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Never Was
Part hallucination, part queer bildungsroman, Never Was is a beautifully strange novel about grief, addiction, transmasculinity and class, taking us from a limbo of lost dreams to a small salt- mining town and exploring the way identity is both inherited and re-invented.
Daniel sits on a clifftop in the aftermath of a party at Fin's mansion, looking out over a junky sea. Daniel's not sure why they're there, or who Fin is, even though Fin seems to be somebody famous. To find out, Daniel must tell Fin the story of their childhood, going back to a small salt-mining town in The North, a visit from their now-estranged relative Crystal, and the life and losses of their salt-miner father, Mika.
Taking us from bus shelters to playgrounds to McDonalds, from the depth of a salt mine to a nightclub toilet, Daniel describes their world of soap operas, sunglasses, newspaper clippings and Princess Diana, steering Fin through the events that led up to The Great Subsidence, when their town and the mine that sustained it collapsed. As Daniel tells their story, they come to learn they’re in a place called Never Was, a limbo for lost dreams and disappointments, a landfill for things that never came to be, but also a place of change and transition. Dreamy, poignant, and revelatory, Never Was is a bewitching and inventive novel by an inimitable voice in literary fiction.
Daniel sits on a clifftop in the aftermath of a party at Fin's mansion, looking out over a junky sea. Daniel's not sure why they're there, or who Fin is, even though Fin seems to be somebody famous. To find out, Daniel must tell Fin the story of their childhood, going back to a small salt-mining town in The North, a visit from their now-estranged relative Crystal, and the life and losses of their salt-miner father, Mika.
Taking us from bus shelters to playgrounds to McDonalds, from the depth of a salt mine to a nightclub toilet, Daniel describes their world of soap operas, sunglasses, newspaper clippings and Princess Diana, steering Fin through the events that led up to The Great Subsidence, when their town and the mine that sustained it collapsed. As Daniel tells their story, they come to learn they’re in a place called Never Was, a limbo for lost dreams and disappointments, a landfill for things that never came to be, but also a place of change and transition. Dreamy, poignant, and revelatory, Never Was is a bewitching and inventive novel by an inimitable voice in literary fiction.
329 pages, Paperback
First published April 6, 2023
21 people are currently reading
1022 people want to read
About the author
H. Gareth Gavin
3 books21 followersH. Gareth Gavin is a writer from Birmingham. Midland: A Novel Out of Time (Penned in the Margins, 2014) was shortlisted for the 2015 Gordon Burn Prize and his short story, ‘Home Death’, was longlisted for the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize 2019/20. Funny Queer, a hand-sewn limited edition collection of stories, was published by the Aleph Press in 2021. An essay on transmasculinity and femininity, ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me,’ takes its title from a Muriel Spark ghost story and is collected in Queer Life, Queer Love (Muswell Press, 2021). He currently teaches in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester.
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December 9, 2023
Shortlisted for the 2023 Goldsmiths Prize
I guess it must have been around this time that the feeling I should have been famous began to move in me. Should have been famous—
— Recognised, known, loved, heard of,' Fin nods.—
— but never would be. That latter bit, at anticipatory let-down, was crucial. The feeling shifted in me like a tectonic nstability; I don't think I necessaily felt it consciously and I don't know exactly where it came from, whether it had something to do with Mika's full name being George Michael or whether it was my version of the story of the blind woman from The Sun or whether it was just somewhere to send the unbearable unsustainable sense that something was somehow escaping me, stealing away from me, something to do with my true form and the hard contours of my body, which if Crystal was right and I would grow breasts, soon wouldn't be my body. Softly softly, the snow would not fail. I don't know, I didn't know. Maybe at the end of the day it was just another way of wishing myself away, of disappearing, or manufacturing my disappearance.
Never Was is the second novel by H. Gareth Gavin, a lyrically written, imaginative and moving exploration of transmasculinuty, fame and societal expectations, working-class origins, white privilege, all embedded within early 90s Northern English pop culture.
His first, Midland: A Novel Out of Time (Penned in the Margins, 2014), was shortlisted for the 2015 Gordon Burn Prize, a prize that "recognises literature that is forward-thinking and fearless in its ambition and execution" and this novel has been shortlisted for the 2023 Goldsmiths Prize which is "awarded to a book that is deemed genuinely novel and which embodies the spirit of invention that characterizes the genre at its best." Gavin's writing in his novel exemplifies this - the Goldsmiths judges' citation reading:
The novel is published by the wonderful Cipher Press an independent publisher of queer fiction and non-fiction. Our aim is to amplify queer voices and to champion LGBTQIA+ writers in the UK and beyond. We want to publish authors who are creating a new literary canon by disrupting existing narratives and retelling them in new ways. We want to publish the many different stories that make up our community, and we want to make those stories accessible to everyone.
