Born in 1967, Mark Bowles grew up between Bradford and Leeds, and studied English at Liverpool and Oxford universities. He lives in south-east London, where he teaches at a secondary school. His first novel, All My Precious Madness, published in September by Galley Beggar Press, is a relentlessly intelligent and entertaining monologue: the musings, reminiscences and fulminations – often foul-mouthed – of Henry Nash, a London-based academic raised, like Bowles, near Bradford. After suffering a breakdown at university, Nash spent a decade working in telesales – inflaming his furious disgust with the idiocies of contemporary capitalism, as typified by Cahun, the jargon-spewing CEO of a tech company who haunts Nash at his favourite café in Soho.
All My Precious Madness is a Bildungsroman of sorts, but it is also an exuberant stream of virtuosic digressions on, among other things, childhood, class, art, Rome and espresso. Beneath the book’s effervescent surface – foaming with Nash’s crankish irritations (such as with people who drink their coffee in a takeaway cup inside the café) – runs an undertow of melancholy stemming from Nash’s complicated relationship with his father. At once embittered and romantic, angry and awestruck, moving and hilarious, All My Precious Madness is a stubbornly authentic novel.
Lola Seaton: All My Precious Madness is your first novel, but it can’t be the first thing you’ve written.
Mark Bowles: I’ve always written, for as long as I can remember, certainly since childhood. For a long time I was writing in a journal, with a view to one day using the entries as material. And some of that material indeed made it into All My Precious Madness. I wrote a blog, back in the 2000s, called “Charlotte Street”, which was mostly philosophical ruminations of one sort or another. A teacher once told my parents that I was “in love with language”. I think that’s true and why I’ll never stop writing.
LS: It’s extremely funny. Did you enjoy writing it?
MB: I did enjoy writing it, and yes sometimes laughed at my own writing. But at a launch recently, one reader, who’d loved the book, said he didn’t really hear that much of the humour because he was too aware of the narrator’s pain. I thought that was an interesting angle and one I need to think about further.
LS: How and when was the book conceived?
MB: There are a couple of answers to that question. Around 2016 I was working in an office, and I made sure that I called into a café on the way to work and secured some time for myself to write. There was a striking androgenous man who came in, sometimes with his dog, but he wasn’t a businessman, or at least not audibly so. Physically, he was the inspiration for my character Cahun. But there was also, thankfully only occasionally, a businessman who came in and talked loudly on the phone about all things digital. That gave me the basic situation that frames the story. If you can call it a story.
The other answer is that it began as a voice, the insistent voice of the narrator, with its rhythms and turns of phrase, its energy that requires fuel. I was writing fragments in the café and realised that the same voice was pulsing through them, and that this voice needed its own stage, as it were.
A good portion of the book was written in a delightful Italian place called Bar Termini on Old Compton Street. The description of the espresso in a thick enamel cup with navy piping is based on that exact place.
LS: All My Precious Madness is powered by that voice more than a conventional narrative, as you say. It also seems – this is of course presumptuous – partly autobiographical. Did you originally conceive of the book as a novel, and do you think of it that way now?
MB: I think it is a novel, but I don’t really mind what it’s called. It’s not an autobiography, but some of it is autobiographical, yes, with a fictional veil – a veil which is quite diaphanous! I think when I was drafting it I called it (to myself) a “fiction”, aware that the word “novel” carries certain expectations. However, I don’t think these expectations are valid or really to be respected. One of the reviewers referred to it as a “creation” – I like that word. I’d be happy to just stick with that.
LS: The book is composed not of chapters but extended paragraphs – as though the unit of the novel is a bout of thought. Was this a natural consequence of your process of composition?
MB: Yes, it’s partly a function of how it was written, and partly a function of my naturally digressive mind, jumping from fragment to fragment without necessarily having a pre-emptive sense of the whole. Having said that, Walter Benjamin’s saying, which I quote in the book, that “method is detour” is, I think, true for me: the idea that you approach things not in a linear way but often sideways and by surprise (eg, lyrical rapture abruptly following coarse and cathartic rage).
LS: There are a lot of ideas and quite a few thinkers in the book (Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, among others). I’ve read that you’ve just finished a second novel “about how or in what sense we’re the same person over time”. This sounds like it could equally be the subject of a book of philosophy. Do you think of your writing as philosophical, and of the novel as one form philosophy can take?
MB: This is a very big question! I think the short answer is yes, but also that there has to be a specifically literary way of being philosophical. It can’t just be using a story or character as the mouthpiece or disguise for a pre-existing idea. For me literature generates non-pre-existing ideas through the care and authenticity of writing. With regard to the thinkers in the book, it’s partly the narrator’s autodidactic zeal to display his knowledge, partly his desire to tag himself as European. But I think they’re also thinkers with an acute sense of thinking’s inseparability from the forms and tones of language.
LS: Did the mixture of tones in All My Precious Madness – irritable contempt and childlike wonder – arise spontaneously, or was it more of a deliberate, post facto strategy?
MB: Those two things, and I’m glad you pointed them out, seemed to me inseparable and complementary, in ways I’m not sure I can fully articulate. Partly, there’s a rage at the loss not only of childhood but the child’s way of being in the world, which the narrator thinks is so precious but which he sees everywhere so defiled. It’s a bit Blakean I suppose in that way. His rage is also – perhaps – a way to clear space for beauty.
LS: The book opens with a memory of a vivid few hours spent reading in a bookshop in the middle of the night. Despite the narrator’s rage at the shallowness and of much of modern life, the book seems also to be partly about taking pleasure in reading and in art.
MB: Yes, again, the rage against (what the narrator sees as) the business-model view of the world, where things have to yield “value” and be monetisable, is at the same time born of a fidelity to the aesthetic or even just a sensitive and attuned way of being in the world for its own sake, its smells, textures, colour-splash, sonorities, and the conviction that these are absolutely ends-in-themselves. They don’t have to justify themselves to some sort of Thatcherite kangeroo court asking “what are you going to do with that?” or “what’s its monetary value?”
LS: The book has a conversational fluency yet it is also exquisitely eloquent; its narrator takes an erudite and joyous interest in language. What kind of writer are you – what is the ratio of effortless flow to meticulous tinkering, of delight to graft?
MB: The rhythm of the voice is very important to my writing, and I often test out the sounds and rhythm of the line before or as I write. At the same time, I do a lot of refining, tinkering. But it’s always a refining and tinkering of that initial voice – once it’s on the page, trapped in little inky squiggles, I’ll read it again, and revise and so on. It can be a long process, but always pleasurable. And just occasionally a sentence or paragraph will emerge fully fledged. (The first paragraph has almost no revisions.)
LS: The Goldsmiths Prize was set up to reward fiction that “breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form”. What can an “innovative” approach offer the reader (and writer) that a more conventional novel might not?
MB: In a way, the Goldsmiths Prize honours the origins of the novel, the original impulse from which it sprang which has been “forgotten” to some extent by conventional novels. The “bagginess”, the bringing together of different discourses, different genres. There are so many examples of how classic novels, essential novels, are departures from the “traditional novel” – most obviously books like Tristram Shandy and Moby Dick.
LS: What past British or Irish novel deserves a retrospective Goldsmiths Prize?
MB: Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping by Derek Jarman.
LS: Why do we need the Goldsmiths Prize?
MB: The prize creates room to redraw our definition of what a novel is, and without this redrawing the novel becomes a dead form. In fact, the novel is arguably this perpetual redrawing.
“All My Precious Madness” by Mark Bowles is published by Galley Beggar Press. The winner of the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize is announced on 6 November. Read more interviews with the shortlisted writers here.
