broken up by words like "inaudible" before resuming again mid-sentence. Groan. Perhaps above all, the choice of narrator blunts any hope of perspective & ensures that the story stays hopelessly within its own limitations, & tho the speaker occasionally drops tantalizing hints that other interview subjects would be able to provide essential different points of view, those never materialize. The only real mystery here is how in the world this book found its way to publication.
November 8, 2023
Tell is comprised entirely of a series of one-sided interview transcripts, with a woman who worked as a gardener for a wealthy businessman. As the woman tries to make sense of her employer, and of what happened to him, the reader begins to build up their own picture of Curtis and the people in his life.
I couldn't resist the premise of a book comprised of interview transcripts, and this one didn't disappoint. Tell is a story about telling stories, with a plot that drives the book but that also revolves around the theme of its title. We don't know what questions the narrator is asked, and we only have a vague idea of who is interviewing her and why. And we never get to hear anyone else's side of the story. Tell takes the idea of the unreliable narrator - a trope I love - somewhere new, with its musings on the unreliability of memory, and the way people see the same things differently. This was one of those books where I found myself rereading certain phrases and lines, because the author just captures something so perfectly. And yet, I was also fully immersed in the fictional world of the author creates, almost able to see and hear the narrator thanks to the beautifully crafted writing style.
I love a metaliterary book, and Tell is one of my new favourites. Although this one doesn't pretend to be a true story, the characters and settings in this book are so realistic that I could easily believe it is all based on the truth. Tell didn't quite have that extra wow-factor that makes me want to give a book those elusive five stars, but this is a really interesting, engaging, and smart read. I want to reread it already.
Tell is out on 28 March. Thank you to NetGalley and Fitzcarraldo Editions for an advance copy.
I couldn't resist the premise of a book comprised of interview transcripts, and this one didn't disappoint. Tell is a story about telling stories, with a plot that drives the book but that also revolves around the theme of its title. We don't know what questions the narrator is asked, and we only have a vague idea of who is interviewing her and why. And we never get to hear anyone else's side of the story. Tell takes the idea of the unreliable narrator - a trope I love - somewhere new, with its musings on the unreliability of memory, and the way people see the same things differently. This was one of those books where I found myself rereading certain phrases and lines, because the author just captures something so perfectly. And yet, I was also fully immersed in the fictional world of the author creates, almost able to see and hear the narrator thanks to the beautifully crafted writing style.
I love a metaliterary book, and Tell is one of my new favourites. Although this one doesn't pretend to be a true story, the characters and settings in this book are so realistic that I could easily believe it is all based on the truth. Tell didn't quite have that extra wow-factor that makes me want to give a book those elusive five stars, but this is a really interesting, engaging, and smart read. I want to reread it already.
Tell is out on 28 March. Thank you to NetGalley and Fitzcarraldo Editions for an advance copy.
May 7, 2025
I really wanted to love this.
For years, I’ve had a novel idea in mind: telling the story of an artist’s life entirely through press clippings, interviews, and reviews — so Buckley’s premise, revealing an enigmatic man through the recollections and gossip of his gardener, immediately appealed.
There are moments of brilliance here — particularly the way Buckley plays with memory, perception, and narrative unreliability. I loved the little philosophical asides: the idea that we tell stories from the inciting incident backwards, that eyewitnesses can’t be trusted, and how even we struggle to truly tell our own stories truthfully “you can’t see the back of your own head / it’s like looking at a picture with your nose pressed against the canvas.”
But overall, I found myself slipping in and out of its frequency. The narrative within the clever device never quite gripped me, and I struggled to stay engaged. A fascinating concept, but one that didn’t fully land for me.
For years, I’ve had a novel idea in mind: telling the story of an artist’s life entirely through press clippings, interviews, and reviews — so Buckley’s premise, revealing an enigmatic man through the recollections and gossip of his gardener, immediately appealed.
