Quilt

by Nicholas Royle

Facing the disarray and disorientation around his father's death, a man contends with the strange and haunting power of the house his parents once lived in.

He sets about the mundane yet exhausting process of sorting through the remnants of his father's life - clearing away years of accumulated objects, unearthing forgotten memories and the haunted realms of everyday life. At the same time, he embarks on an eccentric side-project. And as he grows increasingly obsessed with this new project, his grip on reality seems to slip.

Nicholas Royle challenges and experiments with literary form to forge a new mode of storytelling that is both playful and inquisitive. Tender, absorbing and at times shockingly funny, this extraordinary novel is both mystery and love story. It confronts the mad hand of grief while embracing the endless possibilities of language.

Genres: Fiction

159 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this short novel up, almost on a whim, last year, at my award winning local independent shop Five Leaves, and I have finally got round to finding the few hours needed to read it. I am glad that I did, as it is very original and entertaining, if somewhat baffling at times.

The surface story is that of a man dealing with his father's death and living in his parents' house who acquires a bizarre obsession with stingrays and manta rays, filling the house with aquaria and gradually losing his sanity. There is plenty of humour, wordplay and symbolism so the surface is largely symbolic. The narrative viewpoint switches from first to second person about halfway through, the second part being narrated by the young woman who is a sort of girlfriend living and working in another country.

Royle uses a lot of obscure language, some of it made up - I didn't look much up because the gist was always clear enough.

Incidentally, this Nicholas Royle is the author of An English Guide to Birdwatching, and the excellent reviews of that book by Neil, Paul and Gumble's Yard contributed to my decision to buy it.

[Mark Zieg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow, what does one say of this? I've spent two days trying to come up with the words for a proper review that sufficiently reflects the complexity and charm of this slim volume, but I'm afraid my muse has deserted me; or rather, has been humbled into awed silence by the erudite extravagance of Prof. Royle's mesmerizing monograph. That, and I'm still trying to figure out the ending :-)

I suppose Quilt qualifies loosely as a novel, in the sense that it has characters (really just the two), time more-or-less flows forward in linear fashion, and the author shows a grudging nod to such plot niceties as beginning, middle, and end. However, it's also free-association stream-of-consciousness poesis, in which the writer gives full rein to his obvious infatuation with ontological wordplay.

The book starts out as a reasonably coherent if lyrical tale about a man dealing with his father's demise, but quickly develops a Kafka-esque quality as the protagonist waxes weird on the philosophical and theological import of...wait for it...stingrays. As it happens, I have a thing for sharks and their compressed cousins myself, so was delighted by the professor's unexpected dive into the philological murk of our subconscious substrate; however, crafty readers hoping for allusions to actual quilting will be much surprised, as mantuas are masked by mantas, and purls passed over for pearls.

Four stars, for reminding us that syntax is our servant, not master, and that words were created expressly to share thoughts, feelings and dreams which could not otherwise be communicated simply by pointing to rock, and grunting.

[Angela · Rating 1 out of 5]

Tedious. Had no empathy for any of the characters. The author seemed more concerned about the language in a way that was at the expense of the reader's navigation through the narrative, and engagement with it.

[Amanda Rosso · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have an unabashed admiration for intelligent authors. The ones that layer their books with multiple meanings and construct narratives that intertwine with storytelling, literature, history and reality in a very conscious and intentional way.

Most of all, I feel extremely grateful and appreciative when authors respect (and challenge) the reader's intelligence, when they dare to dream that their books will meet someone able to read through and across, and to the very depths of their writing.

Nicholas Royle is one of those authors, and each one of his books confirms this trust and hope and intelligence. His penchant for language, intertextuality, wordplay, and the pristine form of his structural and formal dexterity, are an absolute privilege to witness.

I do understand why some people might feel intimidated and confused by his work, and I don't judge them, they're simply not the reader that Royle's books were written for. And this is not in any way a snobbish intellectualism, it is not a matter of intelligence or acuity or erudition. It concerns the type of relationship the reader has with the written form and its potential, with the discombobulating and discomforting power of language and its demanding expectations. With the artificiality and arbitrariness of it all. With the subtle revelation of a grinding machinery underneath it all.
To me, it sounds like gold, to others it might represent the unwelcome peak behind the Veil of Maya that they'd rather do without.

[Des Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can forgive all potential stylistic pretentiousness, or radical change of POV, or a supposedly rushed ending with pages of word lists embracing embedded anagrams or homophones of ‘ray’, yes forgive everything for a brilliant ending. You need to read it all and embrace the words yourself, including the ending concept of the manta ray etc. I am enormously impressed and will continue thinking about this novel for years to come, even re-reading it, not least for its startling echo of the photo earlier in this thread of bird prints, plane prints in the snow, surrounding a paragraph centred on this phrase: “uncontrollable traffic of miniature chubby Concordes”.

