First, a declaration of interest. I published a short story by Dan Clements a few years ago as part of the Galley Beggar Press ebook Singles series. You may see evidence of bias in the fact that I think his first novel What Will Remain is by some distance the best so far on the Not the Booker shortlist.
I think that this book’s connected stories about army life in Afghanistan – and what happens on the return home – are vivid and real and clearly born of the hard-won experience of Clements’s own time in the Royal Marines. They have emotional, almost physical heft; the descriptions of the Afghan terrain, and the mental landscapes of the various soldiers, seem real to me. The book is shot through with moments of genuine insight and intimacy – as when a soldier steps outside his air-conditioned pod into the strange “nighttime city smells” of Kabul and gets the “sudden dumb feeling” that he is on holiday.
But, as I say, you may want to take that with a pinch of salt. I’m not going to try to pretend that I don’t like the author and that I admit I’m glad that his book has turned out so well. But, to reassert my objectivity, one of the most satisfying things is that in this book I see the same things that made me think that Dan Clements was worth promoting in the first place. This is a writer with skill, an earnest dedication to his craft, and stories to tell.
When I published that short story, I also thought that as well as considerable promise, Clements had a few rough edges. He was a work in progress, who hadn’t quite found his voice. The rough edges are still there in What Will Remain. It isn’t just that he tries many different angles and techniques; writing in present and past tense, in first, second and third person and with varying degrees of intimacy with his subjects. There are inconsistencies. Some stories are stronger than others. Some have moments of overwriting. I felt there were too many fancy adjectives and too many nouns creaking from the strain of being changed into verbs: “as they needled towards the three hundred marker” is just one example. There are too many writerly mannerisms. I couldn’t see a good reason why the dialogue was presented without speech marks, for instance. There are also a few moments of confusion: “There is a picture of him from that night, long lost now, and in that picture he is leaning back.” But how is he still leaning back, in a lost picture?
I also didn’t like the big chunks of italicised, punctuation-free prose that divided the stories. True to most writing in italics, these sections were overstrained and on the way to unreadable. They were important, however, in that they also reflected back on and connected the various stories in the book. Hemingway fans will recognise this idea as a tribute to In Our Time. Hemingway lovers will also probably blanch at sentences like the following:
Down in the bay that year the spring tides brought the water high up over the car park and across the road and it was good to sit among the diners on the waterfront and drink and listen to the waves sighing black against the palisade.
The golden rule: only Papa can do Papa. When Clements gets too close to the voice of his hero, he inevitably comes a poor second. But comparisons to Hemingway are almost always invidious. No one wins from being matched up to him. It’s also worth noting that some of the finest moments in What Will Remain are tributes to the great writer. There’s a very effective and moving riff on Hemingway’s In Another Country, in a story where a “transfemoral amputee” starts to work out that the rehabilitation process he is going though doesn’t have a chance in hell of giving him a normal life again. The quote above about the spring tides in the bay also breaks out into a powerful account of two soldiers who use surfing as a way to temporarily forget.
By the time this story appears, late in the collection, the need to forget is all the more understandable. Clements has done such a good job of showing the action that such men have to endure – the horror and pity and futility of war – that their pain is all too comprehensible. Their agonies feel real, as do their quiet moments of companionship.
On friendship, Clements is particularly strong. He never overplays the emotional bond between the men (and more rarely, women) on the frontline, but you sense it all the more as a result, especially in moments of unexpected humour and rudeness. There’s a glorious moment where an overeager brain specialist is (correctly) dismissed as a “tremendous bell end” and some fantastic conversations; one soldier explains that he is smashed up in bed because he “fell out of a plane”, prompting his companion to ask: “Why the fuck did you do that?”
It is in such moments that the secret of Clements’ talent lies: he cares about his subjects and makes us care. That’s an important and special thing and made me glad that this book was on our shortlist – in spite of my own embarrassment at knowing the author already.
• The next book on our list is The Combinations by Louis Armand – look out for that review in a couple of weeks, as this one will be a long read for all of us!
