Michael Nath

Nonfiction

 An essay on the writing of Talbot & The Fall: A Comedy (With Support), forthcoming from Indirect Books in June 2026 || preorder the novel here

The honest way to give account of the process of composing and redrafting this book would have been to go through the Talbot notebooks.  Since these run to 766 pages (so far), and ‘I am other I now’, what follows is but a memory, or interpretation, of its development.

Some years ago, I’d completed a novel called The Treatment. What to do next? Over Easter, we were on holiday in Wales. In the notebook appeared a civil man of our time; so did the London Underground. The civil man was a passenger, observing others, hoping they’d ask for directions. Among these notebook entries appears as well a passage on the Orpo, or Field Police, a notably-vicious element of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and Poland in World War 2.  Thus, the proto-molecules.   

The preliminary effort was a story about a character I called John Talbot, a Welshman in ‘exile’. Having undergone a medical procedure, he was awaiting the results, which might be serious, fatal even. By occupation, John Talbot was a tube-driver on the London Underground. That story, I called ‘Talbot and the Many’, from the Latin ad plures ire (‘to go among the many = ‘to die’). It was a meditation on death. 

As often with short-story efforts, I was trying to get too much into the thing; becoming more interested in the life and world of Talbot than could be managed in that form. So I set about turning Talbot and the death theme into a new novel. Set in the spring of 2018.

Talbot had a cult: the lyrics and music of Mark E. Smith and The Fall (an enduring influence on my own life). Mark Smith had died in the January of that year. The idea of art’s power over death came into play.

But I needed to avoid writing solely about a middle-aged man and his taste in music: stale theme. So John Talbot had a daughter, Charlie, who’s around 22; craftily, he was introducing her to his cult. 

For The Fall to be making a difference in Charlie’s life, there must be some problem. Here, I had recourse to the none-too-original idea that Charlie wishes to be a writer, but cannot find her subject. So the education, development, of Charlie, became another theme. She is a university student; but The Fall function as an alternative university – as they have for her father, who never experienced higher education. Indeed, Mark E. Smith himself exemplified the auto-didactic tradition which at one time flourished in Britain.  

Already, I was expanding the theme of education with the story of a ‘squim-squam’ youth on horseback (in the year 1620 or thereabouts) setting off from the provinces for Oxford University. That youth, Master Richard Thorndyke, ended up in the Thirty Years War in the company of an ancestor of Mark E. Smith, a musician-soldier called the Captain. 

Furthermore, the notebook passage referred to above on Nazi units was materializing fact-fictionally in an account of an infamous SS officer, Oskar Dirlewanger, his activities in the two World Wars and Spanish Civil War, along with his PhD studies. In this way, the theme of education was broadening; likewise the historical element.  

So, the earliest versions of Talbot & The Fall were composed of four narrative lines (along with the presence of two supporting characters, Joanne Fender and Tyson Campbell-Jones). The themes were death, art, education. Between the two historical narrative lines and the two present-day ones, you had correspondences, and a degree of permeability. You had as well the historical visions of John Talbot (stimulated by the lyrics of Mark E Smith).  The whole thing somewhat improvised. My test reader said that the composition was effective ‘fugally’. I first submitted Talbot & The Fall five years ago. 

Crisis.

The publisher of my previous book suggested removing the historic narrative lines, concentrating the story on John and Charlie Talbot and their circle. The suggestion being firm, I set about this. Which raises the question of faith in one’s chosen form, faith in the judgement of publishers, the tension between the one and the other. 

Raises as well the problematic tension between faith and fanfaronade, in one’s self-consciousness, or identity, as a writer. 

By that I mean the sort of thing one may say in interviews or conversations, or adopt as a motto; e.g.: 1) As a model for the novel, I prefer the power station to the private house. 2) I’m for the baroque (= magnification). 3) My mind is a junk shop, through which a gale is blowing.  4) My writing is a rough sea. 5) Me, I like to carve from the whole block (apologies to Goethe, ‘Das Sonett’).  

The problem being that declarations about one’s art, practice, taste, may come from the lazy self, inertia, conceit, rather than being honest assessments; or they may be rhetorically attractive, without recognising the possibility, desirability, of a change in practice, or horizon. They may be bragging of limits, rather than capacity. And in the way of these things, they can become doctrine, dogma – or foreign policy. Beware! 

When that publisher turned down the new version (having decided that Talbot’s cult wouldn’t sell), I continued revising the MS. as a book about the Talbots, rather than reverting to the four-line structure. 

Why?