Never Was comes with a recommendation from a former Goldsmiths Prize winner, Isabel Waidner, who calls out how it "brings the otherwordly in conversation with reality like no other book I can think of". This reader did have one comparison in mine - Waidner's own novels - the two sharing this effective combination of the surreal and quotidian, flamboyance and rawness, as well as their subject-matter focus and pop-culture references, but where Waidner's prose is staccato and propulsive, Gavin's is lyrical and dreamy.
See Gumble's Yard's review for more on the plot.
A very worthy contender for the Goldsmiths Prize.
Background reading and illustrations
Legendary by Fin, recorded by the author some years ago when the novel was originally going to be centered on Fin and the comeback of a star who never was, a member of a boyband that never existed ... the character, or avatar, of ‘Fin’, whose story is narrated in the third person, but with no pronoun whatsoever.. Sample lyrics
"Birdsfoot trefoil, the flower of revenge" from an Instragram page set up for this earlier version of the novel:
The pop-culture references in the novel lead the reader on an off-the-page exploration of McDonalds and McMansions, Neighbours and Home & Away, George Michael and Lady Di, stories in The Sun, as well as a history of Cheshire salt-mining.
The story of Jewel Shuping behind the 'I decided to become blind' headline (from the Sun in the novel but their archive isn't great, this is the Daily Mail version).
The story of George Michael falling from a car on a motorway, again per the Daily Mail version.
A collapse in 1907 of the ground around the Cheshire salt mines, taken from a series of photos of the Lion Salt Works in Cheshire, including the one in the novel on page 78.
A house in Castle Chambers, Castle Street, Northwhich suffering from subsidence (image dated 1890-99) and included in the novel (p204), from Cheshire Archives and Local Studies:
Craig-McLachlan, who played Henry in Neighbours, appearing both as himself and in character in a self-made video when he was excluded from the Neighbours reunion:
Elvis appears in the bottom of a McDonalds ketchup pot - wonderfully the person who took the photo didn't keep the evidence as she used the remnants of Elvis to season her last Chicken Nugget:
The National Archives relocated to a Cheshire salt mine:
The Centralia mine fire in Philidelphia:
A plaque marking the 1966 Compton's Cafeteria Riot, which closes the novel:
I guess it must have been around this time that the feeling I should have been famous began to move in me. Should have been famous—
— Recognised, known, loved, heard of,' Fin nods.—
— but never would be. That latter bit, at anticipatory let-down, was crucial. The feeling shifted in me like a tectonic nstability; I don't think I necessaily felt it consciously and I don't know exactly where it came from, whether it had something to do with Mika's full name being George Michael or whether it was my version of the story of the blind woman from The Sun or whether it was just somewhere to send the unbearable unsustainable sense that something was somehow escaping me, stealing away from me, something to do with my true form and the hard contours of my body, which if Crystal was right and I would grow breasts, soon wouldn't be my body. Softly softly, the snow would not fail. I don't know, I didn't know. Maybe at the end of the day it was just another way of wishing myself away, of disappearing, or manufacturing my disappearance.
Never Was is the second novel by H. Gareth Gavin, a lyrically written, imaginative and moving exploration of transmasculinuty, fame and societal expectations, working-class origins, white privilege, all embedded within early 90s Northern English pop culture.
His first, Midland: A Novel Out of Time (Penned in the Margins, 2014), was shortlisted for the 2015 Gordon Burn Prize, a prize that "recognises literature that is forward-thinking and fearless in its ambition and execution" and this novel has been shortlisted for the 2023 Goldsmiths Prize which is "awarded to a book that is deemed genuinely novel and which embodies the spirit of invention that characterizes the genre at its best." Gavin's writing in his novel exemplifies this - the Goldsmiths judges' citation reading:
"This intriguing, multi-faceted novel is a feat of imagination. In it, H. Gareth Gavin boldly merges a story of catastrophe in a northern English town with a tale of drug-addled hedonism in a fantasy land. In the overlaps and spaces between, Gavin tracks a father-child relationship, the promise of celebrity, and the progress of salt from a mine to McDonald’s chicken nuggets.
Never Was is a great trans novel, queering and querying expectations of character, type and truth itself."
The novel is published by the wonderful Cipher Press an independent publisher of queer fiction and non-fiction. Our aim is to amplify queer voices and to champion LGBTQIA+ writers in the UK and beyond. We want to publish authors who are creating a new literary canon by disrupting existing narratives and retelling them in new ways. We want to publish the many different stories that make up our community, and we want to make those stories accessible to everyone.
Never Was comes with a recommendation from a former Goldsmiths Prize winner, Isabel Waidner, who calls out how it "brings the otherwordly in conversation with reality like no other book I can think of". This reader did have one comparison in mine - Waidner's own novels - the two sharing this effective combination of the surreal and quotidian, flamboyance and rawness, as well as their subject-matter focus and pop-culture references, but where Waidner's prose is staccato and propulsive, Gavin's is lyrical and dreamy.
