The Minutiae: Why I Liked Butcher's Crossing So Much
and TV and film favourites from 2024
Welcome back to The Minutiae! This is a twice-monthly newsletter for paid subscribers, usually dedicated to whatever book-related topic is currently on my mind. This week I talk about going to see a stage adaptation of Olga Ravn’s The Employees, why I liked John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing so much (plus free rant!) and finally the as-promised list of my favourite TV and film from 2024.
In the true spirit of a newsletter, this one is going to cover a few things that I’ve been thinking about this week, i.e. it’s totally all over the place. I have a bit of a tendency to have an idea, write it down in my notes app and then never return to it again, saving it for when it’s the ‘right time’. But I think I need to start getting some of these thoughts out into the world, for two reasons: the first, so you actually see them—that’d be nice, wouldn’t it!? But also because writing about them and expanding upon them always helps me think through them myself, which in turn leads to more ideas. And I’m speaking to myself here when I say, (my) writing on here need not always be a finished product so much as it is a practice. These newsletters were always intended as a fairly informal space where we could think through stuff together, and also keep working on the act of writing and communicating itself. Throughout all my time online I have always been worried about repeating myself but you know what!? Maybe some things bear repeating! And each time you say them, write them, communicate them, they gain more clarity!
The Employees as directed by Łukasz Twarkowski
Anyway, little pep talk for myself over. Yesterday evening I went to see Łukasz Twarkowski’s stage adaptation of Olga Ravn’s 2020 novel, The Employees and I need to tell you about it in case you want to book tickets before it leaves us! I don’t know what order you’ll see these posts in and whether my favourite books of 2024 is up yet, but I’ll tell you now that The Employees was one of the best books I read last year, so I was naturally very excited about to go and see this (and thank you to the Southbank Centre for having me)
For the first hour or so, I was lightly grumbling to myself that if I were adapting The Employees, it probably wouldn’t look a whole lot like this. Thankfully for everybody, nobody has given me that job. But it’s true that I am a bit (a lot) protective over my favourite books, so I don’t think this reaction was unprecedented, and it wouldn’t really have mattered what I was looking at. But as I got further into it and saw some of the themes of the book develop, I enjoyed the piece more and more. It was clear that Twarkowski read, loved and really understood the book, and I appreciated both his aesthetic take on it (darker, sexier and ‘cooler’ than I was expecting) but also the way he developed some of the themes, and captured some of the important aspects of it in ways that worked for a live performance.
For example, the book is delivered as a set of employee statements regarding events on the spaceship they work on. They have recently purloined a bunch of what they call ‘objects’ from a nearby alien planet, and these are having strange effects on them. Some of these employees are humans, and some are humanoids, and one of the major tensions in the book is that you are not always entirely sure which kind of person is giving the statement. At the beginning of the stage piece, Twarkowski had pre-recorded interviews with the actors/employees up on the screens (it was giving multimedia throughout—fun!) where we saw that there were two versions of each worker; a human and humanoid version. Now this is not really how it works in the book; there are not twinned pairs of humans and humanoids wandering around—as far as we know, they are all individuals. It kind of fundamentally changes the ways the humans would see the humanoids, no? And they were clearly marked in the performance during these interviews, being notably different in affect and labelled as such: Cadet 4 would be a human (and confident), Cadet B4 a humanoid (and shy). In the book there is no such distinction made, they are all numbers just the same. So I just didn’t see how Twarkowski would maintain that ambiguity we feel between the two types.
But of course, this was a great move because as we progressed into the live performance section, now we were not entirely sure whether the actor was portraying a human or a humanoid at any one time (thankfully it was no longer clear in affect). Made even more confusing by a particular scene in which one of the employees (brilliantly portrayed by Maja Pankiewicz) claimed she was B12 while the ‘Organisation’ she was speaking to insisted she was Cadet 12, a human and born of a woman. In every subsequent scene I was second-guessing which one I was watching. It prompts the same kinds of questions as the book; does this human want to be a humanoid, and if so, why? How are the two types different, or the same? Do they act differently, and how would they act differently? How can you tell the difference?
