The Good Books, Chris Barkley: ‘The Tiger Who Came to Tea is the first book I remember reading’

Chris Barkley on the book he is most looking forward to this year, the author who has inspired him and Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner.

The first book I remember reading:

The Tiger Who Came to Tea by Judith Kerr. I suppose this book taught me that no matter how tigery the guest, they cannot help being a tiger. And if one accepts their tigerness and adapts rather than reacts, the tiger tends to let one be. They might even play the trumpet for you.

A book I recommend to everyone:

I worked as a bookseller for five years and would often recommend Ursula Le Guin’s The Wizard of Earthsea. I am inspired by the depth of Le Guin’s wisdom, by her lyricism and her courage. This is a book about magic in which Ged, the protagonist, releases a shadow into the world. His is an inward journey towards that shadow, and I love how the novel is not resolved with violence, but rather an acknowledgement. Le Guin writes masterfully about the unknown, about the Other. Her system of magic is not one of rigid boundaries, but rather a collaboration with the deep unknowable substrate of meaning. She lets the reader develop that relationship with the unknown themselves. Magic is language in The Wizard of Earthsea.

The best book I have read in this year:

The Singularity by Dino Buzatti. Buzatti is one of the great Italian fantasists, along with another inspiration of mine, Italo Calvino. In The Singularity, a university professor is summoned to a mysterious scientific research centre surrounded by an encroaching wilderness. The wilderness and the research centre seem to have a will, an overlapping and conversational relationship in which linear time flakes away. There is a consciousness being developed in the research centre, and I love how Buzatti explores these ideas at the frontier of scientific research (A.I.) while rooting the story in the human experience of love and longing. I say the research centre is developing a consciousness… but perhaps it was already developed? I wish I could have asked Buzatti this question.

The book I am most looking forward to:

Philip Pullman’s third volume in The Book of Dust series. Reading Pullman feels like an old friend reaching out to offer a map for life’s strange terrain. There’s the old saying that fiction is a lie through which we tell the truth; I think Pullman is simultaneously tender and unflinching in his truth telling. I lived in Oxford for a time and re-reading those books in that city was a wonderful experience. (I used to spend a lot of time on Lyra’s bench in the Botanic Garden).

An author that has inspired me:

I first picked up George Mackay Brown’s Beside the Ocean of Time when researching The Man on the Endless Stair. The novel is set on a fictional Orcadian island and follows Thorfinn Ragnarson as he drifts across an ocean of time, remembering, dreaming, foreseeing. Something about this reminded me of the physicist, Werner Heisenberg, and his journey to Helgoland, another island of transcendent revelations. Perhaps islands choose to whom they give their wisdom: who is gentle enough to bear it? I admire Brown’s gentleness, his love of home, his Orcadian heart. On his grave are these words:

The book I am reading now:

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner. I heard Rachel speak at a live recording of Take Four Books at the EIBF and the way she spoke about her new novel was mesmerising. On its surface, the book is a spy novel, but dive in and it seems to ask questions about humanity’s deep past, the whispers left in ancient caves, and those who can hear them. It’s also very funny.

Chris Barkley was appointed Writer in Residence by the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2022. He won the Oxford University Kellogg Writing Competition in 2021, as well as the Bedford International Writing Prize. The Man on the Endless Stair (Polygon) is his debut novel and is available now. 

Read more of The Good Books here.

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