There are moments of brilliance here — particularly the way Buckley plays with memory, perception, and narrative unreliability. I loved the little philosophical asides: the idea that we tell stories from the inciting incident backwards, that eyewitnesses can’t be trusted, and how even we struggle to truly tell our own stories truthfully “you can’t see the back of your own head / it’s like looking at a picture with your nose pressed against the canvas.”
But overall, I found myself slipping in and out of its frequency. The narrative within the clever device never quite gripped me, and I struggled to stay engaged. A fascinating concept, but one that didn’t fully land for me.
August 17, 2025
DNF at 37% because life is too short to read boring books
i hate small talk and my worst nightmare is being stuck in a conversation with an old lady spewing stories about people i don’t care about & things i don’t care about. buckley failed the first principle of telling a story, which is to make us care. i have zero affection towards this narrator, the style and form itself lends the narrative to a deliberate shallowness which i can admire for maybe twenty pages from a purely technical perspective but that’s the maximum number of pages he needed. it’s also the length of my patience. i genuinely do not care about curtis or anyone else that she describes in this book i would have a better time reading The Sun and i have never read nor do i intend to ever read The Sun. I know the intention was there to interweave nuggets of existential insight and human truths and buckley embodies the tone and pacing of speech of the gardner well from a technical level but it lacks soul, it lacks detail and to be honest sometimes the vocab is reaching. i’m not mad. i’m just frustrated. i wanted this book to be good too jonathan buckley but it just wasn’t. maybe it gets better? maybe there’s more on the narrator later down the line? but i don’t want to take my chances anymore, at some point you call quits, 37% is my limit. for my page count record: 74 pages.
i think there’s a difference between the definition of stories on the surface level - things and happenings you communicate to people, things you can describe in detail, but these things usually mean nothing. The other kind of story is not a happening but a meaning, or usually both. Red is red until it’s danger or love and despite talking about both of these things in the book, buckley delivered neither in the first 37%.
i picked this up because it was jointly award the novel prize alongside it lasts forever and then it’s over but this book HAS NOTHING on her.
two stars because i was disappointed and frustrated with its lack of delivery but not mad. it does represent everything i hate about fiction that doesn’t fiction but it’s fine. good day.
i hate small talk and my worst nightmare is being stuck in a conversation with an old lady spewing stories about people i don’t care about & things i don’t care about. buckley failed the first principle of telling a story, which is to make us care. i have zero affection towards this narrator, the style and form itself lends the narrative to a deliberate shallowness which i can admire for maybe twenty pages from a purely technical perspective but that’s the maximum number of pages he needed. it’s also the length of my patience. i genuinely do not care about curtis or anyone else that she describes in this book i would have a better time reading The Sun and i have never read nor do i intend to ever read The Sun. I know the intention was there to interweave nuggets of existential insight and human truths and buckley embodies the tone and pacing of speech of the gardner well from a technical level but it lacks soul, it lacks detail and to be honest sometimes the vocab is reaching. i’m not mad. i’m just frustrated. i wanted this book to be good too jonathan buckley but it just wasn’t. maybe it gets better? maybe there’s more on the narrator later down the line? but i don’t want to take my chances anymore, at some point you call quits, 37% is my limit. for my page count record: 74 pages.
i think there’s a difference between the definition of stories on the surface level - things and happenings you communicate to people, things you can describe in detail, but these things usually mean nothing. The other kind of story is not a happening but a meaning, or usually both. Red is red until it’s danger or love and despite talking about both of these things in the book, buckley delivered neither in the first 37%.
i picked this up because it was jointly award the novel prize alongside it lasts forever and then it’s over but this book HAS NOTHING on her.
two stars because i was disappointed and frustrated with its lack of delivery but not mad. it does represent everything i hate about fiction that doesn’t fiction but it’s fine. good day.
July 15, 2024
Tell contains a series of interviews from a gardeners perspective about her uber rich boss who has gone missing. Through a series of five interviews that read like a stream of consciousness we hear about the lives of his life, an accident, what happened venue and after it and all the relationships in his life. You never find out what happened but the journey is interesting.