See Gumble's Yard's review for more on the plot.
A very worthy contender for the Goldsmiths Prize.
Background reading and illustrations
Legendary by Fin, recorded by the author some years ago when the novel was originally going to be centered on Fin and the comeback of a star who never was, a member of a boyband that never existed ... the character, or avatar, of ‘Fin’, whose story is narrated in the third person, but with no pronoun whatsoever.. Sample lyrics
When you were twenty-four
Your body was torn in a perfect storm
It started to snow and you burned your tongue
Your eyes turned gold and you coughed up a lung
"Birdsfoot trefoil, the flower of revenge" from an Instragram page set up for this earlier version of the novel:
The pop-culture references in the novel lead the reader on an off-the-page exploration of McDonalds and McMansions, Neighbours and Home & Away, George Michael and Lady Di, stories in The Sun, as well as a history of Cheshire salt-mining.
The story of Jewel Shuping behind the 'I decided to become blind' headline (from the Sun in the novel but their archive isn't great, this is the Daily Mail version).
The story of George Michael falling from a car on a motorway, again per the Daily Mail version.
A collapse in 1907 of the ground around the Cheshire salt mines, taken from a series of photos of the Lion Salt Works in Cheshire, including the one in the novel on page 78.
A house in Castle Chambers, Castle Street, Northwhich suffering from subsidence (image dated 1890-99) and included in the novel (p204), from Cheshire Archives and Local Studies:
Craig-McLachlan, who played Henry in Neighbours, appearing both as himself and in character in a self-made video when he was excluded from the Neighbours reunion:
Elvis appears in the bottom of a McDonalds ketchup pot - wonderfully the person who took the photo didn't keep the evidence as she used the remnants of Elvis to season her last Chicken Nugget:
The National Archives relocated to a Cheshire salt mine:
The Centralia mine fire in Philidelphia:
A plaque marking the 1966 Compton's Cafeteria Riot, which closes the novel:
December 16, 2023
Experimentally daring, sophisticated, but also very sincere novel. It shows how it feels to be trapped in one's social environment, one's drug-induced hallucinations and one's body that appeared to be the most alien. And it does so with striking imagery, poetic dialogue, polyphonic structure, visual and typographic techniques. My only minor problem was with the last chapter. It seemed a bit detached from the body of the novel, almost like a stand alone story; and it was a bit too didactic compared with the rest of the text. I look forward to more work by this writer.
July 7, 2023
Love a little fucking about with form love a little setting form on fire
April 8, 2023
Never Was is a hallucinatory novel set in a limbo of lost dreams, exploring transmasculinity, addiction, loss, and what we do when we tell and hear our own and others' stories. Daniel is on a clifftop by an afterparty held by the apparently famous Fin, a party full of drugs and a sense of unreality. It is unclear why they are there, but as Daniel starts telling Fin the story of a mining town in the North, a kid growing up with a salt miner father, and a Great Subsidence that changed everything, maybe the purpose of the place Daniel and Fin are in will become clear.
The page layout of this novel really stands out, experimental but always in service of communicating something, particularly through the bulk of the novel where it serves as a method of dialogue and of telling two stories at once. I loved the opening single page vignettes that lead you into the book and the sense of party hallucination you got from them. The multi-part narrative that sits within this narrative, narrated by Daniel, explores working-class life in a similar to way to Isabel Waidner's books, using both the surreal and the gritty plus cultural touchstones like Neighbours. Lurking around the edges are recurring themes of addiction and gender, and the ways in which these sometimes have to lurk around the edges, as people try to ignore them.
The style and the storytelling really enraptured me, and also what isn't told. Never Was feels like a puzzle that takes you along for the ride.
The page layout of this novel really stands out, experimental but always in service of communicating something, particularly through the bulk of the novel where it serves as a method of dialogue and of telling two stories at once. I loved the opening single page vignettes that lead you into the book and the sense of party hallucination you got from them. The multi-part narrative that sits within this narrative, narrated by Daniel, explores working-class life in a similar to way to Isabel Waidner's books, using both the surreal and the gritty plus cultural touchstones like Neighbours. Lurking around the edges are recurring themes of addiction and gender, and the ways in which these sometimes have to lurk around the edges, as people try to ignore them.
The style and the storytelling really enraptured me, and also what isn't told. Never Was feels like a puzzle that takes you along for the ride.