I was in the sort of hurry that, I fancy, doesn’t affect writers of market-friendly books; and the publisher of earlier novels of mine had expressed an interest in Talbot – though in the end, this came to nothing. 

A third is that I’d made contact with Dan White and Jessica Denzer of the modernist journal L’Esprit Literary Review (and, later, Indirect Books), who were also expressing an interest in Talbot in something like its present form.  

Though in truth, by a trick of reduction, I’d managed to preserve the two historic lines by turning them into the creative projects of a pair of Charlie’s pals, Victoria and Paloma. In this way, we get to experience something of these once-substantial elements, and their historical essence. What’s more, we get Charlie’s reflections on the projects of her successful colleagues; which would not have been possible in the original form of the narrative. These reflections include the discovery that death may be the soil in which art grows. They include as well Charlie’s initially-envious recognition that Victoria Thorndyke can ‘do an old voice’ in her writing, when the latter parodies the style of the early C17th.

Which brings us to the manifestations of voice in Talbot & The Fall, where, alongside the third-person and free-indirect modes, we have the interventions of a kind of chorus. Now, since I first tried my hand at novels, I’ve been affected by a kind of double, conversational voice; in Talbot, this is at last given freedom. Indeed, at times, it is formally named ‘CHORUS’. I regard this as an expansion of the mystery of narration itself, as raised in questions such as ‘Who/What/Where is (or are), the narrator?’

Elena Ferante has recently displayed impatience with writers who refer to their activity in terms of the descent of the Holy Spirit, or other forms of mysterious ventriloquism [see ‘Pain and Pen’ (2021)]; though at the same time, she refers with approval to Virginia Woolf’s assertion that when she writes, ‘I’m 20 people.’ Let’s suggest for now that the spirit of narration is binary, or multiple, even if it issues (as Ferante insists) in the actions of the writer’s hand(s); and if not supernatural, then a phenomenological complex of the vocal and the manual that has so far resisted satisfactory explanation – like so much about consciousness, creative and otherwise.   

In the Old Comedy of Ancient Greece, the chorus was of great importance, and spoke for the poet. I experienced the chorus as, perhaps, transcending the authority of the third-person narrator – or maybe jostling with it. Their appearances in Talbot are irregular, but not capricious; and brought on by an urge to vary the form a novel takes when the narrating voice has been doing its business, successfully as it may be, for a while; for then, things are becoming streamlined; the reader settles back; the voice may decline to a spoken element, from a speaking force. That too is a mode of rationalization; and it is rationalization that modernism is inclined to resist: so, variation versus rationalization. Which is why Ulysses is a great and free work of art: the voices won’t let us settle. At a distance, the catechism in ‘Ithaca’ had an influence on the Talbot chorus. 

Again, this is a book about death. So the chorus are also spirit voices, led by their ‘Captain’ (Mark E. Smith). They leave their garden through the white gate, to visit the narrative world; where, it will be noted, other gardens and green spaces recur. Thus, we suggest the continuity, or intermingling, of the worlds of the dead and the living; for which we’ve resorted to a term from old Welsh poetry and legend, Annwfn (which may be translated as ‘undeep’).   

Finally, we have managed the narrative in such a way as to make it seem as if the whole thing were written by Charlie. This serpentine stunt will be familiar to readers of Finnegans Wake. I hope readers in general may find it a plausible result of Charlie’s peculiar training. 

I had meant to say something of the image of the ‘barrel’ that is used for John Talbot. Meant to say something as well of the relation between ‘I’ and ‘we’ in the voice of this essay itself. But that’s probably enough for the time being.

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Michael Nath is a novelist, essayist, and academic brought up in South Wales and England. Of Welsh and Indian heritage, he holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh and teaches Modernism, Shakespeare, English Literature, and Creative Writing at the University of Westminster in London.

He is the author of three acclaimed novels: La Rochelle (Route, 2010), which was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction, British Story (Route, 2014), and The Treatment (Quercus, 2020). His forthcoming novel, Talbot & The Fall: A Comedy (With Support), will be published by Indirect Books in 2026, and he is currently at work on Hamilton’s Big Favour: Or, A Woman Possessed, a novel exploring the subject of laughter. 

His short fiction, novel extracts, creative nonfiction, and interviews have appeared in Stand: New Welsh Review, Critical Quarterly, Route Anthologies, West Trade Review, and elsewhere. Selections from British Story were translated into Spanish for Argonauta (Issue 3, 2016). He has also published academic essays and articles on modernism and creative writing practice, most recently in L’Esprit Literary Review (2023).The Society Club in Soho named a cocktail in his honor – “Dr Nath’s Fogcutter”.