July 17, 2024
This was not my cup of tea. I kept waiting and waiting and waiting for something to happen. But all I got was a person telling me about other people. It was stylistically interesting, but it did not rock my boat (?) or tickle my fancy. I could imagine that people who enjoy stream-of-consciousness more than I do might feel differently, but I just kept falling asleep.
Read
May 30, 2024The sound comes in, whether you like it or not. It comes in from all around.
February 3, 2024
Published 28 March. This book didn't really excite me. The idea is that it is a series of interviews with a woman who was employed to be the gardener of a man who has disappeared. We never know the questions that she is being asked, we don't even know who is interviewing her. All we have is her side of the story, her version of events. She tells us about her employer, Curtis. She tells us that he was immensely rich, that he collected art. She tells us about his relationships. But I didn't feel she was reliable. Were the events exactly as she saw them or was she coloring them with her own perceptions. As a gardener, she tells us nothing of the gardens. She doesn't really tell us about these magnificent pieces of art that Curtis collected. The people that she talks about came across - for me - as two-dimensional, there was no flesh on their bones, there was nothing to make me like or dislike them. But that could be the whole idea - that we are left to build our own pictures. This is novel about telling stories, I suppose, and is our gardener telling her version so that she can be the centre of attention rather than Curtis? It wasn't a book with a wow factor, it was ok.
October 14, 2024
And there's a terrific bit, after the threat from the Nazi artist, when it occurs to Lara that she exists in this old lady's mind alongside the one-armed pianist and that terrible Stephanie woman, and hundreds of other people who Lara knows nothing about, most of them dead, and then it hits her that of course it's the same for everyone - we have no idea who we're living alongside in the minds of the people were met. We're keeping strange company, every one of us. This isn't the only world we live in, the one that's around us, the one we see. We're characters in hundreds of different worlds. All of us.
Shortlisted for the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize.
The book itself was published in the Goldsmith listed UK edition by Fitzcarraldo, better known for their anticipatory translations of future Nobel Prize winning authors but finally finding their feet with original English language fiction and Goldsmith shortlisted for the third consecutive year after winning it in 2022 with “Diego Garcia” (one would think now required reading for Conservative MPs and right wing papers who have suddenly become experts on the Chagos Islands). It was also published by Giramondo (in Australia) and New Directions (in UK) as it won the second (2022) edition of The Novel Prize, a biennial award for a book-length work of literary fiction written in English.
Jonathan Buckley is clearly a versatile writer – a writer and editorial director at Rough Guides, a BBC National Short Story award winner (following immediately after Lionel Shriver) and a writer of relatively unknown novels which seem commonly to lead to those who review them to comment that they are surprised that the author is not better known.
I previously read his “The Great Concert of the Night” – a French arthouse cinema infused tale of remembering and restoration. As an aside it was published by Sort of Books – the publisher founded by the Rough Guide founders who in 2022 triumphed in the Booker with “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida”). And in review of what I described as a quietly thoughtful and beautifully crafted novel, I added my own voice to the chorus of surprise at his relatively low profile as a novelist.
So it is perhaps no surprise that the back cover of this book has a quote (from Ian Sansom in the TLS) saying that “Exactly why Buckley is not already revered and renowned as a novelist in the great European tradition remains a mystery” but then going on to say that it “will perhaps only be addressed at that final godly hour when all the overlooked authors working in odd and antique modes will receive their just rewards”
I think one may immediately query if a book whose author is (not inaccurately) described on the book’s very back cover as “working in .. antique modes” really should be shortlisted for a prize that is aimed at “fiction as its most novel .. that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form”
The book is told in a series of interviews (I assume even in the fictional world heavily edited as they were transcribed as they lack any fidelity to real speech) by the unnamed (and largely absent in terms of story) gardener at the Scottish estate owned by Curtis Doyle, a hugely prosperous self-made businessman (with a chain of shops – Porter – supplying cutting edge fashion at high street prices) and art collector (and sponsor).