April 26, 2024
4.5 stars
I'm not going to be able to add much to what has been said before in the other reviews. This is a singular book, like nothing I've ever read before, somehow combining hallucinary yet sincere prose to describe a world/thought/idea/place/time/feeling that can never fully be described because it is always transient. It is always growing and changing. This is the very queer (and very trans) story of how we tell (and listen) to stories, and how our (often fantastical) stories can infect the so-called real world and vice versa. This is a feat of seriously sophisticated writing and quite possibly one of the most beautiful pieces of prose I've read in the last few years. This is a polyphonic, extravagant, k-hole of a story with striking imagery and poetic metaphors that would not look out of place in a philosophy PHD program. I am certainly not clever (or academic) enough to translate much of what was happening. But I did understand the feeling. The feeling of not understanding the world, of not understanding my body, of not understanding my place within society. This is a queering of the truth of the world, a real feat of mind-bending imagination. An exploration of societal expectations and fame and transmasculinity and daydreams and addiction and childhood loss, all wrapped up in an alien place of limbo called Never Was. Basically, imagine Neverland, but made out of humanity's discarded hopes and dreams, of everything you've ever left behind. Both surreal and gritty, experimental and heartfelt, this is more like a feeling than a novel. Highly recommended and essential literature. Just don't go in expecting answers. Please DM me if you can explain it at all lol
I'm not going to be able to add much to what has been said before in the other reviews. This is a singular book, like nothing I've ever read before, somehow combining hallucinary yet sincere prose to describe a world/thought/idea/place/time/feeling that can never fully be described because it is always transient. It is always growing and changing. This is the very queer (and very trans) story of how we tell (and listen) to stories, and how our (often fantastical) stories can infect the so-called real world and vice versa. This is a feat of seriously sophisticated writing and quite possibly one of the most beautiful pieces of prose I've read in the last few years. This is a polyphonic, extravagant, k-hole of a story with striking imagery and poetic metaphors that would not look out of place in a philosophy PHD program. I am certainly not clever (or academic) enough to translate much of what was happening. But I did understand the feeling. The feeling of not understanding the world, of not understanding my body, of not understanding my place within society. This is a queering of the truth of the world, a real feat of mind-bending imagination. An exploration of societal expectations and fame and transmasculinity and daydreams and addiction and childhood loss, all wrapped up in an alien place of limbo called Never Was. Basically, imagine Neverland, but made out of humanity's discarded hopes and dreams, of everything you've ever left behind. Both surreal and gritty, experimental and heartfelt, this is more like a feeling than a novel. Highly recommended and essential literature. Just don't go in expecting answers. Please DM me if you can explain it at all lol
August 26, 2023
i’m still trying to wrap my head around what i have just finished reading.
March 27, 2024
4/5
so ambitious and experimental that even when a very small number of stylistic choices don't work it doesn't really matter.. a genuinely emotional raw and all encompassing achievement that encapsulates transness childhood addiction family desire .. also perfectly captures what a k hole feels like
so ambitious and experimental that even when a very small number of stylistic choices don't work it doesn't really matter.. a genuinely emotional raw and all encompassing achievement that encapsulates transness childhood addiction family desire .. also perfectly captures what a k hole feels like
March 13, 2024
some thought-proving contemplations on trans masculinity, queerness as liminal space & lost futures, class etc etc swimming around in here but ultimately I couldn’t make heads nor tails of this, which I suppose is the point
March 22, 2024
“Funny how a life was like a body but at the same time, nothing like a body. How those two things needed each other without being equivalents. Funny, he thought now, moving away from the face, how life wasn't possible without a body to live by, but you could have a body without a life, and a life could live on beyond a body. Not necessarily as a ghost - no, a ghost was too substan-tial, too much of something for what he was thinking of - but just as a sifting sleeting of memories, haphazardly remembered. He had not gone to his own half-sister's funeral, but for years he had kept a porcelain statue of her namesake on the windowsill.
…
The Nothing is not something. The Nothing is what's left when there's no longer something. Or maybe the Nothing is what's always there waiting, waiting for the feeling of there being something to subside.
…
Regret is a strange and difficult thing to feel for your body. How can you regret something you didn't do? How can something that is irrevocably you come to feel, nonetheless, regrettable?
It seems impossible, but it's possible. I could call it grief instead - I could say I felt grief for the body my body was not, the body my body once seemed like it might have become, but which, by now, was long lost. Now my body was marked and I was called names because of it - girl, woman, her. Each of those words felt like names to me, but my body invited them.
…
I felt nothing - no pleasure and no pain - but feeling nothing only made me feel closer to the body my body was not. Feeling nothing made my body remember the body my body had forgotten, and not forgotten. It was like a magic trick. By surrendering, I made myself elsewhere. Throughout the whole thing, I kept my sunglasses on.”
…
The Nothing is not something. The Nothing is what's left when there's no longer something. Or maybe the Nothing is what's always there waiting, waiting for the feeling of there being something to subside.
…
Regret is a strange and difficult thing to feel for your body. How can you regret something you didn't do? How can something that is irrevocably you come to feel, nonetheless, regrettable?
It seems impossible, but it's possible. I could call it grief instead - I could say I felt grief for the body my body was not, the body my body once seemed like it might have become, but which, by now, was long lost. Now my body was marked and I was called names because of it - girl, woman, her. Each of those words felt like names to me, but my body invited them.
