Keiran Goddard, a gifted British poet, has written two poetry collections, For the Chorus (2016) and Votive (2019). Even readers who don't know he is a poet will surmise as much from the lyrical turns of phrase and attention to detail in his debut novel, Hourglass (to be published on Valentine's Day by Europa Editions; reviewed in this issue), in which he exquisitely renders all three acts of a romantic relationship. He spoke with Shelf Awareness about Hourglass, his influences as a writer and the book's universal theme of seeking transcendence.
Why did you choose the title Hourglass? I can think of several interpretations regarding shape and time, but what meaning do you hope to convey with that title?
An hourglass is a curious sort of object. Whereas a clock tells us one thing, namely the time, an hourglass does something altogether more interesting. It shows us the past, the present and the future all at once. The sand at the bottom is the past, the sand heaped at the top is the future, while the present is reduced to the tiny, steady flow of grains that fall through the centre of the glass.
There is something interesting about that arrangement--the past and the future looming so large compared to the present, despite the present being the place we actually exist, materially speaking at least. I wanted to explore what it would mean if we worked to equalise those proportions? If we stretched out the present so that it loomed as large as the past and the future?
The book plays with this idea and its implications. Divided into three identically sized sections, each with an identical amount of subsections, it looks to disturb the interplay between these three temporal states. Tiny moments are magnified, stretched, distorted. Whole years disappear from one sentence to the next. That's the basic idea, anyway.
What was the genesis for this novel?
More than anything, I wanted to write a love story that had a genuine, unmediated confrontation with desire. With the ways it distorts us and makes us strange. Why does it make music sound so incredible? Why does it make us imagine the person we love is always seconds away from dying in some horrific and extremely unlikely way? Why does it make us use weird words and cry on public transport? Why does it make us brave, and capable of imagining new ways of living? And, crucially, how do we carry those instincts of world-making and courage beyond the limits of the relationship itself?
At times, the rhythm of the narrative made me think of poems by Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz. I'm thinking of passages such as when the narrator refers to his girlfriend as, "Not the most beautiful person I have ever seen. The most beautiful thing. Which is a much bigger category. And I cannot turn away." Which poets have inspired you the most, and in what ways do you think they may have influenced this book?
That's incredibly flattering so, firstly, thank you. I can't say that it was conscious, but I suppose I am drawn to poets who work in a declarative, emotive and sometimes repetitive mode, including Neruda. I also love, in no particular order: Blake, Bishop, Rilke, Celan, Donaghy and a bunch of contemporary poets like Luke Kennard, Martha Sprackland and Holly Pester. In terms of how they influence the novel, I think more than anything it is to do with the heightened value placed on rhythm and image, and trusting that the emotional sense of passage is able to be conveyed in less conventional syntactic ways.
I was fascinated by the style you adopted for this work: a series of short chapters consisting of brief sentences. What was the effect you wanted to create with this structure? And how do you feel this structure mirrors the psyches of your characters, if at all?
I wanted the prose to be accretive, to give the sense of a tumbling accumulation of feelings and observations. It's also closer to how we actually think, right?--staccato and slightly impressionistic? That said, I wanted the structure to be welcoming, I hate the idea that anything that might be seen as mildly unconventional is automatically deemed to be distancing or alienating. Not least because it massively patronises the intelligence of readers. Lots of very popular things throughout history have been vaguely experimental; some of the biggest albums and most popular books are actually pretty odd. Death to the assumption of the lowest common denominator reader!--they don't exist, no matter how hard the publishing industry tries to manufacture them.
One theme that recurs throughout Hourglass is your narrator's complicated relationship with faith and religion. Early on, he writes that, on some mornings, "I think I am God." When he and his girlfriend go for a walk near the start of the novel, he says, "God was following us." By the end, he shows signs of doubt, even stating, "God is not with me." Can you talk a bit about religion's role in the narrative and what you, through your narrator, are saying about its role in modern life?
This is a really heavy question, and one that would take me pages and pages to even begin to answer. Perhaps one thing I could say, though, is that I was very interested in the resonances between the ways in which we seek transcendent experience via desire and love and the ways in which we do so via communing with god. It's sometimes really hard to distinguish between a sunbeam and the sun, between a feeling of joy and the true source of all joy. And maybe, for want of a better definition, love is just the act of being able to consistently move beyond the refraction of the light, the sunbeam, and toward its ultimate source, the sun. And if you are really, really lucky, if you are blessed, then you find someone or something that allows you to feel the sun, not the sunbeam. Even if it's just for a while. Hourglass is about catching, and ultimately fumbling, that gift.
I'm curious about your decision to investigate your themes by writing a novel rather than through poetry. As someone who has written both, what do you see as some of the advantages and disadvantages of each genre?
Hourglass was always going to be a novel. This isn't a very fashionable thing to say, but I'm not sure I have much of a choice about how, when and what form my writing comes to me. It is a mysterious process and I reckon my job is just to listen as carefully as I can and rearrange the pieces that are given to me when I do.
What are you working on next?
I have finished a second novel, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, which will be out in early 2024. It's a story about working-class friendship, hope, sex and despair. It's more fun than it sounds. I hope. --Michael Magras