The detailed review (Novel Doodlings) of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.

[Hugo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable and challenging, initially, as a rumination of the vagaries of grief, written in a poetic stream-of-consciousness, reminiscent of Beckett (especially Not I). But a midway change in the central character loses all momentum (largely due to the change in prose style, though this character given no name and having no concretely established relationship with the original narrator does not help at all), and then wobbles off into a treatise on manta rays, before ending obliquely, to say the least. The afterword offers little help.

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

A peculiar book. Not quite sure what the ending was all about.

[Jimmy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Written with a dictionary and to be read with a dictionary.

[Ruby Singh · Rating 1 out of 5]

Abandoned on page 11.

[Deborah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nicholas Royale is a real discovery for me. His strange, other worldly writing, his humour and wordplay can slow reading at times, but it's all thoroughly worth it. I guess his literary interests (the uncanny, Derrida, deconstructivism) might be off putting to some, but despite the density of his writing, there's also a real humanity and sense of deep wells of feeling when he writes about his late parents.

Never going to be everyone's favourite, but he is definitely someone to seek out if a vertiginous linguistic challenge is wanted: think Riddley Walker or The Wake. Joyous.

[Jacqueline · Rating 1 out of 5]

Parts of the "The Quilt" would be best in a volume of poetry - I liked some of its play on and with words. But the rest, for me, fell hugely short as a novel.

[Allie Cresswell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quilt is an intriguing and sometimes perplexing story of loss, loneliness and coping. A man loses his father and begins the doleful process of funeral-organisation and house-clearance - the cumbersome outward manifestations of the grieving and coming-to-terms which occupy him within. On the face of it a dreary enough subject for a novel in all conscience, although a very human one to which many of us will all-too-poignantly relate, and yet the fizzing, darting, tangential lexicon of Nicholas Royle’s prose illuminates it into a bright and effervescing thing. At times I felt like a pin-ball in one of those old-fashioned amusement machines, ricocheting from one image to another, spun off mid-sentence into new trajectories by rhymes and associations of ideas. Then again I was on a bob-sleigh, hurtling down a linguistic crevasse with my stomach in my mouth wondering what on earth was going to come at me round the corner of the next page.
How refreshing it was to have something required of me in the reading process! To be obliged to grapple with the allusions and to think about the philosophy, natural history, psychology and literary references which make up this novel, in order to make sense of it. This novel has more than a little of the savour of the novels of Henry James, Conrad and Poe, which require the same kind of ‘active reading’. Certainly, Nicholas Royle has much of interest to say in his Afterword about the nature of fiction and the role of the novel itself which is well worth reading. Perhaps what we have here is a neo modernist novel. How splendid!
The journey on which the author takes his character (and his readers) is unexpected to the point of being bizarre, but peel away the word-play and what remains is a heart-felt homily which speaks in words a mile high of the abject emptiness of grief and the frantic, eccentric efforts we make to fill up the void.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I should probably declare an interest in that a former tutor of mine wrote Quilt. But whereas I knew Nicholas Royle, English lecturer, reasonably well I am left doubting everything following my reading of this short, disturbing yet matter of fact novel about grief. Certain biographical details do tally with an impression I had, but the central motif of the book is a domestic aquarium filled with Rays. Could Nick really have built such a thing? I could almost belief in the truth of it. So Quilt is either a remarkable memoir of an extreme course of action or a remarkable novel with a radically original streak. The lexicographical playfulness was not always to my taste, but the humour and morbidity certainly were. If you're looking for a novel that's a quick dark read, check this out.

[Oliver · Rating 2 out of 5]

First of all I'm sure this book doesn't really deserve 2 stars but for me personally i found it just to challenging to read and make sense. There were times when I read 5 pages and had no idea what I was reading, but maybe that was the point? Maybe I was meant to be confused and frustrated like the main character?
It reminded me in parts of Kafkas the castle that same mixture of reality and fantasy.
I think it's a powerful piece of work and the writer attempts at portraying grief and mental illness were original and interesting but I guess I just felt a bit to overwhelmed.

[Juno · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't quite know how I felt after finishing this short work about a man dealing in his own peculiar way with the death of his father. On the one hand I got a bit fed up with having to look words up in the dictionary..not a usual thing for me, but then once I gave up doing that and just read it as a poetical piece almost, a stream-of-consciousness type affair, really playing with language..I was enthralled by the writing. Hmm ..interesting..

[Gerdav · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was so cross with the ending. The book had a different style from what I'm used to reading and I was enjoying the change - but I felt that the author couldn't be bothered to finish the book so it made me cross that I had bothered to stay with it.

[Anna · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm really not sure why I kept going with this right to the end. I kept thinking it would get better and start to make more sense but it just didn't.

[Rachel Louise Atkin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Learnt a lot about manta rays.