…
I felt nothing - no pleasure and no pain - but feeling nothing only made me feel closer to the body my body was not. Feeling nothing made my body remember the body my body had forgotten, and not forgotten. It was like a magic trick. By surrendering, I made myself elsewhere. Throughout the whole thing, I kept my sunglasses on.”
January 8, 2025
painfulllllll to read. i can tell the author was trying to do something but trying is the key word here. i picked it up in the charity shop because the blurb sounded cool but most of the book was ruined by the stupid, not necessary at all formatting. it added nothng to the story, in fact it took away from it. barely got through this.
May 6, 2025
so so interesting!! glad i made myself finish instead of stopping when i didn’t like the style bcs! it’s so strange to look at an authors face and know that they’ve had all these thoughts in their head and made it up or got it from somewhere. rly rly liked the book i liked how time was so unclear and real and not real and how the characters weren’t full people but developed enough to understand them….anyways
October 4, 2023
I’m not sure what this was but apparently it’s what I needed to get out of my reading slump
June 6, 2023
"I'm not a little girl and I'm not a woman, I said. Never was. Ha!"
What if there was a place your dreams, aspirations, and truths could live without you? That place is Never Was. A trans-cendental (pun intended) limbo where recognisable strangers talk, listen, and re-invent. The consequences of their stories having rippling effects upon the real world.
Playful and poignant, H. Gareth Gavin's manipulation of form and structure renders "Never Was" a space for trans and queer dreams to be realised.
What if there was a place your dreams, aspirations, and truths could live without you? That place is Never Was. A trans-cendental (pun intended) limbo where recognisable strangers talk, listen, and re-invent. The consequences of their stories having rippling effects upon the real world.
Playful and poignant, H. Gareth Gavin's manipulation of form and structure renders "Never Was" a space for trans and queer dreams to be realised.
August 15, 2024
the more time passes since i finished this book the more affection i hold it in. i truly and deeply savoured it at the time but it’s grown retrospectively into genuine love, like i feel never was constantly echoing through me. it’s joining Lote on the bookshelf inside my ribcage. perfect
February 9, 2025
repetitive both by writing and by oscillating between the same concepts, constantly. interesting setting, the Never Was, but no palpable plot, as far as i could tell
July 11, 2025
4.5 stars
never read anything like this and i do not think i will ever find anything like it again what the fuck i adored that
never read anything like this and i do not think i will ever find anything like it again what the fuck i adored that
August 5, 2025
‘What makes something - anything - difficult to believe? Or just difficult to see? Believability is a funny thing.’
I feel like this went straight over my head. There were some moments where I enjoyed the imagery but I really struggled to connect to the story. I only engage with the the narrative in the epilogue.
I feel like this went straight over my head. There were some moments where I enjoyed the imagery but I really struggled to connect to the story. I only engage with the the narrative in the epilogue.
August 16, 2025
ik snap nogsteeds niet wat ik heb gelezen
October 12, 2025
this kind of reminded me of night in the woods
May 8, 2025
No idea what I just read exactly but I really really loved it.
April 28, 2023
‘Never Was’ is a fantastic experience of a book, exploring gender, grief, addiction and masculinity. It’s confusing in the best possible way. I loved the way that H. Gareth Gavin played with formatting throughout the novel to communicate to the reader. The moments that really dived into the trans experiance were some of the strongest passages in a novel discussing this in recent memory. A must-read queer book.
July 7, 2023
loved this so so so much, one of the most magical reading experiences i’ve ever had and i wish i could read it over and over again for the first time. the only reason i can’t give it five stars is because the editing is abysmal, the amount of spelling errors and general editorial mistakes is shocking and kind of ruined the reading experience. it’s a shame bc it has nothing to do with the book itself but it needs to be reprinted!
October 28, 2023
Shortlisted for the 2023 Goldsmith Prize.
An Apology starting “In Lieu of a constant recognisable world , what follows could be imagined as taking place at the precise point whereupon a lightbulb, balanced on the nose of some handsome body, turns out in fact to be a sun, done with the day, collapsing”sets the scene for a novel which is from the beginning elusive in both its imaginative/fantastical conceptions and in its differently focused lens on the world (part queer, part working class) – both of which are reminscent of the 2021 Goldsmith Prize winner Isabel Waidner, and so it is perhaps no surprise to see that author blurbing both the front cover and front French flap of this fascinating novel.
The next section is a short helpful Navigation introducing, in enigmatic terms, the book’s two longest sections: “A New Beginning” and “An Old Story”.