We work out (and if we don’t quickly the back cover anyway kindly spoils any sense of discovery) that the gardener is giving a series of five lengthy interviews (set out as sessions) to a filmmaker thinking of making a film about Curtis who has disappeared. Doyle a few years before had a crash which left him short term physically but longer term mentally/psychologically impacted. We find out, via the interviews, about this and about the relationships, rivalries, attractions and tensions between Curtis, his wife, his two sons (and their wives), his step daughter (from his wife’s first marriage), his art collector, his drivers and other staff members, his putative biographer and more.
And we are getting this biographical detail less second hand (via the gardener) but third or more hand – as much of what she recounts was in turn told to her by other staff members and often features her recounting of their interpretation of incidents and interactions.
Add in the rather overwhelming list of names and the gardener often saying she will either return to some subjects or has nothing more to add on others and you get paragraphs such as the below – which I have to say rather wore down my enthusiasm for a story that was never particularly appealing.
If you talk to Viv, she'll probably give her theory an airing. That huge row with Lily, the screaming match, Viv thought it might have been about Curtis and Karolina. Or Curtis and someone else. Most likely Karolina. Perhaps Katia was laying into Curtis and Lily wasn't having any of it. Standing by her man. Has to be pointed out that Viv didn't much care for Karolina. And Curtis had broken up Katia's first family, don't forget. Made her father miserable for years. So Viv put two and two together and made five. She has more of an imagination than me. On the subject of Karolina, I've said all I have to say, I think.
Some reviews portray the book as being insightful about the art world or about the world of the super rich but I don’t think this is really at all what the book is about and really any efforts here are I think reasonably high level and also not polemical – this by the way is not a complaint about the book (as I would be equally disinterested in a tale of wealth and art as in a polemic against them) but about mainstream reviews which I think mistake the medium for the message in this case.
What instead the book is really about is about making stories about other people’s lives – what it means to observe the lives of others and whether you can truly know them or in contrast whether an observer is perhaps more objective than the observed about their own interior life. This leads to lots of excellent quotes – such as those that open and close my review – but not I think any really mould-breaking writing. This is far from Rachel Cusk (also shortlisted this year) and the annihilated perspective of her excellent (if rather oddly shortlisted for each book) Outline/Transit/Kudos trilogy as Buckley really does not bring anything new to the table.
So overall I think a novel which is entertaining enough (at least initially before the sprawling cast list, the A said that B said that C said approach, and the “I’ll come back to that” phrases all start to fade) but not really innovative and rather out of place on this shortlist as it is both lacking in terms of the literary experimentation that defines the prize, and absent in the confrontational or uncomfortable subject matter that seems to define this year’s shortlist (as identified by the chair of judges).
..because you can't see the back of your own head. You think because you're you, you've got access that other people don't, because they're on the outside and you're on the inside. But on the inside it can be darker than outside. And you're too close to what you're looking at. Like having your nose right up against a picture. You can't really see it.
September 26, 2025
tl;dr Buckley stretches the act of “telling” to its limit, refracting a dense family saga through the eyes of a single outsider
What makes a narrator “reliable”? This is a question that Buckley explores in both of his novels that I’ve read so far (this one, and the best novel of the 2025 Booker longlist), but Tell stretches that question to the absolute limit. It’s presented as transcripts, but Buckley has stripped all other context of these “recordings”. Is it an interview? Who is her interlocutor? Presumably she’s being asked questions; if that’s the case, who is asking them? What is the purpose of the “recordings” in the first place? We’re forced to consider one single voice, one single perspective, one single human brain trying to recall its own human senses.
Tell’s narrator, whom I’ll refer to as The Gardener (her occupation), relates the story of her wealthy benefactor Curtis Doyle, and the many, many characters in Doyle’s orbit. The sequence of events starts out jumbled, and the members of the Doyle estate (Curtis’s family, his paramours, his staff) are introduced in somewhat of an arbitrary fashion. The Gardener starts with a crash that changed Curtis, but no, actually the story is about Lily, but we’ll get to her later, and there’s a man named Asil, but actually let’s start the story after the crash and work our way backwards... This is how the first pages of Tell introduce the story to the reader, and I was scrambling to follow along, starting out by sketching a family tree and extending it as the novel progressed. You’d probably be able to keep up if you were a lawyer (as in, extremely apt to latching onto details), but I needed something to keep me afloat in The Gardener’s choppy sea-of-details.
