When somebody complained to Turner that one of his paintings was indistinct, he replied: “Indistinctness is my forte.” So, it is with Amy Arnold’s Lori & Joe, follow-up to her celebrated debut Slip of a Fish which was winner of the Northern Book Prize and shortlisted for the Goldsmiths’.
In both books, language’s inability to directly communicate profound traumatic experience governs their technical approaches, imaged in Lori & Joe – set in the Cumbrian wilds where Arnold now lives – by a dense country fog counterpointing her artful narrative indistinctness.
“To be in the fog is to be in a state of suspension. What’s true is not true,” wrote Etel Adnan in Sea and Fog. This is a well-chosen epigraph for Lori & Joe, in suspension from its very start. Bringing Joe his morning coffee, his partner Lori finds him dead. Ambulances or doctors can do nothing, obviously, so she walks out into the November fog on the fell (a pun?). Enveloped in directionlessness, soon time here also loses its contours; slowly, a horrific secret – I won’t spoil – crawls before us into the half-light of Arnold’s pages.
Virginia Woolf, an acknowledged influence on Arnold, wrote: “Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words.” Arnold’s rhythmical prose has its own stylish bleak poetry, with repetition used to musical as well as psychological effect.
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Music features strongly in Lori & Joe, giving texture to its stark narrative (Arnold has degrees in music and psychology). The novel/novella’s grimness is also relieved by close observation of the natural world, even if Lori is persecuted by the consequences of her own fertility.
Judging the last Costa Poetry Prize, I wouldn’t have been surprised to receive Lori & Joe among the poetry-in-prose texts, so porous is that border now – experimental writers have long questioned such categorisations anyway. Lori & Joe is experimental in more than manner as, like Slip of a Fish before it, Arnold seeks to reflect the evasions, refractions and digressions of a damaged and guilty mind, harnessing modern cognitive knowledge to her artistic strategy.
This short, intense book is by turns disturbing and powerful, shot through with flashes of bare lyrical beauty. Arnold takes big risks, challenging us with substance and style. Risk reading it yourself, why don’t you?
Ian Duhig’s New and Selected Poems (Picador) won the 2022 Hawthornden Prize for Literature