“A New Beginning” takes place in the aftermath of a party, hosted by the famous (although unclear what for other than being famous) Fin at his seaside mansion – and is narrated by the post-drug trip Daniel (“although nobody called me that” having “abandoned the final a of my name around the time I should have been famous”) as the two look out from a clifftop over a sea oddly occupied by a derelict cruise ship. Fin encourages Daniel to tell his story, not least by revealing he knows Daniel’s long lost sort-of-sister Crystal.
“An Old Story” is effectively that story – told by Daniel on the left hand side of the page, but with interjections by Fin and conversations between the two on the right hand side of the page.
The story that Daniel tells is of his father Mika (actual name George Michael – not the famous one), an explosive expert in the salt mines in their town in the North, and how their family dynamic was changed when he was 13 by the arrival of Crystal, the 16 year old daughter of Mika’s recently deceased alcoholic sister. Crystal has a confidence and swagger that unnerves and impresses Daniel(a): early on she claims that her own damaged eyes hidden by some sunglasses she gifts her cousin who adopts them as a uniform, might be related to a newspaper headline that the latter has pinned up “I DECDIED TO BECOME BLIND”; later claiming that not only could she have “poured bleached into her eyes” but also that she may have killed someone; she also as a vegan enjoys sucking tomato ketchup of Chicken McNuggets. This dynamic then causes the then Daniela to question the identity that they feel the world is going to start assigning them.
We also learn of The Great Subsidence as the mines collapse.
Now an observant reader of my review may have noticed two typos in the above “DECDIED” and “bleached” – which would seem to be more than the editor of the book did (in the few pages around these two I also came across “cellotape” and “no cars had past us on the way” – its possible these are all part of the hallucinatory narrative (as I felt a lot of the book past (sic) me by) but I was not really sure they were.
At the same time Fin starts to reveal his own theories of the place they are meeting to Daniel
And his theory that everyone coming to Never Was has to find someone else to tell them their story – he doing the same with a claimed Miss Universe, as well as something of how Fin knows Crystal, who seems to be either a repeated and/or residual visitor to the land.
And as Daniel switches to telling the story of Mika, but in a close third person, eventually the narrative in this section then appears to breakdown with Crystal and Daniel communicating via footnotes.
When Daniel returns from this episode, we have a section which I felt had both good and bad parts – some strong ones where Daniel explores his transmasculinity and other weaker ones where it feels like there is a suggestion the whole thing is just a bad drug trip – but we also have Fin talking more about Never Was and Crystal’s influence.
Two short closing sections are told firstly by Fin, explaining Never Was as closer to a computer game/simulation “a lot of trans folk play Never Was, by the way, or else people turn out to be trans having played, but you don't necessarily have to be trans to play”, with Fin and Daniel as closer to user names – a simulation which seemed to interact with the real world and people’s memories and more important their stories.
And then appropriately with the ex-Miss Universe briefly telling their story, appropriately as the concept or even meaning of fame and the ideas of storytelling are as crucial to this novel as they are to another, very different, Goldsmith shortlisted novel Adam Thirwell’s “The Future Future”.
To be honest at the end – and even after a second read through – I was unsure what I read or whether I really gained much at all of what the author was aiming at, but there was enough to keep me interested.
See also this review for much of the background to the novel
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
An Apology starting “In Lieu of a constant recognisable world , what follows could be imagined as taking place at the precise point whereupon a lightbulb, balanced on the nose of some handsome body, turns out in fact to be a sun, done with the day, collapsing”sets the scene for a novel which is from the beginning elusive in both its imaginative/fantastical conceptions and in its differently focused lens on the world (part queer, part working class) – both of which are reminscent of the 2021 Goldsmith Prize winner Isabel Waidner, and so it is perhaps no surprise to see that author blurbing both the front cover and front French flap of this fascinating novel.
The next section is a short helpful Navigation introducing, in enigmatic terms, the book’s two longest sections: “A New Beginning” and “An Old Story”.
“A New Beginning” takes place in the aftermath of a party, hosted by the famous (although unclear what for other than being famous) Fin at his seaside mansion – and is narrated by the post-drug trip Daniel (“although nobody called me that” having “abandoned the final a of my name around the time I should have been famous”) as the two look out from a clifftop over a sea oddly occupied by a derelict cruise ship. Fin encourages Daniel to tell his story, not least by revealing he knows Daniel’s long lost sort-of-sister Crystal.
“An Old Story” is effectively that story – told by Daniel on the left hand side of the page, but with interjections by Fin and conversations between the two on the right hand side of the page.
The story that Daniel tells is of his father Mika (actual name George Michael – not the famous one), an explosive expert in the salt mines in their town in the North, and how their family dynamic was changed when he was 13 by the arrival of Crystal, the 16 year old daughter of Mika’s recently deceased alcoholic sister. Crystal has a confidence and swagger that unnerves and impresses Daniel(a): early on she claims that her own damaged eyes hidden by some sunglasses she gifts her cousin who adopts them as a uniform, might be related to a newspaper headline that the latter has pinned up “I DECDIED TO BECOME BLIND”; later claiming that not only could she have “poured bleached into her eyes” but also that she may have killed someone; she also as a vegan enjoys sucking tomato ketchup of Chicken McNuggets. This dynamic then causes the then Daniela to question the identity that they feel the world is going to start assigning them.