The Gardener’s own personal viewpoints and biases start to crystallize as the layers of the story unfurl. Early on, she acknowledges the disparity of wealth, but also professes some degree of gratitude for employment, hinting at a meek sense of self-preservation:
“Goes without saying” is key to the irony here: The Gardener is mildly defensive about being more-or-less sheltered from the ‘bad parts’ of Curtis Doyle’s wealth, using quite a lot of words to be defensive, and yet, it “goes without saying” that rich people shouldn’t exist.
One of the subplots adds yet another layer of storytelling, where a writer named Lara (a novelist? biographer?) becomes close to Curtis. The Gardener mentions details about a prior book that Lara had written, details that notably diverge from reality. Why does Lara change these details? What is Lara’s motivation behind writing the book about Curtis? Does this make Lara unreliable, too?
Structurally, the transcripts are only broken up by chapter breaks, or a bracketed [Pause], [Indistinct], or [Inaudible]. What really exists in the indistinct or inaudible portions of the recordings? Is it background noise? The Gardener mumbling to herself? Or possibly the ‘conductor’ of these recordings omitting certain parts out?
Back to that original question: who is The Gardener herself talking to? Though the transcripts are stripped of context, The Gardener makes allusions to “casting roles”, implying that this story is being adapted for the screen.
That is, The Gardener is telling the story, a story which involves a different telling of this very story, to someone else who will also be telling the story at some point in the future.
Memory is of course a key part of storytelling, and Buckley explores how memory affects narrative. The Gardener is an outsider (she makes clear that Curtis doesn’t interact with her much), but knows a lot about the family. I reckon that this knowledge comes from coworker-hearsay accumulated over a long period of years. Who’s to say how this information has shifted and changed over time? In addition, the context of her retelling, that is, the interviews, may very well affect the words that are leaving her mouth:
As much as this novel is cerebrally evocative, ultimately, Tell is a more satisfying novel to think about and discuss than it is to read. The Gardener’s transcripts are presented in long unbroken paragraphs with almost zero dialogue, which is occasionally fatiguing to read, even though I found the story interesting. The chapter-to-chapter structure of the novel feels a bit arbitrary; The Gardener simply tires out between chapters, but since we’re offered no space to reflect between transcripts, it gets somewhat tiresome to hear her narration with no respite.
However, Buckley’s tireless examination of storytelling feels like a full, yet compressed family-saga-in-miniature. The truth of narration heavily depends on context; stripped of context, as Buckley does in Tell, we’re left to fill in the blanks. Reliability is relative – after all, there is no telling without listening.
[Inaudible]
… you remember someone doing something, years back, and you know it happened more or less as you recall, that it was this person who did this thing in this way, but can you describe them, like you can describe someone who was in front of you an hour ago? You can’t. Your mind’s eye is seeing them, but you can’t describe them. The mind’s eye isn’t an eye. It’s not that kind of picture you’re getting. Not really a picture at all. Even the person you saw an hour ago. You can’t see them like someone who’s there. The fade-out happens right away. It’s what the police always say. Eyewitness often doesn’t mean much.
(p. 98)
What makes a narrator “reliable”? This is a question that Buckley explores in both of his novels that I’ve read so far (this one, and the best novel of the 2025 Booker longlist), but Tell stretches that question to the absolute limit. It’s presented as transcripts, but Buckley has stripped all other context of these “recordings”. Is it an interview? Who is her interlocutor? Presumably she’s being asked questions; if that’s the case, who is asking them? What is the purpose of the “recordings” in the first place? We’re forced to consider one single voice, one single perspective, one single human brain trying to recall its own human senses.
