Book: Delphi: A Novel

Author: Clare Pollard

Publisher: Avid Reader

Price: $26.00

I began reading this book with high hopes. The blurb promised a mashup of ancient prophetic arts with the waking nightmare of our modern plague. What could possibly go wrong?

Plenty, as it turns out. To start with, the book is barely a novel, and that is perhaps why the publisher felt the need for a subtitle. It’s a collection of interconnected flash-fiction pieces, each titled with the name of a category of clairvoyant practice from the history of magic, the latter being sprinkled through the text like pepper and vinegar on fish and chips. These headings are not without their charm: my favourite has got to be “Ololygmancy: Prophecy by the Howling of Dogs”. I can always reliably foretell from this phenomenon that ‘Someone is about to ring my doorbell’, but alas, the dogs in the relevant chapter are, as far as I can tell, merely metaphorical.

However, the chapter headings are about as far as the magical component in this work is going to take us: very little of the rest of the book has anything to do with real magic. The rest is just factoids from mythology: did you know Hercules killed his own family? That “python” means “rotten”? That “tarot” is derived from a word that means “foolishness”?

This segues into encounters with slick tarot-wranglers wearing too much make-up, and prompts a short disquisition from the author on the many ways in which fortune-tellers have diddled their clients through the ages. A yawnsome retelling of a predictable story, far too superficially treated to be fun.

All this is layered over the daily pandemic-inflected life of a British suburban family of three from March 2020 to January 2021, in which basically nothing happens in a very British manner. Unfortunately, this kind of storytelling does not travel well, given that much of the cultural context would be rather opaque to a non-British audience.

Of course, the author is under no obligation to explain her context to the culturally distant, and this localism isn’t the problem with the book. The problem lies, I think, with a failure of writerly nerve. This can be seen from the fact that the book ends just as it appears to be getting into its narrative stride. The incident which concludes the narrative should have been the starting point of the story, but instead all we get is a hundred-plus pages of setup, and then a flash in the pan.

The whole book has a rather workshoppy flavour, as if it was written in response to one of those writing sprints that are so popular on social media. Everyone writes a thousand words every 24 hours for a whole month on some prompt like Pandemic Prodromes, with lots of crowing about hitting daily targets and absolutely no soul-searching about the eternal verities.

It’s a bit heart-breaking to see that the author is a longtime poet who has been trying to write a novel for years. For all her self-conscious parallels with the Delphic oracle, she hasn’t quite grasped her material like the dying snake it is. The vatic vapours emanating from this fissure in British society smell more like that alley behind the pub after Saturday night footie than the Demogorgon’s lair. No one’s rising like any lions after slumber in this world. At the most, a tabby cat the colour of Boris Johnson’s hair might wash itself on the garden wall.

There are flashes of humour and irony in the book that make the diligent reader wish the author had inhaled. But the trouble is, post the commercial success of Harry Potter’s so-called ‘magic’ (the Wikipedia category, not the scientia), it has become fashionable to bung it into absolutely everything. Yes, this is J.K. Rowling’s magic, not Neil Gaiman’s or Alan Moore’s, so you can swap the druidic robes for some tacky earrings and a silk scarf from Camden Market.

It’s tempting to blame social media for this attention-deficit style of writing, but that would be too easy and, therefore, wrong. There are recent works about the extremely online, such as Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, that do a good job of using the trivia of modern life to get at the quadrivia of the modern soul. I think Clare Pollard could have done this if she had dared to let go of the post-Enlightenment snark with which she views the fine art of prophecy.

For the truth is, we all have the gift of knowing the future. What sets the clairvoyants apart is their courage to believe it, and their foolhardiness in continuing to speak about it, even when everybody else choruses ‘Shut up!’