It's not mine; I snapped back, hating Crystal for saying my name, hating her, now, for everything. I was thirteen and though puberty was still properly to happen to me, already I hated the sound of it. felt estranged from the word as much as I felt estranged from my own name, puberty, so fleshy and putrid; Daniela, so stupid and frilly. I was what was sometimes called a slow-starter and fine with that. My body still fit me but at the same time, I already sensed I didn't belong to it. I already sensed my body's future wasn't mine - not completely.
We also learn of The Great Subsidence as the mines collapse.
Now an observant reader of my review may have noticed two typos in the above “DECDIED” and “bleached” – which would seem to be more than the editor of the book did (in the few pages around these two I also came across “cellotape” and “no cars had past us on the way” – its possible these are all part of the hallucinatory narrative (as I felt a lot of the book past (sic) me by) but I was not really sure they were.
At the same time Fin starts to reveal his own theories of the place they are meeting to Daniel
I've come to think; Fin says, carefully, deliberately, 'that where we are right now is a kind of limbo - but not for people. It's not where people go when they die. No. It's like a landfill for lost dreams and disappointments, things that never came to be - things that we never ended up being. Thoughts that once crossed some-bod's mind - throwaway thoughts that once crossed my mind, and now also your mind. My reasons for being here are similar to yours, similar but different slightly. That's why we can be here at the same time - have to be, maybe - but that's also why this landscape doesn't make sense, Why the air here is brittle and breaking, why the snow. doesn't make either of us feel cold and why I know that's a pterosaur flying through the sky but you don't. You don't, or won't, believe me?
And his theory that everyone coming to Never Was has to find someone else to tell them their story – he doing the same with a claimed Miss Universe, as well as something of how Fin knows Crystal, who seems to be either a repeated and/or residual visitor to the land.
And as Daniel switches to telling the story of Mika, but in a close third person, eventually the narrative in this section then appears to breakdown with Crystal and Daniel communicating via footnotes.
When Daniel returns from this episode, we have a section which I felt had both good and bad parts – some strong ones where Daniel explores his transmasculinity and other weaker ones where it feels like there is a suggestion the whole thing is just a bad drug trip – but we also have Fin talking more about Never Was and Crystal’s influence.
'Almost, Fin replies, clearly a little exasperated, by this point. I asked you if you wanted to be in my future memoir, didn't I
'Sure, though I'm not sure I know what the word future means anymore!
"That's because Never Was is just the future's indeterminacy, Fin says, as if it's the most obvious thing in the world. 'It's full of futures that never were, but being here brings you closer to something in you that might otherwise have died - something that might have petered out, like the lines of a half-remembered jingle or song. Your time in Never Was is far from over, but already it's having an effect on you. Like I was trying to tell you before, some of this landscape has become yours since you arrived here, at my afterparty, and some of it is leftover from those who were here before either of us - Miss Universe, who I told you about, and who knows how many others'
'Crystal?
Fin looks hard at Daniel. You yourself said you thought you heard her voice.'
'But she's not here in any meaningful sense of the word. Is she?
'Maybe not, but I have a sense of her. I've never actually met her, here or anywhere, but I have a sense of her. I told you I could see her in you.
Two short closing sections are told firstly by Fin, explaining Never Was as closer to a computer game/simulation “a lot of trans folk play Never Was, by the way, or else people turn out to be trans having played, but you don't necessarily have to be trans to play”, with Fin and Daniel as closer to user names – a simulation which seemed to interact with the real world and people’s memories and more important their stories.
Another crucial aspect of Never Was is the narrative level, which is also your listener's leaving level, the way the sim comes to an end for them. As the storyteller you tell three stories about your life, which is how the game finishes reading' your character or avatar, how it finishes assembling your version of Never Was. The scene of your speaking is also significant. You're still in your listener's version when you begin, but by the time you finish, the scenery has shifted. In the meantime your listener listens, and by listening, learns how to leave.
And then appropriately with the ex-Miss Universe briefly telling their story, appropriately as the concept or even meaning of fame and the ideas of storytelling are as crucial to this novel as they are to another, very different, Goldsmith shortlisted novel Adam Thirwell’s “The Future Future”.
To be honest at the end – and even after a second read through – I was unsure what I read or whether I really gained much at all of what the author was aiming at, but there was enough to keep me interested.
