It was something of a shock for the writer Kevin Barry to find he was working on a piece of historical fiction. Barry began his latest novel, Beatlebone, in pursuit of John Lennon’s voice, imagining the singer travelling to an island in the west of Ireland to batter his way through a bout of writer’s block by screaming his lungs out. Browsing clips of archive interviews on YouTube, Barry found there was something old-fashioned, something antique, about Lennon’s diction – realising to his horror that the late 70s setting of his Goldsmith’s prize-winning novel was another era. But after making the leap into the past to capture the rhythm of Lennon’s speech for the dialogue, Barry found himself bringing the rest of the story right up to the minute, by reaching for the present tense.
The novel opens with Lennon already en route, like an animal “on some fated migration”.
There is nothing rational about it nor even entirely sane and this is the great attraction. He’s been travelling half the night east and nobody has seen him – if you keep your eyes down, they can’t see you. Across the strung-out skies and through the eerie airports and now he sits in the back of the old Mercedes.
“I wanted to plunge the reader directly into the cauldron of an artist’s mind, and certainly the present tense is very effective in such a case,” Barry says. “Writers, just like everyone else, are so intensely mediated by online, television and film cultures now, it tends to feel like the natural tense to write in.”
Rather than finding a future vantage point from which the story can be framed, Barry is looking for a more intimate relationship with the reader, as if the novel is “being whispered into your ear, late at night, in some dank bar in the west of Ireland”. Perhaps even whispering is too remote, the novelist continues. “I think it is a case of trying to plant a voice inside the reader’s head, to make him or her hear the words as they read them … to make them read with their ears, essentially. You’re aiming to mesmerise, and for me that’s the quality that the best fiction has. It’s a mesmeric force.”
Barry is just one of a host of contemporary novelists who are turning to the present tense to weave this kind of magic. David Mitchell has been slipping into the here and now ever since his 1999 debut, Ghostwritten, but the shift is motivated more by instinct than any programme to rewrite the compact with the reader.
“Some books just come alive in the present tense in a way I feel they don’t when told in the past tense,” says Mitchell, suggesting the decision is a question of following the particular demands of each novel. “I thought that writing an historical novel in the present tense gave The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet a strange paradox. This already happened a long time ago, yet it’s happening now. Time is such an important character in The Bone Clocks – it’s there in the title – that I liked the idea of a narrative that surfed the crest of the present moment for six decades.” As for his second novel, Number9dream, Mitchell remembers “sitting in my then-girlfriend-now-wife’s bedroom and just changing all the verbs from past to present, and liking it a whole load more. Books let you know what tense they want to be written in.”
More and more authors are answering this call. From Marlon James’s Booker-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings to Paul Murray’s post-crash comedy The Mark and the Void to Attica Locke’s political thriller Pleasantville, the tide of the present tense has been rising ever since Philip Pullman declared it was threatening to swamp literary fiction back in 2010.
This contemporary upsurge can perhaps be traced back to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which won the Booker prize in 2009. But when she began working on a novel that put the camera behind Cromwell’s eyes, there was no theory attached, Mantel has explains: “I was writing as I saw it.
“It was only a little later I became aware of what had happened and saw that I’d made two important decisions very quickly – tense and point of view. And they are inextricable.”
While the past tense has been the convention, the default for fiction, Mantel continues, it wasn’t the first time she had brought history to life by pulling it into the present time.
“Large parts of my novel A Place of Greater Safety are in the present tense, and bits of it are close to the form of screenplay. I wrote that novel in the 1970s, though it wasn’t published till later.
“In fact, it’s nothing new to anybody. There are bits of Jane Eyre and Villette that jump into the present tense, where the focus is rapidly narrowed – there’s a tracking shot. We use the language of the cinema to describe it, but the technique predates cinema. Charlotte Brontë’s technique puts the reader and the writer in the same space, as well as in the same moment; you cannot separate them.”
The present tense seems natural for capturing “the jitter and flux of events, the texture of them and their ungraspable speed”, Mantel explains. “It is humble and realistic – the author is not claiming superior knowledge – she is inside or very close by her character, and sharing their focus, their limited perceptions. It doesn’t suit authors who want to boss the reader around and like being God.”
This intimate perspective also lends itself to exploring doubt and uncertainty, she adds. “I have found that many of the givens of history melt away on close examination, so I am trying to reflect that perception. The past tense can take on a God-like knowingness. Here I stand: over there, separate from me, is the past event. I don’t think like that. I think we are in history, history is in us. I am moving, relative to the text I generate, and relative to all the texts that stand behind it, and which are constantly being reinterpreted. We are all moving. There is no moment I can pinpoint as ‘now’, at which I am standing to tell the story.”
The difficulty of finding a stable point from which a story can be told is perhaps only increased by the transience of the digital world. For Barry, this makes the internal music of a novel all the more important.
“Our attention spans are, of course, in flitters because of our constant online immersion,” Barry says, “and maybe we don’t have the ability to engage with a text the way that we used to, but the one thing that can still arrest us, and slow us down, is the human voice. I want to give the sensation of that mode of storytelling even on the page.”
Barry is untroubled by Philip Hensher’s suggestion that contemporary fiction suffers from writers adopting the present tense in the hope they might “meet Hollywood halfway”, arguing that “the novel is infinitely capacious, it can handle anything you throw at it”.
“Beatlebone has play scripts, monologues and duologues, an essay, the works,” Barry says. “All that matters, I think, is that you pack enough intensity into each sentence as you work along the lines of the thing. If you’re giving the reader a sensual charge through the sentences, they’ll go with you anywhere.”
Mantel says she never intended to start a fashion, but she shares Barry’s confidence in the novel’s ability to absorb cinematic effects without losing its particular power. “A screenplay transcribed into novel form, all show and no tell, can read as thin, flat,” she says. “The novel can do more than that.” The present tense isn’t an easy answer, she continues, or suitable for every story. “But if a writer is stuck I think it is always good advice to take himself into the present moment, view the characters and just write down what they say and what they do. A narrative shaped in the past can wallow and founder, but a present-tense narrative has to keep on the move – the ground is hot.”
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