We need to talk

‘Maybe narrative structures didn’t work at all in the world of nature, the real world. Story arcs, character development. Maybe that was part of the problem – our need to make everything a stupid story, to narrativise, when really all this wasn’t a “story” at all. It was something else altogether.’

So muses the character of Annie in Luke Horton’s second novel, Time Together. This new work is not structurally subversive in an overt way. This is not W.G. Sebald, and nor is it in-your-face metafictional. But it is a slow burn of a novel where characters, and their defining features – if we can in fact define these – emerge slowly, and these characters do not necessarily ‘develop’ in the sense of arriving at a reckoning or self-realisation. As in Sebald’s work, the novel explores memory and history, albeit mostly on personal rather than broad, political terms.