Tell’s narrator, whom I’ll refer to as The Gardener (her occupation), relates the story of her wealthy benefactor Curtis Doyle, and the many, many characters in Doyle’s orbit. The sequence of events starts out jumbled, and the members of the Doyle estate (Curtis’s family, his paramours, his staff) are introduced in somewhat of an arbitrary fashion. The Gardener starts with a crash that changed Curtis, but no, actually the story is about Lily, but we’ll get to her later, and there’s a man named Asil, but actually let’s start the story after the crash and work our way backwards... This is how the first pages of Tell introduce the story to the reader, and I was scrambling to follow along, starting out by sketching a family tree and extending it as the novel progressed. You’d probably be able to keep up if you were a lawyer (as in, extremely apt to latching onto details), but I needed something to keep me afloat in The Gardener’s choppy sea-of-details.
The Gardener’s own personal viewpoints and biases start to crystallize as the layers of the story unfurl. Early on, she acknowledges the disparity of wealth, but also professes some degree of gratitude for employment, hinting at a meek sense of self-preservation:
But the system is what it is. I wish it wasn’t, but it is. It’s not going to change. Harry will tell you I’m just a fan. Blinded by the charisma. I don’t think that’s fair. There were things I admired and things I didn’t like so much. But credit where credit is due. I could also point out that Harry was happy to work for Curtis. We all were. Most of us. [...] Which is not to say I have no problems with someone being that rich. Of course I do. If the world was run the way it should be, nobody would be that rich. Goes without saying. It’s wrong. (p. 35)
“Goes without saying” is key to the irony here: The Gardener is mildly defensive about being more-or-less sheltered from the ‘bad parts’ of Curtis Doyle’s wealth, using quite a lot of words to be defensive, and yet, it “goes without saying” that rich people shouldn’t exist.
One of the subplots adds yet another layer of storytelling, where a writer named Lara (a novelist? biographer?) becomes close to Curtis. The Gardener mentions details about a prior book that Lara had written, details that notably diverge from reality. Why does Lara change these details? What is Lara’s motivation behind writing the book about Curtis? Does this make Lara unreliable, too?
Structurally, the transcripts are only broken up by chapter breaks, or a bracketed [Pause], [Indistinct], or [Inaudible]. What really exists in the indistinct or inaudible portions of the recordings? Is it background noise? The Gardener mumbling to herself? Or possibly the ‘conductor’ of these recordings omitting certain parts out?
Back to that original question: who is The Gardener herself talking to? Though the transcripts are stripped of context, The Gardener makes allusions to “casting roles”, implying that this story is being adapted for the screen.
That is, The Gardener is telling the story, a story which involves a different telling of this very story, to someone else who will also be telling the story at some point in the future.
Memory is of course a key part of storytelling, and Buckley explores how memory affects narrative. The Gardener is an outsider (she makes clear that Curtis doesn’t interact with her much), but knows a lot about the family. I reckon that this knowledge comes from coworker-hearsay accumulated over a long period of years. Who’s to say how this information has shifted and changed over time? In addition, the context of her retelling, that is, the interviews, may very well affect the words that are leaving her mouth:
But we all do it, to make things fit, in retrospect. I know that. Like when you take a photo of something from a distance, and things look closer to each other than they are in reality. When we look back, the perspective is all crushed up. Such and such a thing happened, but when we remember it we can’t experience it again exactly as it was. We make a story of it. It’s something we need to do. There has to be a build-up.
[Pause]
(p.151)
As much as this novel is cerebrally evocative, ultimately, Tell is a more satisfying novel to think about and discuss than it is to read. The Gardener’s transcripts are presented in long unbroken paragraphs with almost zero dialogue, which is occasionally fatiguing to read, even though I found the story interesting. The chapter-to-chapter structure of the novel feels a bit arbitrary; The Gardener simply tires out between chapters, but since we’re offered no space to reflect between transcripts, it gets somewhat tiresome to hear her narration with no respite.
However, Buckley’s tireless examination of storytelling feels like a full, yet compressed family-saga-in-miniature. The truth of narration heavily depends on context; stripped of context, as Buckley does in Tell, we’re left to fill in the blanks. Reliability is relative – after all, there is no telling without listening.
June 8, 2024
It’s was like being at the hairdressers and someone next to you telling a long meandering story that you tune in and out of and slightly want them to leave
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