The staging was at times frustrating, but alleviated by the use of live recording beamed to the screens around each side of the box in which much of the action took place. This box became more transparent as the piece went on, which I appreciated, though I’d have liked to see into it a bit more right from the start. I’m sure there was symbolic reasoning for this, so I’m not wanting to die on that hill too much. Plus it’s clear that the camera and live-streaming of the action plays a huge role here. We had myriad close ups on the actor’s faces as they moved around the space, more akin to the experience of watching a film (obviously), which paradoxically probably added more intimacy to the experience. And Twarkowski was able to splice in different stuff to add more layers of meaning. I’ve watched a fair few plays now which use this livestreaming technique, and I think this was probably the most successful and integrated.
I was glad I had read the book, I think it gave me a much deeper understanding of the piece as a whole (particularly the role of the objects), and in general I found it to be so thought-provoking and also genuinely enjoyable. If you want to see it but are worried you haven’t read the book, I still think you would enjoy it (I was sat next to someone who hadn’t read the book and she really liked it!) Also, the book is so short you could read it in a couple hours tomorrow!
It was about two and a half hours long with just three three-minute breaks, so it was quite an intense experience, but I never felt bored or like I was checking the time. And I particularly loved the ending. The words and scenes fell away to a more movement-based climax, as we saw the culmination of the effects of the ‘objects’ (or is it the programming?) Overall, highly recommended! You can book it here, it’s only on until Sunday (but there are matinees!) so be speedy.
Why I loved Butcher’s Crossing so much
I read Brandon Taylor’s piece ‘against casting tape fiction’ this week off the back of reading Lincoln Michel’s great ‘Turning Off the TV in Your Mind’ (which he then followed up with this piece with more examples of what he meant). Thank god for both of these writers for helping me further pin down why I find myself so annoyed by so much contemporary fiction.
I don’t even know why so many of us literally can’t stop talking about it! I almost get annoyed with myself for going on about it so much and I keep thinking I must be boring you when there are clearly great litfic books being published all the time, it just requires a bit of looking. Surely this was always the case? Not everything published is going to be great.
Yes but also definitely no, I think most of us haters would answer. First of all, the new and bad version of litfic is consistently garnering a lot of praise and winning a lot of prizes, which is just annoying and shouldn’t be happening when there are much better books out there. Secondly, it does seem to be something of an epidemic. I started reading literary fiction when I was young-ish so I had a good long run of reading in the time before. And whilst no, not everything was going to be a work of artistic genius, a lot of the books were at the very least readable and enjoyable novels with some artistic merit. You know, they were novel-y novels. It felt like authors had a particular story they wanted to tell and they told it. There was more variation in prose style and voice, and there was an underlying sense that a book is not about exorcising one’s own demons or exploring one’s own mind but that a book was written for a reader, sometimes even to be entertained!
Say what you will about Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! (a book that inevitably splits the crowd, partly because it actually tries something) but one thing I really appreciated about it is that you could tell that whilst he was writing it, he was thinking about entertaining me, the reader! Keeping me interested! Rewarding me for the precious time spent reading it! Idk what to make of all the MFA discourse, but if nothing else I was pretty convinced by Erik Hoel’s idea here of authors these days minimising their ‘attack surface’. Whether it’s to do with MFAs or whether it’s to do with the way any art is received in the absolutely insane online sphere these days, I don’t know. Martyr! has a much bigger attack surface than other books of its kind, and that’s fine.1 We should disagree about books. But it also makes it so much more interesting than some of these wishy washy books that cross my desk. I think that’s why a lot of people do love this book and why it turned up on so many ‘best of’ lists this year. Also the cover is really great.
Anyway, I’ve been sidetracked again. I wanted to talk about John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing (1960) and why I liked it so much in the context of Brandon and Lincoln’s pieces, and what I wish I would see from more new writers. Sure I could’ve saved this all for the review I’ll be writing in a few weeks time, but I wanted some extra room to stretch and it’s on my mind today! I suppose what I’m doing below is giving my own example of what I think is meant by Brandon when he asks writers to write more thoughts.