See also this review for much of the background to the novel
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Fame is always in some ways a metaphor - a metaphor for the way a life falls away from itself, becomes something other than what it once might have been, splits. shivers, is briefly felt, like the presence of a ghost, by somebody somewhere else, before they realize it was only a breeze - a breeze blowing in nothing. But fame is also a form of recognition, a song hummed and instantly known … It wasn't that I wanted to be famous - not really. It was just that I felt a queer and difficult affinity with the feeling of not having become what I should have been. Even before I didn't become what I could have been, I felt that affinity, I mean. A synonym for fame is sometimes making it - being OK, and not succumbing.
September 9, 2023
Brings these lyrics to mind:
Despite the, the brick walls, the ceiling
Up here I'm freer than the birds
We soar above the broken Earth
The train line in Seaforth
We sit and watch the planet dyin' up above
We sit and smile without concern
Now walk through shop centres together
Our love dissolves this universe (Our love dissolves the universe)
Despite the, the brick walls, the ceiling
Up here I'm freer than the birds
We soar above the broken Earth
The train line in Seaforth
We sit and watch the planet dyin' up above
We sit and smile without concern
Now walk through shop centres together
Our love dissolves this universe (Our love dissolves the universe)
November 2, 2023
Best novel I read in 2023 so far.
I felt like I wasn't reading but inside the author's lucid dream.
I particularly appreciated how the theme of gender is not a central focus in the story, proving that we can have interesting trans characters without having to be restricted by biographical standards of trans literature.
I felt like I wasn't reading but inside the author's lucid dream.
I particularly appreciated how the theme of gender is not a central focus in the story, proving that we can have interesting trans characters without having to be restricted by biographical standards of trans literature.
March 1, 2024
Story of two people in a liminal space telling stories about their lives and unpicking their traumas together. Touching and vivid. Some stylistic choices that didn't work for me.
December 6, 2024
i have so many thoughts on this bear with me & i honestly cannot decide if this deserves 3 or 4 stars
the first 200 pages were the most bizarre and experimental thing & i truly couldn’t tell if i understood any of what what being said, but i was compelled to read more with the hope that all my confusion would be cleared up as the novel progressed and BOY was i right !!!!! the final 120ish pages were EXTRAORDINARY literally everything made so much sense and it was completely captivating !!!! genuinely those final 120 pages were a complete game changer and skyrocketed my enjoyment of the book while also making me think so hard about everything that had come before in the earlier pages !!!!!
there was like a 10 page section with 3 typos and a random repeated sentence & i can’t for the life of me figure out if it was intentional or an editing error
the first 200 pages were the most bizarre and experimental thing & i truly couldn’t tell if i understood any of what what being said, but i was compelled to read more with the hope that all my confusion would be cleared up as the novel progressed and BOY was i right !!!!! the final 120ish pages were EXTRAORDINARY literally everything made so much sense and it was completely captivating !!!! genuinely those final 120 pages were a complete game changer and skyrocketed my enjoyment of the book while also making me think so hard about everything that had come before in the earlier pages !!!!!
there was like a 10 page section with 3 typos and a random repeated sentence & i can’t for the life of me figure out if it was intentional or an editing error
October 23, 2023
Utterly brilliant, discusses the queer experience and the journey to acceptance and realisation through wild experimental form and MANY different prequels and epilogue style entries from differing characters. I have genuinely never read a book quite like this, there are still questions unanswered but it is such a hallucinatory novel that i don’t feel they need to be - through the whole thing i was wondering what was happening and what in meant while deep down knowing it at least suspecting. The first page of this book is my favourite introductory paragraph of a book ever, the whole thing felt like a fever dream that was somehow also so real and an interconnected personal story. incredible.
November 8, 2023
We selected this sublime novel as the most stylishly written book on the shortlist for the Goldsmiths Prize for innovative fiction, the strongest shortlist we've looked at this year. Never Was is the best-written novel we've read so far this year, and is also a work of dark comic genius.
Auraist selects the best-written books from prize shortlists and major reviews, and interviews the prose experts who wrote them. ‘I like very much what you are doing. I’ve been giving out about the same problem for years.’ - Paul Lynch, Booker-shortlisted 2023 for Prophet Song.
Read a passage from Never Was at https://auraist.substack.com/p/goldsm...
Auraist selects the best-written books from prize shortlists and major reviews, and interviews the prose experts who wrote them. ‘I like very much what you are doing. I’ve been giving out about the same problem for years.’ - Paul Lynch, Booker-shortlisted 2023 for Prophet Song.
Read a passage from Never Was at https://auraist.substack.com/p/goldsm...
November 19, 2024
I can't decide how I feel about this book...on the one hand, it's form is extremely experimental and contemporary which I found very hard to get to grips with, and honestly for most of the novel I had zero understanding of what was happening other than potential metaphorical meanings. But, if (and that's a big if), my reading of this novel being a hallucinatory reflection on sexuality, gender, and societal status is correct (...), then I think Gavin's means of achieving this was very clever and representative of the LGBTQ+ community, especially those who are struggling with who they are and finding themselves out.
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